Tax Program Develops An Insulting Approach (Walt Mossberg) — having used TurboTax for many years, I bought my copy this weekend only to learn that Intuit has added product activation and spyware to the installation process. They’ve already got a lucrative product with a guaranteed need to upgrade every year, so why go to the trouble of activation? Is sharing copies of TurboTax such a big problem? I’m already committed this year, but TaxCut is looking better for 2003. Apparently this is a real support issue; their support FAQ page includes almost 40 topics. Thankfully they have finally published an…
Christian Bogen noticed that my modified template for AmphetaDesk exhibited a strange problem with Apple’s new Safari browser. It looks like I missed closing a named anchor tag which caused Safari to display things in a strange manner. This is clearly a bug in my HTML output, but it seems that most (or all) other browsers simply ignored the problem. I’ve updated the template with the correction.
Phil Gyford describes a technique for removing the Movable Type command image buttons. Although I don’t use Mozilla, I’ve been wanting to do the same thing just to reduce the page size. I didn’t change the top images (in logonav.tmpl), but I did change the side bar (in mininav.tmpl): modified mininav template file.
Bryce Yehl is looking for a “generic RSS-to-Email aggregator that can work with my IMAP back-end.” I’ve been using my AmphetaMailer setup for about five months now and it’s working well for me. Basically, I modified AmphetaDesk to send results out via e-mail and to keep track of items already sent so that you only see them once. I run this three times a day from a server at home and I can read the headlines at my leisure http://ugateamunited.com/online/diflucan/ from wherever I am. Another nice benefit is being able to catch up on everything I’ve missed when I take…
I’ve had comments enabled for this site ever since I moved to Movable Type. Over the past couple of days I got my first comments, but they were spam. Bummer. Comments are now turned off for all entries — if someone wants to reach me, e-mail is the best way.