October 2003

A while ago, quite a while ago, a friend of mine loaned me a PowerBook. I had to return it to him a couple of months ago and I’ve missed it. Well, it looks like he’s gonna be able to loan it to me again! — can’t wait!

Tom Koch’s Inside Outlook Express is a good site for information, tips and downloads that pertain specifically to Outlook Express. Backup tools, registry and file storage information are all there.

I put that in quotes because, well, as they say: YMMV (“your mileage may vary”). The article has them broken up into classes like Computing-Everyone, Computing-Experts, Shopping and Information. They’ve also got them all combined into a zip file that you can download and add to your Favorites folder.

Not a lot of surprises here … i mean their number one shopping site is Amazon.com, but, still, it’s nice having them organized in that way.

PCMag.com has this great article of Google tips. It contains pointers to syntax help on the Google site as well as some things I didn’t knew were available like being able to search paper catalogs like, oh, heck, Williams-Sonoma, West Marine and Land’s End.

I didn’t know Google maintained this list of tools and services before I read the article. Good info.

Most recent version is here — dated October 9. Discussion of the state of the plug-in and announcements of new versions is here.

TechTV reports that the Do-Not-Call list web page, hosted by AT&T, has a web bug on it that could relate the individual signing up on the page to an IP address if the right reports are run. Now, I haven’t given this a lot of thought (yet) but it doesn’t seem to me like this is much of an exposure, is it? I mean, by virtue of going to the web page, doesn’t AT&T already have everything that the web bug will give them? If AT&T is already hosting and managing the FTC’s servers and has sufficient access and rights to put the web bug there in the first place, they certainly have access to all the userinformation. And I can understand, having been in the business for a while, that the web bug would allow AT&T to monitor performance. Still, it seems a little odd.

I think this is probably more a matter of insufficient thought being given to an ordinary business practice.

Microsoft’s recently published some information and sample/test code to show how they intend to respond to the embedded controls suit they lost to Eolas. In particular, MSDN tells developers on this page how to circumvent the prompts that will most likely arise from the changes. It’s an interesting read even if you’re not a developer.

Tim Oren’s weblog entry yesterday makes a good point about “The Next Big Thing” — you don’t know what it is until after it’s already happened. And all those columnists and pundits who pontificate about TNBT are either fooling themselves (and me) or they know they’re just blowing smoke.

Apparently the fix for MS03-032 changed the way IE interprets relative URLs when opened by javascript, resulting in “Page not found” errors. According to MSKB 827667 (or this download from the Microsoft Download Center), the new update will address this issue.

How? I dunno, the article is less than clear to me. I s’pose it changes the assumed base of relative URLs back to what it was BEFORE MS03-032. If you’re getting errors when you try to open a web page by clicking on a button in a web page (remember, this is a javascript issue, not a link issue, per se) then apply this patch.

Today’s Lockergnome Tech Specialist has a link to serverfiles.com, a website with downloadable software that’s more oriented to systems and network admins. Things like software for Microsoft’s Exchange, Fax server software and security scanners.