Few days scare me more than those when I return from a vacation (as in yesterday). I take certain measures to ease the pressure, e.g.:

• Mail auto-responder/s are set up to suppress incoming messages
• Wikis for correspondence (IM equivalent which updates a few times a day) are locked or put on hold
• Disappearance from Web logs and forums
• No involvement in newsgroups and mailing lists

Despite all, E-mail, newsgroups, and feeds require catching up upon return. Even worse, additional reasons to worry lurk around the corner:

• One can forgot what has recently happens in the field of IT
• Orientation within API‘s gets eroded
• Breakage of Web sites or pages
• Shortage in updates, resulting in reduced crawling
• Electronic moderation, approval, and authorisation are delayed
• Site spam in its various forms
• An extensive list of tasks which cannot not be handled remotely
• Backups which are long-overdue

So, moments after a vacation are perhaps good moments to stay isolated… and catch up.

My sister had no worries about comment spam

There appears to be a consistency across platforms when it comes to keyboard accelerators. Here are a few examples:

• CTRL+Enter dispatches E-mail
• ALT+F4 closes the window in focus
• ALT+TAB cycles between windows
• CTRL+P prints a page
• F11 enables full-screen mode

Under a Mac, ALT and CTRL will vary. All accelerators exist to save you time, so learn them, practice them and most importantly, use them.

While on the issue of accelerators, menu layouts have become consistent as well. This suggests that more operating systems and more application are designed to ‘absorb’ new users. The biggest gainers are standards and conventions of course.

recent market survey reveals which Linux distributions are most popular, which windows managers are on the rise and likewise with applications. A must to any Linux enthusiast (via Slashdot).

…Mandrake and SuSE are now essentially tied for first place — at 17.6 and 17.5 percent respectively. Red Hat comes next, at sightly over 15 percent, and last year’s winner, Debian, has slipped into fourth place, garnering half a percent fewer votes than Red Hat…

On the left: Screen-shot of Metisse for FVWM

UPDATE: More details on FireFTP, an FTP client for Firefox, are available in a new and comprehensive item. Visitors are strongly encouraged to follow this link.

o some this may be no cause for excitement, but many Firefox users would love to integrate FTP capabilities into their browser.

An extension called FireFTP was released two days ago (beta phase) and its value to regular FTP users is high. To discover more Firefox updates, RSS feeds for new themes and extensions exist and are highly recommended.

Long URL‘s (addresses) break consistencies in mail and news clients, as well as on the Web. A URL exceeding the standard line in length cannot be wrapped as it would cause a conflict; layout is compromised instead. Several sites offer tools that produce short permanent aliases to long addresses.

• The first such site, which I discovered long ago is www.makeashorterlink.com. Evidently, it is quite a long URL in itself.
• A very popular site among newsgroups subscribers is tinyurl.com
• Dr. Scott Tobkes has just informed me of another such service: snipurl.com

Domains can now be ranked using the criterion of traffic. This gives insight into popularity, without relying on Google PageRank.

• Go to A9, Amazon’s excellent search engine, which is heavily reliant on Google
• Type in the full name of the URL, e.g. http://google.com
• Hover over the button labelled Site Info to view the figures

Google, by the way, is only ranked 3^rd, MSN at 2^nd and Yahoo! at 1^st.

These ranks include all registered global domains, as well individual parts of the world, most notably Germany (.de) with around 5.5 million. Italy (.it) at second only has 681,779 registered domains.

Photo from John C. Dvorak

A slowly-expanding dot may often appear on Treo displays. It is a serious problem, which has become a real plague affecting a whole range of Treo models.

It starts as small patches of yellow that gradually grow and eventually destroy the entire screen.

Other people in UseNet have voiced complaints with regards to the stability of the Treo. It apparently cannot endure weeks or months without a reset, unlike other devices from PalmOne. Nonetheless, the vast majority is praising the Treo, describing it as an excellent PDA which successfully integrates telephony with highly-functional computing.

Cited by: PalmAddict