Tracking cookies are small text files that can tell advertisers and Web analytics firms what you (or your computer or your IP address) are doing online, even though they usually don’t record your name or other identifiable information. They are used all over the Web, but in most cases, their presence is only disclosed deep inside privacy policies.

If the majority of the sites you vist are customers of the same one or two advertising companies, this would be useful in that you should only be served ads that have relevance to you. If you find this to be the case, then by all means keep the tracking cookies, if you wish. However, if you do want to know how to get rid of these tracking cookies, read on.

First of all, here are links to pages where you can opt out of the cookies set by double-click (probably the most common source of tracking cookies):

• http://www.doubleclick.com/us/about_doubleclick/privacy/
• http://www.omniture.com/privacy/2o7

I’d prefer a totally opt-in system, but obviously, it’s much more useful for the ad industry to require the opposite.

If you want to clean out all tracking cookies from all your Web sites, here are links where you can download three programs that can clean out tracking cookies:

• http://www.lavasoftusa.com/products/ad-aware_se_personal.php
• http://www.spybot.info/en/download/index.html
• http://www.webroot.com/consumer/products/spysweeper/

You can also change the preferences or settings in your Web browser to control cookies. In some cases, you can choose to accept cookies from the primary site, but block them from third parties. In others, you can block cookies from specific sites or advertisers, or clear out all cookies.

Remember: Not all cookies are tracking cookies. For example, many Web sites place cookies on your computer to save information like your registration information or preferences for that site. They aren’t read by third parties (like advertisers) and can not tell the owning site about where you go online.

Narrowing opportunities for entrepreneurial foreigners to come work no matter what their skill level is a greater threat to Australia’s future than even a few thousand waterlogged asylum seekers off the western coast. Australians should know that better than anyone—their country was built by English convicts who showed up with rap sheets, not Ph.Ds.

Programs like Commercialisation Australia have a 2010 budget of $15m and a 2011 budget of $31.9m.

The total budget for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research in 2011 is $6.15b, (2002 budget was $3.04b).

http://www.innovation.gov.au/General/Corporate/Documents/Budget%202010-11/2010-11ScienceResearchandInnovationBudgetTables11May.pdf

People tend to think that having a great idea is enough, and they think the communication part will come naturally. We are in deep denial about the difficulty of getting a thought out of our own heads and into the heads of others. It’s just not true that, “If you think it, it will stick.”

And that brings us to the villain of our book: The Curse of Knowledge. Lots of research in economics and psychology shows that when we know something, it becomes hard for us to imagine not knowing it. As a result, we become lousy communicators. Think of a lawyer who can’t give you a straight, comprehensible answer to a legal question. His vast knowledge and experience renders him unable to fathom how little you know. So when he talks to you, he talks in abstractions that you can’t follow. And we’re all like the lawyer in our own domain of expertise.

Here’s the great cruelty of the Curse of Knowledge: The better we get at generating great ideas—new insights and novel solutions—in our field of expertise, the more unnatural it becomes for us to communicate those ideas clearly. That’s why knowledge is a curse. But notice we said “unnatural,” not “impossible.” Experts just need to devote a little time to applying the basic principles of stickiness.

JFK dodged the Curse [with “put a man on the moon in a decade”]. If he’d been a modern-day politician or CEO, he’d probably have said, “Our mission is to become the international leader in the space industry, using our capacity for technological innovation to build a bridge towards humanity’s future.” That might have set a moon walk back fifteen years.

I’ve downloaded the ‘Ducati’ and ‘Inspired by New Zealand’ Theme Packs as well.

But….. what if you’re running an older release (XP Home or Pro) of Windows, or a Linux system ? According to the MSDN Library entry on Creating and Installing Theme Files,

Windows 7 and later. A theme pack is a .cab file that contains not only the .theme file but also the files needed to implement the theme on another computer, such as sound files and images. Users can create theme packs through the Personalization Control Panel.

My first thought was “what have I got already on my machine that opens files of files ?”, so my first attempt was to try opening the .themepack file with WinZip. This failed, but then I tried WinRAR Archiver (available for both Windows and Linux), and voila !!! We have a bunch of new Windows 7 background images for our XP machine !!!

(click on the image to see a larger version)

If you have a Nokia phone, a good place to start learning more is at mobilecodes.nokia.com/scan.htm.

If you have a Nokia N82, N93, N93i, N95, N95 8GB, E66, E71, E90 or 6220 Classic (APAC variants) you will find the Nokia Barcode Reader pre-installed on your device, ready to scan mobile codes around you. For Nokia N78, 6210 Navigator, N96 and 6220 Classic (non-APAC variants) you can download the application via the following link: Nokia Barcode Reader. Download to a computer and transfer it to your mobile device.

The Kaywa QR code generator was one of the first available on the web, and is still very good. It can embed a URL, text, a phone number, or an addressed and ready-to-send SMS message into a QR code. Once you have the QR code, you can display it on a web site, your business cards, the side of a building, in fact anywhere !!

I’ve just been reminded (via Hack Your Day) of the simplest, safest, way to mount an .iso image. The program, supplied by Microsoft, is only 23K program, and comes with a 9K sys file driver.

The one downside is that this file is not actively supported by Microsoft, meaning they are not developing it, and probably won’t accept any support requests for it. However, I’ve used it extensively on Windows XP (SP 3) and Daniel Pataki of Hack Your Day is using it on 32bit Windows 7 and it works perfectly for him.

First of all, download winxpvirtualcdcontrolpanel from the Microsoft servers. It is a self extracting zip file, so just execute it, and tell it to place the files in a folder. I stored them in a folder in my Program Files folder, as if it were a normal application.

To install the program and it’s driver:
1. Execute VCdControlTool.exe
2. Click “Driver control”
3. If the driver is in the same directory as VCdControlTool.exe, it will be found automatically. Otherwise click the “Install Driver” button is available, navigate to the %systemroot%\system32\drivers folder, select VCdRom.sys, and Open it, then click “Start”.
4. Click OK.

5. Click “Add Drive” to add a drive to the drive list. Ensure that the drive added is not a local drive. If it is, continue to click “Add Drive” until an unused drive letter is available.
6. Select an unused drive letter from the drive list and click “Mount”.
7. Navigate to the image file, select it, and click “OK”. It works OK with mapped network drives, as well.

You may now use the drive letter as if it were a local CD-ROM device. You can close the application as soon as the image has been mounted, but if you want to unmount the image, just restart the exe and click unmount, or stop the service in the device manager. That’s it, task done, no memory footprint, not bloatware, nothing, just a mounted disk, wonderful!

While the initial installation may seem more technical, it is quicker than Daemon Tools or Power Iso or something like that. Furthermore, the light weight means there’s much less impact on your system.

Thanks, Microsoft!

At the moment there are three methods that I have used or know of.

goosync

I use a Nokia N95. It synchronises it’s calendar with Lotus Notes using the standard s/w that came with the phone. I use a product called goosync to synchronise the phone with my google calendar. They provide a free trial period, and various levels of service / payment after that.

For those using an iPhone the 3g is supported by goosync, but without one myself, I can’t help you getting the lotus notes calendar to the phone.

Device setup guides are at http://goosync.zendesk.com/forums/31074/entries.

awesync

awesync is (currently free, due to being in beta) software that synchronises your Lotus Notes and Google calendars. Some of the features include:
- Automatic scheduled synchronization at defined intervals of time, or manual on-demand synchronization;
- Full two-way synchronization, or one-way with defined data source, i.e. either Notes to Google, or Google to Notes;
- Comprehensive conflict handling – newest wins, or defined data source overwrite;
- Selection of one or more Google calendars for synchronization.

lntogooglecalsync

An entry on Intoiphone talks about an open source tool, hosted on sourceforge, called lntogooglecalsync that synchronises directly from your Lotus Notes Calendar to Google Calendar. The original web page is quite old, so I checked the Intogooglecalsync site and its still under development (for example, the original release didn’t support auto-sync, but it now does).

Summary

I find the combined method – Lotus to Nokia, and Nokia to Google to be sufficient for my needs. However, this is because 99.9% of my calendar originates from Lotus. The other pieces of software may be more relevant if you have updates flowing both ways.

Please feel free to add any other utilities (free or not) for synchronising Lotus with with Google calendar or any other Google products in the comments.

When Word Press introduced one click upgrade for pluggins, it was like Christmas in July. But this time maybe on the actual Christmas or perhaps slightly earlier with the release of Word Press 2.9, we will now be able to upgrade multiple pluggins with one click from our WordPress Admin Panel.

Optimize/Repair Database Functionality

WordPress has added a new feature to the core which allows you to repair and optimize your database. In order to activate this function, you will need to add this line in your wp-config.php

define(‘WP_ALLOW_REPAIR’, true);

Once you have added it, you will now be able to run the script which is located at this URL:

http://www.yoursite.com/wp-admin/maint/repair.php

WordPress Recycle Bin / Trash

One useful thing most desktop operating systems have is the trash bin or recycle bin. WordPress has now added similar functionality; instead of permanently deleting posts, pages, and the comments, you can now trash it and then later on empty the trash once you are completely done with what you were doing. By default WordPress will empty the trash every 30 days, but you can change the time limit by simply entering the following code in your wp-config.php:

define( ‘EMPTY_TRASH_DAYS’, 10 );

Image Editor

The image editor is something that a lot of users were waiting for and it is included in this release. This editor will let you make simple changes such as cropping, rotating, scaling, etc.

Ability to add Post Thumbnails

You have probably seen many sites displaying posts on the homepage with a post thumbnail. Or many sites having the post thumbnail next to each post in their index. Before version 2.9, it was done through custom fields. In this release, you can simply add the thumbnail when writing the post and displaying it in the template is even easier.

In order for you to have this functionality available in the admin panel, you must have a theme that supports this function. However, a quick way to add it now is to visit your theme’s functions.php and add the following code:

add_theme_support( ‘post-thumbnails’ );

Once you choose the thumbnail, you display it on the template using the following code:

<?php the_post_thumbnail( ‘thumbnail’ ); ?>

Extend User Contact Info

The WordPress user profile page is quite old and many new networks have gain popularity such as twitter and facebook. Prior to version 2.9, it was really hard to add a custom field in the contact area, but thanks to Joost De Valk for his contribution, now this feature is available.

Simply open your functions.php and add the following function:

<?php
function my_new_contactmethods( $contactmethods ) {
// Add Twitter
$contactmethods['twitter'] = ‘Twitter’;
//add Facebook
$contactmethods['facebook'] = ‘Facebook’;

return $contactmethods;
}
add_filter(‘user_contactmethods’,’my_new_contactmethods’,10,1);

?>

This will add extra fields in your user profile pages.

You can display these on author profile page by using the normal $curauth variable or the_author_meta variable.

New Excerpt Filter

Up till WordPress 2.8.6, if you added the_excerpt code in the loop, it would display content with a 55 word limit and once the word limit was reached, it would add [...]. With this new ability, You can now specify a function and control both excerpt word count, and the more text. Implement this by opening your theme’s function.php file and add the following code:

// Changing excerpt length

function new_excerpt_length($length) {
return 60;
}
add_filter(‘excerpt_length’, ‘new_excerpt_length’);

// Changing excerpt more
function new_excerpt_more($more) {
return ‘…’;
}
add_filter(‘excerpt_more’, ‘new_excerpt_more’);

All thanks goes to Ramiy for suggesting this feature.

oEmbed making Embedding Easier

Thanks to ViperBond007 that this feature was added to the core of WordPress 2.9. It is a specification that allows media providers like Flickr, YouTube and others to provide data for consumer applications like WordPress about media.

There are many many more features that are being included in this version. To see a full list check out version 2.9 page in the codex.