More and more of my writing happens in the browser, with much of the text being inputed into forms. Whether it is typing articles for my blogs or commenting in others or doing most anything else.
While some online applications have spell check built in, most doesn’t. That’s where a browser plug-in for spell checking comes in handy.
Yet another huge exploit in Internet Explorer discovered and published by Secunia
The scary part? The exploit can easily allow any site you visit to create windows folders and files on your computer, and thereby destroy your windows installation, turn your machine into a spam zombie, turn your machine into remote storage for illegal material that could put you in jail for a very long time, etc. ad infinitum.
More information over at Virtuelvis: Stop using Internet Explorer! Now!
So whats the fix for Internet Explorer? Quit using it. There is really no reason to continue using Internet Explorer anymore. Internet Explorer 6 is outdated and VERY unsecure.
Instead I would suggest installing another browser, such as one or both of these two:
Its a good question, that I will try to find the answer for. The problem isn’t only limited to network printing, it also involves slower access to network shares, programs running slower when checking documents on network shares etc.
The solution to the slow network printing is however quite simple. I would love to know how he came up with it, but in any case – Pavel posted this solution in microsoft.public.windowsxp.print_fax some time ago:
Ecto is a pretty cool new tool for MovableType, Blogger, Typepad and Windows users (Uses XML-RPC so it should be possible to use it with any blog system utilizing XML-RPC), at the moment it is in pre 1.0 beta, and this is my first post with it. Will probably report more about features and possibilites. The first that caught my eye is the possibility of having the song you are playing at the moment you are posting being listed automatically. Unfortuantly I haven’t been able to download the plug-in for WinAmp yet – but I will get to it.
A cool little function in the editor is that it will automatically past in the last url you have copied into the clipboard.
The only thing I am missing at the moment is a spell checker.
BTW: Ecto has been available for Mac for a long time.
Some of you might have noticed that theres a project going on to replace todays RSS formats with a format everyone can agree upon.
Yesterday Clay Shirky wrote a nice piece called “RSS, Echo, Wikis, and Personality Wars” where he talks about how Sam Ruby has moved the format process away from egos (Need we mention Mark, Dave and Sam?) and over to the actuall format.
Though both weblogs and wikis support conversational patterns, weblogs are “conversation as published comments” while wikis are “conversation as shared editing.” Weblogs tend towards polarized or divergent views, while wikis tend towards convergent ones, which is just what you want for a conversation around standards.
[Via Mamamusings]
This is a nifty little tool, made in Flash, allowing you to browse your installed fonts: STC fontBrowser
[Via Quasimondo]
This is great news. Although the patent has only expired in the US due to the 20 year rule, it will most certainly make it possible for Open Source products to start supporting GIF again without having to pay blood money to the patent holder.
Among the products that have already received patches are GD (Graphics library, used in PHP et. al).
[Via Pnut’s Thoughts]
A cool Flash site for the soon-to-be-released Futurama Game (PS 2 and XBox)
Nice looking site, but having to wait forever (on 4 Mbit/s) everytime I make click a link is not fun. Not sure if its the site that has maxed out its bandwidth, or just poor design/programming.
Tools -> Options ->Viewing Mail -> Preview Pane
and un checking “Show messages in preview pane”
While you are in that window, I would also recommend un checking the “Use Microsoft’s viewer” in the Message Window part of the screen. That will make you safer against viruses.
Tools -> Options -> Display
and un check the “Automatically download HTML graphics”
This is a move I highly recommend! – It will stop Eudora from downloading images included in formatted e-mail, thereby making it impossible for spammers to use images to verify e-mail addresses.
BTW: If you don’t have it already, Eudora is available for download at Eudora.com, and comes as a light version (no ads, fewer functions), sponsored version (free with all functionality available, but with ads), and as a for-pay version with all the features and none of the ads. They even have an Internet Suite including e-mail and a lightweight browser for the Palm OS.
PS: No money changed hands for me to praise Eudora like this, I just feel that Qualcomm has made a great job with their tools and deserve some praise now and then. :-)
Eudora has always been my favorite mail application. It (almost) supports standard mailbox format (one mailbox = one file) so its easy to port mail from one platform to another, if configured right its virtually bulletproof against viruses, and it just works. My one gripe with it is that its only available for Windows and Mac.
I have written about how Eudora 6 will make it even easier to battle spam with Eudora, and I have to admit that when I saw in which direction Qualcomm is going with Eudora, I was also wondering how it would affect companies such as Spamnix that supplies anti-spam tools for Eudora.
While Eudora 6 is being designed to allow easy implementation of third party anti-spam applications and services, it is also taking a slice out of the market with a very simple anti-spam tool included in the mail application itself. One that should work for most people right out of the box. The little tests I’ve done shows that the anti-spam feature of Eudora 6.0 has a hit-rate of over 90% straight out the box – without any work needed. Pretty impressive if you ask me, and the added benefit of a tool that is hooked right into the mail application, makes it easy to white list everyone in your address book.
So how does Spamnix meet the future competition, by giving up? Not at all. Today, in an early beta/alpha release their new version sports more muscles than ever with the inclusion of a Bayesian
machine-learning system. (And I was just wondering when they would come around to that!). According to Spamnix software they have archived a 99% accurate spam filtering with this version already. That my friends are almost as good as a challenge-response system such as the one implemented by Earthlink earlier this week, but without all the disadvantages (with senders having to verify themselves before their mail goes through).
Look out for public betas of Spamnix for Eudora 1.2, coming for Windows and Mac OS X soon!
Psst: David Mertz has written a good article about spam filtering techniques, among them Bayesian filtering – if you are wondering what it is.