Yahoo announces that it uses “web beacons” to track people around the web. Because you are registered with them, they can tell where you go when you visit sites containing their beacons. See their disclosure for more information.

They also indicate that they use web beacons in html formated email to tell if you have opened your email. Spammers use this technique too, so if you have not already made the switch to plain text email, now is the time. I use Thunderbird in text mode and only switch to html for a particular message to avoid such intrusions.

Now days, many of us have joined the mobile brigade and now work from laptops, recently it came to my attention that many laptop owners
were feeling left out in that they can’t upgrade the video card of their laptops like our desktop brothers and sisters have been doing for years.

There is no longer a technical reason why this should not be possible, the only reason is marketing, why sell you an upgrade, when they can
force you to buy a new laptop by not selling you an upgrade.
To that end, I have setup a petition to Dell (in this case) that they consider offering us the ability to upgrade the video cards of our laptops.
Since Dells laptops already have modular video cards, there is no reason for them not to do this for their customers.

So if you own a laptop, owned a laptop or may one day own a laptop, its in your best interest to support this.
The petition can be found here:
Support laptop upgrades petiton

Many thanks,

Independent Testers.org – Home Page is a site that will have various volunteers look through a site on different browsers and provide a report back. Interesting concept as long as the volunteers don’t mind the grind 🙂

I often am looking at something on my computer and think, now that is a nice color … what is it. In the past I most often look either at the coding (if it is CSS for example) or save the image locally and then look using my photo/image editing software. So today I said ENOUGH! I went looking for a free dropper and found one that I like: Color Picker Eye Dropper. It has many options like which color format to show/use, copy and paste to the clipboard or a color dialog, etc. Very nice.

I’ve been reading allot recently on the SCO/IBM legal debate about whether IBM is responsible for putting SCO proprietary code into Linux. (I should add that it hasn’t been proven yet that any proprietary code has been included in Linux because any time SCO reveal something they claim as illegal code, its found to have been released as open source by SCO themselves or one of the previous Unix owners.)

Apart from my personal belief that SCO will have to pry my wallet from my cold dead fingers before they get a Linux license from me, I figured I’d point out some interesting details that most people seem to miss.

(more…)

We’ve started working on the advanced downloader script now.. As well as all the features of the free versions , it will support multiple download locations and will also work as a link tracker as well. (thats the plan anyway).
I’d also like to see it able to work with the IPN script to provide a method whereby a download URL will only work once, as determined by a list of serial numbers, The idea being that for people selling ebooks, scripts, mp3’s or any other files, they can have the IPN script send an email to the client with a serial number in it. and once the client has downloaded the file, the link will not work again.. So it’ll be a sorta ecommerce feature for the downloader. We already have a few extras to go with the advx downloader, like a “Top 5 downloads” plugin so you can show people how popular your downloads are.

Once the downloader is finished, I’m going back to working on free scripts for a while, like Formreader, which is a new kind of form processing script. (already working but it needs some updating to bring it inline with the other HTMLfixIT scripts). and the “Tell a friend” PHP script. (about time we released a script that wasn’t Perl based 🙂

Franki
HTMLfixIT.com

I have posted a new “tutorial” although it is really just an accumulations of findings I had in trying to solve the broken box model in Internet Explorer 5. This results in problems for css layout sites when viewed in IE5 unless some adjustment is made. In this article, The Box Model Hack and other solutions to fixing the IE5 problem with CSS layout: HTML FIX IT . COM, I attempt to cover the very basic of five ways I found to get around the problem. I hope it is helpful to you.