Ed Bott very accurately explains what the Windows XP Prefetch folder is all about, and more importantly what it’s not. Most Power Users know that they should be occasionally purging their Prefetch folder under the Windows system folder. But what they “know” is wrong; Ed explains.

This is the greatest piece of writing relating to video games EVER.

Common Bits has a great introduction on how to start using BitTorrent. I’m going to start pointing people to this post when they ask me what this “BitTorrent thing is all about”.

Now this is brilliant. ClearContext, The Outlook Add-In that I’ve written about previously (here, here and here) has a new program. If you write about ClearContext in a public forum of some kind (i.e. a blog), you are eligible for a free license. To learn more about it, view the announcement here.

This is a great plan. As they state in the announcement, getting the word out is the biggest problem for a new product. Marketing is expensive, and these days word of mouth carries far more weight than advertising does. But there’s another component as well; to give away software licenses means to still offer support services to these “customers”, even though they didn’t have to pay for the product. This could be very expensive, unless the product you’re selling is rock-solid. It takes some serious guts to start giving away a product like this - especially an Outlook add-in - for free. Kudos to the ClearContext team. It really excites me that I can recommend an email overload solution, and know that if people are truly interested, there is a way they can get a license without having to pay. Very cool.

This nearly made me fall out of my chair. Not for any real reason; it’s not a bad thing at all. In fact, it’s probably quite good. I’m hoping the FeedDemon gets the full-synchronization features that NewsGator 2.0 is touted to have. I’ve been accepted as a NewsGator 2.0 beta user, so depending on the requirements (e.g. NDA) I’ll post my thoughts on it.

I’m a huge fan of Robert X. Cringely’s weekly I, Cringely column on PBS’s website. His main goal is always to make his readers think, and this week’s column is another winner in that regard.

Cringe talks about three occurrences this week that amount to an “inflection point” (a mark of serious change) in the world of high-tech. He touches on Yahoo and Apple, as well as mentioning the true importance of the Google Web Accelerator. Great reading.

Wow, this just has me completely flabbergasted. Apparently in B.C. blogs are considered a form of political advertising, whereas “bona-fide news sources” are not. I wonder what defines “bona-fide news source”? Another site I do, beerleaguehockey.com is included in Google’s News index - does Google get to decide what is legitimate news? If I write a political editorial there rather than here, is it okay by British Columbia standards? I doubt it, but it makes for an interesting thought experiment.

Darren Barefoot has the skinny.

This is a must-try utility from Google: the Google Web Accelerator. So far, I believe it is making a difference for me. I’ve been waiting for a useful web accelerator for years, and it’s really exciting that Google would weigh in with an offering here.

I’m sure you’re wondering how it works. This is from the FAQ:

Google Web Accelerator uses various strategies to make your web pages load faster, including:

* Sending your page requests through Google machines dedicated to handling Google Web Accelerator traffic.
* Storing copies of frequently looked at pages to make them quickly accessible.
* Downloading only the updates if a web page has changed slightly since you last viewed it.
* Prefetching certain pages onto your computer in advance.
* Managing your Internet connection to reduce delays.
* Compressing data before sending it to your computer.

The coolest part is that this is web acceleration intended for broadband users:

Dial-up users may not see much improvement, as Google Web Accelerator is currently optimized to speed up web page loading for broadband connections.

Note that there are some privacy issues with letting Google cache all of the web content that you are viewing, but you can tell it not to cache certain domains explicitly. I think the potential gain here far outweighs the privacy concerns, at least for me.

Give it a try, and let me know what you think!

I just came across a really funny post in a blog called Technolovie. Martin, the owner of Technolovie commented here on another post, so I figured I’d check out his blog. Here’s what he has to say about bottled water companies:

Did you ever notice when you open a water bottle how full it is compared to…let say a bottle of pop or beer. It’s like the water company is felling guilty of selling water, so they fill up their bottle as much as they can, that’s the least they can do. Just a thought.

That made me laugh. I think he’s on to something!

Well, I watched the Longhorn portion of the WinHEC keynote, and it left me cold. Frighteningly so, in fact. Chris Pirillo nails my feelings on it perfectly.

I sure hope that I’m wrong, but at this point Longhorn is not high on my list of things to spend money on when it becomes available. My gut feeling is that Longhorn is XP with a coat of lead paint; I expect it to run significantly slower than XP, regardless of all the talk of optimizations.

All of this from a guy that is getting very tired of Windows XP. I sure wish Microsoft would give us something to look forward to, because for anyone that is interested in Longhorn (and that should be any Windows user), there’s still nothing to get excited about. This state of affairs is starting to make me nervous.

Watch the Longhorn demo at WinHEC here.

Yesterday I spent the day doing yard work. The previous night I had a late-night hockey game and didn’t get much sleep, so by yesterday afternoon I was pretty beat. I took a shower, and managed to rub liquid soap into my hair rather than shampoo. As soon as I did it, I realized my mistake, and thought to myself that I ought to use extra shampoo to wash out the soap. I’m sure you can see where this is going; by the time I had lathered my head up with a combination of soap and copious amounts of shampoo, I had the biggest shampoo afro I’ve ever seen. To be honest, it was pretty cool. I may even do it on purpose again sometime.

Wow, I can sure be immature sometimes.

Okay, I’m doing it. I’ve known that there was something wrong with my MS Office 2003 installation for some time now; when I tried to install the first Service Pack, the installation failed, and from that point forward, I was unable to make any configuration changes to the setup of Office. The tip that I pointed to here requires you to turn off some options in Office’s setup, and since I can’t do that, it’s time I really fixed my installation.

I know, I know - how could I possibly leave it this long? I don’t really know. It’s mainly the prospect of having Outlook unavailable to me while uninstalling and reinstalling that has freaked me out. Addicted much?

Anyhow, Outlook slows down steadily, and relatively quickly these days over the course of about 2 hours to where it becomes unusable. I need to find the cause, and making sure I’m patched up to the latest Service Pack is the first step. Wish me luck!

And no, Chris, it’s not the plugins! (I hope.)