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Odds & Ends
Links to general info (meaning we weren't sure where else to put this great information), computer related information and basic help with website creation. Translation links found in this section.
Check out Computer Talk with our very own Anna Morvee!

~General Info~ ~Computer Talk with Ann Morvee~

~Computer Info~ ~Web Site Words of Wisdom~

~Translation Links~ ~Conversion Charts~

GENERAL INFO

http://www.ebookcompilers.com/ will give you reviews on compilers -- what they do and don't do.

If you have been guilty of forgetting Birthdays, Dentist, Doctor appointments, Vet appointments, Business meetings, Car registration dates, School functions, and more... We Can Help! Candor's Free Email Reminder Service is just for you http://www.candor.com/reminder/default.asp

Ever wonder how your friends come up with those little facts and witticisms they include in their e-mail signatures? Perhaps they subscribe to Coolsig, home to--when last we checked--some 2,439 signature files: http://www.coolsig.com Sign up, and every Wednesday you'll receive a list of ready-to-use signatures, culled from the thousands submitted weekly to the site. If you have a Web site, you can also download something called the Coolsig Randomizer--which, if you're not afraid to cut and paste a little HTML code, will display a different signature on your home page every time someone "hits" it. Even if you couldn't care less about signatures, you can have some fun just reading through this site.

Great little freeware program called CraftGrid. You can print out grid paper. You can choose the size of the grids. Works great when you kid comes to you five minutes before bed and says he/she needs graph paper for school in the morning. http://www.craftsoft.com/cgi/b?L1=Software&L2=All&L3=1101

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TRANSLATION LINKS

Babel Fish Translator: http://babelfish.altavista.com/

Go to http://dictionaries.travlang.com/EnglishItalian/ and type in any word you wish to know. This is a good resource for foreign language translations.

FreeTranslation.com - Free Translation from English to Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian and Norwegian http://freetranslation.com/

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CONVERSION CHARTS

http://www.intmed.mcw.edu/clincalc/wtmeas.html

http://www.onlineconversion.com/

http://convert.french-property.co.uk/

http://www.convert-me.com/en/

http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Metrics/factors.htm

http://www.metric-conversion-tables.com/

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COMPUTER TALK by Anna Morvee

The first thing to do is download TweakUI. That will fix your cookies and repair icons, font folder, system files, Internet temp files and more. You can download it at http://www.download.com and do a search for TweakUI, it is FREE. When you click on the exe file it will do its thing. To find out where it went, go to MY COMPUTER then to CONTROL PANEL and the Tweak UI Icon will be towards the bottom. This program works for all versions of Windows except XP and 2k.

Have you done a repair for IE? If not go to MY COMPUTER, CONTROL PANEL, ADD/REMOVE PROGRAMS scroll down to Microsoft Internet Explorer, highlight, click on add/remove and choose the second button for repair and let IE do its thing. You will have to reboot after so make sure everything is closed before doing this.

Dragon Dictate is one of the best Speech to text programs available. I can talk into a mike and it types. It has a very high accuracy rate, can correct problems and navigate windows with little or no keyboard contact. The training period is rather short and you can read interesting stories rather than blah material. It can handle up to about 160 words per minute and you talk normal not pause between words. It is a resource pig though, so you need to have a lot of zing in your puter...and it works in email! Outlook 98. :-) That came with the newest update.

There are several "red flags" that you can use to identify a hoax, chainletter or urban legend. You can see these signs and after a while you will recognize them immediately and know to just delete the email.

1. The more >>>>>> you see in a forwarded post is a dead ringer...delete.
2. The more !!!!!!! you see in the email another red flag...delete.
3. Check for grammar and spelling. Official messages do try to send out grammar and spelling correct emails...however this is rare to receive one from any company...
4. If the forwarded email has a list of people a mile long in the email message, another red flag...delete.
5. Specific wording that you will find in the email and subject line. Here are some examples and I know there are many more: "This is not a Chain Letter." A message released by (insert favorite big company) has issued this warning. **Note: Companies DON'T send out email messages to be forwarded to all your email lists and friends warning of a virus... they use the media, (which also hypes up a lot of warnings), newspapers, and other "more" reliable sources. Please pass this message on to as many people you can. And many others that you all have seen.
6. ALWAYS check the validity of the email before sending it on to other people. Spam is identified by passing on information that is not related to the specific forum...I.E Posting referral programs to writing lists, Usenet, newsgroups or message boards unless the topic is specifically related to the post. This also goes for email lists.
7. If there is no official contact information--no valid address, email addy, phone number--it is a hoax.
8. BEWARE--many spam emails and hoaxes have remove phone numbers--many of these numbers are to places like Guam or other far out places and just to call you can be charged huge amounts of money.
9. NEVER reply to spam--meaning don't ask to be removed from the email list...this VALIDATES your email as live and then the long stream of spam may start coming in.
10. If there is an address or name research this on the web chances are you will find out that it is a hoax.
11. Signing guest books, posting to message boards and filling out surveys are the easiest ways spammers get your address to send spam to. This is a detailed process done on the spammer part...To make it simple they have a program that searches the Internet for all email addys...then this list is used to automatically send out spam. So watch where you post, sign or enter your email addy. Check the TOS of the guest books, you may be surprised at what you find.
12. If you are on a friends list that sends out cute emails and these kind of emails, you may want to email them back that you don't wish to receive this kind of spam and offer a few links so they can see for themselves that it is a hoax, chainletter or urban legend.

Well that's about it. I probably could write a book, but don't have the desire to do so. I'm going to include several sites where you can find out about hoaxes, etc.

These two sites are invaluable. They have links and articles about hoaxes, urban legends and chain letters. If you get a chance you might want to take a look. They include all the links that have been listed here.
http://antivirus.about.com/compute/antivirus/
http://urbanlegends.about.com/culture/urbanlegends/

Most importantly don't run an exe file that you get in email, even if it was a friend. Scan first! Also scan all Word documents for viruses. I got a virus from a reputable person that many of you deal with on a daily basis...this was in July and it crashed my Word program. So even if you think or know who is sending the attachment DON'T open until scanned. I recommend checking your virus software web site at least once a week or more often because viruses are discovered every day and several are set to activate every day.

For those that have Norton 2000 scanning your email please be aware that there is a security hole allowing hackers to sneak in. Norton is working on a patch for this. For the time being I would recommend that you save the attachment to your hard drive in a test or temp folder and scan it from there. Norton 2000 is a good program and each person has their own personal preferences for what program they are going to use.

If you get a hoax warning delete immediately because if you pass it on it is considered spam unless it is valid.
Please feel free to send any thing to me on the MW listserve and I will check it out.

Thank you,
Anna Morvee ~ Virus/Hoax Coordinator ~

Question:
"today has been very trying for me. I have been harassed for the past six or so hours by someone who subscribed to one of my newsletters and then screamed that I was SPAMMING him. He has called me names and threatened me and now is subscribing me to almost a hundred newsletters - most of them pornographic. To get off some of these list, I have to visit the sites... I have a very important question. Have any one of you ever had to change your e-mail address because of this sort of thing? As you know, I can't actually just close up shop and hide. He's already gone and signed my guestbook so he knows where my site is and will get any new address I get and do it all over again. I swear - I didn't do anything to this man. He honestly subscribed himself and then when he got the newsletter today, he said - quote "Subject: get me off this list you ***** ******" I'm sorry to who that might offend, but I didn't say it... Well, I immediately banned him and he kept coming at me. I blocked his addy and he came at me with another. I can't hide... I have gone through the process of reporting him to everyone I can think of - AOL, Yahoo (because that's the address he used at first) Onelist and his ISP's, as well as mine. In fact, he reported ME to my own ISP... Anyway, how would you bounce back from that? Most people could change e-mail, but I can't... Advice please -- especially if you have ever gone through this."

Answer:
"I don't know where you live, but this is illegal behavior. Contact the police. We have a high tech task force here that will handle these situations for you - maybe there is one in your area. Just save everything that comes from him, and contact the police and ask what you can do. If the cops can't help you, don't try and reason with him. He will get off on knowing he's bothering you, so let whatever he does go without comment. Let him fade away. You can block email from a sender at your ISP - it never has to be downloaded to your computer - just call them and ask them how. Any newsletters he signs you up for can be blocked at that level."

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COMPUTER INFO

Find a computer article: http://cma.zdnet.com

Great resource, at least for those of us with aging PC's. Have you ever installed a software upgrade, then found that the new version and your PC didn't agree with each other? Check out www.oldversion.com. There you can obtain scads of old versions of software, which likely disappeared when you upgraded and can no longer be found at the usual sources.

Find a domain name: www.networksolutions.com or http://www.internic.net

Find a high-tech company: http://www.corptech.com

Find an ISP: http://thelist.internet.com

Steamed about spam? Try www.spamcop.com

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WEBSITE WORDS OF WISDOM

Web Developement Course http://www.trainingtools.com/coursedesc/learninghtml.asp
Learn HTML - trainingtools.com - Free Course, JavaScript Training, HTML Training, FrontPage Training,Web Based

A great primer on HTML is NCSA's "Beginners Guide to HTML" located online at
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/General/Internet/WWW/HTMLPrimer.html This document explains the very basics of building a web page, without getting distracted by the more advanced bells & whistles. Print it out. Keep it by your computer while you're working. I'm sure it contains everything you need to compose a neat, sophisticated and professional looking page. Once you feel comfortable with the contents of the primer, you can move on to the other stuff. HTML -is- easy, but it's best to take it one step at a time.

HTML Goodies is found at: http://www.htmlgoodies.com

http://www.hotwired.com/webmonkey/

http://webdesignclinic.com is an index site which will lead you to lots of useful tools and information.

Here, you can find lists of HTML tutorials, graphics sites, font sites, designers sets...just about anything you can imagine...all neatly organized and labeled. http://www.sweetaspirations.com/resources.html

Looking for some artwork to put on your Web site? Here's a search engine that will help you find all sorts of graphics on the Web. It's called, naturally, GraphSearch http://www.graphsearch.com/, and you can use it to search for icons, photos, clip art, 3D icons, and more. You can do a keyword search, or browse the list of categories to find what you need.

Can someone please email me the URL where you can find out if a name has been taken or not for new websites? Try http://www.networksolutions.com/cgi-bin/whois
What you need is information from the ISP or webhost that your domain name will be residing on. You can't buy a domain unless you have an actual machine to "park" it somewhere. The $119 charge means that Network Solutions will allow you to park your domain on their machine; the $70 is if you already have arrangements with a server to host your domain. Assuming you've got this, contact your ISP and ask them for the info you need to register your domain.

Anonymous reply to the above statement:
I like to use http://register.com -- simpler (and you don't need any ISP info). You can buy all the domain names you like and just *not* pay to have them activated on a server -- a lot of people (like me) do that. Just for the name is $70 for 2 years.
There have been a lot of bad vibes about network solutions lately -- they're essentially slamming their service on you. I think it's very confusing now. The government is NOT amused, let's put it that way.
I wouldn't pay Network Solutions anything over and above the $70 per domain. You can get better deals elsewhere -- and let that choice be yours.

For all of you who design Web pages, you might be interested in checking out Jacob Neilson's latest Alertbox column at http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990613.html. The article is called, "Disabled Accessibility: The Pragmatic Approach," and comments on the W3C's latest accessibility standards.

Note that the accessibility standards call for
* 17 high-priority rules: follow these or many users will not be able to use the site at all.
* 33 medium-priority rules: violating these rules will make it difficult, but not impossible to use the site.
* 16 lower-priority rules that do improve accessibility but can be violated without hurting users too much.

For a rules checklist, visit
http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WAI-WEBCONTENT-19990505/full-checklist

Here's a link that lists a lot of character codes for html. http://www.htmlstylehouse.com/charactr.htm

Shareware to sort through old URLs to see which are dead: http://www.softseek.com
This program is called "Linksweeper" . All you have to do is type that in the search field and it will pull it up.

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~General Info~ ~Computer Talk with Ann Morvee~

~Computer Info~ ~Web Site Words of Wisdom~

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