GNOMEREPORT: Purple X Marks The Spot

Last week, I mentioned I never could come up with a good name for my blog and pointed to the history and the naming information page. I forgot to mention that I did come up with one I like... three years too late since everything points to Meryl's Notes. The one I came up with is "Meryland" as it sounds like the state. The slogan is, "The 52nd state that follows the laws of bloggin' and geekin'." I used this for a second blog I had with nothing but fun stuff, but had no time to keep it up.

Everett Bosch wrote in with a suggestion that I never thought of - "Meryl's Peryls." That's creative! When thinking of Peryl, I think of peril, which is danger. Ha, danger and me don't belong together.

Die, BHO, die! A few people wrote in about the BHO (browser helper object - a bad guy like spyware). I do use Ad-Aware and Searchbot S&D. The thing is, I would have to run those after every program installation to know it came from a program. That would take too much time. So I run them about once a day or couple of days.

You readers are a helpful lot and shared your solutions for knocking out BHOs. Bob Laurence recommends BHO Cop, but unfortunately, you have to be a PC Magazine subscriber to get it - so those who are can look for it. Bob Dietz recommends WinPatrol, of which I'm familiar. Jeff Partridge, my second tech support advisor (first being Paul, of course) says to get Norton's AV 2004 since it catches spyware on the fly. Then, Paul tells me that while on a CM/IT job, someone's computer came to a standstill and Norton's AV was the culprit. ARGH! When I get my laptop, the plan is to add Norton. I can hear half of y'all screaming not to do it, but after much research it seems to be the best of the worst.

I've got a weird problem that I can't resolve between Google, forums, and experts. I use SurveyMonkey with one of my clients and I can't get into it because of a cookie problem. I even set IE to allow all cookies and it still would not let me in. It may be the same problem affecting two other sites. When I am in Amazon and I make a change to my wishlist, I get an error page even though the change was made. I check e-mail online and have a choice of three applications, Squirrel being my favorite. I can't get into it - error. Same goes for Horde. I can get into Neomail, but I don't like the style. Vervehosting Support is puzzled - checked viruses, cleared cookies, rebooted, no firewall changes, etc. Oh yeah, I can access all of these on Paul's computer on the same network without a problem. Figure that out.

Perplexedly yours,
Meryl K. Evans

GNEWBIE GNOOK: I Wanna Font!

Ken Colburn of Data Doctors answers Neil, who asks:

Q: How do I find and add new fonts to Windows?

A: Microsoft and Apple jointly developed a font standard called "TrueType" which is scalable and is supported in both Windows and the MacOS. Scalable means you can increase or decrease the size of the font without distorting it.

Way back before the Internet, you generally had to purchase font packages and install them from disk. You can still purchase commercial font packages in retail stores and online, but for the most part, any font that you may want is likely available as a free download from dozens of Web sites.

If you know the name of the font(s) that you want to add, try going to your favorite search engine and putting the font name followed by ".ttf" into the search bar. The ".ttf" tells it to look specifically for the True Type Font extension, which will narrow your search results to actual sites that have the font. For instance, if you were looking for the "comic" font, put "comic.ttf" into the search engine so that you will go to sites that will actually have the font for downloading.

If you just want to go on a font finding spree, try going to 1001freefonts.com, acidfonts.com, getfonts.com, or type "free fonts" into any search engine.

When you find the font that you want, you must download it to your computer from the Web site. The exact process differs from site to site, but be sure to remember where you saved the file on your computer. If the download file has a ".zip" extension, it means it has been compressed and will require an unzip utility such as WinZip.

Once you have downloaded the fonts that you want to add, go to the Control Panel (Start/Settings/Control Panel) and open the Fonts icon. This should open a window that displays your currently installed fonts. Next, click on File / Install New Font to open the Add Fonts window. Navigate to the folder that contains the downloaded fonts by using the Folders: section. When you get to the folder containing the new fonts, they will automatically appear in the List of fonts: box at the top. If you want all of the fonts listed, click on the "Select All" button to the right, then on OK. If you only want certain fonts installed, hold down the "Ctrl" button on your keyboard, then select the fonts that you want to install, then press the OK button.

The newly installed fonts will appear in the list and will now be available to all of your programs that allow you to change fonts. A word of warning: installing too many fonts can impact the overall performance of your system and slow it down. The more fonts you install, the longer it will take Windows and some other programs to load. The number of installed fonts will appear at the bottom left of the list of fonts. To remove a font, simply click on it and press the delete key on your keyboard. To view a font, simply double-click it. Windows has a core group of fonts that are necessary for the system to operate properly, so before deleting any fonts check the table of required fonts that Sue Chastain has so kindly posted here.

DOWNLOAD: GL-117 v1.1

• 2.3M
• Win9x/2k/XP
• FREE

home.t-online.de/home/Primetime./

{Flight simulator} Man, I remember my very first boss in my first real job out of college giving me Microsoft Flight Simulator as a going-away gift. I was in a one-year internship program and had finished my rotation. I loved the gift as I played games a lot back then (pre-kids). Unfortunately, I never did open the game and play it. You can use a joystick and mouse with this one as you take on your role as a member of the Eagle squad. The download is a tar.gz file and most zip programs can unzip it plus it requires OpenGL, GLU, and GLUT. It'll get you close to the real thing as you deal with the four forces and do the maneuvering around three axis of rotation. Go, Air Force! Paul is a former member of the US Air Force. [Meryl]

DOWNLOAD: AutoPatcher v4.2.29

• 202M
• Win2k/XP
• FREE

autopatcher.com

{Windows updater} Instead of going to Windows update and updating patches and updates, AutoPatcher does it in one shot. Before running this program, you'll need Service Pack 1 (SP1), which you can get from Microsoft. The program comes with 182 updates, upgrades, and bonus features (like the PowerToys). When starting it, you'll have the option to select which features to install. Yes, the WinXP version is 202 megs. I had trouble downloading even from the sites that were up. I tried again later and had no problems, so you may have to do the same. After rebooting, I've yet to find a problem with my system. It took a while to run, but my system isn't a little thing. The people behind the patcher release a new version on a monthly basis. [Meryl]

SYSTEM: SiteUptime

By Brandon Watts

http://www.siteuptime.com

There's no question that downtime is a Webmaster's kryptonite. Even minimal amounts of downtime can mean a loss of customers, which in turn means a loss of profit. A free service called SiteUptime will help to ease your worries about the condition of your site. SiteUptime is a Web site monitoring system that will alert you when your site is down. You can employ multiple monitoring servers from around the world to check the status of your Web site every 30 or 60 minutes. If more than one server detects a failure, an e-mail is sent to notify you of the problem. You are also contacted when your Web site becomes available again. Along with the HTTP protocol, SiteUptime will also monitor SMTP, POP3, and FTP servers. A very nice control panel which allows you to view the logs of the uptime/downtime of your Web site is present as well. SiteUptime also offers premium services that will check your site more frequently and even notify you via SMS.

ALERT: Serious XP Bug

By Don French

Well, at least I consider it serious. Being a programmer, I have the frequent need to search libraries of source code for references to some particular string. I tried doing a context search (searching for text WITHIN a file instead of the file name) on my new XP system and was horrified to find that I couldn't find the string I was looking for. I thought at first that my files were gone or corrupted. But as I came to find out, XP's search for data within files is seriously buggy. It does not look in files with certain extensions, including .c, and .h for example. This is a serious bug, in my mind.

There is a Microsoft page that tells you what to do, but guess what? It was impossible to follow their instructions. They say to install Windows XP Application Compatibility Update, October 25, 2001, but they don't give you a link to the specific upgrade. Instead, you have to go through the XP upgrade procedure and it does not show that upgrade as one of the possibilities. Arrgh!

Here is the Microsoft Product Support page that addresses the problem.

It is easy to try for yourself. Create a folder on your desktop and place two text files in it containing the word "test." Name one of them t1.txt another one t1.c. Now search that directory for files containing the word "test." It will show you t1.txt and NOT t1.c. Now, just for fun, add another file named test.txt and put any text in it EXCEPT the word "test." Search again for "test" inside the files. Guess what? It finds test.txt even though there is nothing inside to match "test."

So, file search is flawed in two ways. It fails to find text inside files with the "wrong" extensions, and it misreports finding the match if the file NAME has the matching text even if the file content does not.

And there appears to be no current way to fix the problem short of using some other file search program. I found the freeware program, Agent Ransack to be a fine way to do the job, but it is still not as convenient as launching a working search tool from the Explorer!

FEEDBACK: Spooking The Spoofs

In response to the last Gnewbie Gnook of the year in which Gnomie Michael told us how to check the legitimacy of a URL by typing:

javascript:alert("The real URL of this site is: " + location.protocol + "//" + location.hostname + "/");

into your address bar, Ron Goers writes:

I have been plagued with spoofs [of] PayPal and eBay lately. Many messages are obvious, but some are real good fakes. A few go as far as stealing the graphics off the real Web site, and set up theirs to look just like it. I was pleased to find the tip from Michael in today's issue of Lockergnome Windows Fanatics. I went one step farther... I used the snippet of code to create a link on my IE toolbar. Now, any time I visit a site I'm unsure of, I simply click the link, and it reveals the real identity of the site. Cool! That's what I like so much about LG... great people sharing great tips!