August 09, 2003

Microsoft's weblog intentions

Dan Gillmor reports this response he got from Microsoft when he asked them what they were gonna do with/about weblogs.

Posted by tony at 08:58 AM | Comments (0)

Lockergnome's RSS Resource

Pirillo's really hard at it! He just released this RSS reference site.

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

Differences: Pocket PC 2002 to Pocket PC 2003

Actually called "Windows Mobile 2003 Software for Pocket PC," this article from the O'Reilly Network is a good overview of the differences between the 2003 release and the 2002 version.

Posted by tony at 08:50 AM | Comments (0)

Another .NET weblogging engine: DasBlog.net

Found DasBlog.net from the ASP.NET weblogs, too. It's another weblog engine written in C# using the .NET framework.

Posted by tony at 08:46 AM | Comments (0)

Preparing to move my weblog

Just another warning: bloki.com has got their act together on their weblogs so I'll be moving my weblog soon. I'll post the new link soon.

Posted by tony at 08:39 AM | Comments (0)

Transform XML into RSS

Good how-to article here on transforming XML into RSS. Got this from the ASP.NET weblogs.

Posted by tony at 08:38 AM | Comments (0)

August 07, 2003

More JSPs running on Windows that Solaris!?!

Netcraft reports in this article that 26% of the sites running Java Server Pages run Windows while only 17% run Solaris. Linux is the clear winner, though, with 40%.

Posted by tony at 03:22 PM | Comments (0)

August 06, 2003

Convert Win2K3 Server to a Workstation/DLLs by product

Another good set of info from today's Lockergnome Tech Specialist. First, this link to a procedure to "convert" your Windows 2003 Server to a Workstation and then a link to the Microsoft Help DLL database where you can look up which DLLs are installed and used by which products.

Posted by tony at 08:45 AM | Comments (0)

WinXP Services

Along with Black Viper's Windows XP Services page and his Example Configurations, this page of startup applications at Pacman's Portal comes in very handy identifying what's running. PC Magazine has its new TaskPower utility that might be helpful but their utilities cost money now so I can't tell for sure.

Posted by tony at 07:24 AM | Comments (0)

August 05, 2003

ASP.NET .Text weblog system

Written in C# and ASP.NET, you can download it here. It's a piece of work by Scott Watermasysk.

(Found this is the ASP.NET weblogs.)

Posted by tony at 12:54 PM | Comments (0)

Google's got a synonym operator!?!

Yeah, that's what I hear. Supposedly if you precede a word with a tilde (~), Google will use that word and synonyms for that word in its search (at least according to this).

Posted by tony at 12:41 PM | Comments (0)

Clean RSS 2.0

Chad's got another good post about the travails of trying to get a "good" RSS 2.0 feed out (here) along with this link to his un-funky 2.0 template.

Posted by tony at 12:34 PM | Comments (0)

August 04, 2003

Combating SPAM

Chad discusses SPAM in this weblog entry and lists a couple of pretty good services to help block SPAM. I HATE getting SPAM and I've tried just about every service out there and, while SPAM blocking is certainly one element of a successful crusade, I find that separation of email addresses is crucial -- i.e. discardable email addresses. There are many services that allow you to create discardable addresses and I've tried quite a few. The one that I swear by is Mailshell. I've been using this service for 2 years now, 1 as a user of the free service and 1 where I'm actually paying for it.

The idea behind Mailshell is that you "own" a subdomain and can create and "delete" addresses at will (I put delete in quotes because deleting an address doesn't actually delete it but causes the service to bounce mail back to the sender). So, you could sign up for, say, ts-links and you would get ts-links.mailshell.com. When you sign up for a newsletter from ZDNet and they ask you for an email address you can give them [email protected]. Mail comes in to that address and you can send email originating from that address. If someone else uses that email address to communicate with you, BANG! -- you know where they got it. Naming follows whatever standard you want cause you pick each and every address you want to use. Make 'em meaningless if you want or as meaningful as you care to get. Me, I try to use the name of the service it's related to so, yes, I have a zdnet and a cnet and a blogger.com.

Mailshell also has a great feature called "remote compose". With this feature you can compose email on your "home" account (AT&T, AOL, MSN, whatever) and send it through your ISP to Mailshell. When the service receives the message it throws away all the mail headers and creates a brand new set that only reference mailshell servers -- et voila! -- no indication that the message originated anywhere other than Mailshell. And if you own your own domain they will, for an additional fee, be your mail exchanger (MX records for the DNS literate).

Posted by tony at 07:58 AM | Comments (0)

August 03, 2003

Cheap PDF creation

PC Magazine has a review of 12 PDF creation tools, at least one of which is free.

Posted by tony at 09:23 AM | Comments (0)

Mailblocks now supports PINE's IMAP

I got a Mailblocks account back during the introduction when they were $10 for 3 years. At that time their IMAP server couldn't handle requests from my favorite text-mode mail user-agent (MUA) Pine. I sent their technical support folks several messagea about it but never got anything even remotely satisfying from them. Well, the challenge/response model has lost some of its sparkle and I just kinda let it lie. They relaunched a week or two ago with a new version of their system and apparently they fixed their IMAP server, too, cause now it works just fine with Pine.

Posted by tony at 08:40 AM | Comments (0)

Free PHP-based web content management system

MajorGeeks brings you this update on the Esselbach Storyteller CMS System V1.2, a free PHP-based web content management system which is actually used by MajorGeeks to manage their site. Only 114KB and it can support up to 99 web sites.

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

Shut down DCOM!

This article in CNet shows that hackers are actively exploiting the DCOM hole that everyone was talking about last week (Microsoft Security Bulletin MS03-026). I strongly recommend that you make sure your people know about the fix. You
should also consider recommending that they shut off DCOM altogether, especially if there's ANY chance they'll be connecting to the Internet away from home or if they don't have a firewall at home.

Posted by tony at 08:16 AM | Comments (0)