June 29, 2003

Weblog tool round-up

Over at WebMonkey.

The article is here. It's a little out of date, being from May, 2002, but it compares the features of what he calls "off-site" (Diaryland/Pitas and Blogger), "on-site" (Movable Type, GreyMatter), and "on the hard-drive" (Radio Userland). The last page has a pointer to another list of blogging tools.

Posted by tony at 11:26 AM | Comments (0)

What have I been doing? -- RSS!

I've spent the last few days immersed in RSS readers. What are they? RSS stands (according to different sources) for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary or ... What is it used for? It's a way for websites to "publish" their content on a regular basis and for me, the user, to retrieve that content on my schedule, not theirs, without subscribing to a newsletter and giving them my email address. In a manner of speaking, RSS clients go to each website that I've told it to and "reads" headlines from it, storing the data until I'm ready to look at it. No, it doesn't store the entire web page and it automatically expires old articles so it really doesn't take up a lot of room on my hard drive. A really good discussion of RSS and its uses is here.

Which sites have RSS feeds? CNet's News.com, Slashdot, Lockergnome Windows Daily and ComputerWorld, just to name a few. NewsIsFree syndicates a lot of sites including CNN and the AP. Heck, even Amazon.com's got a syndicator (e.g. Amazon E-books).

RSS Bandit is a the prototypical RSS client and is written about in the MSDN article entitled "Building a Desktop News Aggregator." See here for more info about it. Other clients include

FeedReader
Awasu
NewsDesk from WildGrape
Syndirella
NewsMonster -- an interesting reader that integrates with Mozilla and runs as a sidebar.
FeedDemon -- a new reader in beta now, expected to be commercially available. my current favorite.

There are numerous lists of RSS clients. Here are 3:

Abbe Normal's RSS Readers Wiki
Haiko Heibig's Directory (a little old now)
Open Directory of RSS Readers

And there's at least one Yahoo! group for these things: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aggregators/.

I like it!

Posted by tony at 08:28 AM | Comments (0)

June 24, 2003

Shell objects

Today's Lockergnome Windows Daily has a pointer to a neat tool that fits right in with my entry about special folders (e.g. My Computer). Called the Shell Object Editor, it's a small, free download that lets you add, delete and modify your own shell objects. In expert mode you can even futz with the shell folders that are already present on your machine. The author explicitly states that he's using some undocumented functions so this isn't something I'd count on working when you need it. Still, if you're like me, just seeing the shell objects that are already present on your machine is a real learning experience.

Posted by tony at 02:13 PM | Comments (0)

News, news and more news and updates and news and ...

Sheesh! I must be browsing a couple dozen sites to check for updates and news. I happened across a news aggregator called Daily Rotation. No, it's not an RSS feed, it's just a web page that shows headlines, updated regularly, of over 200 sources including places like BetaNews, VersionTracker, SlashDot, InfoWorld and CNet. Each headline is a link to the story.

Posted by tony at 01:49 PM | Comments (0)

Cut the bull

OK, this one's kinda funny. Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Consulting is distributing a bullsh*t filter for Word and Powerpoint documents. Not the first of its kind but I think it is the first to come from a major company. It's part of DC's Straight Talk series and is called Bullfighter. You run it, it scans the document for "readability and jargon" and suggests alternatives. Here's the download page. Knock yourself out!

Posted by tony at 07:36 AM | Comments (0)

Privacy and control via proxy

Let me give you the payoff first and then the background. Proxomitron has been sold and the free version is no longer being developed. Alternatives? Supposedly privoxy is one and Internet Junkbuster is another. As I find others that are (nearly) as as capable I'll post them.

OK, now for those that aren't familiar with the particulars, here's some background. Scott, Proxomitron's developer, finally had enough of the whining and kvetching on the the Yahoo! Group and decided to pack it in (see the group for details). Proxo, as it's known to its friends, has been around for quite a few years and is known as one of the most powerful and configurable filters/proxies around. With it you can literally rewrite entire pages, adding, removing or changing it as you deem necessary. This power allows you to selectively block ads, cookies, manage privacy and a bunch of other things including adding your own decorations if you want. It requires a bit of knowledge to set up, though, because it's configured by editing text filter files which are applied to your browser's data stream. There's LOTS of help on the group as well as a bunch of filters that you can download.

OK, now for those that aren't familiar with the particulars, here's some background. Scott, Proxomitron's developer, finally had enough of the whining and kvetching on the the Yahoo! Group and decided to pack it in (see the group for details). Proxo, as it's known to its friends, has been around for quite a few years and is known as one of the most powerful and configurable filters/proxies around. With it you can literally rewrite entire pages, adding, removing or changing it as you deem necessary. This power allows you to selectively block ads, cookies, manage privacy and a bunch of other things including adding your own decorations if you want. It requires a bit of knowledge to set up, though, because it's configured by editing text filter files which are applied to your browser's data stream. There's LOTS of help on the group as well as a bunch of filters that you can download.

Posted by tony at 07:19 AM | Comments (0)

June 23, 2003

It's not a new trojan, it's a network mapping tool!

Remember that eWeek article about a new trojan that could eat the entire Internet's lunch in 24 hours (see my blog posting from 6/16 at 10PM)? Well, guess what? They were wrong (gasp, no!) ... at least they think they were (what, more uncertainty?). In an eWeek follow-up article from 6/19 (how'd I miss it?) called "Security Researchers Uncover Mystery Malware" but a network mapping tool that they call "Stumbler".

Posted by tony at 06:14 PM | Comments (0)

Wireless deals at eCost.com

eCost.com has the SMC EZConnect 802.11b wireless PC card with configurable transmit power (up to 100 milliwatts meaning greater distances) for $19. Only 58 left with the deal set to expire in about 68 hours.

They've also got an Adaptec 802.11b Wireless 4-Port Router for $39.99 (4 left with 70 hours to go) and the Adaptec 802.11b Wireless Access Point for $29.00 (no idea how many or how long the deal will last).

Posted by tony at 06:05 PM | Comments (0)

Launching the default browser - an answer :)

OK, I promised the answer I'm using: run wscript on the following:

function main()  {
  var i;

// Create an instance of the scripting Shell Object
WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell");

if(WScript.Arguments.length >= 1) {
// Have the Shell Object call ShellExecute on the 1st argument.
WshShell.Run(WScript.Arguments(0), 1, 0);
}

// Destroy the Shell Object
WScript.DisconnectObject(WshShell);
}

main();

Simple, no? Coming up with this led me through the confusing labyrinth of Wscript/Cscript, JScript, VBA and a few other things that I cna't remember anymore. It's been an intense couple of days! What I learned, though, has, as usual, been invaluable. I finally "got" the WScript object model and how it differs from the language that's being used to implement.

For completeness (and so that I have a record of some of these incredible sites and pages), here's where I went:

ShellExecute is in shell32.dll. Method of operation (how it decides to start a new instance, what registry keys it looks in, etc.) is in MSKB 224816.

MSKB 164787) describes the RunDLL and RunDLL32 interface and mechanism.

Then there's this article in the Microsoft Systems Journal which describes how to script an autorun utility.

WhirlyWiryWeb has a utility called ShellExe.exe which will launch documents through ShellExecute. The download is only 14K. The article and the download is available at http://www.whirlywiryweb.com/q/%2Fshellexe.asp. It takes multiple arguments and goes through trying to open each one of them till it succeeds. Kinda overkill for me and what I'm trying to do but it's still a good starting point.

"Fundamental Shell Concepts" at NetEZ.com explains some of the shell space naming, including how to locate the "name" of special folders. For instance, "My Computer" is "::{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}" (sans quotes). You can use this as an address (like C:\WINDOWS) in Explorer, for instance.

Another good place I found some JScripting help was at newObjects in their Code snippets section. This particular article has 2 snippets: a sprintf implementation in JScript and a file preprocessor. I took some JScript hints from them.

The Google search terms I used to find most of this stuff was simply "jscript parameters" without the quotes. I found a VERY good document on JScript at http://docs.rinet.ru:8080/BumazhnyyKofe/index.htm. There are LOTS and LOTS of documents there.

Posted by tony at 07:23 AM | Comments (0)

June 22, 2003

The search is over! -- And why I've been tearing my hair out over this

I think I have finally found an answer to programmatically launching the default browser. I'll get to that in a minute but first I thought I'd tell you why I'm doing this.

As most of you know, I'm pretty paranoid when it comes to email and Internet access. I don' t like to read my email, for instance, in a web-enabled email client. Too many nasties can sneak past your defenses. I'm not crazy about the protection afforded by accessories external to the main email clients I use (Outlook and Outlook Express) and so I opt to inspect (and often, handle completely) my email through clients that aren't HTML nor even really web-enabled. Yeah, I know, I'm a throwback, a neanderthal but you just can't get any safer than that. For the longest time I've been using a pure text-mode email client called mutt on my Unix shell account at RawBandwidth. This is a good, safe environment and the email client is under active development so it's been a pretty good solution. Problem is it can't render ANY HTML and relies on an external viewer (like lynx) to display anything having HTML in it. One of the shortcomings of such a setup is that when I find an HTML email that I consider "safe," I can't easily view it or any of the links in a multimedia browser (like IE or Mozilla or ...).

I've danced around Pine for quite a few years, never really getting too far in to it ... I was happy with mutt. One day I decided to look into it further (probably because a new version became available for Cygwin). Turns out that Pine development has far outstripped what I expected of it. It can display HTML in line-mode but in a form that's pretty easily understandable. There's a native Windows PC version and, of course, a version for just about any *nix you care to name (including, I might add, OS X) and they have a fairly recent version on my shell machine. I tried it and, by golly, I like it! Next thing is, naturally, to set it up so I can browse those links in the message I deem "safe." OK, well, the easiest thing is just to run IE directly. I did that for quite a while but, with all the flipping back and forth between browsers, it became tedious to have a web page come up in IE when I was using Opera or MyIE2. That's what sent me on my hunt for a way to send a URL to the currently-running browser. You'd think that'd be simple, wouldn't you? Well, it is simple if you know the trick (ain't that always the case!).

I was on the right track a few days ago when I asked a few of you if you knew how to do this in VBScript or JScript or a BAT file. My meanderings and Google and Microsoft searches finally led me to ShellExecute -- an API function. I'll go in to the details in the next entry.

Posted by tony at 05:09 PM | Comments (0)

OK, that's not a great way to do it ...

Problems in the last solution I posted: URLs that have dollar signs in them don't parse right. Gotta find another way.

Posted by tony at 05:04 PM | Comments (0)

How to programmatically launch your default browser

I've been searching for a way to do this for a while now and I think I may've finally found an answer.

Even though MSKB article 283225 ("HOWTO: Start Internet Explorer from a Java Application") says it's osolete, you can still use rundll32 passing 2 parameters: the first being the string (sans quotes) "url.dll,FileProtocolHandler" and the second being the URL you want to browse. I sat up a little test and it seems to work, even if the URL contains spaces or other characters that you would normally expect to require quoting.

MSKB article 174156 ("HOWTO: Programmatically Launch the Default Internet Browser") documents how to use ShellExecute from VB which ishow the previous KB article says you're supposed to go about it. I dunno, it just seems like the long way around. I suppose for long-term supportability, though, I should look into this. If anyone has any comments or suggestions, please drop me an email ... I can use all the help I can get on this!

Posted by tony at 11:04 AM | Comments (0)

June 20, 2003

ieHTTPHeaders plug-in

Was browsing the MyIE2 forums and found a link to the ieHTTPHeaders plug-in -- a plug-in that shows the HTTP and HTTPS headers that are exchanged between whatever web server you're talking with and your browser. Nice! I've used curl and Microsoft's wFetch which is included in the IIS 6.0 toolkit (see MSKB 284285 for details) but having it integrated into the browser helpls a lot.

BTW, Jonas Blunck (ieHTTPHeaders author) has some interesting tools and links on his site.

Posted by tony at 09:05 AM | Comments (0)

New version of MyIE2 tabbed browser: 0.7.1350

With this release MyIE2 has supplanted AvantBrowser as my favorite. They run neck-and-neck and I go back and forth between them.

One feature I look for is the the ability to auto-refresh a page. AvantBrowser has it and MyIE2 has it (Opera's has it, too, but I'm concentrating on IE-based browsers for the time being). The auto-refresh UI's a little slicker in AvantBrowser but, operationally, it seems to work just a tiny bit better in MyIE2 -- in AvantBrowser the page sometimes will lose focus during an auto-update and at other times the AvantBrowser windows will pop to the front. I don't seem to have that problem with MyIE2.

Another feature is form-filling. AvantBrowser relies on AI RoboForm for it's form-filling capabilities whereas you can choose whether to use RoboForm or the form filler that's integral to MyIE2. RoboForm comes in two flavors: a free one and a paid one and is supposed to be pretty powerful with a lot of bells and whistles even in the free version but, personally, I've never had a problem with MyIE2's built-in support which is why I continue to use it.

Posted by tony at 08:09 AM | Comments (0)

June 19, 2003

TheScreenSavers: How to start a WiFi ISP

A call came in to TheScreenSavers last night from a guy that wanted to start his own ISP. Patrick referred him to the following two sites:

Seattle Wireless
NoCatNet

(Can you tell I've been reading the TheScreenSavers daily email update?)

Posted by tony at 07:29 AM | Comments (0)

Cheap notebooks reviews on TechTV's TheScreenSavers

Article is here.

They're not really the cheapest ... the author was looking a notebooks around $1,200 whereas I've seen (probably discontinued) HP laptops in Fry's ads for the last few months at $749 and $799. Still, it's nice to have another set of opinions around and he looks at some not-so-common notebooks like the Averatec 3150P. And the Gateway 400SP Plus and Winbook J4 are only $800.

Posted by tony at 07:20 AM | Comments (0)

Blogging tool comparison

urldir has a pretty neat blog comparison tool called BlogComp. At this time you can use it to compare up to 5 of 27 different blogging tools. The list includes b2, Blogger, Movable Type, LiveJournal along with some other very popular ones. Note that it includes hosted services as well as host-your-own.

And while you're there, take a look at the home page and archives. There're some interesting links there, too, including a small article about TypePad, the Movable Type folks' upcoming service based on the Movable Type engine.

Posted by tony at 07:09 AM | Comments (0)

phpMyAdmin Cross-Site Scripting vulnerability

Reported by Secunia. Here's the advisory: http://www.secunia.com/advisories/9076/.

Posted by tony at 06:55 AM | Comments (0)

June 18, 2003

[Blogging] Alternatives to Movable Type

b2 looks like a pretty neat alternative to Movable Type. You need PHP4 and MySQL. I'll have to check this one out. If anyone has experience with it, please email me.

Posted by tony at 09:47 PM | Comments (0)

PhpLens V3.0 PHP app server

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.

Posted by tony at 08:29 AM | Comments (0)

It's a PEN. No, it's a LASER POINTER. No, it's a ...

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.

Posted by tony at 07:20 AM | Comments (0)

New betas: MP3Gain V1.2 and Kerio Personal Firewall V4.0 Beta 4

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.

Posted by tony at 07:19 AM | Comments (0)

Want to publish your own Ezine?

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.

Posted by tony at 07:17 AM | Comments (0)

Scot's Newsletter, his forums and a discussion of XP services

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=.

Posted by tony at 07:15 AM | Comments (0)

Chris Pirillo and Lockergnome Windows Daily

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.

Posted by tony at 07:09 AM | Comments (0)

Couldn't add to my blog last night ...

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.

Posted by tony at 07:02 AM | Comments (0)

June 17, 2003

BlackICE filter bypass

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."

Posted by tony at 05:59 PM | Comments (0)

On a completely unrelated topic ...

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.

Posted by tony at 05:51 PM | Comments (0)

Another IE Cross-site scripting vulnerability ...

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.

Posted by tony at 07:14 AM | Comments (0)

... and an XML cross-site scripting flaw in IE

Looks like this is based on the same kind of flaw reported above. Here's the Secunia advisory: http://www.secunia.com/advisories/9055. Check out the GreyMagic site for the original report.

Posted by tony at 07:08 AM | Comments (0)

June 16, 2003

Commissions?

Looks like a few of you decided to pick up the SMC wireless router from CompUSA. Glad I could help and I hope it works out.

And, no, I don't get a commission from CompUSA :)

Posted by tony at 10:44 PM | Comments (0)

New Trojan or paranoia in action?

Story's at http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,1126751,00.asp. Here's the deal: they say a compromised system listens for packets of size 55,808. Supposedly there's another system (systems?) out there that are sending TCP SYN packets to random IP addresses at a speed that will allow them to hit 90% of the Internet's addresses in 24 hours (!! -- that's gotta be FAST! -- there're a LOT of addresses out there). They don't know what the compromised systems will do or what kind of information they'll leak so they can't say what's up with this new trojan/virus. You gotta admit, though, this is a weird one!

Read the article. Decide for yourself.

Posted by tony at 10:00 PM | Comments (0)

Microsoft's preparing an update to Mac OS X Internet Explorer and then discontinuing development

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?

Posted by tony at 09:53 PM | Comments (0)

Good newsletter: WinXPNews

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.

Posted by tony at 09:15 PM | Comments (0)

IOGear USB 2.0 PCI card at Outpost.com for $10 -- $0 after rebate

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

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

Posted by tony at 09:13 AM | Comments (0)

CompUSA $29.99 SMC 802.11b router deal is still good

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.

Posted by tony at 09:09 AM | Comments (0)

Basic Information For Safe Computing For Home Users

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").

Posted by tony at 08:14 AM | Comments (0)

The ASP.NET Web Matrix Project -- A Free ASP.NET IDE from Microsoft

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.

Posted by tony at 08:05 AM | Comments (0)

Adobe Acrobat Reader Security Exposure On Linux

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).

Posted by tony at 07:41 AM | Comments (0)

June 15, 2003

Software I Swear By (and, sometimes, AT)

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.

Posted by tony at 09:31 PM | Comments (0)

Microsoft Action Pack

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.

Posted by tony at 08:57 PM | Comments (0)

W3C's WSYIWYG HTML editor

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.

Posted by tony at 08:43 PM | Comments (0)

$29.99 SMC 802.11b router and $29.99 Belkin 802.11b PC card at CompUSA

I think this may be a one day-only deal but the router normally costs $79.99 [Update: 6/16/2003, 09:05 AM: Well, it turns out this deal is still available. Check the CompUSA web site]. There's a $20 Internet purchase instant rebate and a $30 mail-in that brings the cost way down. Now, it's 802.11b, not the newer 802.11g but it's cheap enough that you could make a case for throwing it away when the price of 802.11g hardware comes down. Go to http://www.compusa.com/products/product_info.asp?product_code=295202&pfp=hpfod#checkstore for details on the router.

The Belkin card is, I think, a card that I tested out in a prior life and found it to be almost as good as the Orinoco card I use. The price is $59.99 with a $30 mail-in rebate. See http://www.compusa.com/products/product_info.asp?product_code=287284&pfp=BROWSE for the card.

Posted by tony at 01:49 PM | Comments (0)

Be notified when a web page changes

I've been using WebCQ for a year or so now and, while the change detection and/or notification engines somtimes get "stuck", it's generally a pretty reliable and accurate service. It's an academic project at Georgia Tech.

Another site that I've begun using just recently is http://www.watchthatpage.com. I've got a couple of pages that are being monitored daily and they haven't missed a notification yet.

Posted by tony at 01:25 PM | Comments (0)

Wi-Fi News

http://www.wifinetnews.com/ is a site dedicated to news about all 802.11 protocols and standards. It's maintained as a blog using Movable Type.

Posted by tony at 01:02 PM | Comments (0)

SmallNetBuilder

With good info about networks, wired and wireless, http://www.smallnetbuilder.com keeps a page with status on 802.11g vendors and products. Last update (as of this posting) was 6/14/2003. See http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/News_story_237.php.

Posted by tony at 12:55 PM | Comments (0)

Software downloads and updates sites

http://www.betanews.com lists updates and beta software by date along with news about software and software vendors.

http://www.fileforum.com is frequently referenced by BetaNews as a download location. It is, itself, a good site for Windows and Unix updates and downloads. Files are categorized and date-sorted.

http://www.majorgeeks.com seems to be a little more technical. Information is recorded chronologically.

http://www.versiontracker.com has sections for Windows, Palm, Mac OS and Mac OS X and has a Pro (paid) version

http://www.webattack.com is another useful software site. Paid version is at http://www.mywebattack.com

Posted by tony at 12:29 PM | Comments (0)

Windows Mailing List at Sunbelt-Software

Lots of good Windows mailing lists at http://www.sunbelt-software.com/forums/. Some of them are very techical, like the NTSYSADMIN list and some are pretty high traffic. The Windows XP Users list is a good one for beginning to intermediate Windows XP Home/Professional users.

Posted by tony at 09:16 AM | Comments (0)

Mac OS X Mailing Lists

Lots of OS X mailing lists at http://www.themacintoshguy.com/lists/X.html.

Posted by tony at 09:08 AM | Comments (0)