Announcements

Yesterday, I announced that our web site will be hosting a special fund raiser. To quickly recap: I will be compiling special reviews (once a week over the summer), featuring really great software at ridiculously cheap prices; a percentage of the ... proceeds will be used to fund our web site. Yesterday's Summer Sizzler was "SpeedUpMyPC": an award-winning system optimization program used to monitor and boost your PC's performance when you need it the most (click here to read -- you won't want to miss it!). Today's newsletter announcement is an email I received this morning, and deals ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader James S. writes: " Dear Dennis, For the last two email editions of your newsletter, I have noticed a 'special announcement' near the top of the page, concerning 'RSS implementation' to your web site. At the bottom of the ... announcement, you have linked to a review of FeedDemon to better explain the RSS technololgy. I'm a bit stumped, however; the more I read about RSS, the more I don't understand it! There almost seems to be too many explanations. In fact, RSS sounds so complicated that I sincerely feel like throwing away my computer and going back to 'the good old days ... (view more)

It's been nearly one week since I last sent out the newsletter. Apparently I didn't make myself clear when I said that the web site reconstruction effort wasn't yet completed and that it was going to take some time, because a handful of folks ... emailed me over the weekend threatening to unsubscribe from the newsletter if I didn't hurry up and put things back in order. Talk about taking things for granted! I would agree with these sentiments if (and only if) I had a team of developers working around the clock and I paid them the going rate of $65.00 an hour to get the project completed ... but ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader Konrad L. write s: " Dear Dennis, I'm writing you today because I am questioning the change of some content of your newsletter. Don't get me wrong -- the effort you have put into inter-linking the articles is very welcome. ... However, now all that seems to remain is just your educational articles. I.E.: where is the 'On This Day in History' section? What about the freeware picks from Shell Extension City? Change is good. But if some things ain't broken, why fix 'em? " My response: Konrad isn't the first person to ask me the question, so I'd imagine there's probably a ... (view more)

It's been one heck of an enduring battle, but after waging war with the new web server gremlins -- and after standing vigilantly for the last 5 days in hopes that the hosting company could resolve a number of outstanding issues -- I finally decided ... that "enough was enough" and had the system re-imaged [formatted] all over again. Of course, this meant that I had to reinstate all the dedicated web server software and web pages by remote command-line. Not fun. It was a royal pain in the neck, but it appears that the second walk-thru has cleared the path and things *seem* to be much ... (view more)

I have been *extremely* busy as of late and am having a hard time keeping up with my regular schedule (and subsequently, the regular newsletter schedule). Just before the holiday break, I mentioned that the newsletter layout would be changing. Well ... -- no surprise -- it looks like I jumped the gun again. As I was adding the finishing touches to the new article format, I decided that it would be extremely beneficial to include links to related articles [previously posted in our newsletter], immediately following the feature article. So, for an example: if I wrote a new article on XP Service ... (view more)

I can't imaging what my life would be like if I didn't know how to program in PERL. Side note: PERL stands for Practical Extraction and Reporting Language, and is a robust programming language frequently used for creating programs that run on web ... servers. (Source: wmo.ch ) Perl's elaborate support for regular expression matching and substitution has made it the language of choice for tasks involving string manipulation. The language's highly flexible syntax and concise regular expression operators, make densely written PERL code indecipherable to the uninitiated. The syntax is, however, ... (view more)

I'm stoked. For the last 3 months, I've been nibbling away at a special web script (project) that reformats all the previous Infopackets newsletters into a simple, clean layout. Why all the excitement? There are a lot of great things to come now ... that this daunting task is nearing completion. With article layout standardized, I can now move forward with: a) splitting articles into separate pages: it is important to split the articles so that potential web visitors can locate our web site through search engines (such as Google). As it stands now, 95% of all traffic to our web site is from our ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader James T. writes: " Dear Dennis, I read and enjoy your newsletter everyday that it's published -- yet, I can't understand why (as of late) you've giving so much hype to Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2)? I agree that SP2 is a ... critical and necessary update ; nonetheless, Microsoft's Service Pack releases almost always coincide with incompatibility issues. As with any Service Pack, I feel, there is no guarantee that it will install successfully -- nor is there a guarantee for anything, when dealing with computers. ... My reason for writing you today, in fact, is with ... (view more)