In the spirit of using Google for good instead of evil, I point you to Tim Heuer's personal blog where he declares (and rightly so) that Fulton Homes suck.

-G

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Yes, believe it or not, I've found a truly adware free, spyware free weather applet that fits snugly in your toolbar, and is basically what I've been looking for.

It's called Weather Pulse, and you can pick it up from Tropic Designs.  It's a litte rough around the edges, and there are a number of blocking internet calls, but they don't take but a few seconds to resolve themselves if you're on a broadband connection, and there are active support forums if you run into larger problems.

Of course, I wouldn't point you to anything was wasn't 100% free, and I'm not changing that policy here.  Weather Pulse is currently freeware - the author just wants you to send a note if you find the program useful.

Go check it out - remove Weatherbug and the other adware/spyware weather applet ilk from your lives!

- G

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I haven't seen too many reviews out there for DeepMetrix's new product, LiveStats.NET, and I believe I know why.  I've got to believe that they're terribly embarrassed by it, and hope that no one notices that they've got a new product until they've had a chance to make a few updates.

What's so horrible?  Well, let me explain how their LiveStats.NET works.  On the servers being tracked, a piece of JavaScript inserted into every page served calls home to the tracking server, requesting a 1K GIF.  LiveStats then reads the log of the server hosting the .GIF file, and tracks stats accordingly.  The problems arise when you think about how you can insert all that JavaScript.

Option #1 is to manually do it.  Even DeepMetrix realized that was a bad idea, so they give you the other 2 options.  Option #2 is to use of of their 3 automatic JS embedders (or, as they say, “embeders“... the typos are thorough and throughout), either their custom tool, or two they developed for DreamWeaver or FrontPage.  I can't speak to how useful they are... I can't imagine doing this to any existing web content.  Option #3 seemed the most appealing to me, installing their IIS ISAPI filter to insert the JS on every call manually.  It works as advertised, kinda.

You see, after its finished inserting all the JavaScript, the filter seems to have a need to have one more HTML comment closing tag.  Not a big deal, except the developers left off one of the dashes in “-->”  So, best case, you have a small arrow printed at the top of every web page served.  At worst, you get a bunch on a single page.  I'm not exactly sure how such things get by QA... maybe they hoped no one would notice.

I noticed.

The next big bug I found almost makes me think they are trying to cut off any corporate customers that they have.  When setting up a new website to track, you need to enter a fully-qualified domain name for it... no single-name servers like you would find on a corporate LAN (i.e. companyweb).  The same applies to the server aliases... FQDNs only need apply.  Well, that's not entirely true... IP addresses are OK too; anything with a dot I guess.

I haven't bothered to actually use the reporting aspect of LiveStats.Net, because I can't.  I haven't any public websites to point to, and nobody uses FQDNs in their browser for the internal sites.  That's right - the configuration is so broken, the product is 100% unusable.

I'd give them 0 stars, but I don't think that's fair... I spent a good chunk of my day trying to get it to work.  If you find another review for it out there, let me know... I'd like to take away a few of the stars from them there.

- G

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So I downloaded iTunes today, because it is probably where things are headed, and I wanted to take a look. The install took a little bit of time (whatever), and it added Quicktime to my systray (yes, I know that's not it's real name) - I hate it when applications add themselves to my systray - and I fired 'er up.

First impression - I was scolded for not having restarted my computer before loading it. They say you don't get a second chance to make a first impression... but I'm forgiving, so I press on. The iTunes window pops up, and it looks good, very organized, taking up about 75% of the center part of my screen. So, I double-click the title bar of the window to maximize it (I'm a big fan of maximized windows). The window proceeds to make itself bigger... taking up about 85-90% of the center part of my screen... not maximized - strike two. OK, Apple developers apparently don't use Windows very often, but again - I'm forgiving. So, I click the middle control button on the right of the title bar - 99.999% of the time reserved for maximizing/restoring. Not today - in iTunes, the button puts the app into supercompact skin mode - strike three... now I'm frustrated.

Me - the developer who forgives HCI errors 100x more often than any normal user. I started to manually resize the window to fill the screen... and the window took *forever* to keep up with the mouse pointer as I dragged it... my PC may be a few years old, but it's not that bad... nothing ever moves that slow - strike, um, four... now I'm pissed.

Well, I closed the app at that point, and don't know if/when I'll open it again. They've had a good while to bring the Window version of this app to light, and as far as I'm concerned failed miserably. I was outright angry at the app before I even had a chance to look around.

Is this how Mac users feel when they're using MS Office for Macs?

- G

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