New Software Quietly Diverts Sales Commissions

in

Some P2P software developers are bundling "parasite-ware" into their products that intercepts certain web transactions such as Amazon referals and diverts the referral fees to their own company to pay for software development according to this New York Times article.

Products include LimWire, Morpheus, Kazaa, and Bearshare. I use BearShare that uses the SaveNow program by WhenU which, I deleted from the Windows registry. To remove SaveNow and.doxdesk.com provides removal instructions.

Web Standards Sites

in

After meeting with Jay Goldman of Inflection Design and having some in depth discussions about web standards I'm deciding to venture forth and begin to embrace CSS 2.0 on all my sites. Jay also provided some helpful sites to make the transition smoother and account for older browsers like Navigator 4x. Thanks Jay.

The Web Standards Project, HTML Help by The Web Design Group, and W3Schools Online Web Tutorials.

The Simpson's Generation

in

I finally read The Simpson's Generation by Chris Turner in the 10th anniversary issue of Shift on the train ride home last night from Burlington.

"We were being told - in emphatic terms - that the thing we were defending and the way to defend it were one and the same; we were the great globalized Republic of Buying Stuff, and so we should bravely go on buying stuff to protect our right - our most basic, most cherished right - to buy more stuff."

New Glenn Group Site

in

I launched my father's new pharmaceutical consulting site, The Glenn Group, today. It uses the same content management system that my own site uses and employs the new Flash text editor, has industry news feeds, and a client document management area. The technology was a perfect fit to make editing posts easier. I'll be adding new features such as a calendar and hopefully smoothing the graphical look in the next few weeks.

The Smaller Picture

in

Typophile is running an interesting collaborative experiment in which users collectively participate in building a bitmap font by choosing one bit at a time, black or white. The Smaller Picture

At first I thought that it would only be a matter of time before the letters and numbers were formed albeit, slightly deformed. However, this is assuming that the group all share the same goal. If a significant percentage or participants have the goal of not creating a readable font, the project will never succeed.

I also noticed that there are measures in place to prevent you from trying to manipulate a single glyph. The system keeps track and only allows so many alterations over a given period. I assume clearing your cookies would defeat this though.

Replacing Textarea

in

One of the things I do is create dynamic content interfaces for web sites. But standard web forms are limiting for text editing. I had originally tried to implement additional textarea functionality using Javascript but was limited by cross browser functionality due to DOM not being well supported in Netscape 4 if not at all and an annoying bug in Mozilla.

I would have thought that a DOM HTML bug would have been fixed before 1.0 or even 1.1 but in the open source world priorities are not always based on important bugs but rather what programmers feel like fixing. Not like I can complain much, I know how to program but haven't tried to fix these bugs myself. Too much of a pain to get into C++ and learn the intricacies of Mozilla code. Bug I'm rambling.

So, I thought, why not do it in Flash? Turns out there are two good starts on this. Josh Dura has a Flash text editor and so does Stuart Schoneveld although Stuart's is not available to download and therefore tweak and use. It's too bad since Stuart's has a link option that Josh's doesn't yet have.

So I'll have to stretch my limited Flash muscles to plug in a link bar into Josh's editor and solve some issues I noticed. First, the text field in the editor seems to only update it's associated variable with formatting information after more data is entered. So just calling setTextFormat won't apply it to the variable right away. The second thing is that the HTML stored in the variable has the tag <textarea%gt; which last time I checked is not standard HTML. Small details to fix.

Timothy Appnel had some good ideas on Flash based editors.

Naked Toronto

in

Via this Slashdot article, IpEverywhere has produced Naked Wireless to among other things, show a graphical representation of open wireless networks in Toronto.

As pointed out by at least one Slashdot posting this doesn't necessarily mean a security breach based on the requirement of an "unsecure network". It also doesn't account for nodes open for the explicit use of public wireless access.

I just like the map to get an idea of how "wireless" Toronto is.

The Windows 2000 Incident

in

My hard drive was slowly dying from the dreaded click of death. The reads were slower and slower and various diagnostic tools were telling me of multiple read errors. For those who aren't aware, I've lost over three hard drives in one year. If you're looking for a subject in a human magnetic field study, I think I may be able to help you.

So I went out and bought a new hard drive. 80 GB, 7200 RPM Maxtor for $202 with tax, Canadian dollars. I also came into possession of a legitimate copy of Windows 2000 Professional. Away I went partitioning the drive into OS and documents, then installed Windows 2000.

The problems started with the Windows Update program. I like to get all the updates before working. Best to be safe and up to date. The problem was the Windows Update program didn't work. Clicking on the 'Accept' button did nothing. I had a small contract deadline so I decided to forgo the updates for now. I had to install IIS for the project, without an update this turned out to be a big mistake.

After working on the project for a few short hours I noticed a consistent amount of drive activity that shouldn't be happening. I installed McAfee virus professional and after a scan found the Nimda virus all over my drives. I proceeded to clean it out taking several hours as I didn't realize it wasn't able to clean a lot of files until IIS was shut down. I also installed the firewall portion of the software only to discover just how many programs Windows opens up to the network by default.

Finally several hours later the virus scan was complete. But a new problem decided to rear it's ugly head. Every time I logged in as Administrator the system would reboot. After much searching through the registry for what I thought would be some sort of Trojan horse I reformatted the OS partition and started the reinstall again.

After the reinstall McAfee went in first. A full scan showed more Nimda left over on the documents partition. Finally it was all cleared out. "Perhaps I'll try Windows Update again" I thought. Still no go. I tried several times until magically one of the critical updates for networking and IE worked. Upon reboot my Internet connection was lost. Great. I guessed that it might be the firewall getting in the way. I removed McAfee firewall and sure enough the network was back up. Back to Windows Update. No go. In fact now it wouldn't even scan the system to see what updates I needed. Furthermore deleting the Update ActiveX control didn't cause IE to download the control again. I ended up downloading Service Pack 3 (SP3) manually.

What to do about the remaining updates? I noticed that SP3 had installed "Automatic Updates". Shortly after that the automatic updates icon indicated an update download. For now, this will suffice. I don't know if I'm getting all the updates but exhaustive searches on the net resulted in no solutions for my Windows Update problems.

Finally to add further frustration to this upgrade / reinstall, the dreaded mystery reboot returned. Attempting safe mode failed several times until a hard boot allowed safe mode and I surmised that the mystery reboot was being caused most likely my the Adaptec software I just installed. So a little registry hunting and editing and the programs were removed so I could log in again.

So now I can hopefully get back to work in between program reinstalls. The saga continues, stay tuned...