Ok, now I’m sure that some people aren’t going to be real happy about me saying this. But I have suffered in silence for long enough, and I think it’s time I get this off my chest.

iTunes is a bloated, sluggish, buggy, and ugly piece of programming. First off, Paul Thurrott gave the best description of iTunes that I’ve heard to date. It’s a spread sheet with music in it.

I have to apologize to all of the people who love Apple’s award winning design skills, but iTunes is ugly. I was surprised to download Safari recently, and realize that it looks exactly like iTunes. Does it look like this on MAC OS? What’s up with that?

The picture above illustrates why I was inspired to write this post. Why in the world does iTunes need 60 % of my CPU? I’m playing a itty bitty video, 320 x 240, about 6 minutes long.

I’m not running a Pentium II 450 Mghz, I have a 4Ghz P4. It shouldn’t need that much CPU time even if I was encoding the video.

I didn’t mention yet that iTunes is using about 100M of memory. Do you think that’s reasonable?

The picture to the left is just one example of the scrambled display that I get from time to time. I don’t mind that so much as I do the fact that iTunes is so terribly slow, especially over remote desktop.

Even when logged in locally, it is still painfully slow to resize windows.

Redeeming Qualities

OK, there are two reasons why I use iTunes. One, it is the only application that works with my iPod. I love my iPod, which has an excellent design.

If Apple wants to use their near monopoly over the MP3 player industry to push a sub standard music player and their own music store, I guess I can’t do anything about it.

The second reason is that iTunes supports podcasts. I wish Media player did this as well. I’ve heard that the Zune supports them now, but I haven’t verified that, and I don’t own a Zune anyway.

For now I’m stuck with the sluggish, bloated iTunes, and I don’t have much choice about it. I’ve heard that there are some Open Source alternatives out there. I should check them out. I’m not concerned with losing my music, since I haven’t bought one single song from the iTunes store.

Feel free to chime in if you have any experience with another iPod friendly app.

Posted in Apple, Applications, iPod, iTunes 6 Comments »

The eDoxs service is an excellent way for companies to deal with SPAM. Once you sign up, you replace your domain mail server (MX) records with eDoxs servers, and they accept or deny the e-mail on your server’s behalf. Any valid mail gets forwarded on to your mail server.

eDoxs is the service that my company uses. This is not a pay for post, I was just reminded recently how much I love their service, and I wanted to post about it.

I’ll explain what reminded me a little later in this post. First, let me explain a little bit more about this service.

The SPAM and Nothing but the SPAM

There are a whole lot of anti-spam services and software out there, but eDoxs’ big selling point, for me at least, was that eDoxs has a 0% false positive for their SPAM scanning. In other words, not a single legitimate email is going to be labeled as spam.

I’ve had to deal with other companies blocking email from my company for really dumb reasons, and I didn’t want others to have to deal with that when they were sending email to my domain.

It isn’t a perfect system, but I prefer to know that I have some spam that gets through, rather than have valid email that get blocked.

Saving you Bandwidth and Server Space

Mail that is accepted is scanned for viruses and malware, compared to known black lists, and scanned to see if it matches any known SPAM. The virus definitions that are used get updated every 4 minutes, from Symantec, before the updates are available to the general public.

I signed my company up with eDoxs years ago, and have been a very happy customer ever since. As soon as I signed up, I saw a dramatic drop in my bandwidth utilization, and I think I would’ve  needed at least twice the bandwidth that I have now, if it wasn’t for eDoxs.

What brought this up

The reason this came up is that eDoxs called me a couple of days ago to let me know that for some reason, I have had a dramatic increase in the number of email coming into my company’s domain.

It looks like some bot net has singled my company’s domain out for a dictionary attack.

You see, lately we have been receiving about 3 Million emails a day.

Yes, that is a whole lot of email. About 2,083 emails a minute!

Thankfully only a fraction of them are sent down my Internet connection, and on to my mail server.

If you’re looking for a corporate email solution, I highly suggest eDoxs. The money saved in circuit costs, not to mention employee time, makes the service a bargain.

Thank you eDoxs!

Posted in Email, Internet, malware, Recommendations, Reviews, SPAM 4 Comments »

One of the really neat things about the Internet is how much data is available right at your fingertips. Zip Skinny takes some of this data, and shows you some demographic information for your neck of the woods.

You enter your zip code (hence the name), and shows you some basic information about your zip code, compared to your state average and the national average.

The basics include Education Level, Marital Status, Income levels, and Occupation, all represented with a graph like the one pictured here.

The statistics are compared with zip codes close by, and clicking on them drills down even farther.

The data is based on Census data, and of course may be a little out of date. You can also see some of the top zip codes for various population attributes, such as population density, median age youngest or oldest.

It’s really neat to see how your zip code stacks up compared to the national average, as well as some of your other neighbors. You should check Zip Skinny out.

Posted in Distractions, Web Tools, WebServices, WebSites No Comments »

Well, November was a whole lot better than October was. I ended up being sick for just about the whole month of October, so I didn’t bother with writing a summary for that month.

This month, however, has been pretty good. I did my “Command of the Grill Week“, which didn’t go all that smoothly, but tasted delicious.

I have to thank the mumbler and Kellypea for helping me out. Art gave me a nice plug, and Kellypea was adventurous enough to try Disco’s Hot and Tangy New York Strips.

Now, on with the stats …

Visitors: 15,369! No, that’s not a typo. In September I had 405 visitors, and I’ll admit that this is all thanks to one article getting stumbled.

PageViews: 30,903. Up from 1,567 in September.

New Visits: 92.4%. This was 57.88% in September.

Bounce Rate: 34.18%. This was 53.46% in September. Even though it went down, I’m still pretty happy. I was able to double my subscribers, which was amazing, and really I’m just glad that those visitors thought it would be worth checking back, just from that one article.

Top 5 posts:

1. Find out What is Using up Your Hard Drive Space With WinDirStat – This one blew everything else out of the water. 27,829 pageviews. Thanks so much for stumbling me Pearl!

2. Steak Satays – Delicious meat! These came out so good, I was really impressed. You just have to taste them to believe it.

3. Combat Steak – A bone in ribeye, with a mushroom and red wine sauce. So tasty!

4. What is ESATA? – An explanation of the external Serial ATA specification. I know what I’m using the next time I buy an external hard drive.

5. Test Drive Ubuntu Linux Without Installing Anything on Your Computer – This was a article about a great way to try out Linux by booting with a CD. When you’re done, you can pop it out, reboot, and it’s like nothing happened.

So, I hope to put out some great posts this month, even with Christmas, New Years, and all that nifty stuff coming up.

Once again, a big thank you goes out to all of my loyal readers, you’re what keeps me blogging. Also, welcome to all of my new readers, I hope you like what you see, and keep coming back for more.

Posted in BlogNewsandUpdates 5 Comments »

After you’ve shared your calendar with other user’s in Microsoft Outlook 2003, you’ll want to tell others how to open it. Here’s how you do it.

Using the Navigation Pane:

Step 1: Click on the Calendar Shortcut button

In Outlook, Click on the Calendar Button in the Navigation Pane. The button may look like this:

Or if the shortcut bar is not expanded, it may look like this:

Step 2: Click the Open a Shared Calendar Link

Scroll down to the Bottom of the pane, and there is a link titled “Open a Shared Calendar”.

Note: The “Open a Shared Calendar” Option only shows up if you are using a Microsoft Exchange Server.

After Clicking the link, the “Open Shared Calendar Dialog Box page will appear. Pressing “Name” will open up the Address book, and you will be able to select a specific user from the list.

After opening a user’s calendar once, their name should appear under the “Other Calendars” section of the Navigation Pane.

Posted in Calendars, Groupware, Microsoft, Office 2003, Outlook 4 Comments »