What Skype Needs To Learn 2
I’ve been a Skype user for many years. I’ve even had the paid subscription for months at a time. Generally, it did what I needed better than other solutions, until I tried to make it my home phone too. That worked, but not as well (quality) as I’d like.
Anyway, I find myself trying to get the latest versions of Skype for my systems this morning and ran into a few issues.
Here are things that didn’t work for me – for a normal user, these would be show stoppers.
Simple Shipment Tracking CGI Script 1
Over the years, I’ve used a few different techniques to track UPS, USPS, and FedEx shipments. I’ve tried direct links to the shipper’s website, email status updates with cron, and just using the store’s shipment tracking. The email tracking interfaces have changed to be less-than-useful to me. Logging into the shipper’s website just to track a shipment became a hassle. No thanks.
None of these made me happy, so this morning I created a trivial CGI script + data file to track shipments. It isn’t anything too fancy and you need to edit the data file manually, but it feels better than the other alternatives.
Memonaut for Note Taking
If you’re like me, you take notes all the time. You may have tried using paper, todo lists, spreadsheets and even personal wikis like TiddlyWiki or SoloWiki to accomplish this. Having the notes available at home, at work and when you aren’t connected is a requirement. Well, I accidentally came across a new browser/javascript tool today called Memonaut
I’ve just played with Memonaut a few minutes. It does bulleted lists, indented lists, numbered lists and generic notes all with HTML and JavaScript. There’s some lite formating too – bold, italics, strike-through, etc. The setup is like TiddlyWiki – you open a specific HTML file and start adding content. Then you “Save” the file to store the updates. Certainly there will be performance/size issues when lots of content is added, but then you just archive the file and start a new one, perhaps monthly? TiddlyWiki was used at a previous employer to share How-To Team information after we were merged into an other group. That data sharing probably saved lots of jobs because about 30 people who were trying to understand how things worked AND who to call for “x” were able to centrally store and access that data.
Did I mention that this works when you’re offline?
Anyway, Memonaut could be worth a look. Obviously this is cross platform AND it requires JavaScript to be enabled in your browser for local HTML files (which could be a security concern).
Enjoy.
Why Are You Still Using Adobe Tools? 4
2014 Update:
Adobe is at it again. This time violating paid customer privacy.
Adobe spies on readers: EVERY page you turn, EVERY book you own leaked back to base
Time to start blocking adobe domains, if you don’t already.
adelogs.adobe.com is one.
Adobe has been plagued with security issues in their most popular tool, like Acrobat and Reader. These issues seem to be on all platforms, but are mostly targeted by hackers on MS-Windows. For years, we’ve known that Acrobat allowed PDF documents more access than most people need by default – JavaScript and the ability to start other programs running on the system. 99% of Acrobat Reader users do not need or want either of those features, yet, they are enabled by default.
Adobe has been slow to correct issues and claimed to be on a quarterly patch cycle. This is for Flash, Shockwave, Reader and all products including PhotoShop. For almost all of these tools, there are alternatives that are not the main targets of hackers.
So, I gotta ask …
