• Pornography
• Phishing
• Malware
• Proxy and anonymizer (for the “street smart” kiddos)

You can easily set up the service by following the walk-through instructions on configuring your router or computer’s DNS servers.

Panopticlick

I was disappointed to see VirtualPC is no longer supported for Home versions of Windows. I was also disappointed to see the free VMware Server equivalent of VirtualPC had disappeared.

However, I just discovered the free VMware Player now not only runs VMs, as it always has, but also allows you to create them! You can also create and run 64-bit guest VM’s if you have the appropriate hardware, which I do. VirtualPC can’t do that. Sweet!

Update: A co-worker (thanks Shane!) mentioned to me the free VMware Server is still available. I’m going to try out Player, hoping it is more light-weight, and see how it goes first.

“Translation: If your company is deemed “critical,” a new set of regulations kick in involving who you can hire, what information you must disclose, and when the government would exercise control over your computers or network.”

Yikes.

I’m running into a problem with the Delicious Toolbar 1.12.273.0 causing IE8 to hang on Windows XP SP3. It is super annoying, as I would like to use the Favorite Tags functionality on this machine.

worksforme – On Vista

I have the Delicious Toolbar running with IE8 on Vista with no problems. However for some reason the other computer I use running WinXP is choking on the Delicious addon.

Issue

After I install the Delicious Toolbar, I can open IE8 for one session. After closing the browser, the IE window disappears like everything is normal. When I try to open IE again, the chrome starts to load, but the window hangs. My home page doesn’t open, and the IE functions are frozen.

Behind the scenes, there are two iexplorer.exe processes, and one DeliciousManager.exe process still running. IE8 becomes responsive again once I kill the DeliciousManager.exe process in the Task Manager. Once I kill the DeliciousManager.exe process, the iexplorer.exe processes are freed up and end normally. Then I can start a new web browser session, until I run into the issue again when I close IE.

Attempt 1 – Disable potential conflicts

I tried disabling all other IE addons, setting exclusions in antivirus for real-time scans on the Delicious Toolbar data directories, and disabling the firewall. The DeliciousManager.exe task would still hang IE8.

Any Ideas?

Does anyone out there have any other ideas? If I find a solution, I will post a follow-up here.

…is controlled by computers almost exclusively located in China and has infected 1295 computer in 103 countries in the last two years…

They report that, not only can the espionage software monitor email and documents on infected computers, it can also control a PC remotely, switching on any cameras or microphones attached to it, to carry out surveillance of its surroundings.

Creepy.

When I open up this page in IE8, the browser is extremely slow after the page finishes loading. I have not taken the time to dig real deep, but AJAX is being used to bring in the body content, and I see jQuery in use quite a bit behind the scenes. For what it’s worth, I used the “Report a Webpage Problem Internet Explorer 8 Add-On” to let Microsoft know of the performance issue.

When I use Firefox 3.0.7, I have no performance issues on the test page. I have not tested IE7 yet to see if the performance problem is in that version as well.

I still primarily use Firefox for personal usage so far, but am fairly excited by what the IE team has done with version 8 in supporting web standards and adding extra security. I’ll have to give it a good spin.

There are several books that stand-out in my career where the value is well over the $50 spent on the book. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Best Practices is definitely one of those books.


P.S. WordPress 2.7 is pretty slick

I want one!

Originally, Magnolia had the interest and investment (skills if not money) of some people at the core of the web development community. They were focused on building out a bookmarking site that focused on a pleasant, well thought-out user interface. Things started good, but it appears they got distracted over time.  Things I’ve noticed over the years:

• It started for me when search wasn’t fully working, and you could only search on tags, not titles and descriptions. This took a long time for them to figure out.
• They have also struggled with tag management, especially when it comes to groups.
• There is no way to do mass tag management in a group.
• It is impossible to match a group’s taxonomy without opening multiple windows to view the group’s tags.
• They have also seen their share of server downtime, which is a bit unfortunate when you are hunting for a work-related resource.
• Now they seem to be focused more on login API’s and an activity stream – which still hasn’t populated for me, my home page has been blank since they launched it – rather than finishing up what I would call phase 1.5 or phase 2 tagging functionality and group management.

I’m sure there are a lot of behind-the-scenes reasons for the above, but my perspective is from an end-user (client). I kept waiting for them to polish up what was missing, but they kept adding stuff that didn’t really matter for the purpose at hand. I think they started developing more for themselves, and began to forget the point of Magnolia.

I liked the concept they were building, with a nicer (ie, more pleasant to the eyes, and easier to user) interface. I really like some of the minor social aspects, like being able to thank users for bookmarks. I also like the concept of groups, although they need a bit more work to see the full value in both user and tag management.

However, the most recent network/server outtage gave me enough time to check out Delicious, and I found my new home. Working through tagging my imported bookmarks has been a pleasure. Very easy and quick. I do miss screenshots of the web sites, but it’s not a huge loss, and would definitely trade for easier tag management. I like the Firefox extension, although in full mode it needs a little work to be able to move icons to different areas of the status bar. Tag bundles are awesome, and I’m just starting to think through how I want to use that. Near-inline editing of an existing bookmark is fantastic. Overall it’s been a great experience so far. I’m also experimenting with the feature to post bookmarked links to my blog. We’ll see how that goes, but I think I like it so far.

And besides, all the cool kids have been here for awhile.