Folk using CityDesk with servers that only have SFTP enabled may be interested in this script I wrote that uploads only changed files to your CityDesk website. If you don’t have rsync, this should be very useful.

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Outlook Express: Not Dead Yet? For what it’s worth, I’ve been using Outlook Express since version 4, and I haven’t distributed a virus yet. Maybe because I’m not 733T enough, or maybe because I use a well-configured firewall, updated antivirus DATs, and mail-scanning at the server.

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Windows can be patched. But who’s gonna patch the millions of Windows users who insist on not applying patches or otherwise protecting themselves on time?

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Perhaps these people should stop griping and get themselves an ISP that scans for viruses on the server. They’d save themselves a lot of grief this way.

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Swaminathan Aiyar on Indian Independence, with a story that’s not usually quoted in textbooks:

World War II converted India from a debtor to a creditor with over one billion pounds in sterling balances. Britain, meanwhile, became the biggest debtor in the world. It’s not worth ruling over people you are afraid to tax. That’s why the British left.

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BengaliLinux.org has a better rendition of Google’s Bengali interface than Google itself!

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Google’s calculator tool does a very good job of unit conversions in addition to expressions.

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Intel video driver installers (for example, the 82845G) add a few annoyances to the user’s machine: a system tray icon (igfxtray.exe), a hotkey processor (hkcmd.exe) and entries to the Windows desktop context menu. Apart from needlessly duplicating the Display Settings applet’s functionality, this eats resources and increases the time it takes to display the desktop context menu. Here’s how to remove these annoyances:

• From HKLM\SOFTWARE\ Microsoft\Windows\ CurrentVersion\Run, remove the IgfxTray and HotKeysCmds values.
• From HKCR\Directory\Background\ shellex\ContextMenuHandlers, remove the igfxcui key.

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ZDNet.com.au: Microsoft kills off Outlook Express. Dang, there goes my non-work mail/news client of choice (Thunderbird is still not ready for prime time). On the other hand, this may actually get people to look seriously at ISV-developed products, like Eudora and The Bat.

Of course, if you read the ZDNet article, it seems OE is not being ‘killed’, merely being put into a feature freeze. Of course, I’d love decent angle quoting in OE, and SOCKS support, but the current feature set isn’t too bad for something that comes with an OS install.

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Dave Winer points to this post about unscalable aggregators why he thinks presenting an aggregator’s output in reverse-chronological order is the best only way to do things. Not convincing. Three pane views, if correctly done (meaning an easy way to mark all as read, and easy keyboard navigation) makes it possible to go through large amounts of information relatively efficiently.

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