Steve’s Stuff

E-Week’s review of Star Office (eWEEK Labs Review - StarOffice) is generally right, but misses one point that makes it impossible for me to use OpenOffice as my normal word processor. It’s next to impossible to do a merge to email in OpenOffice. Allegedly, this can work if one installs several proprietary Sun Java packages. So far, it has not worked. I invested several hours in this, then gave up, went back to Word, and got done what I needed to do in about two minutes.

There has to be more to it than “It’s an alternative to Microsoft and almost as good.”

On the heels of Symatec’s warning that Firefox is not a security panacea, Opera is now offering their full browser as freeware.

The two events are probably not related, but their timing is excellent.

A friend loaned me his Garmin StreetPilot for a long car trip we took last week. OK, I’m sold. So now I’m not sure on what to buy. The Street Pilot i5 is the latest from Garmin. It has voice navigation, isn’t too expensive, and is preloaded with all of North America. It lacks the features of the more expensive Street Pilot 2620 that I just used, but I can’t see paying $500 more for the additional features.

I need to find a GPS gadget geek website!

Mozilla Web browsers are potentially more vulnerable to attack than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, according to a Symantec report,
says CNET News in the article Symantec: Mozilla browsers more vulnerable than IE | CNET News.com.

But I think this is the kicker: There is one caveat: Symantec counts only those security flaws that have been confirmed by the vendor. According to security monitoring company Secunia, there are 19 security issues that Microsoft still has to deal with for Internet Explorer, while there are only three for Firefox.

So, while there may *have been* more flaws, if one is fully patched and up to date, I read this as there are fewer *active* flaws in Mozilla browsers.

This site and other CCIM sites were offline for a while today. Of course, we first thought it was our problem. After tearing up a lot of time and effort and emotion, we found the problem was outside our network. The Internet Storm Center reported that the problem was that another ISP was “claiming” IP addresses that belong to AT&T.

Just a small typo and it took down a big chunk of the ‘net for an hour.

Newsweek has a story about how Google is moving in on Microsoft’s traditional turf, the Windows desktop.
How long before your use Google Write or Google Calc, applications that live in your web browser, not on your desktop and not licensed from Microsoft, as your word processor and spreadsheet?

Typically, Microsoft has not let this pass unnoticed. Steve Ballmer (aka Monkey Boy), Microsoft CEO, has vowed to “… kill Google”. An empty threat? Maybe. But the streets are littered with the remains of those who dared steal Microsoft’s fire.

I’m back to Copernic from Google Desktop. As I wrote a few days ago, I like the Google Sidebar, but I ran into Outlook related problems. First, when the new GDS indexed mail, Outlook removed the little envelope icon in the system tray that indicates new mail has arrived. Second (and more important), our voicemail system is integrated with Outlook. As GDS indexed mail on this IMAP account, new voicemails were marked as read. I could live with this within Outlook, but the integration is such that it also turns off the red light on my phone that indicates I have voicemail. It was quite a surprise to find 10 unheard messages! (My apologies if one was yours.)

So, my current personal recommendation for a desktop search tool is Copernic Desktop Search.

Copernic