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

In the words of Jean Luc- Picard,

“We’ve made too many compromises already, too many retreats. They invade our space and we fall back. They assimilate entire worlds and we fall back. Not again. The line must be drawn here! This far, no farther!”

Picard goes on to say that he will make the Borg pay, but that is not what I want. Rather, I want to stand and defend free speech. No religion (Islam included) is above question, criticism, critique, or examination. People the world over need to be reminded that the freedom of speech most certainly includes the freedom to offend.

However, the position of the Muslim community, even moderates, seems to be that Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn’t, we will kill you. In the words of Sam Harris at the Huffington Post (Losing Our Spines to Save Our Necks)

Muslims appear to be far more concerned about perceived slights to their religion than about the atrocities committed daily in its name. Our accommodation of this psychopathic skewing of priorities has, more and more, taken the form of craven and blinkered acquiescence. 

….

Our capitulations in the face of these threats have had what is often called “a chilling effect” on our exercise of free speech. 

To paraphrase another writer (Mark Goldblatt’s post titled The Poet Versus the Prophet), we (and our Representatives in Government and Media) have failed. We are not walking the walk of our forebears, that gave us the freedoms we take for granted. We have failed to put ourselves on the line in order to defend the principles of free thought and free expression. Not just Christian principles, but the ideas of freedom of expression and belief, of tolerance — the very principles that are at the heart of the difference between the Judeo-Christian West and Islam.

It does have the downside that files have to meet a particular Sky Drive criteria that they can not be larger than 50MB. To get around this, have a look at SDExplorer tool (windows XP and later), which integrates Microsoft SkyDrive into Windows.

The two biggest differences between the free version and the Pro version (apart from the price) are:
* the Pro version lets you open directly files from the SDExplorer drive
* the Pro version does away with the SKyDrive limitation of 50MB per file.

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)

Google’s url shortener at goo.gl can also generate QR codes (See my previous post on how to use the QR Scanner included on Nokia Phones for more information) just by appending “.qr” after the goo.gl url.

So the url http://goo.gl/1hwd does a redirect to http://www.martin-english.com/whatsup/ just as it always did…

But now the url http://goo.gl/727X.qr will generate a QR code that also goes to http://www.martin-english.com/whatsup/. Check the source of the image below.

<image src="http://goo.gl/1hwd.qr" >

FWIW, I’ve also included a bookmarklet for using goo.gl. Drag the link to your toolbar or bookmark list, then when you want to goo.gl a page, just select the bookmarklet from your toolbar or bookmark list
Goo.gl this page

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!