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.
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.
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:
(Can you tell I've been reading the TheScreenSavers daily email update?)
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.
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.
Reported by Secunia. Here's the advisory: http://www.secunia.com/advisories/9076/.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Lots of OS X mailing lists at http://www.themacintoshguy.com/lists/X.html.