Tuesday, October 02, 2001
Trillian IM (instant messanger)
Well, I had enough with using ICQ, AIM, MSN, and Yahoo to communicate with friends and colleagues. I would have all of them open, and it was filling up my task tray and memory. Also, I wanted people to use ICQ, but of course they wouldn't... so I have accounts on all IM mediums. Well finally I found a solution, Imici. It installed, and setup really easy, but the features I loved of ICQ were gone. No logging, no timestamps, notta! After using it for a while, I went on the hunt for something better. After previewing a few multiple IM consolidators I found Trillian(http://www.trillian.cc/). It is still technically in beta testing, but it has been the best one yet. All the instant messangers are there. Setup is a breeze, and its loaded with the configuration options I need. I can log, timestamp, file transfer, and even use the IRC in addition to all the IMs. It imported all my contact lists without error, which was more than Imici could do. Other pluses include allowing you to appear offline in MSN (MSN itself doesn't allow that), allows you to have multiple accounts on one medium (e.g. to ICQ accounts under one IM), and it allows you to set your status (online, away, etc.) on a user-by-user basis! The one thing I want to see: make the Trillian tray-icon restore the buddy list (not the main window) when you double-click. I highly recommend this one, but will always keep my eyes open for new ones.
posted by Adam Stubbs 11:13 PM
Wednesday, September 26, 2001
XoloX
For all the Gnutella network clients, one, imho, is standing above the crowd
XoloX,http://www.xolox.nl is intellegent and simple. A lot of Gnut clients are cluttered, overly-complicated, and loaded with creeping featurism. Could XoloX have more features? Yes, but why? XoloX allows easy navigated searching superior to all other Gnut clients, plus its so fast. Downloads are easily tracked, new hosts automatically searched, and simultaneous downloads for best speeds. XoloX is so small, takes very little memory. If there were 1 more feature, i would want the ability to "minimize" hosts (which are hidden so it may work anyways) when actively downloading, only occassionly adding new hosts to search for waiting d/l. Thats as small detail, but XoloX is the smallest, fastest, easiest, and smartest Gnut client on the web.
posted by Adam Stubbs 6:54 PM
IE View Source Default Editor
As a web developer, I commonly look at source code, View -> Source, from my web browser, which most of the time is Opera, but sometimes I am forced to use IE. This poses a pain in the ass since the default editor is the small, but mostly useless, Notepad. So wanting to be able to View Source (available from right-click on the page), and open it in my favorite editor UltraEdit I tryed and tryed, and eventually came up with the following:
Shutdown IE
1. Rename Temporary Internet Files
Originally, step 1 was step 2, but doing this first will help you avoid the problems I ran into. So, open up windows explorer, right click the start button -> explore, and scroll down to your windows folder. Find a folder called 'Temporary Internet Files', and right click and rename it to 'Temporary_Internet_Files'. Hit ok when prompted. Now, I am going to recommend restarting windows at this point only because IE is so tightly integrated with windows (can you say anti-trust), that we IE refused to do this and got mucked up. Furthermore, without renaming this, my editor became confused because IE was passing a weird directory name.2. Edit Registry
Ok, now follow these directions to set it up:
- From Start -> Run, open 'regedit'
- Expand the folders to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer
- Select/highlight the 'Internet Explorer' folder in the left pane
- Right-click the selected folder, select New -> Key
- Rename the new key to 'View Source Editor'
- Select/hightlight the 'View Source Editor' folder in the left pane
- Right-click the selected folder, select New -> Key
- Rename the new key to 'Editor Name'
- Select/highlight the 'Editor Name' folder in the left pane
- In the right pane you will see an object '(Default)', double-click it to enter in path to editor
- Enter in the path to your favorite editor, 'C:\Program Files\UltraEdit\Uedit32.exe'
- Close regedit
Thats it... Now open up IE, and view source TAA-DAA
posted by Adam Stubbs 5:46 PM
