Zen's Junk Drawer

ICQ Pager

E-Mail

Well, this is my junk drawer, so if yer rootin around, don't be disturbed at what you find, ok?

I made this page so I can access my most frequently used browser bookmarks and information tidbits from other computers. As I find interesting stuff that others may like, I throw them into this junk drawer too, so look around if you see anything that interests you. Just be careful 'cause... well, you know what happens when you pull a drawer out too far.
April 14, 2000 4:34 AM PT
Microsoft Corp. acknowledged Thursday that its engineers included in some of its Internet software a secret password -- a phrase deriding their rivals at Netscape as "weenies" -- that could be used to gain illicit access to hundreds of thousands of Internet sites worldwide. Click here for details.
Click here to find out the wording of the "Good Samaritan Law" for any state.

Here is an interesting tidbit from the book "Learning Linux" by Bryan Pfaffenberger. "In head-to-head tests on inexpensive Intel hardware, Linux outperforms most other verions of Unix, including expensive commercial versions, and outperforms all other versions in certain key areas. In most tests, Linux also outperforms its chief competitor, Microsoft Windows NT.

An exception was a 1999 test conducted by Mindcraft, in which NT server was found to be more than twice as fast as Linux. It was subsequently revealed that the test, funded by Microsoft, pitted an expertly configured NT workstation against a poorly configured Linux system. Microsoft's own internal tests, revealed in a memo that was leaked to the internet (see Raymond 1998), show a contrasting picture. The memo records a test in which Linux and Windows NT were run in a head-to-head competition on identical systems; for Web browsing, Linux and Netscape Communicator outperformed NT and Internet Explorer by a factor of 40 percent."

We are READK

Our staff has completed the 18 months of work on time and on budget. We have gone through every line of code in every program in every system. We have analyzed all databases, all data files, including backups and historic archives, and modified all data to reflect the change. We are proud to report that we have completed the "Y-to-K" date change mission, and have now implemented all changes to all programs and all data to reflect the new standards:

Januark, Februark, March, April, Mak, June, Julk, August, September, October, November, December

As well as: Sundak, Mondak, Tuesdak, Wednesdak, Thursdak, Fridak, Saturdak
Behind the free PC craze

If you're considering taking advantage of one of the many free PC offers that have sprung up in recent months, you might want to think again. With many of these deals, you're getting a PC that was state of the art about two years ago. In addition, there may be several catches. For one, companies may give you a free PC, but not a monitor. Others require you use their Internet service provider exclusively, which -- depending on where you live -- may or may not offer or provide proficient access. Those companies offering rebates in exchange for an ISP or other commitment may be a viable alternative since you will at least be able to choose what kind of PC you want. But with any of these offers, read the fine print and be clear on how long you have to opt out. If you're going to be stuck with this computer for three years, you want to make sure you're happy with the whole deal.
Lost a pet? Look Here
AOL

Here are some ideas on what to do with those AOL CD's you keep getting in the mail. Do ya wonder what's wrong with AOL? Wanna see some more? Wanna know how to cancel your AOL account? Wanna remove all the AOL stuff from your computer?
BROWSING

Want to filter banner ads from your browsing? Go to http://internet.junkbuster.com/
Y2K

Be aware that the year 2000 is a leap year. The year 1900 was not a leap year, and the year 2100 won't be either. Normally, a century year is not a leap year, even though it is divisible by 4, but every 400 years this rule is skipped. Some programs are not aware of that, however most of those don't even know about the 100 year anomoly so most date functions work properly. In other words, two wrongs make a right. From 1901 through 2099 every 4th year is a leap year starting with 1904. However, if you have an application that references dates outside that range, such as historical and geneological applications you should be aware of this. Also, there are still people alive that were born prior to 1901 so, for example, if you were trying to determine the day they were born based on their birthdate, it would be in error by one day. A practical example is an old DOS program Quicksilver which compiles dBASE programs. dBASE handles the 400 year term correctly but Quicksilver does not. Therefore, records with date keys that are indexed by dBASE will not function properly under Quicksilver, and vice versa.
Read about The Day the Dinosaurs Died
Take the Purity test
Have a Purity Party
Read about the first report of Iomega's Click Of Death problem in PC Week's report

and an unofficial web site devoted to the problem.

Also here for an explaination,

and here for Steve Gibson's solution.

Read about the First ever freeware summit
Check Symantec's virus information.
Every once in awhile a program comes along that is so beautiful you want to embrace it's creator. Unlike most programs, it does exactly what it is supposed to do, actually saves you time, and makes you wonder how you got along without it. If you have a Zip drive, you might want to check this little nugget out.
Last September, Dave Van Allen of Bethlehem, Pa., gave his 12-year-old son Christopher his own domain name, pokey.org , taking after the boy's nickname.

Because Pokey is the registered trademark of the same name, the trusty sidekick of Gumby. Prema Toy Co. which owns the rights to all the Gumby characters is now badgering this 12 year old boy, and telling him to hand over Pokey's name!!!!!!!

P.S. On April 15th Prema Toy Company relented, in the face of angry email from thousands of irate people from all over the world.

For a refreshing treat in the humdrum world of mediocre personal web sites, stop by and visit with Kelly Holmes. Pretty kewl. One of the most interesting, fun, and original sites I have seen.
SECURITY

JavaScript has been used to copy the contents of a surfer’s AUTOEXEC.BAT file without the surfer’s knowlege. Take a look at http://www.scoopy.com/secure.htm to see how.
If you want to put spaces between your images on your web page, download this 43 byte 1 x 1 pixel empty image and save it. To use it just specify the size you want with the height and width attributes.
Here is an interesting tidbit. Confused about the speeds of different connections? Here is a quick summary: Estimated times for download of a large file Optical fiber cables are designated OC-1, OC-3, etc. An OC-1 has a bandwidth of 51.84 mb/s, about half of a 100 mb ethernet. An OC-48 has a bandwidth of 2488.320 mb/s (about 2.5 Gig) and an OC-192 is the equivalent of four OC-48s or around 10 gb/sec. Cost of an OC-192 is around $2500-$4000 / km
Click here for more information.
Is it better to leave your computer on 24 hours a day or shut it down at night?

Who knows? Leaving it on keeps the hard drive and fan motors running all the time, which some people think will cause an early death. Turning it on and off sends a jolt of juice through the innards, which other people think shortens lifespan. I prefer to NEVER turn on my computer. That way I have no problems at all.

Thought for today

Someone recently wrote "My observation is that technical merit is not what gets you kudos. It is the ability to deal with Neandertals and make them COMFORTABLE. Smooth talk, smozhing, kissing up to those who evaluate you, and a shiney smile work much better than a crash-proof server."
Windows 95 Defined

32-bit extensions and a graphical shell for a 16-bit patch to an 8-bit operating system originally coded for a 4-bit microprocessor, written by a 2-bit company that can't stand for 1 bit of competition.
JUNK MAIL

Never respond to spam. Most spam email comes with an invitation to "remove" yourself from the list. Don't believe it! The replies usually bounce. What's more, the spammer can use your reply to confirm that your address is active.

If you are having a problem with junk e-mail, here is something that may work. First do a trace route to identify the source of the email. If you run Windows 95 or NT and you don't have a trace program, go to a DOS window and type tracert then the domain name, i.e. c:\windows\tracert www.junk.com Once you locate the culprit, you can find out who is in charge by performing a Whois search at http://rs.internic.net/cgi-bin/whois/ You'll find the name, address, and telephone number of the technical administrator who may be unaware that his connection is being used for bulk e-mail. More information can be found here

Also check out the spam recycle center at http://www.chooseyourmail.com/spamindex.cfm. It It lets you forward your junk e-mail to Congress and the Federal Trade Commission.
If you need an updated winsock from microsoft
If you are having a problem getting the "Save Password" feature to work for W95 dial up networking, check out this
Win 95B stuff
A resource for Win 95B details is at http://ling.ucsd.edu/~erwin/osr2.html
another is http://www.users.cts.com/king/s/serwin/osr2.html

To correctly autorun any inserted CD-ROM (and to display the AutoPlay menu option when right-clicking on a CD-ROM icon), the registry value of NoDriveTypeAutoRun should be hex: 95 00 00 00

Hwdiag.exe lists every key in the Windows Registry that refers to hardware in your system and is on the Win95B CD-ROM at D:\Other\Misc\Hwtrack\Hwdiag.exe

Some Win 95B tips from Brian Livingston

There's a secret to avoid installing Win95B twice: Run Setup only to the point where you are asked to create a start-up diskette. Make such a diskette, then cancel the install. You now have a bootable floppy from which you can run the FAT-32 versions of Fdisk and Format. After you have a FAT-32 partition, install Win95B fully.

If you exit Win95B abnormally, Scandisk automatically alerts you when you reboot that it will scan your drive and fix any errors. (To make this scan take place automatically, with no prompt, add the line AUTOSCAN=2 to the [Options] section of the text file C:\Ms dos.sys. To prevent any such automatic scans, use the line AUTOSCAN=0.)

To determine whether you have Win95B, Win95A, or plain-old Win95, double-click on the System icon in the Control Panel. "Version number" should say 4.00.950 followed by B, A, or nothing. Microsoft has already released OSR2.1 (Windows 95B.1?), which adds support for the new Universal Serial Bus. The System dialog box, unfortunately, doesn't tell you whether you have OSR2 or OSR2.1. To determine this, check whether "USB Supplement to OSR2" is listed in the Add/Remove Programs applet of Control Panel. If so, you have OSR2.1.

Some Win95 video drivers won't work under Win95B, such as the Matrox MGA Millennium. Microsoft hasn't verified this yet, but you can always run the video drivers included with Win95B until affected third-party drivers are upgraded. Microsoft does say that the Drivers tab in the Win95B Device Manager tends to show erroneously that "no driver files are required or have been loaded" for devices. This can be fixed by running an improved Hardware Diagnostics utility from the OSR2 CD-ROM. It's located at X:\Other\Misc\Hwtrack\Hwdiag.exe, where X: is the letter of your CD-ROM drive.

OSR2 tends to prematurely shut down PC Card modems if you enable the "Turn off PC Card modem when not in use" item in Control Panel's Power applet. Deselect this item and restart OSR2 if this happens to you.

ICQ

ICQ pagers don't always work. About half the time you get a "Not Found" error. Just keep trying from time to time. Sometimes 10 minutes can make a difference. Someday, perhaps, Mirabilis will get their problems resolved.

For what it's worth, if you are trying to reach geocities.com to view a page and the browser just sits there, try one of the following instead of www.geocities.com for example, you want http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Plains/9860/
try http://192.216.191.21/Heartland/Plains/9860/ instead.
IRC

Lately, I have been seeing more and more of these types of messages from IRC servers. Cut this and paste it to an E-Mail message to your ISP if you're having problems getting on IRC and your ISP tells you it isn't their fault. (Like mine does)

- **** IMPORTANT NOTE - 17 March 1997 **** - This server no longer accepts connections from hosts with faulty DNS
- (name service) records. If your hostname (from /WHOIS) is numeric
- (i.e. 206.15.106.129) rather than a name, this applies to you and you
- should ask your sysadmin to fix it.

INTERNET EXPLORER

IEClean30 allows you to disconnect from possible monitoring of your searches on the net by allowing you to point your search directly to a genuine search server of your choice rather than having Microsoft filter your net travels through theirs. The privacy issues raised by MSIE 3.0 users go far beyond those raised about Netscape. Grab a free demo and see why Internet Explorer is far more worrisome to net surfers than Netscape.

Is Microsoft's Internet Explorer really free?

Read a daily review of Microsoft Antitrust Trial transcripts.
E-MAIL

Here are a couple of ideas for road warriors, or people wishing to remain anonymous while still using E-mail

MailCity is a free web based E-mail service that lets you check your POP mail box (Your "regular" one) from any web browser from any computer. You don't need to load any special program or keep any data on the computer you happen to be using. Good for getting mail while on the road, from an Internet Cafe, from your neighbor's house, etc. It also gives you an email address with no clue who you really are or where you live. i.e. if my address is me@myisp.com Had I signed up with bogus information, no one could trace me through that email address.

iName is a free forwarding service that transfers any mail received through that email address to your POP mail address, and also handles your outgoing mail from your regular email program, again, not giving a clue who you are or where you live. For example, if my iName address is me@myisp.com Any mail sent there, gets forwarded to my regular email address and any mail I send from Eudora goes to the iName mail handler and shows up as From: me@myisp.com. Notice: since I wrote this, iname went belly up for a week without notifying anyone that their email server was not working. My advice would be to not use this for any important email that you want to make sure to receive.

FREE Email!
If you think you would like to have AITcom host your domain, you might be interested in this
If you think you would "really rather have a Buick" you might enjoy this site
And if you think Ford has a "Beter Idea", check out this one
And here's an Intel bashing site.

Who's Linking You?

Want to know about those nice people who have linked your page without your knowledge? Ask Alta Vista. Type in your URL:

Don't bother bookmarking this page. Instead, ask Netmind to tell you when I update.

Just type your E-Mail address and click:

List the pages you get notice for already

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