Tuesday, May 25, 2004

Breakfast: an orange and a banana. Sent out a new proposal for software requirements to the student computing subcommittee. Staff meeting. Updated entering students security page. Lunch by myself at desk: Greek lemon noodle soup, roast cow sandwich. Meeting with Cindy. Experimented with electronic Form A for James. Dinner: two homemade cow burritos with mushrooms, lettuce, cheddar. Installed Workrave on a 2nd computer and networked it with my first installation of Workrave. Watched 2 Simpsons episodes. Installed Firefox 0.8 on a 2nd computer and configured it. Played with Firefox's View Speed Report feature in the Web Developer toolbar. It's a feature I had only previously dreamed of. I thought I would have had to write my own code to do that, but no—Firefox makes it easy. Very enlightening, too, but I'm not sure it's completely accurate as I saw images excluded from reports for one of my own sites. Confirmed that Workrave networking is working properly. It was a little bit of a hurdle figuring out how to edit the host name—you just click in the empty space—there's no separate inputline or dialog, but it works. Installed a security update for ZoneAlarm on my computers. It seems that new with these updates ZoneAlarm is taking on Real's (former?) bad software practices (search Google: real cartalk) by tricking people into downloading and installing free software and then making it really hard for them to continue using it without paying for the Pro version. Bad Zone Labs! Bad! It's a great product aside from the new misleading dialogs. Essentially, it forces you into trying out the Pro version even if you never wanted the Pro version to begin with. In 2 weeks, we'll see what happens with the nag screens. I also see on their Web site that Zone Labs now offers anti-virus with some version of ZoneAlarm. I don't yet trust that Zone Labs can keep current with all the viruses going around. But I'll check in with them in a few years and see what's become of their reputation. Dishes.