Found this on the FileForum of BetaNews. Article is here: http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail.php3?fid=990107347.

It’s a rapid application development environment for PHP that includes WYSIWYG. It costs at least $550 if you wanna do full development work ($1,200 if you want Oracle or SQL Server support) but it looks pretty powerful and could speed up development work quite a bit.

Belkin has a new pen that is also a laser pointer, a reading light and a PDA stylus. $19.99 isn’t a bad price for this kinda stuff but it takes 4, count ’em, batteries. It’s called the Quadra.

Reported by BetaNews yesterday, 6/16/2003.

MP3Gain directly adjusts the volume of an MP3 file (as opposed to decoding it, doing peak normalization and reencoding it). Don’t try to do a lot of files at once, though: the analysis and normalization can take quite a while. The BetaNews article is at http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail.php3?fid=1015687834.

The Kerio Personal Firewall V4.0 Beta 4 article is at http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail.php3?fid=1013029502. I’ve used V2 and did some playing around with the V3 betas. I don’t think V3 was ever released and I got tired of using beta firewall code which is why I switched to Sygate Personal Firewall. On the whole, I think I prefer Kerio’s V3 … maybe I’ll give V4 a try. There’s a Yahoo! group for Kerio at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/keriofirewall.

Ezine Manager gives you the tools you need to publish and distribute your own ezine … for FREE if your distributing less than 1,000 copies. Their list of clients is pretty darn impressive, too, if you like Dr. Phil, Dun and Bradstreet and the Red Cross.

Another newsletter I subscribe to is Scot’s Newsletter. It’s usually pretty long but every so often there’s a real gem in it. The June 17, 2003 issue has a link to one of Scot’s Forums that discusses XP services. The forum postings have some good links to sites that explain what service does what, which services you can shutdown and so on. Here’s a link to the forum:
http://www.scotsnewsletter.com/forums/index.php?act=ST&f=4&t=1271&s=.

Since parting company with TechTV, Chris has stepped up promotion promotion of his properties — GnomeTomes, GnomeDex, and his new GnomeForums to name a few — and it gets a little tiresome. Still, a guy’s gotta make a living so I’ll cut him a little slack. Anyway, his Lockergnome Windows Daily still comes up with some useful tidbits. The 6/16/2003 issue tells about Drivers Collection — a site that lets you search for drivers by vendor or product category.

It was available to read but I couldn’t update anything. It was pretty frustrating cause I had, oh, I dunno, 5 or 6 entries to make. I’ll get ’em posted here shortly.

Another security advisory from Secunia, this time about BlackICE. You can see the advisory at http://www.secunia.com/advisories/9058/. In short, I guess BlackICE is supposed to protect the PC against Cross Site Scripting attacks (the thing that’s been in a lot of the newer advisories of late). It apparently doesn’t check for some small subset of HTTP requests. Their solution isn’t too helpful … it basically comes down to “be careful out there.”

I picked up a prime grade Chateaubriand from PW Markets yesterday and we grilled it last night. Man, what a steak! It was one of the best meals I can remember having. Went over and picked up another one this afternoon, too.

I dunno, this is listed by Secunia as “moderately critical” but I think the probability of it happening is pretty low if you’re careful about what sites you visit as it first requires the site operator to take you to an error page first and then you must click on a link provided by the malicious site operator.

Secunia has what they call a fix but I consider it a workaround and it requires you to edit the registry. The Secunia advisory is at http://www.secunia.com/advisories/9056/ and gives you a link to the original security notice by GreyMagic which contains a much better explanation than what I gave. Make up your own mind.