Monthly Archives: October 2004

Look out Lookout

I’ve been singing the praises of Lookout for a while now, although I was beaten to the punch on this blog.

Well it seems Lookout has some competition and after just one day of use I’m impressed.

The free Copernic Desktop Search allows you to search across the contents of your PC including files, emails, attachments, music and video. It’s lightning fast although the search tool it can install on your task bar can make it a little cluttered, especially if, like me, you’re running Google Desk Bar and have Windows Media Player running in minimised mode. Unfortunately it doesn’t index Firefox bookmarks or history, only IE, nor does it index OneNote files but with any luck and an avalanche of requests that will hopefully change.

From what I’ve read it’s offering what Microsoft plan to include in some future version of Windows and what Google are planning on offering in a tool called ‘Puffin’. Why wait though? It’s small, fast, works and is available now.

ONE HOUR LATER…

More and more impressed – wanted to find REM’s ‘Bad Day’ in my disorganised music folder, I swear it was displaying the result before I finished typing the ‘y’.

File not found

Back when IE4 came out, Microsoft trumpeted the integration of the Web and the desktop. Active Desktop, remember that? One of the other things they did was to make Windows Explorer look a bit more like the Web, and make Internet Explorer capable of doing Windows Explorer-type things.

I was doubtful that it was very helpful, but in any case they went too far. We now have the ridiculous situation of Windows Explorer showing the following message if you try to go manually (eg by typing) to a path that doesn’t exist.

Windows path not found error

The path doesn’t exist. Adjusting my browser settings is not going to help.

Refreshing or trying again later is not going to help.

Checking my Internet connection settings is not going to help, nor is getting Windows to do its magical check of my connection settings.

Checking if I have 128-bit security it’s definitely not going to help, for F’s sake.

Click the Back button? Try another link? I wasn’t clicking on a link!

And it says it can’t find a server, or had a DNS error. Bullshit. WhatTF use is that?

(This was in Windows 2000/IE6. Have they fixed this in Windows XP?)

It’s A Coffee Table Book…

It’s a coffee table book, but not about coffee tables.

This one is tells the story of 44 early personal computers, and even features my first ever computer, the mighty Acorn Electron. Check it out, I can hear my Mastercard groaning already. Via JD.

Spyware

The US House of Reps has passed an anti-spyware bill, which appears to ban a lot of insidious activities such as hijacking browsers. Congress still needs to pass it.

It sounds like a positive move, though I wonder how much of the spy (eg user tracking etc) part of these things will still be legal, hidden away in the small-print of user licence agreements, happily accepted by Mr/Ms Average User merrily clicking on “Yes” when installing Kazaa or whatever.

It doesn’t necessarily help those of us elsewhere in the world, but as is generally the case a lot of the evil bastard companies doing this kind of crap are US-based, and hopefully other governments would look at introducing similar laws.

The problem with Fairfax

A while back The Age (and other Fairfax Digital sites) introduced a free registration requirement to get to read pages with any meat on them. I can kinda understand their motivation in this, it probably makes their web advertising more valuable knowing who’s looking at what.

Three problems with it though. Firstly it discourages casual viewers. While it’s relatively invisible once you’re registered, it is a pain to have to remember yet another e-mail/password combination, especially if you move around a lot. Have pity on the expat Aussies roaming from Net cafe to Net cafe.

Secondly Google News is now counting some Fairfax sites as “subscription,” putting off more casual viewers. (Curiously the SMH is labelled as subscription, but The Age isn’t.)

Thirdly one day last week I tried to look at an article in The Age and the authentication system had broken down, barring entry. Surely they should realise that they’re in the content-delivery business, not the web subscription business, and if the authentication system fails, waive the requirement to check my logon, and just show me the damn page.

Oh yeah, and why is their up-to-the-minute fast-breaking Technology Daily e-mail bulletin filled with stories that are two days old?

Geek Speek

Having problems accessing some email accounts this morning. The exchange with their tech support ended with this :

Your connectivity is perfect. All I can suggest is using another email client, another PC and if possible disable your firewall if you run one. If you can connect just fine at http://mail.yourdomain.com then the issue must be client related.

That’s the geek way of saying “I’ve run out of ideas, you’re on your own.” One reset of the computer later and all is fine.

Office Clipboard

I’m used to the Windows Clipboard, which has one spot to put things in. Copy/paste. It’s simple, it’s easy to use, it’s quick.

Office ClipboardDamn this expanded Office Clipboard that comes with Office 2000, with its extraneous toolbar turning itself on and plonking itself right at the top, screwing up all your menus. Damn its 12 spots which fill up and then interrupt you to tell you they’re full. I don’t care if they’re full. Yes of course I want to copy this and bump some old long-forgotten thing from an hour ago off the list.

I don’t want it. I didn’t ask for it. Is there some way of turning this bloody thing off?

Yes, thankfully there is.

(Thankfully in Office XP, it can be done from the Options screen.)

Beating the queue

I was wondering how the geekrant.org domain name propagated so fast. Turns out since September, DNS updates have been happening about every five minutes, instead of twice a day.

We also got a quick path on getting indexed by Google, courtesy of using Google’s AdSense, which evidently bumps you to the top of the indexing queue so they can serve more relevant ads.

Speaking of Google, for people in the US, there’s now Google via SMS.

Firefox point and counterpoint

I like Firefox a lot. I use it almost exclusively at home. At work it’s not so easy, as something in its password caching plays havoc with the corporate proxy, hitting it with an old password continually, and constantly locking my account. So IE6 rules the roost there.

But I do have one big problem with Firefox, and the way its development goes. My series of annotated photos on my blog uses little popups to describe things in the pictures. I wanted something easy* to implement, completely standards-based, don’t rely on any hyper-funky overkill technology like Java or Flash, nor on an external service provider like Flickr (which looks really good, but these things have a habit of going west after a few years, and I intend my blog to be online virtually forever, or at least until they prise my credit cards from my cold dead hands).

So I used the <title> tag in the hotspots of the pictures. But Firefox abbreviates long tooltips, rather than wrapping.

This is a known bug in Firefox. It’s been a known bug in Firefox for four damn years. Jeez. Is that a failing of the open source community, that sometimes it can take them so long to agree something needs to be fixed, write a fix, and then get it released? I call that pretty piss-poor. At least with monolithic corporations like Microsoft, some jackbooted Program Manager would have clicked their fingers and had it done by now.

By the way, if you’re playing about in Firefox, but some obscure option you’re looking for isn’t on the dialogs (like when I turned off the closing all tabs warning and couldn’t turn it on again)… then check try about:config in the address field. Very groovy.

*Easy as long as doing HTML hotspots is your idea of fun, or you have a tool that can do them for you.

Update 10/11/2004: This bug is still not fixed in Firefox 1.0. It can be cured using the PopupAlt extension, but that’s not the point. Firefox should work. It shouldn’t be up to individual users to go out hunting for a solution they have to download to get around a known Firefox problem.