billso.com

This article explains why your computer might substitute one character for another in an e-mail message. This is a common question in Hawaii and at my university, as we have many computer users who speak English as a second language.

It all revolves around ASCII, “quoted printable”, and Unicode.

I found this link in the New York Times.

This is a good time to mention that some news sites, like the New York times and CNN, are difficult targets for hyperlinks. The Times shifts many news articles to a paid archive after a few days, while CNN deletes some articles from its public web site after a few weeks. There are ways to maintain links by adding additional arguments to the URL.

Sometimes, Google’s cache can be used to find old news articles.

So for New York Times and CNN articles, I usually save the print-friendlty version of the article as a PDF. Mac users can use the Print, Save as PDF dialog to do a PDF capture. Windows users can install freeware like CutePDF.

From howstuffworks.com: A virtual private network allows administrators to create a secure, encrypted tunnel into an internal network. External users can access internal servers.

This web site is a nice example of a general reference. While our textbook has a lot of information, sites like HowStuffWorks.com and Wikipedia.org have much more detailed articles on information technology.

Keep in mind that theese articles can change without notice. This is one reason why APA style includes a retrieval date for references found on the Web.

Engadget reports on a Dutch user’s campaign to remove the CAPS LOCK key from the standard keyboard layout. You can read his blog at http://capsoff.blogspot.com/

This is a fine xample of a usability issue. Mac OS and Windows will prompt a user if CAPS LOCK is on while they are in a password field.

I do use CAPS LOCK once in a while to leave quick comments or reminders for myself as I’m writing a long document.

But the CAPS LOCK key is a necessity for some users. Removing the key seems like an extreme solution. Remapping the keyboard is easy, and we’ve been doing this for years to support multiple languages.

I remember when Microsoft added the Windows and property keys to the standard keyboard in 1995. It took a couple of years, but most manufacturers added these keys to the left and right of the space bar.

I still see laptop keyboards that place these two keys in odd corners. Again, it’s a usability issue for me. Fortunately, Honolulu has a couple of well-stocked computer stores, so I can check out computers and their keyboards before I recommend products to clients and friends.

This just in from HowToWeb: a stunning 95 percent of all e-mail is unsolicited commercial e-mail.

This Washington Post article from May details an anti-spamming effort that went awry when spammers retaliated.

Spam counts have continued to rise as more e-mail administrators choose passive management approaches such as filtering. On my e-mail servers, the most obvious spam is scanned, identified and tagged by programs such as SpamAssassin. My servers then send the high-scoring spam directly to the trash without delivering these messages to an inbox. This process eliminates most of my incoming spam.

Because I have many international students, I don’t filter messages by top-level domain, language or code pages. But many companies do use these criteria as filters. A mainland company that has no Korean customers or suppliers can afford to dump any e-mail message from South Korea. That country has been a popular mailing point for spam messages, as it offers a high concentration of broadband subscribers.

I still agree with Joi Ito’s statement from three years ago - e-mail is broken.

From the Washington Post: Microsoft has finally ended Windows 98 product support in North America. Rob Pergoro of the Washington Post discusses some inexpensive, legal alternatives to a Windows XP upgrade.

Anyone who is still running Windows 98 needs a reality check. The first version of Windows 98 didn’t support USB, and this is a key reason many users have upgraded over the years.

Now that Microsoft has stopped issuing patches and security updates, any computer running Windows 98 is a potential entry point for viruses, worms, and Trojans.

One final reason: any computer that is running Windows 98 is likely to be several years old right now. On average, desktop computers seem to last a few years. Notebook computers have an even shorter life span. Yet according to this article, 3 percent of computers are still running this operating system.

Windows 98 is an example of legacy software that is more of a burden than a benefit in most organizations.