Uncategorized

The story’s at http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,1128152,00.asp. Microsoft said last Friday, I think it was, they were discontinuing development of IE for Mac in light of Apple’s Safari. Maybe this’ll be the last IE update for the Mac?

I’ve been subscribing to this newsletter for probably over a year now and I find something valuable in just about every one of them. This issue gives the steps for optimizing your XP system with Microsoft’s BootVis, a list of free data recovery tools and some interesting statistics on the xecurity of the average broadband user. To read the latest issue go to http://www.winxpnews.com/index.cfm?id=80. There’re links to prior issues as well as subscribe links.

http://shop4.outpost.com/product/3291161.

2 USB 2.0 ports rated at 480 Mb/sec (that’s a small “b” for “bits”).

I just checked the CompUSA web site and the deal is still there. See http://www.compusa.com/products/product_info.asp?product_code=295202&pfp=hpfod#checkstore.

http://www.staff.uiuc.edu/~ehowes/main.htm.

This site is the project of an English instructor that teaches Business and Technical Writing classes at The University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, of all things! It’s not a bad site and seems like Joe Normal could understand and implement most of what he says. Includes topics on controlling mal-ware, securing email and protecting yourself while on the web (which has some pretty obvious things like “don’t download files from sites that you don’t know”).

If you wanna get locked in to ASP, or if you just wanna experiment with ASP.NET, Microsoft has a free tool you can download (1.3 MB) from http://www.asp.net/webmatrix/. It provides drag-and-drop of GUI elements, support for FTP transfer of your project to your ASP.NET-enabled ISP and includes a mini web server so you don’t have to run IIS to develop your app.

Secunia reports that Adobe’s Acrobat Reader V4.x and V5.x allows publishers of PDF documents to execute arbitrary code as the result of a vulnerability on the XPDF specification. See http://www.secunia.com/advisories/9038/ for the description of the Reader exposure and http://www.secunia.com/advisories/9037/ for the XPDF description.

This hasn’t been confirmed on Windows or Mac, just on Linux (so far).

InstallWatch Pro from EpsilonSquared.

AvantBrowser — a good, free tabbed browser (followed closely by MyIE2).

MediaCenter V9 from J. River to keep track of and play my CDs and other music.

The Pine text-based email client from the University of Washington.

Cygwin to handle my Unix habit without requiring me to dual-boot any of my machines. I have curl, wget, SSH and X11 running on WinXP Pro.

CoolMon to keep me informed about what’s happening on my machine.

NetPerSec from PC Magazine/Ziff-Davis.

IrfanView, probably one of the greatest free image browsers around.

Microsoft has a great deal for partners: you get over 15 pieces of software including licenses for Exchange 2000, Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition, Windows 2000 Advanced Server, SQL Server 2000, 10 licenses for Windows XP Professional, 10 Office XP Professional, 10 Outlook 2002, 10 FrontPage 2002, 10 Visio 2002 SR1 Professional and 10 Project 2002. All of this is NFD (Not For Distribution) software but you ARE allowed to run it in production (“internal business use” as Microsoft calls it). The “catch” (if you can call it that) is that it’s a subscription which means you are only licensed for the software for a year. At the end of the year, you can
1) resubscribe or
2) buy licenses outright or
3) deinstall the software.

The Standard Action Pack normally sells for $299 but Microsoft has a special promotion going on right now: $99 for a year (code MHQ062). Now, you have to be a Microsoft Partner but it’s not difficult to become one. If your business provides Microsoft software or solutions to 3rd party customers then all you have to do is fill out a form to become a Registered Partner. Go to http://www.microsoft.com/partner for details on becoming a partner and http://www.microsoft.com/partner/actionpack for details on the action pack or to purchase a subscription.

Oh, one more thing: they ship quarterly updates. OK, $99 for all that PLUS you get updates every 3 months. Are you convinced yet? I can’t figure out why anyone wouldn’t do this.

The WorldWide Web Consortium has its own WYSIWYG HTML editor called Amaya. Its described at http://www.w3.org/Amaya/. It’s different from the other editors in that you can really work a lot more closely with the HTML. It’s got a structure view so you can see how your document is laid out as well as the more classic source view and, of course, the formatted view. Once you get used to its different way of working, it’s really a pretty nice editor! It doesn’t give you all of the whippy, gee-whiz features that the other editors have but it supports XHTML 1.1, XHTML 1.0, SVG, MathML and CSS. And since it comes from W3C itself, it generates code according to the standards.