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Archives: Web sites

This is a catch-all category for posts that point to other Web sites (including Google) that don't fit into other categories.

More Bloglines issues

According to an announcement on the Bloglines News page, one of their crawler machines crashed yesterday, causing an outage that lasted until very late in the day. They say everything should be fixed by now. But what's really curious is that two announcements have been scrubbed from the News page....

I'm not the only one who is noticing problems at Bloglines

Russ Beattie, who gets more traffic in an hour than I get in a week, says he's about ready to give up on Bloglines: Lots of Bloglines folk have pinged me about the fact that my site isn’t updating. Not much I can do. I’ve emailed them several times to...

When ads go bad

I've expressed my displeasure before with the hideous ads from Vibrant Media. These are the hyperlinks that appear within stories where certain keywords appear; the links are usually indicated by a double underline or an underline of a different color. My objection is that these links are usually completely inappropriate;...

More great gift ideas

Thanks to Dwight Silverman, I found this collection of amazing T-shirts, all inspired by the comic "Goats." How can you not like Infinite Monkey Gus? Although Republicans for Voldemort (based on this strip) is also nearly irresistible....

What's up with Bloglines?

I sent an e-mail to the Bloglines media rep yesterday and have received no response. Have they finished the move to the new servers? Are the problems that have plagued users for the past few months solved? Who knows? There's no update on the Bloglines site. On the plus side, my readership at...

I've just unsubscribed from eHomeUpgrade

I was baffled to read this post from Chris Lanier. And then I read the discussion under this post by Alexander Grundner and it all made sense. Sadly. The only thing worse than a site that allows no comments is one that is dishonest with its commenting policy. You don't...

A new feed to read

Dwight, you didn't tell me you added a full-text feed! (Thanks to Mike Torres for the pointer.) Update: It's an experiment, Dwight says. Even if you don't live in Houston, you should visit his site and subscribe to his feed....

Science project

John Walkenbach is running an interesting experiment. OK, I'll play....

Bloglines still not coming clean about its problems

Bloglines has been having major problems for at least a week, maybe longer. A company spokesperson has acknowledged that the problems will only be solved when the whole site is moved to a new server farm, and the company has not said when that is going to happen. Yesterday, in...

Electric power around the world

For years, I've been recommending Steve Kropla's World Electric Guide as the definitive source of information about all things electrical. For the world traveler, it's indispensable. If you're planning to visit another country and you want to know what kind of adapter to bring and whether your 110V power supply...

I miss Calvin and Hobbes

The greatest comic strip ever drawn has been gone for a decade now. But fortunately, it lives on through the miracle of the WWW. Today's strip (from August 9, 1994) is especially good. Start.com offers Calvin as one of its popular feeds, so you can add it your Start page with...

Bloglines responds

In the comments to a post I published this weekend, Cathy Thompson of Bloglines addresses the complaints I raised about the recent problems with the service: Man, you guys are cold! Absolutely not BS. We're not trying to hide anything. Point taken that we should blog an update. Bloglines has a...

Google needs a new motto

Several people have e-mailed me this story from today's New York Times: Google's Chief Is Googled, to the Company's Displeasure: CNETNews.com, a technology news Web site, said last week that Google had told it that the company would not answer any questions from CNET's reporters until July 2006. The move...

Surprising browser stats

This is interesting. According to SiteMeter, the excellent service I use to monitor my Web traffic, 31.8% of all visitors to this site are now using Firefox. That's up from 24.76% last October. While the Firefox share grew 7%, the share for Internet Explorer 6.X dropped almost exactly the same amount, slipping from 64.88 to...

Bloglines confirms problems

SiliconBeat, part of the Mercury News family, confirms that Bloglines is having "issues": If you're one of the many folks who read SiliconBeat through Bloglines, you may have noticed that our content is sometimes many hours old by the time it shows up in your Bloglines reader. Apparently, Bloglines is...

Bloglines is broken

So, after I complained yesterday about Bloglines not updating itself, I started keeping an eye on the spider. After taking almost all of Thursday off (including the entire business day on both coasts), it woke up around just before midnight last night, and it came back a few times early...

AOL buys Xdrive

AP report: America Online Inc. said Thursday it has bought the online storage company Xdrive Inc. to meet the growing needs of consumers with rapidly expanding collections of digital music, photos and other files. Wow, that was close. I just canceled my Xdrive account about two months ago. Not that...

Bloglines still broken

I got a response from Bloglines support saying they were resetting the feed for this site, but so far not one of my posts from today has reached Bloglines. I've heard this complaint from others as well, so I don't think it's an isolated incident. Mark Fletcher, is something going...

What do Amazon's rankings really mean?

Chris Anderson, in the process of writing The Long Tail, is highly motivated to learn exactly what Amazon.com's sales ranking numbers mean. Today's post on the subject is fascinating: Amazon still isn’t releasing the hard numbers, but we do at least have a bit more experience at reverse-engineering them. A...

Hello, Bloglines? Tap, tap, tap. Anyone there?

According to Feedburner, 1217 people are subscribed to this site via RSS (thank you very much!). Of that number, 328 use Bloglines. Unfortunately, you Bloglines users are getting a subpar experience, because Bloglines regularly, for no apparent reason, decides to stop picking up this feed. In fact, if you read...

Who says geeks can't write?

The results of this year's Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest have been announced, and the winner is one of us! Yes, as the founders note, grand prize winner Dan McKay is "a 43-year-old quantitative analyst for Microsoft Great Plains ... A resident of Fargo, North Dakota, McKay is currently visiting China, perhaps to...

Be annoyed, get free software

The folks at O'Reilly have started a new group blog called Annoyances Central. Obviously, the point of the site is to promote their series of Annoyances books, but the lineup of writers is impressive and includes a bunch of people I have worked with and admired over the years: Robert...

Some things just get better with age

I'm a huge Bob Dylan fan, I love red wine, and I'm especially partial to Italian reds. So this certainly caught my eye: Legendary American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan may not have had a chart-busting album for a while, but his red Italian signature wine is an international hit. The wine,...

Kitten, puppy, baby, or new video card?

Dan has a full-length comparative review of his new kitten, complete with feature table....

I don't get podcasts, either

What J-Walk said. I can scan 200 blogs in my RSS reader in 20 minutes. They get indexed so I can find them later. I can understand why I might - might - want to listen to a podcast on my portable media player at the gym. But to use this as...

A is for Arrogant, B is for Bloggers, D is for Dell

Jeff Jarvis had a problem with his Dell computer. Dell's customer service did a terrible job of responding to him. He documented the whole affair here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. (I may have missed one or more installments in the saga, and no doubt there will...

More details about RSS in Longhorn

Microsoft has a new home page for RSS in Longhorn. Here's a reasonably simplified explanation of RSS Support in Longhorn. The specification itself is here. This license information appears at the bottom of the specification page: Microsoft’s copyrights in this specification are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License (version 2.5)....

Dear Google, where's the scale?

Does anyone else find it odd that Google Maps and satellite images, while undeniably cool, are completely lacking any indication of scale? I've been using the service a lot lately and have been very frustrated at the inability to calculate how far things are from each other on the map. There's...

More on Microsoft and RSS

Joe Wilcox at Microsoft Monitor has a series of three posts on Microsoft’s RSS Platform. (Part 2 is here and Part 3 is here.) They're well worth reading, with some interesting insights and a nice historical overview. It's too bad the first post in the series starts with a big mistake: Microsoft...

Wow! Microsoft releases new RSS standards under a Creative Commons license

I'm listening to the live stream of Dean Hachamovitch's keynote at Gnomedex, where Larry Lessig just gave a public thank you to Microsoft for its decision to make its new list extension to the RSS standard available under a Creative Commons license. For those who don't remember, Lessig was the...

It's funny because it might be true

The Onion has published its 300th anniversary special edition. Want to know what's going to be in the news in 2056? Check it out. Hilarious, as in "The guy in the next cubicle will want to know what's so funny and you won't be able to tell him." Rich with detail, too. Be...

Another comment spam update

Last March I provided a progress report on the effectiveness of MT-Blacklist, an add-in to the Movable Type software that runs this blog. In the first 75 days after I installed it, it blocked just under 10,000 comment and trackback spams. In the 105 days since that report, spammers have gotten more...

Anyone know how to make your own tiny/short URLs?

One of the most frustrating aspects of writing a computer book is providing pointers to useful information on the Web. We have a lot of URLs in this book, and most are long and random - expecting the reader to type in one of these URLs from the printed edition isn't...

Comments and conversations

Mark Cuban talks with CNN: One of the great things, and the key, really, I think, to a successful blog is that you have to be brutally honest. You can't do CEO speak, you can't do annual reports speak, because people in the blogosphere and your readers are just going...

Tip of the day: Use the Clipboard for quick, temporary backups

One of the most frustrating experiences any Windows user can have is to compose a lengthy comment in a Web-based form, only to click Send, have the server reject the submission, and lose all that effort. Here's a tip that can save at least some of the pain. Before you...

I must be off Scoble's list

I've been wondering how come none of my posts have shown up on Robert Scoble's blog or his link blog in, like, forever. It can't be because I'm not writing about stuff that Scoble is intensely interested in. It can't be because I wrote something that pissed him off (that's actually the best way...

Mark Cuban gets it, the New York Times doesn't

In the New York Times' "What's Online" column, Dan Mitchell takes aim at Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and blows a hole in his own foot: [W]hen [Cuban]'s not talking about himself the pervasive theme is money, and why it is good. In a recent entry about a proposal to...

Brenda Starr, geek girl

Dwight Silverman passes along this great moment in comics history....

Buy these books, and then burn them...

Human Events Online, which bills itself as "The National Conservative Weekly," has just published a list of the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries. I really hate to give them the traffic, but you really have to see this list to believe it. It was compiled...

Techno-tabloid journalism

Greg Saunders at This Modern World passes along a jaw-dropping quote from former New York Times public editor Daniel Okrent, which, in Greg's words, "pretty much says all you need to know about modern newsrooms": I also believe that columnists are entitled by their mandate to engage in the unfair...

The Senator from AccuWeather speaks up

Last month, I wrote about Sen. Rick Santorum's bill to prevent the National Weather Service from freely sharing information it collects with the public. The beneficiary in this scheme would be private companies like AccuWeather, which just happens to be based in Santorum's home state. Today comes news that the...

Thank you, Doug Knox!

Earlier today I tried to play a DVD on my Media Center PC and received an odd error message. When I looked in the My Computer window, I found that the icon for my CD/DVD drive had gone missing. In Device Manager, the entry for the NEC ND-3800 DVD-RW drive...

Google Print lets you search inside books

I've been reading about this for a while, but it looks like Google Print has now gone into a somewhat wider beta. Here, for example, is what turns up under my name. Here is the much longer list you get if you search for "Windows XP." These pages have been...

The history of the Batmobile

Ah, jet lag! I'm awake a few hours earlier than normal (and normal is already pretty early for me). I'm caught up with e-mail, too, which allows me to be tempted by Web sites like this lavishly illustrated History of the Batmobile. It has an interactive timeline that goes from 1941...

Language lessons

Do you know the difference between flaunt and flout? How about imply versus infer? The answers to these and other knotty language traps are on display at the Columbia Journalism Review's Language Corner. Less practical and more fun is Paul McFedries' The Word Spy, which is always worth a visit for anyone interested...

Steve Jobs continues assault on the press

Today’s San Jose Mercury-News (registration required) reports that Apple is taking another shot at an author who dares to criticize: John Wiley & Sons, a leading publisher of technology books, said Apple Computer has removed all its titles from the shelves of Apple stores in apparent retaliation for the upcoming publication...

Oops. Your mom just read your blog.

A local paper reports that kids in my neighborhood might not understand how the internets work: A Scottsdale student reports on her blog that she did not have sex following Chaparral High School’s prom on Saturday. "As for my date . . . well, let’s just say I might as...

The weather forecast? Sunny, warm, and expensive

This is mind-boggling. Josh Marshall reports that Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) wants to prevent you and me from having direct access to weather data that the Federal government collects. Instead, he wants it to be available only for redistribution by paid services: This page right here is the one I...

Please do not buy me this

Milk chocolate dipped pork rinds. Allegedly, they're low-carb. I don't care, the very idea is just ... wrong. (Via Boing Boing)....

Google sightseeing

See the world. From space....

Best golf shot ever

Although I live in a golf mecca, I don't play. In fact, I haven't picked up a set of golf clubs since I was 10 years old, and watching golf ranks up there with watching paint dry on my list of fun ways to spend a Sunday afternoon. But even...

Media Center users, let the bidding begin!

Last month, I posted the news that eBay listings are coming soon to Media Center. Well, they're here.  In the comments to that earlier post, Christoph Buenger writes: thanks for the appreciation! and it's even getting better: mceAuction Beta is available for download at www.cbuenger.com. have fun with it Be sure...

How I use Gmail (new invitations available too!)

Gmail just doubled its storage limit to 2GB, with the promise of more to come. I use my Gmail account for a very specific purpose. I have e-mail newsletters and summaries of daily postings from my favorite newsgroups delivered to that address. I use filters to automatically tag each entry...

Bloglines unveils new translation

I just received this news release from Bloglines: Bloglines, the world's most popular free online service for searching, subscribing, publishing and sharing news feeds, blogs and rich web content, today opened the doors of its service to audiences beyond our solar system with a new translation in Klingon, the galaxy's...

How bad is this writing? It's so bad...

Paul Boutin has the winners of this year's Bulwer-Lytton awards (named in honor of the novelist responsible for the prototypical worst opening line in history: "It was a dark and stormy night.") Here's #10: "As a scientist, Throckmorton knew that if he were ever to break wind in the echo chamber,...

Google adds a (dangerous) Firefox tune-up

From the Google Blog: Now Google's faster than ever on Firefox and Mozilla browsers. When you do a search on these browsers, we instruct them to download your top search result in advance, so if you click on it, you'll get to that page even more quickly. I'm not so...

How come I wasn't invited to this?

MSN Search Champs? I coulda been a contender!...

How this blogger does it

Phil Rodemann has some kind words and a question: How do bloggers do it? What tools should a committed blogger use? If you are committed to drawing traffic, what helps keep the workload to a manageable level? I have two tools that make my life easier. One is NewsGator Outlook Edition,...

Online storage made simple

Back in the dot-com heyday, I reviewed five online file-storage services for an article on a Web site that long ago crumbled into pixel dust. Two years later, only one of those companies was still in business. Most people, it turned out, weren’t willing to pay for the privilege of saving files...

Search the top blogs

Via Search Engine Watch comes this news of a Top Blogs Search feature at A9.com, the experimental search engine from Amazon.com. Search a constantly updated set of recent blog entries from over three hundred of the most influential English language blogs on the web. Imagine my (pleasant) surprise when I searched for “Firefox”...

How to Destroy the Earth

Start your day with some light reading: this remarkably complete treatise on methods and materials for completely getting rid of the Earth. The good news is that it won’t be easy. Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe. You've seen the action movies where...

Google gets personal

Hmmm. This looks interesting. Update: As Steve Rubel points out in the comments, this is nearly a year old. Oddly, it doesn’t appear to have advanced much during that time. Does anyone else think Google has more “live” beta software than any other company in the history of computing?...

Woody Leonhard has a new Web site

Woody and I write books together (Special Edition Using Microsoft Office 2003 and Special Edition Using Microsoft Office XP, for instance), but because we live on opposite sides of the earth, we rarely see each other in person. So it was a real surprise and treat when I discovered that...

Help us test the Windows XP Inside Out BBS

For the past few years, Carl Siechert, Craig Stinson, and I have maintained a group at MSN to help readers of Windows XP Inside Out. When we published the second edition last year, we promised to create a new Web site and forum with more features. It took a few months longer than promised, but...

eBay ad of the day

I’ve been trolling eBay lately in search of a Windows SmartPhone. (Yes, I bought an Audiovox SMT5600 last year, but Judy fell in love with it, and being the loving husband that I am… Well, you can guess who’s using it now.) Anyway, I nearly fell out of my chair...

How many states (and countries) have you visited?

Prof. Froomkin passes along the link to a fascinating little applet that lets you fill in a form containing all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The result is an HTML-formatted list of states using the following key: bold for states you've been to, underline for states you've lived in, and italics for the...

Some Friday fun

The J-Walk Blog is still off-line. (“Maintenance,” he claimed yesterday before the site went completely dark today. Problems with MySQL? Maybe. I think a team of RIAA commandos parachuted in and took him prisoner until he agrees to join the BMC Music Club and buy at least two copy-protected CDs in the...

Uncle Duke's first appearance

I did not remember that the character of Uncle Duke (based on Hunter S. Thompson) made his first appearance in Doonesbury in 1974. I would have guessed much later. Of course, I don’t remember much about 1974. (Via Paul Boutin)...

Spectacular wildflowers

As some of you may know, I live in Arizona, where this year’s wet weather (third wettest February in a century) means a bumper crop of wildflowers. The hills around here are spectacularly green, and the color is already appearing. Desert Wildflower Watch is a great place to go for details...

Comment spam under control

Since this blog opened for business in December 2002, y’all have left 700 or so comments. But the number of comments that haven’t been posted is more interesting. For several months last fall, I stopped accepting any new comments, while I figured out the best way to cope with comment spammers. I settled...

An easy solution to the AutoLink mess

Google’s new toolbar (which is still in beta) has caused a bunch of kerfuffle with its new AutoLink feature. AutoLink does to Web pages what Microsoft wanted to do with its Smart Tags nearly five years ago. Every time you visit a page, the toolbar checks to see whether anything on the page...

Remembering Mad magazine

If you’re a Boomer, you probably remember Mad magazine. I’m not sure exactly when I started reading Mad, or when I stopped, but I sure do remember a lot of the issues pictured at Doug Gilford's Mad Cover Site. When I was a kid, I bought lots of the paperback compilations so I...

Lawrence Lessig laments the miserable PC press

Lawrence Lessig: “Another mistake, Mr. Orlowski. Will you correct this one?” Hey, get in line!...

More thoughts on DEMO

Dwight Silverman of the Houston Chronicle has resurrected his blog at the Houston Chronicle. That’s good news! (Dwight, where’s the RSS feed?) In one of his first posts, he points out that I was at Demo yesterday but not updating as frequently as he wishes I would have. I plead not guilty by reason of strategy....

How to fix URL typo scams

At Slate, Paul Boutin offers an interesting set of suggestions on how to fix URL typo scams. Various studies have estimated that 10 percent to 20 percent of all hand-entered URLs are mistyped, adding up to at least 20 million wrong numbers per day. From my own experience that sounds...

Kazaa haters, unite!

I am proud to report that two articles on this site are at the top of the list if you do a Google Search for I hate Kazaa (with or without quotes). Excellent!...

Understanding the blogosphere

Interesting observations on the speed at which information bounces around the Internet. For some reason, the trackback never reached me, but this post still managed to get to me within 24 hours, thanks to Technorati....

Wired News conducts a clinic in bad journalism

Wired News published a horrible story this morning. In Hide Your IPod, Here Comes Bill, author Leander Kahney writes: To the growing frustration and annoyance of Microsoft's management, Apple Computer's iPod is wildly popular among Microsoft's workers. Now read the story. Read it carefully. (I’ll wait.) Note that the entire...

RSS feeds! Get your RSS feeds!

As alert readers will probably notice, I’ve been tinkering with the RSS feeds on this site lately. The biggest change is that I’m now hosting the feed at Feedburner. I’ve been testing this service for more than six months and I continue to be impressed. It gives me good stats about readership...

Images from New Mexico

New Mexico is one of my favorite places on earth, and Philip Greenspun’s Photographer's Guide to New Mexico has the pictures to prove it. I just had to share…...

When translation robots attack!

My publishers regularly send me copies of my books that have been translated into foreign languages, and it’s always amusing to see my by-line on a book written in a language like Thai or Romanian. But I’m not used to seeing my words translated on the Web, as in this curious link...

Highways West

Ken Layne has a new Web site called Highways West. As longtime readers know, Judy and I live in Arizona and love it. One of our favorite animals, of course, is the roadrunner, aka the “Clown of the Desert.” Today, Ken published a profile of this amusing bird entitled “Huzzah for the...

What happens when you don't understand technology

Every so often I wonder why our legal system thoroughly screws up any issue that involves technology. Then I read posts like this one, from attorney Martin Schwimmer at The Trademark Blog, and I start to understand. It was brought to my attention that a website named Bloglines was reproducing the...

I'm unsubscribing from this feed, too...

I’ve decided to take all the Windows IT Pro feeds out of my newsreader. Why? Because they use the hideous  IntelliTXT sponsored-link technology provided by Vibrant Media. Take a look at this post for an example. The green underlined words, which are designed to look almost exactly like hyperlinks, are actually ads. Hover your mouse over...

When we assume...

Joe Wilcox at Microsoft Monitor had a little problem accessing a Microsoft Web site today and decided to jump to some conclusions: I found that I could easily get to the Website using Internet Explorer on Windows. This morning, I tried to access the Website using Mozilla'z Firefox and ended...

Spreading misinformation

Dan Gillmor is an excellent journalist and a ferocious critic of Microsoft. His blog is widely read and respected - in fact, it's on my must-read list daily. That's why I was distressed to see that a recent blog entry from Dan contained a startling bit of misinformation. As part...

The (continued) decline of the PC press

Alan Meckler offers up his thoughts on PC Magazine The Barometer: The Internet is killing PC Magazine and its competitor PC World ... just as it has killed several other books over the previous few years. The information in these magazines is dated by the time it is published because...

Thanksgiving for Geeks

Articles like this one, "Kitchen Notes: Buying Whole Turkeys", are why I love the Cooking for Engineers site. We're doing our traditional turkey the week after Thanksgiving, on the grill. First time ever. Judy learned the technique at a cooking class at Sur la Table and claims it's really easy....

Browsing on a cell phone

Scoble says everyone needs to redesign their Web sites so it looks good on a cell phone. There's some very simple tips to make your site work great on cell phones (millions of people look at the Web on cell phones and that number is going up every day). A...

Google bug fixed (apparently)

Elliott Back links to an old post of mine and reports that Google has fixed a longstanding problem: In a news release today, Google releases new numbers for the number of pages it can search. Looks like Google has overcome its 4-byte DocID problem and happily doubled its index: You...

AOL says: We suck

Have you seen the new, exceedingly annoying commercials for AOL? Mike at Techdirt has, and he pens this comment about one of them: It shows every AOL customer showing up at the headquarters to give suggestions. The message is supposed to be "AOL listens to its customers," but what I...

New Google search box

How do you like this? homeHTML = ""; document.getElementById("hm").innerHTML = homeHTML;...

Time tools

I've been thinking about time today. This weekend marks the end of Daylight Saving Time. Fortunately, I live in a state that doesn't spring forward or fall back, so I don't have to run around like a madman this weekend and change all the clocks, but you probably do. So...

Google cheat sheet

I didn't know that Google offered a cheat sheet with lists of useful search operators and links to most Google services. I knew about 75% of this stuff, but I picked up a few tricks. Check it out. Thanks to J-Walk Blog for the tip....

How publishers lose readers

I subscribe to several RSS feeds from Windows & IT Pro magazine. Generally, they have good stuff, like an article I ran across today, This is how it goes sometimes. The author, Brett Hill, described how a server was infected in a lab, and how that infection got onto the...

Help me clean up sleazy ads

Longtime readers of this site may have noticed that I included Google ads when I implemented a site redesign the site a few months back. I like Google ads because they're unobtrusive and they're targeted. I'm not going to get rich off them, but they help pay the hosting fees....

Is Google dying?

Daniel Brandt of Google-Watch says Google is dying. Or, more accurately, its abaility to index pages on the Web is severely broken: On sites with more than a few thousand pages, Google is not indexing anywhere from ten percent to seventy percent of the pages it knows about. These pages...

Register? I don't think so...

Adam L. Penenberg has an excellent essay in Wired News: What, Me Register? He tells how he (and others) circumvent the annoying registration requirements of Web sites, mostly news-related ones: Depending on my mood, I'm a 92-year-old spinster from Topeka whose hobbies include snowboarding, macramé and cryptology; the CEO of...

RSS demystified

Wondering about RSS? Here's an excellent introduction that explains all about feeds and aggregators. If you're visiting this Web site and others at irregular intervals in your Web browser, I strongly encourage you to learn about RSS. By using an RSS aggregator, you can skip the tedium of checking all...

New RSS feeds

I've redone the templates for the RSS feeds generated by this site. It took a little prodding from Robert Scoble, who said he was going to drop any feed that didn't publish full text. So OK, I now publish full text. No more wimpy excerpts. Robert, are you happy now?...

Should pirates get SP2?

I bookmarked this column by Bruce Schneier some time ago but am just getting around to discussing it here. It's titled, Microsoft's actions speak louder than words: Initial news stories reported that Microsoft would make this upgrade available to all XP users, both licensed and unlicensed. To me, this was...

Become a Master Googler

I'm continually amazed at the number of people I meet who still don't know about Google, the amazing search engine that helps you find just about anything on the Internet. Go to Google's home page, type a word or phrase into the search box, click the Google Search button, and...

All about About.com

A number of people have asked recently why I no longer work for About.com. Maybe this link will help explain: Class Action Lawsuit Against Primedia Inc., About.com and Scott Kurnit - Levinson et al v Primedia et al. In a nutshell, the past and present management of About.com and its...