Someone asked me tonight if you could copy text from a portable document (pdf) formatted file into Word or some other program. The answer fortunately is yes! Find the text button and click it. Either drag the section you want to highlight, or click control + a to highlight all. Hit control + c to copy. That puts it on the pasteboard. Place your cursor in the next program and hit control + v and you are golden and off to the races.

I follow Robt. Scoble’s blog. Don’t ask me why, but I do. He posts more than any other single poster blog I know. It is all sorts of wierd stuff. Maybe it now replaces random surfing for me because in a way he is very random. In the original days of web, you just surfed. I don’t so much anymore. Instead I scan rss feeds and follow one that catches my eye, like his link to a t-shirt company because the guy he meets is wearing one and it impressed Robt’s wife.

The guy actually hangs his phone number out there and says call me we’ll try to fit you in! Now I’m nowhere near the guy, but I always wonder, if someone boring like me calls, will he find the time? I suspect that the answer is yes. He interacts with an interesting crowd. Talk about networked. It’s pretty amazing how small the world grows.

I really need to get our commenting turned back on, don’t I. Not sure when or how it broke, but it did and I’ve been too lazy to get it fired up. I tried it one day and without spam control it was a disaster. I could turn it on, but we had thirty spam in ten minutes. They must be firing constantly at us in hopes of breaking through.

Since Franki has been scarce, I am afraid if I really botched it up, I might take down the site, but with comments broken isn’t that the practical effect anyway.

How’s that? Was I as random as Robt?

According to an article in todays Washington Times, the California Supreme Court has ruled that those publishing untrue defamatory statements obtained from other sites (republishing) are not subject to liability for those actions. The original author of course could be subjected to liabilities.

The reality is that often the blog-o-sphere, or on-line publishing industry as it is becoming has a tendency to self correct over time, as Robert Scoble pointed out recently — at least I think he did but I cannot find it, so I substitute this thought instead …. There are advantages of being able to speak one’s mind and not face repercussions in most instances. I think this decision is a victory for those supporting free speech, even if that speech is not factually accurate.

Internet Explorer 7 has been available for download for about a fortnight, but it wasn’t until today that I received my first task-bar prompt to update from IE6 to IE7 via Microsoft Update / Windows Update. As Don mentioned in an earlier post folks who develop and test web pages would be wise to run both IE6 and IE7 (on different PCs) until IE6 usage drops away, and this High Priority Update is the first step towards that goal.

In the interests of dumping the dud that is IE6, my guess is that this High Priority Update will see most personal Windows users migrate over the next few weeks via Microsoft Update. This would leave corporate and small business users at the mercy of system administrators to update SOEs in their own sweet time. And with IE7 only able to run on Windows XP (or higher) and many businesses still running Windows 2000, this will be “a journey” for many. Point in case is my employer, who only recently rolled out XP nearly 5 years after I first started running it on my home PCs. The other group of users, unable to update from IE6 at all, will be those people running an ancient version of Windows or one that fails the “genuine Microsoft product” test.

After all of this, the next round of IE7 converts will probably come from people buying new PCs or otherwise upgrading to Windows Vista from early 2007.

As a fan of Firefox and Opera I only run Internet Explorer (6 & 7 now) as a tool to check web pages as I develop them. But I’m certainly looking forward to the day when IE6 usage statistics reflect those of IE5 and earlier versions, and then I can trash it forever!

News.com.au reports “a Perth-based company and its director has been fined $5.5 million for sending spam emails.”

The fine levied against Clarity1 Pty Ltd and its director is pretty significant, not only because of the price tag on the fine but because it is the first time an Australian company has been fined under the Spam Act since it became an Australian federal law in 2003. Looks like this law has some teeth after all!

If my maths is correct, a $5,500,000 fine for sending 280,000,000 unsolicited e-mails works out to nearly two cents per message. I’m not confident that sales income from spam sent would have covered this operating expense, but still my in-box expands……

This article over on C-Net suggest that spending on Municipal Wi-Fi networks like those in several large cities and many small ones will proliferate over the coming years with costs in the hundreds of billions of dollars. It will be interesting to see how people react as there will then be little to protect them from Big Brother should it decide to monitor the activity of the users. Currently your ISP offers some protection from such activities. You don’t probably do anything all that bad, but what if you buy something on-line and then forgot to pay the state or city sales/use tax? They would know it and be able to monitor your purchases if they desired. I bet everybody you know has done something like that at one time without giving it a second thought. Outages would be widespread if virtual monopolies develop in these markets as well. Remember that there is a large likelihood that a successful wi-fi install will bump out many of the traditional providers who cannot affort to compete. So invest now I guess, but see what the reaction is too.

Stealing a little thunder from Microsoft’s IE7 release is Mozilla’s update: Firefox 2.0. This version had been in beta for a while, but now available as a full version release.

The user interface has improved (improved tabs, spell check, session restore, search suggestions, live bookmarks, and so on), security has been up-ed further, and and the number of extensions has grown to over 1,000. This update really does see a great browser become even better.

I particularly like the anti-spyware measures described on the Firefox site “Firefox will not allow a Web site to download, install, or run programs on your computer without your explicit agreement. Period. You will be notified whenever downloading or installing software, and Firefox will always tell you what’s happening so that you can stay in control of your computer.”

Of course unlike IE7, Firefox 2.0 is avaliable for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

CNet has published an extensive review which says it all far better than I could have. I was interested to see the critical comparisons to the new IE7; only a week old but apparently miles behind the Firefox offering. User reviews are also interesting.

Of course there’s only one way to be sure, and that’s to Get Firefox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 7 and compare for yourself!