NevOn 2.0 Experimental

While I'm paying most attention to my new WordPress blog, I mustn't neglect this MT one.

Still in housekeeping mode today, and spending too much time this morning on sorting out an irritating problem on my desktop system with Norton Internet Security (NIS). I upgraded to the 2006 version a few weeks ago and have had problems with it since then.

These are the types of problem that are difficult to pinpoint. But they include things like whenever I shut down the PC, I get an error with the ccapp.exe part of NIS where it doesn't close on a timely basis. Or the Norton firewall keeps popping up a dialog re the MS print spooler accessing the net even though I've made changes to the permissions for that app.

irritating. The PC's currently running a disk test as part of the diagnostics I'm doing. I could do without this at the moment. Maybe I should switch back to Zone Alarm. That's running on the laptop on which I'm writing this post. Never had problems with Zone Alarm.

And while on the subject of weird things, why can I still not set multiple categories when creating a post in MT 3.2? In the post edit window, I can choose the primary category. Yet in the drop-down list to assign multiple categories, I can select them but they don't stick.

But enough ranting for the moment and back to the PC. What an end-of-year commentary to post!

Many more good things to talk about re software in particular. Later.

Posted by Neville at 11:13 AM | Permalink

I'm writing this post with Flock, the new browser that includes an extremely easy-to-use blog editor.

The software is not yet even beta - it's sort of in-between alpha and beta - so you need to be prepared for some flakiness. Nothing so far gives any indication that this tool is less than polished and complete. But I've been using it for less than 30 minutes ;)

The blog editing functionality is very good. Configuring it to access this blog was very easy. Writing a draft post with the WYSIWIG editor and then publishing it was equally easy. The editor even includes a spell checker. Well, maybe that's planned as clicking the spell button produced no action.

So, impressive. More later as I play with this.

Posted by Neville at 02:30 PM | Permalink

First post to this MT 3.2 blog using the ecto for Windows offline editor, version 1.7.8.

Adding this MT blog to ecto as a new profile was very simple and the profile wizard worked just fine. So I'm pleased that the setup was so straightforward.

If this post works, then I have my preferred option up and running of writing posts offline and then publishing.

The only little glitch I can see is with ecto - in the create new post window, it doesn't offer a line break option in the formatting drop-down list, just 'none.' So I have to manually add the paragraph tags to get paragraph breaks.

I had exactly the same behaviour when I installed this version to use with my TypePad blogs. But, somehow, the line break option eventually appeared. So maybe this will eventually happen here as well.

Last month, I tried out the first public beta of the forthcoming new version 1.6 of FeedDemon, the RSS aggregator for Windows.

In my first impressions post, I commented mostly on the glitches I noticed, which weren't a big surprise given that it was the first beta.

Since then, beta 2 has come and gone and now beta 3 is available, which I've installed and am now using (and, today, installed beta 3a released yesterday). And I do like it - I've not experienced a single fault/problem/bug/crash so far.

I've been interacting with it a lot, doing all the things I usually do with the current release version 1.5 - things like toggling news items, copying them to news bins, blogging items, etc - as well as changing styles and generally giving the tyres a good kicking.

So if all this in one day is any indicator, it's looking pretty good. Many fixes, improvements and new things since beta 1 as you'd expect

A big improvement for me - the newspaper display issue that beta 1 exhibited (where the newspaper would not display news items in the same date order as the news items list, no matter what you did) has been fixed. Great!

Also it seems that one issue I had in beta 1 with synchronizing FD and NewsGator Online has been fixed. That issue was that if I deleted a channel in FD, it would get recreated when FD sync'd with NGOL. That behaviour doesn't seem to happen now - I deleted three channels yesterday; on sync this morning, FD did not retrieve those from NGOL (I haven't yet checked my NGOL to see if those channels are still there: I'd expect them to be deleted from NGOL as well).

One other thing - I have Internet Explorer 7 beta 1 for Win XP installed, which FD uses as its browser. Works absolutely fine, no issues with that. The only thing I've noticed is if I click on a link in a news item in the newspaper that takes me to the blog or site concerned, the status bar has an IE message saying that the phishing filter couldn't be loaded. But IE7 is a beta (as well!) so maybe it's more to do with that than with FD b3a.

Anyway, I think beta 3a is terrific, so looking forward to the next iteration!

Posted by Neville at 01:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

For the past few weeks, I've been trying out the first beta version of Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP SP2, and I have to say that while its functionality is pretty good, I'm a bit underwhelmed by it.

Maybe my expectation was wrong but I was expecting to see something a little more visually exciting than it currently looks. All the talk about tabbed browsing being implemented and I was thinking that I'd see something that looks like Firefox, perhaps, even Maxthon, the IE-based browser I used for some years (when it was known as MyIE) before switching to Firefox last year.

No, it's all a bit bland-looking really.

That aside, it's pretty good in its functionality. Perhaps that's the key to how it might survive in a crowded browser market - it just works. And considering it's only a beta, I am impressed that I have had no crashes or failures so far.

Two new features that I like:

1. Integrated RSS bookmarking with a little orange button simply called 'Feeds.' It works nicely in adding RSS to your Favorites, although to make it work you need to make a change in the options settings (it would be smarter to make this behaviour the default). See this post on the IE7 developer blog for detail on IE7 and RSS. A good move to call it 'Feeds' - you and I know it's RSS but who really cares what it's called when all you want to do is grab the content? 'Feeds' is a much better name and will simplify all the techie-talk surrounding new media tools like RSS and thus aid its wider take up.

2. Phishing protection that alerts you if you're about to land on a potentially fraudulent web site. (Here's an explanation of phishing.) The IE7 documentation about the phishing filter and how it works is very good, clear and simply written so that just about anybody will understand what phishing is and why protection is a good idea.

So, initial impressions from using IE7 on and off over the past few weeks. It's not my default browser and not because it's a beta. I will stick with Firefox and probably consider at IE7 again once it's actually released, although using the betas will obviously influence my thinking. Meanwhile, I'll continue playing with it.

Posted by Neville at 10:55 PM | Permalink

In parallel with my Movable Type experiment, I started a WordPress blog last week.

I was pretty much decided on MT yet friends kept saying I shouldn't dismiss WordPress. So I thought, ok, let's take a look at it. The blog is running WP version 1.5.2.

I have to say I'm pretty impressed with it. Far easier to install and set up than MT. Changing the look-and-feel is also very easy, and seems much more so than with MT.

Then on Thursday, Six Apart released version 3.2 of Movable Type. That looks impressive and I will upgrade my MT 3.17 blog to it.

So nothing decided yet.

Posted by Neville at 10:48 PM | Permalink

Last night, I was reviewing the various documentation for the Windows Vista beta 1 programme - release notes, readme, and setup guide. Although I am a participant in this testing programme, I haven't yet installed the beta nor downloaded it from the beta site. It's a 2.4 gig download (yes, gigs not megs) and I need to find a good chunk of dedicated time to actually get it.

But I've not yet decided whether to install and test this first beta. Mainly, I'm not sure I can dedicate my test PC for this right now because I'll need to do one of two things:

1. either install Windows Vista as the sole OS on that machine; or
2. partition the hard drive and install it in one of the partitions and so have the machine as a dual-boot machine.

Unlike Windows XP Service Pack 2 which I tested prior to its release last year, the Windows Vista beta cannot be installed as an upgrade to XP - you have to install it fresh, so to speak, what the setup guide calls a 'custom' installation (meaning a clean installation).

And, my test PC is the one on which I've just set up my Movable Type learning experiment! I really don't want to have to start over with all that installation again.

Last week, I ordered a new desktop PC from Dell - a Dimension XPS Gen 5 - on which I was expecting delivery sometime early next week. But, the order status on Dell's website now shows estimated delivery as the first week in September (due, I gather, to delays with the flat-panel monitor which are in big demand in Europe). So I won't have all the hardware I need until then.

But maybe this is a good thing. By the time September comes around, there will be lots of learning reported about Windows Vista beta 1 which will be helpful to every tester. Meanwhile, Paul Thurrott has an excellent series of reviews of beta 1.

One beta I do intend to test straightaway is the Internet Explorer 7 beta 1 standalone version for Windows XP SP2 (it also comes as part of the Vista beta). I'm curious in particular to see how the RSS integration works and see how the tabs look.

Posted by Neville at 07:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Ok! Finally up and running with Movable Type!

Not getting MT 3.17 to run until now was definitely a MySQL configuration issue - but not wholly. I've solved the overall issue that prevented MT running at all, but I don't really know what the heart of the problem actually was. And the solution is a workaround and not the right long term solution.

The error I kept getting every time I ran the mt-load.cgi script was puzzling. But that was only one part of the problem. The other part concerned the MySQL Administrator and saving user settings in User Administration. What happened was that no matter what I did, I couldn't save any settings: every time I tried, I got this error:

Error while storing the user information. The user might have been deleted. Please refresh the user list.

A helpful pointer in a post in the Movable Type Community Forum took me to a bug report at MySQL with many users commenting on this error message. A bit of digging from there took me to a discussion thread in the MySQL Forums, where I tried the offered solution - uninstall the version of MySQL Administrator I had (1.1.0-rc) and download and install an earlier version (1.0.21).

So I did that - and saving user settings now works. So I was able to assign the MT schema privileges to the user I'd set up, and actually save those settings.

Yet running mt-load.cgi again still produced the same error message as before:

Bad ObjectDriver config: Connection error: Access denied for user
'mt_user'@'localhost (using password: YES)

Then I tried something else - I edited the mt.cfg file to show the user as 'root.' And this time, running mt-load.cgi produced a successful result, showing that system initialization is now complete. Next, running mt.cgi was successful and I was able to log in to my new MT installation on a local PC. Fantastic!

So there's still something with 'mt-user' where it's not configured correctly somewhere. I will look into that, but at least I can now get moving with Movable Type.

Posted by Neville at 06:21 PM | Permalink

I really would love to get stuck into trying out Movable Type for myself if I could get it to run.

No progress since I successfully installed it a few days ago on a local Windows PC running as a server. As far as I can tell, what's preventing me running MT isn't MT, it's MySQL.

Running the mt-check.cgi script produces a successful result - it tells me that MT is properly installed and set up and ready to go.

When I run the mt-load.cgi script, though, it stops very early in its execution with this error message:

Bad ObjectDriver config: Connection error: Access denied for user 'mt_user'@'localhost' (using password: YES)

The only difference from the error I first had is that, this time, the error includes a complete user name as I have uninstalled and reinstalled MySQL a couple of times.

I posted a comment about the error in the Movable Type Community Forum. Received a helpful response that was useful in initial troubleshooting, plus a link to a thread on the MySQL bugs section which indicates that there is a bug in the version of MySQL (4.1.13) that I have installed. Based on the final comment in the thread, I downloaded and installed the v5 beta.

That didn't work, unfortunately. I'm reasonably sure there must have been a step I missed somewhere before installing the beta as it resulted in major system instability (100% CPU use, sluggish performance, lack of responsiveness in the MySQL Administrator). So I uninstalled every MySQL instance, restarted the PC a couple of times during that process and re-installed 4.1.13 again.

Still this error when mt-load.cgi runs.

I'm actually stumped now. I need to retrace all steps again to make sure that there's not something I missed somwehere or did incorrectly at any stage in the overall installation, including checking into IIS. Trouble is, that's a left-brain approach whereas I'm definitely a right-brain kind of person ;)

So back to square one with no imminent solution. There has to be one - I just haven't found it yet.

[EDIT 31/7/05] Ok, reading the comprehensive MySQL Reference Manual, section 5.6.8 Causes of Access Denied Errors, has this explanation:

If you specify a hostname when trying to connect, but get an error message where the hostname is not shown or is an IP number, it means that the MySQL server got an error when trying to resolve the IP number of the client host to a name:

shell> mysqladmin -u root -pxxxx -h some-hostname ver
Access denied for user 'root'@'' (using password: YES)

This indicates a DNS problem. To fix it, execute mysqladmin flush-hosts to reset the internal DNS hostname cache.

I did the flush-hosts command and got this error:

Access denied for user 'ODBC'@' localhost' (using password: NO)

A bit more investigating needed. Getting closer, I think.

Posted by Neville at 04:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I'm currently trying out the first public beta of the forthcoming version 1.6 of FeedDemon, the RSS aggregator for Windows.

This is the first development following NewsGator's acquisition of Bradsoft, the company who makes FeedDemon.

As a first beta, it's not bad. It does suffer from some obvious glitches, the most noticeable of which to me is how the program doesn't display individual news feeds in the correct sequence no matter what setting you define. That looks to me to be the same as happened with betas for version 1.5 earlier this year. Not a major issue I don't think, just a bit irritating, and hopefully will be addressed in the next beta.

There's also some issues with feed synchronization with NewsGator Online, although I'm still trying to figure out NewsGator Online. But that is a great feature, the ability to sync your FeedDemon feeds with a web-based service so you can get at your info from any PC with a net connection.

As I encounter odd things or have questions, I'm posting my thoughts, etc, in the new NewsGator FeedDemon beta forum.

One other thing I'm playing with is NewsGator's feature to display headlines in your blog from one or more of the RSS feeds you subscribe to. In TypePad, you do this by creating a typelist. So I've done one which captures the ten most recent posts from Headlines from PR Weblogs and displays excerpts. Pretty cool. You can see it in the right column on my main blog.

More thoughts later as I continue.

Posted by Neville at 05:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Does Skype have a serious competitor? According to the Gizmo Project, it does:

What distinguishes Gizmo Project from the other services out there, and why is Gizmo Project a better choice?

Skype: Like Gizmo Project, Skype has excellent sound quality, and is able to connect calls even in difficult home networks. Unfortunately, its technology is completely proprietary and you cannot contact their members without installing skype on your own computer.

That doesn't sound like a compelling differentiator to me. I've been using Skype for almost a year now and I have yet to find any other VoIP service that comes close to it in terms of overall tech reliability and scale of its user network.

But you have to start somewhere and competition is good. From a user point of view, Gizmo has many similarities to Skype: a peer-to-peer system, free calls to other Gizmo users, ability to buy credit to call normal phones, get a phone number so you can receive calls, get voicemail, etc. See the full story at Gizmo.

So I'll take Gizmo for a spin and see how it is. I will keep Skype as a) I'm happy with it overall, and b) I have a lot invested in it now (two SkypeIn numbers, for instance). Any alternative would have to be so compelling from many different points of view - wholly-reliable service and price being just two - that switching would be a no brainer.

Posted by Neville at 01:10 PM | Permalink

Since last September, I've been using ecto for Windows as the tool for creating content for my blogs. Ecto is an offline editing and publishing application - you create all your blog posts offline, on your PC, and then publish them to your blog at your convenience. It supports a wide range of blogging platforms including TypePad, the one I use. It was originally developed for the Mac platform.

During all of this year, I've been using version 1.0.8.4 in spite of a number of upgrades that the developers have released. The big one was 1.5/1.6 back in March which fixed bugs, added some new functionality and changed the look and feel of the application. I didn't like those versions, mostly from the look and feel point of view (and mainly to do with all the separate windows everywhere), so I've stuck with 1.0.8.4.

Today, I'm writing this post with the latest version 1.7.1, released early last month. It's a bugfix update from version 1.7 released at the end of May which introduced a significant number of improvements.

It could be that I will permanently leave 1.0.8.4 behind as, on my first looks, version 1.7.1 is very good indeed. I very much like the appearance and the way in which I can interact with the app. The only thing right now that didn't seem to work from install was when I created my profile to log in to my TypePad account - on retrieving posts from my blogs, it displays all the titles but not the actual post content. Yet 1.0.8.4 does do that.

I also use BlogJet, switching between the two now and again. BlogJet is wholly WYSIWYG but I prefer ecto's partial code view with a preview window that you use to see how your post will look when posted.

I think many people would prefer BlogJet for its simplicity and ease of use. Ecto, though, is my preferred application.

Let's see how it goes with 1.7.1.

Posted by Neville at 12:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A couple of weeks ago, I bought a Packard Bell AudioDream digital MP3 music player/recorder.

While Packard Bell is not a brand I have a load of confidence in, to be frank (a view based on very poor experiences some years ago with a desktop PC), they have a potential winner with this little gadget.

The impressive spec includes 1Gb of flash memory, rechargeable lithium-ion battery, colour LCD display, plays WMA and MP3 files, supports ID3 tags, has voice recording capability in WAV file format and a line-in socket for a microphone. The whole thing is about a third smaller in size than a credit card (thicker, of course: it's about a quarter-inch thick) and weighs just 30 grams.

What I wanted such a device for was to record conversations for the podcasts Shel and I do in For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report. There are a few conferences coming up during the next few months that I'll be presenting at or otherwise participating in, with opportunities for conversations with some interesting people.

Today, I bought an external microphone, and a very neat one at that. It's an Eagle G157B clip-on (or desktop standing) stereo mike that comes with a powered sound amplifier (which is actually bigger than the AudioDream), that uses one AA battery, to help capture the best-quality sound. I think it does that - check the short test recording I made (MP3, 03:33, 1.5Mb). Note: this isn't a podcast, just an MP3 file. It would be a podcast if it were available via RSS, but it's not.

Now, voice recording on the AudioDream is in WAV format only, so how did I get an MP3 file? Quite easy, actually, using a method that's simple and straightforward.

Once I'd done the test recording, I connected the AudioDream to the PC via the supplied USB cable to copy the WAV file to the PC. Then I opened that file in Audacity, the free cross-platform sound editor (I have the Windows version) which enables me to save the WAV file in MP3 format.

I could also have manipulated the WAV file if I'd wanted to. Perhaps enhance the quality, or strip out any extraneous noise, add a fade, etc. But for this test, I just saved it as an MP3.

While this certainly isn't a studio-quality or professional sound recording, I think this set up will do just fine for recording conversations for our podcasts.

Incidentally, the AudioDream makes an excellent backup device for files. It's one-gig capacity is pretty huge, really. It's by no means the simplest device to use for managing music files - no simple synchronization here with iTunes, for example, which automatically updates a device as it does with an iPod.

No, with the AudioDream, you get the device and a USB cable (plus headphones, carry case, etc). When you connect it to your PC, Windows see it straightaway as an external drive. So you'd access it to copy and delete files just as you would with any drive. Getting music on to it means manually copying the music files.

I'll likely be using it more for file storage. I don't need this to play music as I have my iPod Mini!

Posted by Neville at 04:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Last week, Mozilla released Firefox version 1.0.2 which includes some security fixes.

While Firefox is a great browser, and continues to be the one I use above any other, where the developers fall down with Firefox is with what happens when you install it.

If you're using Firefox version 1.0 or 1.0.1, you'll see a little red icon at the top right of your browser. Clicking on this displays a window that tells you that critical updates are available. This is a great feature in any software and I wish more developers would include something simple like this.

So with Firefox, you'd tell it to go and get an update which it does and installs it. The trouble is, if the update is a program update, what this doesn't include is the advice that's buried in the release notes on the Firefox website not to install an updated version on top of a current installation:

Prior to installing Firefox 1.0.2, please ensure that the directory you've chosen to install into is clean and doesn't contain any previous Firefox installations.

Great to learn this after you've already installed the update on top of your existing installation!

A few days ago, I installed version 1.0.2 on my IBM ThinkPad T30, a machine that's not my day-to-day PC, by clicking on the update icon within Firefox. In looking in Add/Remove Programs in Windows a few days after the installation, I noticed the multiple installations of different versions you can see in this little snapshot image.

So I have three Firefox installations on this PC. Apart from the disk space each one takes up, I wondered whether these multiple installations might be the reason why Firefox 1.0.2 was behaving a little oddly and crashing a little too frequently.

So what I did was uninstall version 1.0.2 using Add/Remove Programs. This removed remnants of the two other versions and, after the uninstall, no Firefox information showed in that listing. During the uninstall, I did not remove all the Firefox directories thus preserving my Firefox configuration info. I then downloaded the 1.0.2. setup file from the Firefox website and ran then. Now I have an installation of just version 1.0.2 complete with all my settings. And no more crashes.

The auto-updating feature of Firefox is great, but what I'd like to see is this:

1. Auto-update tells you that you either a) need to uninstall the previous version before updating, or b) install the updated version into a different directory.
2. If you choose to uninstall, the updating feature will do it for you and then install the update.

It does something sort of similar with themes and extensions that a particular Firefox version doesn't support - it disables those themes and extensions so you can go and see if updated ones are available. At the very least, the Firefox updater should warn you re an existing installation before you install an update.

Simple, surely?

Posted by Neville at 04:21 PM | Permalink

AudioShell is a Windows Explorer shell extension plug-in which allow you to view and edit music files tags directly in Explorer.

The extension supports all file and tag standards supported by Tag&Rename. AudioShell adds tag editor and viewer tabs to a music file's properties. You can edit tags file by file or by groups.

Supported files and tags formats: mp3 (all ID3v2 tag versions), wma, asf and wmv, Apple iTunes aac (m4a and m4p) and mp4 files, ogg, flac (vorbis comment tags), mpc , mp+, monkey's audio, wav pack, optim frog ( APE and APEv2 tags). The app include full Unicode support.

This looks very useful for MP3s used for podcasts, especially those you download that don't have any or sufficient tag information in the file properties that work with playlist identification in programs like iTunes - helpful for setting up smart playlists, for instance, which you want to auto-sync to your iPod.

Published by Softpointer. Still a beta, but worth a try. Requires Windows 2000 or later. Freeware. Download AudioShell 1 beta 1.

(Hat tip: Home Computer magazine)

Posted by Neville at 05:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Engadget reports:

A new night-vision system developed for the Dutch military may signal the end of those grainy green and grey images we’ve all come to know. The new system, created by the TNO research lab, works by drawing colors from similar scenes in the system’s memory then mapping them onto the night-vision images (seen in the three-step process above),resulting in a more natural looking image.

The researchers say the system will improve soldiers' reaction times and reduce fatigue that comes from staring at traditional night-vision images. Military for now, but we’re sure we’ll see plenty of other uses for the system sooner or later.

Posted by Neville at 04:54 PM | Permalink

One of my favourite utility programs for Windows, Total Commander, released version 6.51 a couple of days ago. Developed by Christian Ghisler in Switzerland, this neat utlity does for Windows what Norton Commander did for MS-DOS, and then some.

There are lots of Norton Commander-like utilities around - see this list, for instance - but for me, Total Commander does the file management job better than most as well as provide additional functions like FTP file transfer, integrated file viewer and much more. I've been using registered versions since version 1.2 about nine years ago. Shareware, free to try and 40 Swiss francs (€28) to buy. See this screenshot (which actually doesn't do the program full justice at all).

Back in the good old MS-DOS days, Norton Commander was one utility program that was absolutely indispensible. I stayed with version 2 for years during the 80s. Here's a great screenshot so you can see what it looks like (it says it's v5.5 but it looks the same as v2).

What this great program did was enable you to manage your file system (at a time when there was no real Windows, just a shell on top of DOS) - you had a command prompt (basically, what you see now when you type 'cmd' in Start > Run in Windows) and had to type instructions at the command line to run programs (one at a time), create directories, copy/delete files, see even hidden files, etc.

Thinking about MS-DOS utlitiies, another one I used in the early 90s was Lotus Magellan 2. What a great program! I still have the original disks and manuals. And I wonder what became of 1-Dir? Made by Borland, I think. I used that at times during the 80s.

But nothing beat the Commander for its simplicity and ease of use.

Posted by Neville at 06:46 PM | Permalink

One problem I've consistently had with Skype in recent months is that, every time I load it up, I get an alert from Norton Antivirus 2005 to tell me that its worm protection feature has detected a remote system trying to access Skype:

No matter what I do, this alert happened every time I ran Skype. I just couldn't figure out why. Skype is included in Norton's list of permitted application yet Norton kept giving me these alerts.

The solution is actually very simple:

1. Close Skype if it's running
2. Open Norton Antivirus options and select: Internet Worm Protection > Program Control
3. In the resulting dialog, select Skype (which will be listed) and click on Remove and then click OK
4. Close Norton and run Skype
5. You'll get the warning, as per the dialog shown above
6. Select Permit and click OK
7. Exit Skype and run it again - you won't get the alert

Is this a Skype or a Norton issue? Or both? I don't know. This fix works - but you will need to repeat it each time when you install a new version of Skype.

Thanks to rocketman in the Skype Support Forum for this extremely helpful solution.

Posted by Neville at 07:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Google released version 2 of its Picasa photo manager program today. I tried version 1 out when I had a blog on BlogSpot as I was keen to see how it integrated with Picasa's Hello, the service for posting photos to your blog. It worked well.

With TypePad, you don't need such third-party services, so I haven't used Picasa for over 4 months now. But version 2 looks good with some neat new and improved features, so it might be worth looking at it again.

There's a good concise overview on The Office Weblog.

Posted by Neville at 07:28 PM | Permalink