Category: Technology

I so like using my new PDF reader that I have to post this article. Thanks to Marc Orchant for first posting about it.

If you’ve been surprised by Adobe’s staggering 50MB of size, or annoyed by its slow load time, or annoyed by its nagging “upgrade me” notices, then Foxit’s PDF reader is for you. From what I can tell, it loads up every PDF you can throw at it. And, it is faster than blazes. I’ve often used Google’s “translate from PDF to Text” feature to avoid using Adobe’s slow Acrobat reader, but with Foxit, you don’t need to do it anymore because it loads so quickly.

Foxit’s reader loads instantly. It’s only a 1MB download, and it is free! Get it while it’s hot!

Further, if you create PDF documents, Foxit has their own editor for sale too. I haven’t tried it, but the price tag is $99 compared to Adobe’s $449…

If you haven’t already seen Thomas Hawk’s PriceRitePhoto Story, it is an interesting read.

In summary, he got baited by one of the Digital Camera scam sites (having just purchased a camera online myself, I had seen such horror stories and was lucky enough to avoid them!)

What is amazing about Thomas’ story is it’s demonstration of how powerful a blog can be!

Within 1 week of his posting, the following happened:
* Searching for “priceritephoto” on Google, Yahoo! and MSN surfaces Thomas’ review of his negative experience as the #1 result.
* PriceRitePhoto was dropped from several major price comparison engines
* PriceRitePhoto turned around and tried to fix the service issue; and claims to have fired at least one individual with their firm

All in all, that is pretty cool. I hope the reporting on the story is all accurate. But, if you’ve ever been scammed by an online site, it may be time to invest in a blog, and be ready to share your experiences on digg!

According to this article, Bill Gates considers the current internet changes akin to the “Internet Tidal Wave” that crashed on our shores nearly ten years ago. What was noted then, and what I hope will be noted now, is that one of Microsoft’s great strengths is it’s ability to change. I like change. Change is good!

Microsoft’s Gates: Web Services are ‘sea change’

You may not have noticed that Microsoft’s stock has risen about 10% in the last couple of weeks. And, looks like Forbe’s is predicting future growth in the 20% range over the next few months…

I guess Google’s politics-parsing engine has determined my party affiliation, as I found the following ad on my blog this morning:

In case you didn’t know, Google is wrong on this one!

I spent a fair amount of time searching for good javascript and ajax libraries. Here are the ones I’ve tried and like.

DOMAPI is a great JS library. Its cheap, easy to use, and very modular. Its also been around for a long time and has pretty good support. If you buy it, you get access to the upcoming versions which have improved AJAX support. The 3.0 version uses a javascript RPC library which is an earlier version of AJAX concepts. Most everything in the library works great on FireFox + IE.

prototype.js is a free toolkit for writing ajax applications. Works great on IE/Firefox. Also claims to support Safari.

Rico is an open-source javascript library that builds upon prototype.js. They’ve done some great work with visual effects here. I especially like their Accordion widget, drag/drop features, and expanded AJAX support (check out their demos!). My biggest gripe about Rico is that it distributes itself as a single js source file which is about 80KB. In practice, this is probably not unbearable, and if it helps speed development, the size issue can be conquered later. I don’t think it works with Safari yet either.

An interesting library which I haven’t experimented enough with is Behaviour. This one looks promising as a great way to specify javascript actions/behaviors in the CSS rather than in the HTML. Used effectively, this could greatly improve the maintainability and readability of your HTML/Javascript.

Lastly, I’ll mention Zimbra’s Ajax Library, which is probably worth a look if you are just getting started simply because their demos are so impressive. Because Zimbra is an applications company, the library is buried within their source code, and they don’t spend a ton of time making it easy for developers. So it will a take a little more time to get started with this one, which is the reason I have yet to try it myself.

If you are searching for ajax info, you might want to check out the Ajax Frameworks page at ajaxpatterns.org.

I’ve never seen a RAQ before (Rarely Asked Questions), but I found one on Paul Graham’s site. It turns out that the RAQ is where you learn how to avoid becoming the dreaded PHB (And fortunately, so far, I’m not a Pointy Haired Boss).

If you haven’t seen it already, Windows Live launched today. It looks pretty cool. But its all “in Beta”.

The best new part of Windows Live is the new Hotmail look. If you use hotmail, you should definitely check it out – its way better. To see it, you have to signup, however, so just login to your hotmail account here. You have to wait for approval before you’ll get the new look.

PS – the live.com site says, “Firefox support is coming soon. Please be patient :-)”

PPS – don’t forget to check out start.com. It’s a better “home page” than Yahoo or Google.

I’ve started reading digg. It highlights really interesting stuff.

And for those slashdotters out there, you might want to see this.

Here you can read the interesting story of the guy who hacked MySpace.com with a javascript worm. Myspace.com allows you to collect “friends”. Using javscript in his own profile, he was able to make any user that viewed his profile add him as a friend in the background without them knowing! And in doing so, he was able to collect over 1M “friends” in less than 1 day. Pretty impressive! It shows how exponential worm growth can be. For kids at home, don’t do it. Demolition is easy, building is hard.

He goes on to also post the details of how he got the javascript to work, too. Those of us who are programmers, know of many of these tricks. For those of who aren’t, well, take a look and see how easy it can be for a hacker to jump over roadblocks and get past the guards…

Oh yeah – I have verified that his pages don’t contain any hazardous javascript right now. So hopefully its safe to click on these links. But don’t hold me liable! He did it once, and seems to be sincere that it was just curiousity that made this happen, but who knows what he will do next!