Rafe's Blog

Sanity Saver: DisplayFusion

DisplayFusion is a Windows XP and Vista utility designed for people with multiple monitors. But even single-display users should check it out.

The free app's core feature is wallpaper management. It lets you select different pictures for your desktop background on your various displays.  XP by itself can't do this.

It will even let you search for Flickr photos for your backgrounds. Cool.

But what I really like about it is its built-in shortcuts for window management. There are a number of customizable ctrl-Windows commands that I've taking to using habitually. Ctrl-Win-left-arrow and ctrl-Win-right-arrow resize windows along the left and right halves of your display, respectively. It makes it easy to line up two windows side-by-side, like a browser and word processor. Multi-monitor users will also like ctrl-Win-x, which sends your active window to the other display.

DisplayFusion is donationware.

Webware.com is live!

For the past several months I've been working on launching a new blog at CNET: Webware. It's finally live. The blog is about online apps for real people. Not the inside baseball of the blogosphere or venture capital.  Anyway, I'm having a great time covering new Web sites and services. Check out the blog.

I can't believe I made it this far without saying, "Web 2.0."  I hate that term.

Good buy, Microsoft

Microsoft has acquired ByteTaxi, the company that makes one of my favorite utilities, FolderShare.  I use this program constantly -- it keeps the data files on my laptop and desktop in perfect synch.  Hopefully, MS won't feature it up and mess with it too much. It works extremely well as is. Except for one thing: I haven't gotten it to work reliably with Outlook's offline (.PST) folders. 

Schwab update

A very poorly worded email from Schwab -- and a tech support rep without a good grasp of Quicken's own security -- led me to believe that Schwab now required that my Quicken datafile password was the same as my Schwab account access password. This appears not to be the case. Which is good. See the comment thread on the original item.

Dear Schwab: Keep your hands off my PC

I just got a notice from Schwab. They want me to change my overall Quicken software password to match the account password that's on their servers, or my capability to download data from Schwab into Quicken will stop working.

This is terrible. First of all, I use Quicken to access more than one Schwab account, and they have different passwords. I don't want them to be the same. Secondly, I don't want Schwab to have my Quicken password. If, by some strange event, they get my Quicken data file, they would have access to it. Furthermore, if some other bank also wants me to synchronize my passwords, and they have different password rules, it is possible that I wouldn't be able to access both. Or if I could, I'd then have the same password across Schwab, another bank, and my Qucken file. This would make my data less secure.

There's a reason I have a different password on my two Schwab accounts, and there's also a reason my Quicken password is different from those. I'm fine with financial institutions that set their own password rules. But it's not their purview to set the rules on my personal software.

I talked to Schwab tech support, and they say they are doing this for "convenience." Personally, I am more than willing to deal with a little inconvenience to maintain the security of my personal finances and of active trading accounts. I'm stunned that Schwab doesn't get this.

An uncomfortable meeting about spyware

I met this week with a top exec of an anti-spyware company. His firm is in the business of preventing damage caused by spyware. It’s a noble venture, yes? But this company also makes money from spyware — it charges for its spyware-fighting tools, the same way anti-virus vendors profit from their products.

Of course, even those pursuing noble goals deserve to make a buck, but after 90 minutes of talking with the folks from this company I realized how uncomfortable I had become. In order to keep their business going, they need spyware to continue as a threat. They’re close to the very element they’re trying to protect us from. No threat = no business.

I probably shouldn’t fee so weird. After all, insurance companies make money from the threat of tragedy too.

I did a CNET podcast on this topic.

Speaking of weird, though: Microsoft is said to be in talks to by spyware maker Claria. Reportedly it’s leading to some heated discussions in Redmond. Good.

Related: CNET.com on how to fight spyware and a comparison of anti-spyware tools.

The new phone books are here!

I had one of the most bizarre meetings of my career today: Chris Capossela of Microsoft came by to pitch Microsoft Office 12's new file format.  How thrilling!

The weird thing is, though, it is an important announcement. Microsoft got soundly spanked last time they changed Office file formats, so I can understand the company trying to get the word out on this change before it actually takes place.

The change is this: Office 12, which comes out sometime in the back half of 2006, will, by default, save files in XML format. The XML schema will be published, and use of it will be royalty-free. In theory, this will enable other parties to develop applications that read and write Office files, without requiring the Office applications. Word and Excel from Office 2003 (the current version) already can read and write XML files, but by default they use the creaky binary format that's hard for other apps to decipher. Office 12 will add Powerpoint to the list of apps that can write XML files, and it will also continue to support .DOC, .XLS, and .PPT files.  There's more on News.com.

There are a lot of open issues still. Mac support? Unknown. Update: Yes it will.  Outlook using XML? Not likely. Will Access write XML? Highly unlikely. How about Visio and OneNote -- will they be able to read these XML files? Also unknown.

Microsoft moving to an open (or, at least, openly published) document format is a very important move. But this is an interim step, since it looks like it will be several years before all the Microsoft productivity applications are able to interoperate using XML.

Longhorn: Beyond search

I just got a demo of Build 5063 of Windows Longhorn, from Microsoft group product manager Greg Sullivan. There are interesting changes from previous versions we've covered at CNET.com, including the removal of some of the whizzy user interface flourishes like the side bar. On the other hand, this OS finally does a very good job of combining very different file organization schemes into one UI, including the standard folders-based file organization, searching, and tagging (which MS calls keywords).  I'll put a Works for Me column together on this quick as I can. For latest Longhorn news, click here.

The cure is worse than the disease

The two women in my life (my wife and my mother) started to complain to me this weekend that their computers were acting funny. My wife couldn't get her email. My mother couldn't do anything at all; her system became totally nonresponsive as soon as it booted into Windows. Both machines were showing 100% CPU utilization. In both cases, I found that the problem was a bad (very bad) Trend Micro virus pattern update (all my machines use Trend). I found instructions on Trend's site to fix the problem and all is copacetic again.

This is an especially bad problem, though. Because of the way this bug affects computers, there's no easy way to implement the fix. I had to startup both PCs in safe mode, delete the bad file, and then reboot. I fear this update might be causing very serious problems out there in the real world, where people don't have access to geeks willing to run down bugs like this.

Boy, am I mad at Trend.

Shocker: Linux not cheaper

The OS may be free, but nothing else about Linux is. Training and security implementation costs make servers just as expensive to run on Linux as Windows, a new study says. Microsoft, wisely, had no comment.

From my "Business Buzz" on CNET.com - work.cnet.com.