A Bloy and his Blog

For the past several weeks I’ve been using Mozilla Thuderbird for email, and liking it a lot. Prior to that, I had been a loyal user of Eudora. Would you believe I’ve been using that for at least 15 years now! In fact, for the past 5 years or so, I’ve been buying the full version to take advantage of the extra features (like spell check). When I opened up the program a few weeks ago, I got a notice that there was another new version available. Did I want to shell out $50 for the upgrade?

Lately, I’ve been hearing good things about Thuderbird (made by the same folks who created my favorite web browser (Mozilla Firefox) and I decided to give it a try. Like Firefox, Thunderbird is open source software and free to use.

read the rest of: Mozilla Thunderbird

Over the past few days I’ve gotten several mass-mailed advertisements to my personal email address. That email address has, for the most part, been spam free for me. It isn’t posted on the web anywhere, so spam harvesting robots can’t grab it.

Well, it turns out there is a mass-mailing e-mail worm spreading around the net, which is distributing spam to every address it can find on the infected computer. If your computer has it, you are unknowingly sending spam to everyone in your address book.

Please folks, use anti-virus and anti-spyware programs. Make sure to keep them up-to-date. Keep your software up-to-date as well. Those of us in your email address book will be grateful.

Over the past few days, I’ve been using the new version of Mozilla Firefox as my default web browser. A free product from the Mozilla project, Firefox is the best browser out there. Its outstanding set of features include a pop-up blocker, excellent privacy and cookie management, the ability to have multiple web pages open in a tabbed interface, fast display rendering and excellent support for displaying pages designed with web standards. To do all of this, Firefox uses a small amount of computer resources compared to the other popular browsers out there, causing others to label it a lean, mean, browsing machine.

Do yourself a favor. Stop using that old, bloated browser and download a copy of Mozilla Firefox. You’ll be glad you did.

I’ve been a loyal user of Homesite for several years now. I’ve tried just about every HTML editor out there, and I always come back to Homesite. I was anxious to get the upgrade to version 5 when I heard that Macromedia (who merged with Homesite’s previous company, Allaire) was releasing a new version. So yesterday with credit card in hand, I logged onto Macromedia’s Homesite Upgrade Page and downloaded my copy.

After I had a problem with the original install (the validator component would not work) I reinstalled the program, and it worked fine. So far I think the $30 I spent on the upgrade has been worth it. My only concern is, after the validator component would not work I spend twenty minutes clicking around in circles on the Macromedia web site, looking for a way to contact for technical support. There is none! No e-mail address, no phone, not even a feedback form. The only thing I could find was a link to Allaire’s Homesite user forum. I hope that’s not a bad omen for what has been an excellent piece of software.