Simplelinks | January 2003

Jan 31, 2003

Open and Free Project Management Tools in Project Management
This is the place where you can follow the development and status of the project management tools under some kind of Open Source or Free Software license.

Jan 30, 2003

WiFi Sniffer: More information in Gadgets
The WFS-1, as it's named, is a very simple device that searches for WiFi signals when you push a button. The WiFi sniffer is slated to be available in April for $20 - $25.

AlwaysOn * Contact Us in Marketing
So basically what we are saying is we really, really do not want to be contacted unless you are on fire and you think we can put it out.

Microsoft fails Slammer's security test in News
In this case, Microsoft urged customers to fix a vulnerability in the SQL Server 2000 software, but it apparently hadn't taken its own advice. Moreover, despite its 1-year-old security push, the software giant still had critical servers vulnerable to Internet attacks.

Am I Paranoid or is this a New Approach to Spam? in Spam
This is the real effect of spam -- it has completely broken the "trust component" that used to be a part of email. Lately I look at email from new individuals as if it was paper email. I read it but I just don't trust it.

Jan 28, 2003

Matrix Event Advisories in Site management
Matrix NetSystems scans the worldwide Internet all day, every day. Our systems know when there is an event on the network that could affect your traffic. The Event Advirsories are a weekly summary of the events that we detect.

PHP Code Genie in Development: PHP
Just design your database tables and phpCodeGenie can write the php scripts and programs for you.

Enterprise Payroll Systems in Software
The goal of this project is build a multi platform, multi lingual, web based timesheet and payroll systems using PHP and MySQL.

Jan 27, 2003

Content-Management Vendors' Struggles Continue in Site management
Licensing revenue, a key indicator for software vendors, is falling at both Vignette and Stellent--and the losses are mounting.

Judge Bars Sending of Unwanted E-Mail in Spam
State Supreme Court Justice Lottie E. Wilkins permanently enjoined MonsterHut Inc., which state officials accused of sending some 500 million unsolicited commercial e-mails and then telling complaining recipients that they had requested it.

Microsoft CRM to be in resellers' hands soon in Software
Microsoft CRM is intended as a low-cost, entry-level product for smaller businesses seeking a CRM package that will easily connect to ubiquitous Microsoft products such as Word and Outlook.

Jan 25, 2003

Categorize or Search in
The second problem is that I don't know what my main categories of interest will be next year. I change often, and next year I mostly likely will have a list of new ways of categorizing things, which I couldn't think of now. But am I then going to go back and apply those categories to all my old information? No, I won't have time for that.

Jan 24, 2003

Bundle Up for Cold Calling - Part 2: 8 Hot Script Tips in Business
Even at a large company, it's surprisingly easy to get through to the right person if you ask a specific question. I simply called up the main switchboard of a major portal and asked, "Who is the person in your IT group that is in charge of Website performance?" Two minutes and a little chit-chat later, I had a name, phone number, and email address.

Backup4all in Software
Backup4all works with any drive letter, including mapped network drives and UNC paths. You can back up to inexpensive CDR/CDRW media. (Free)

City Ogles Google Impact in Site management
It's difficult to imagine getting more from a $23,000 investment in search technology than the city of San Diego has gotten from its deployment of a Google Inc. search appliance.

Pervasive Spam? in Spam
With more network-connected devices doing more things for us, there's an opportunity for spam to muck up more than our inboxes. This could definitely be a dark side of pervasive computing. Can you imagine unwanted ads worming their way through your system and popping up on your camera or your PVR?

Jan 23, 2003

The Dell Way in Business
"Our direct model has basic principles: Don't let anyone come between us and the customer. Keep clear communication, and no extra costs." Those tenets apply even when Dell is selling services, Rollins says.

PEAR :: Package :: LiveUser in Development: PHP
Using different permission and auth containers, it's easily possible to integrate newly written applications with older ones that have their own ways of storing permissions and user data. Just make a new container type and you're ready to go!

Switching to PHP: What's the Language Difference? in Development: PHP
A review of those PHP features that should be of particular interest to the Perl, Javascript, and VB/ASP programmer.

Phoenix Help: Tips & Tricks in Software
This page contains various tips and tricks for Phoenix. The tips are divided into four categories and sorted by importance/popularity.

Exactly One Mile in Diversions
One mile for me will always be the distance from the end of my parents' lane to the crossroads at South Cambridge. The Turi family lived there, in an old hillside farmhouse with a small pond in the dooryard.

Intranet cost-benefits in Site management
If a senior mangement team does not have the vision to see what the benefits of an intranet can be, then it's time to find a job elsewhere before the intranet implodes.

Interview with Vincent Flanders (Part 1) in Design
Wal-Mart doesn't block the entrance to its stores by making you watch a movie or make you listen to someone who explains the history of the company. That's what a splash page does. It blocks your visitor from getting to the meat of your site. Also, certain search engines give a higher ranking to the contents of your root page (where the splash page is located) and splash pages rarely have any information. A splash page can hurt your rankings with a search engine.

THE Key to User-Friendly Computers? in Usability
These problems are magnified by handheld devices, where cursor placement is less exact and pull-downs even more cumbersome.

Jan 22, 2003

Taking PHP the OO way in Development: PHP
A concept of OOP is often overlooked, misinterpreted or barely touched by numerous books and articles about our favourite language

Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing in Development

Jan 20, 2003

SpamArchive in Spam
SpamArchive.org is a community resource that provides a database of known spam to be used for testing, developing, and benchmarking anti-spam tools.

Smart mobile offers web to go in Gadgets
Danger is improving the Sidekick ahead of its launch in Europe in the summer. It is planning a colour screen and improved web browser, as well redoing the way the phone works after several critiques.

Filename Magic Pro in Software
Filename Magic Pro is a tool which renames files with many advanced features.

ServiceManager in Software
ServiceManager is a tool designed to allow System Administrators, Power Users and Developers an easy means to view, modify or remove services and their information on Windows NT 4, Windows 2000 and Windows XP platforms.

Fabulous stupendous movie blurbs come under review in Marketing
The commission argues that its overall guidelines -- including recommendations against distorting the meaning of an endorser

Manywhere - Moblogger in Software
This application runs as a background process that monitors a POP3 email account for new email, then downloads it, detaches any files such as pictures, sound or video, uses the Blogger API to post the text in the email to your blog and uses FTP to post the files to your server.

Jan 19, 2003

Uh-oh: Spam's getting more sophisticated in Spam
Just as security experts match wits with hackers, those trying to block unwanted e-mail face increasingly elaborate "attacks" from spammers trying to slip messages through antispam defenses.

WiFiMaps.com in Telecommunications
It's purpose is to map wardriving results onto street-level data from the US Census, and to provide outstanding visuals.

Lessons From Online Groceries in Business
Unlike Webvan and other cautionary examples, British companies carefully thought through how to efficiently coordinate their IT processes, marketing approaches and supply-chain strategies. For example, most companies pick up customer orders from existing stores instead of building separate distribution centers, thereby assuring a lower fixed cost.

Why every small website needs a CMS in Site management
Along with the many other administrative tools, this leaves you to concentrate on the words, and not on the technology.

Jan 18, 2003

SelectORacle in Development
Ever wondered what a particularly complex CSS selector really means? Here's your chance to find out! Simply enter one or more semi-colon separated selectors or rulesets.

Credit Card-Size Hard Drive Can Hold 5GB in Gadgets
StorCard can contain from 100MB to more than 5GB of data on a plastic card. At first glance, it looks like a credit card, and even has a magnetic strip like a credit card. ($15 each, readers under $100)

The Way Customers Want to Buy in ECommerce
Online efforts that don't make allowances for different ways in which people approach decision making leave lots of money on the table.

Jan 17, 2003

Boston Globe Online / Business / AT&T Broadband users see 3d e-mail shift in Business
Lynch said he found it surprising that Comcast was moving to put its own name on the e-mail service - but letting the AT&T Broadband name continue to appear on cable bills for several months after last fall's 8 percent rate hike. ''Comcast would rather you think that was AT&T,'' he said.

Joel on Software - Mouth Wide Shut in Project Management
When you tell someone about the upcoming clam steaming feature, no matter how careful you are to delimit what it actually does, they will inevitably spin elaborate fantasies about how it cures baldness and warts and has a telepathic user interface. When you finally deliver something, they are bound to be disappointed.

Sweet Jesus, AOL Guy! I want to cancel my goddamn service! in Humor
"So am I to understand that you want to cancel your service?" [insert sound here of me slamming my head into wall forcefully] "Golly, it finally recognizes the English language. YES! After saying it to you nigh on twenty times, YES I want to cancel my damned service."

The PHP Layers Menu System in Development: PHP
PHP- and database-backed system for creating DHTML menus.

Who Had the Worst User Experience? in Usability
Let me offer three examples of companies that failed to deliver a good user experience during the holiday season. They failed through a lack of the basic abilities to do thorough design, implementation, quality assurance, and intradepartment communication.

Why Bill Gates is Richer than You in Humor
Should the government be suing Microsoft for violating antitrust laws? Perhaps. But doesn't it seem kind of odd for government lawyers to be typing Microsoft Word documents about how bad Microsoft is?

Business apps get bad marks in usability in Usability
Most software companies have little incentive to make their applications more intuitive, because their training programs are an important source of revenue.

Column Two: Even more style guides in Design
Discussions on sigia-l has thrown up more good style guides.

Long or Short Copy? Part 1 in Marketing
Are your readers looking for an experience; do they want to feel they "belong"? Or are they driven by a simple task with the intention of finding what they want and leaving as quickly as possible?

Get Your E-Mail in Shape for 2003 in Marketing
Firming up and adding more power to your e-mail messages for greater profitability.

OWASP Guide to Building Secure Web Applications and Web Services in Security
A practical approach to building applications and covers a wealth of content from defining your security needs to avoiding common security problems like Cross Site Scripting and SQL Injection.

CodeSeeker in Security
It intercepts HTTP traffic off the TCP/IP stack (immediately after its been decrypted by SSL if its HTTPS), and applies a set of security rules to determine if the traffic is legitimate or malicious.

dbForm in Development: PHP
dbForm is a PHP class that will create a Web Form for a database table and handles all processing of the form including validation of data, inserts, updates and deletes.

Jan 16, 2003

CSS Centering: Auto-width Margins in Design
This box is horizontally centered by setting its right and left margin widths to "auto".

Jan 15, 2003

Column Two: More style guides in Design
I've come across a good number of web style guides.

Observer Pattern in Development: PHP
The Observer Pattern is designed to help cope with one to many relationships between objects, allowing changes in an object to update many associated objects. It provides a powerful mechanism to extend our applications, in terms of how they respond to events, without needing alter existing (and working) code.

movabletype.org : Requested Features List, An Overall View in Software
The list below (while not all-inclusive) is to give MT users an idea of what features have already been requested in the past.

New insurance products for the hosting industry in Business
ISPs and Web hosting are the only industries that have been able to get away with contractually denying any liability for incidents involving their services.

Jan 14, 2003

Griffin Technology in Gadgets
The iTrip FM transmitter for the iPod can play your music through any FM radio in your car, at a party, wherever the mood strikes you - and you have a radio.

California disclosure law has national reach in Security
A new California law requiring companies to notify their customers of computer security breaches applies to any online business that counts Californians as customers, even if the company isn't based in the Golden State.

The Most Important Question E-Mail Marketers Need to Answer in Marketing
First, let's talk about what people don't care about: They don't care about your company, where it's located, how long it's been in business or who founded it. And unless your logo provides instant recognition, that doesn't matter either.

Why Music Stays Free in Business
For $9.95 to $24.95 per month, each allows consumer downloads from song catalogs. But the services come with restrictions. Full song catalogs aren't available, only about 200,000 tracks. There are rarely new songs by major artists. MusicNet prevents its songs from being burned to CD. pressplay allows consumers to burn only two tracks per artist each month (making it almost impossible to assemble a copy of a CD). MusicNet doesn't allow its downloadable songs to be ported to portable music players; pressplay normally allows only 10 songs to be ported per month.

Jan 13, 2003

If you overtax the rich, they may not come to dinner in Diversions
The people who pay the highest taxes should get the greatest relief from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up for dinner next time.

Jan 10, 2003

4GuysFromRolla.com - Forget to Set your Recordset/Connection Objects Equal to Nothing? in Development: ASP
Checks for open recordset and connection objects and closes them.

Jan 8, 2003

Object References in VBScript in Development: ASP
Examines object references and how VBScript handles copying objects and arrays

Native Win32 ports of some GNU utilities in Software
Here are some ports of common GNU utilities to native Win32. In this context, native means the executables do only depend on the Microsoft C-runtime (msvcrt.dll) and not an emulation layer like that provided by Cygwin tools.

centricle : css filters (css hacks) in Development
Will the browser apply the rule(s)? (How to hide CSS from different browsers)

Safari information for web designers [dive into mark] in Development
Safari is a new browser by Apple. Rendering is handled by a modified version of KHTML, the rendering engine used by KDE and its Konqueror browser. This page attempts to document known rendering bugs in Safari.

Taking our struggle with CSS font sizes public in Development
Simon Willison comments: The main difference between ems and percentages comes when you start using them for widths/height/margin/padding of a block. 5em means "5 times the height of a letter within this block", while 500% would mean "5 times the width of the containing block" - they have very different meanings.

ASP 101 - ASP Transactions in Development: ASP
Transactions aren't restricted to databases - you can use them in Active Server Pages as well, and without having to create custom components using Microsoft Transaction Server.

Jan 7, 2003

ThinkPad Button Customiser in Software
The ThinkPad button on T-Series laptops is normally reserved for running the Access IBM help system. This is all very well, but if you're an IT professional who doesn't need this help system, wouldn't it be nice to have the button do something more useful to you?

Builder.com: Creating objects for your Active Server Pages in Development: ASP
I’m going to show you how to put together objects using VBScript. The main reason I use this approach is so that I can quickly prototype and develop my code without having to worry about compiling and registering the objects.

Deception Lessons from a Pro in Security
The Art of Deception (John Wiley & Sons), a compendium of cons compiled by well-known computer break-in artist Kevin D. Mitnick.

Colorblind Web Page Filter in Design
Indicate a resource to be viewed, and a color filter to be applied to that resource.

Lean Toolkit in Project Management
"Lean Development: An Agile Toolkit for Software Development Leaders" - This is a review copy of a book to be published by Addison Wesley in June, 2003.

Tesugen.com: Lean development in Project Management
Lean manufacturing is concurrent rather than sequential; decisions are made as late as possible; critical decisions aren't pushed up the hierarchy, but made by the engineers themselves; a single leader envisions what the car should be, and constantly communicates this to the engineers. The car design environment is as complex as in software, and the lean approach has been tried and proven there. (Book review)

Set Height in Development
Bit of JavaScript to set the heights of all DIVs equal to that of the tallest one. Usefull for adding footers to CSS pages.

NoCatNet in Telecommunications
Albert Einstein, when asked to describe radio, replied: "You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."

Apple - PowerBook G4 17" in Gadgets
Featuring the largest, most spectacular display ever to grace a portable.

VoIP is a simple idea and simply works in Telecommunications
Rather than wondering whether Voice over IP is viable, we should be asking whether traditional telephony is viable. Why are cordless phones so bad and why are cellular phones getting so weird? Why is the telecommunications industry so dysfunctional?

revjim.net: read my Inbox in Development: PHP
For the curious, it's only 5 lines of code. (IMAP via PHP)

Better Content Starts Today in Marketing
Are you spending hours editing copy by someone who wasn't born to write? Perhaps it's time to take inventory of your team's assets and weaknesses. Reassign the literary-challenged to other tasks.

Saltire : Dress Casual Must Die in Business
I just think it promotes an overall tone and image about the way you do business with people. Unfortunately at a lot of companies dress casual has slipped a few notches to casual or even ultra-casual (aka sloppy chic).

Jan 6, 2003

Adobe Photoshop Album in Software
Adobe Photoshop Album software helps you instantly find and organize your digital photos.

Network Associates bags Deersoft in News
Deersoft, of San Mateo, Calif., makes the SpamAssassin Pro and SpamAssassin Enterprise products.

Spammunition in Software
Spammunition is an add-in for Outlook 2000 (and higher) that helps you fight spam. Spammunition uses a Bayesian filtering technique to analyze the incoming mail you get, both spam and legitimate mail.

The Mini triumphs in Detroit in Diversions
As the world's most prestigious motor show opened in Detroit, the reborn British symbol was judged car of the year.

Jan 4, 2003

7-Zip in Software
Open source Zip archive manager. Supported formats: 7z, ZIP, CAB, RAR, ARJ, GZIP, BZIP2, TAR, CPIO and RPM.

Jan 3, 2003

Content Management Design in Site management
This book is about designing and coding Content Management Systems from scratch. It covers revisioning, permissions, workflow, and templates, and by the time you've reached the end, you should be able to write your own enterprise-strength CMS from the ground up, or at least have a better appreciation of the issues involved. (With complete PHP code, data models, and database)

Credit Card Validation via the Luhn Formula in ECommerce
Because issuers of cards follow certain rules when creating card numbers, it is possible to verify whether a given number is accurate or couldn't possibly be a number of the stated type. (With PHP and ASP sample code)

The GUI Toolkit, Framework Page in Development
This page provides a comprehensive reference on toolkits for building graphical user interfaces (GUIs), with emphasis on resources for Free Software (Open Source).

Jan 2, 2003

MeadCo's ScriptX in Development
ScriptX is a non-visual downloadable ActiveX control, developed to provide absolute control over document printing operations from client and server computers running Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser.

About Simplelinks

Simplelinks is a collection of interesting spaces on the Web. Short, to the point, without commentary. Provided by Kalsey Consulting Group.

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