bruceb news

Lawyers: there’s a new version of Westlaw Citelink, a free utility that works with Word and WordPerfect to check case citations, construct a Table of Authorities, and the like. If you’ve got Office XP, the new version of Citelink also turns on “smart tags” for your citations, giving you right-click access to the wealth of West resources related to your cases.

The current selection of kids’ software is pretty uninspiring. The interest in getting computers and Internet connections into classrooms arose from the belief that there would be rich content that would engage kids and trigger their creativity and desire to learn. For the most part, I don’t see it happening. And since the entire computer game industry is in the doldrums, it shouldn’t be surprising that kids’ games are mostly uninspired retreads as well.

Lego Software has released several games that are just magnificent, though. Not educational, but great fun. The best of the bunch is LEGO Racers, which can be picked up at Costco right now for $7.99, or ordered from Amazon for $9.99. […] continued

I’m a fan of Media Jukebox for playing, recording, and organizing .mp3 files. Each of the main players – Windows Media Player, RealJukebox, and MusicMatch Jukebox – have annoying quirks or shortcomings that drove me to distraction. Media Jukebox does a lot of things with a minimum of fuss and a great deal of control. It costs $29.98, similar to the others, and you can sample it for free for thirty days. Over the last year or two I’ve learned about .mp3s, the other file formats, IDv2 tags, the right way to organize thousands of music files, and a lot of other things, and Media Jukebox has never let me down. […] continued

Easy CD Creator is the software I use for burning CDs. It’s got a reasonably simple interface and it does almost everything most people want to do with their burners. (Out at the fringe, with other software, it’s possible to overburn CDs, copy discs that are copy-protected, and have more fine-grained control over the process, but most people never get to that point.)

As I understood it, Microsoft licensed some of the underlying technology from Adaptec and included it in Windows 2000. You’d think it would be compatible, right? Nope. If you installed the retail version of the same software – the first release of version 4 – there was a good chance that your Windows 2000 system would crash so severely you’d have to reformat the system to get it back. […] continued

Two years ago America Online decided to block outside access to its instant messaging system, in a heavyhanded tactic that made their boo-hoo complaints about Microsoft look very hollow.

It may have backfired. A new study shows Microsoft Messenger has taken the lead in worldwide and US usage. And MS Messenger is even more deeply embedded in upcoming Microsoft releases of operating systems and net services.

The article has a good description of Microsoft’s tactics, by the way, which strike me as eminently fair: “Target the software that potentially threatens the Windows franchise, create your own version, tie it closely to Windows, push your product as a standard, solicit developers and vendors to build and sell it, and then watch market share tilt in your favor.”

Norton Antivirus offers a feature called “e-mail protection” that I routinely turn off. It’s a service that scans e-mail for viruses as messages come into your system – an appealing idea, but it’s implemented badly. It changes the settings for your POP3 server and frequently prevents e-mail from being retrieved at all. It’s not documented well – an explanatory message should come up when it’s installed. If you turn it off, Norton Antivirus will still scan all files when you open them from an e-mail message, so you don’t lose very much protection. Here’s an article by somebody else who noticed the same problem. […] continued

Symantec has created a great resource for PCAnywhere users. There’s an extensive set of tutorials on program features and troubleshooting tips. Each one can be viewed with Shockwave animation, or with normal graphics, or with plain text. Click here for PCAnywhere tutorials.