I forgot to mention this and a friend of mine brought it to my attention. The NStorm games connect back to the mothership (i.e. the NStorm site). Their Privacy Policy discusses this under the Gaming heading and they say that all they do is collect the fact that a specific game is being played. Their "About NStorm" page tells you that they're an "advergaming" company so it makes sense. For what it's worth, I still play their games. YMMV.
NStorm has been one of my favorite gaming sites for a long time. That's saying something cause I'm not much of a gamer ... just occasional visits to the Space Invaders site and NStorm. Anyway, I'm a fan of quite a few of their games such as Elf Bowling. Haven't played it yet but I'm looking forward to it.
Check this out. Looks like their business is listing companies because they've got printed directories as well. And they have them for more than just Northern California, like one for Arkansas, Louisana and Oklahoma, one for Texas and a couple for Southern California.
CERT issues quarterly summaries and the one for this quarter is out. Besides some new Windows vulnerabilities and some Win32 viruses, there are exposures in SSL/TLS, Sendmail and OpenSSH.
OK, I don't know why but a simple change of browser rectified the Control Panel performance issue I wrote about earlier. I now use Firebird and the Control Panel performs quite nicely!
I saw this a couple of weeks ago and forgot to post something about it and, wouldn't you know, when I thought of it again, I had to go dig up the info again.
Anyway, Infone is a relatively new service which, for 89 cents, gives you 15 minutes of talk-time to a real person for assistance (time beyond 15 minutes is billed at 5 cents/minute). What kind of assistance? Well, nationwide directory assistance, of course, but there's more. You can upload your address book and have the attendant read you information from it or place a call. You can upload your calendar and get information on your appointments. You can call and get dinner reservations or check on flight status or get driving directions ... y'know, stuff that, if you're like me, you've said "Gee, I wish I could ..."
No monthly fees, no charges of any kind until/unless you use the service.
Oh, by the way, if you have them place a call for you, the clock is running until you hang up.
It's not the same-old, same-old. voiceglo offers phone calls over the Internet for, get this, DIAL-UP as well as broadband users. The information on their site is pretty sparse as to the particulars but it looks like you can use your existing phones if you have a broadband connection, otherwise you have to use one of their free USB phones. Apparently they are a full-fledged telephone service provider as you get an actual phone number (how else would someone call you?). The good news is you get to pick the area code you want. I can't tell what area codes they serve as their area code map won't come up on my machine for some reason.
Prices look good. Since they operate over your existing Internet connection, you'll have to keep a wireline provider.
No, it's not gibberish -- it's Tsalagi for "turkey eating time" (in the page referenced above, look just above item 3). The 2nd letter, "v" is actually pronounced like "uh" and the rest of the letters are pronounced as we do in our version of English.
PC Magazine has a Product Activation FAQ which supposedly takes the mystery out of the process. See for yourself.
Secunia has issued this advisory for a privilege escalation vulnerability in PC Anywhere. No fix yet ... the workaround is to
1) NOT run PC Anywhere as a service -- or --
2) grant only trusted users access to vulnerable systems (yeah, right!)
I activated my account. Seems to be pretty full-featured ... I've got SSH access (without a lot of rights, natch) and I can set up FTP users and email users and I can point an existing domain at the site. Everything seems pretty snappy except for the control panel and that is painfully slow.
More when I've had more experience.
1 & 1 Internet, Inc. is offering 3 years of premium web hosting for free. With no commitments. And no contracts. You can cancel at any time. Weird, huh? Internet bubble thinking isn't it? I've seen their ads in several places, most recently in PC World. So, I signed up. They say you don't need a credit card, and you don't. They say all they need from you is your mailing address but that's not true -- they also need a phone number they can call to "activate" your account. I haven't been through this stage yet but supposedly they have an automated system call you to verify your phone number (within 30 minutes of your clicking on an "OK to call me now" button) and then call you again to give you your PIN so that you can activate your account. Hmmm....
What do you get for free?
* No banner ads
* No pop-ups
* No sales calls
* No SPAM
* 500MB web space
* 5GB/month traffic
* Backups
* Firewall protection
* SSH access (shell account?)
* Cron jobs
* PHP3 and 4
* MySQL
* 5 FTP accounts
* 50 subdomains
* 50 POP3 email accounts each with a 50MB mailbox
* Free full version of Fusion 7
That's a partial, but fairly complete, list. This will supposedly cost about $30/month after the promotion ends which, I think, is in mid-January, 2004. If you sign up before then you supposedly get the entire 3 years free. Now, no doubt this is intended to lock you in to using their service so you'll continue after the 3 years is up but it seems they're incurring a significant amount of risk. I've looked through their TOS and don't see anything unusual -- they're allowed to shut you down if you're taking excessive resources and you promise not to create code or pages that are intended to take too much resource but that's about it.
No endorsement from me (yet) -- I'm just passing this along. If/when I have some experiences with them, I'll post them.
Woody Leonhard's Woody's Windows Watch of Nov. 11, 2003 has a good rundown of this month's updates from Microsoft. He calls attention to the fact that if/when you apply this month's update to IE6 you also need to (re)apply the help patch.
Woody Leonhard's Woody's Office Watch from Nov. 12, 2003 has a pointer to this MSDN article which describes in detail how to remove personal information from Word 2000 and Word 2002 documents. You can use some of those tips in Word 2003 but let's hope there's an updated version coming out.
At least that's what this story's tagline would lead you to believe. I could swear Palo Alto has free Wi-Fi and I know their library and the main San Jose Public Library has it available, too. Regardless, this is a case of "more is better."
Lockergnome Windows Fanatics reported on NationMaster -- an interesting site that has all sorts of interesting information about countries around the world. It's not just facts and figures but it's graphs and charts and flags and stuff like that. Have I said it's interesting? Really! It is!
Dave Winer reports on a list of RSS feeds that ABC has.
See http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;299340.
See http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;301041.
The November 4, 2003 issue of WinXPNews talks about this tool from Microsoft will let you mount an ISO image just like it's a real CD. It's only 60K and is unsupported but free.
The October 28 issue of Woody's Office Watch has some great tips on obfuscating your email address on web pages and the like. In it, he also gives a link to a web page that lists all 256 characters in URL-encoding form.
So, what does he recommend? Well, yeah, URL-encoding your email address is one good way. Browsers will be able to figure it out but spammers probably won't. He lists more ways, too.
Reading Woody's email lists is probably one of the best time investments I make.