letter paper format with latex

The default seems to be A4. Various ways to change this to letter:

Directly in the document (if converting to pdf) (not tested)
\usepackage{ifpdf}
\ifpdf
\setlength{\pdfpagewidth}{8.5in}
\setlength{\pdfpageheight}{11in}
\else
\fi

In Unix, for all documents (not tested)
sudo texconfig-sys paper letter

In Windows, for all documents
With TeXlive, we can use texlive manager (run as administrator) and choose letter for all documents, under the configuration tab.

disable hibernation in windows 7

Start, type command, right-click run as administrator, and type powercfg -h off.

This will disable hibernation and remove hiberfil.sys, which saves a lot of disk space when you have a lot of RAM.

jabber (gtalk) client

Google Talk client from Google sucks. I didn't find any way to disable pop-ups so it keeps switching to desktop whenever I receive a new message, which is horribly annoying when playing games.

Pidgin sucks, as it does the same thing. I also heard that it takes huge amount of RAM after several days of use under Ubuntu (mem leak?).

I'm now using Psi and so far like it.