E-Musings Mon Immorata

Monday brings better messaging; Share Files by Email Apropos of my remarks (see Aug 31, 2003 posting below), about instant messaging woes. And my problems with Trillian vs. Yahoo and MSN, my connect blues magically turned green after I upgraded my Trillian 1.0 Pro client to the newly released (Aug 28, 2003) Trillian 2.0 Pro Beta 3. This leads me to believe that the Trillian 1.x code base is flawed. So if you too use Trillian consider an upgrade. In comparison, the other (supposedly) all-in-one messenger clients like Gaim, Miranda, and even the so-called homegrown Indiatimes Messenger (which uses a lot of open-source code) are pretty clunky. Hell! Even the real Yahoo! Messenger and MSN Messenger 6 look dated in comparison. To get your copy of the Trillian 2 Pro Beta, search Google. Or go here. Maileet 1.1 Beta (781 kB, Windows, free) let's you circumvent firewalls to transfer files. Of course, both you and the recipient need to be running the software. Your Maileet chops a file into smaller parts then using its own SMTP server email the pieces to the recipient who uses their Maileet to recombine the bits into a single file. This free utility uses AES to encrypt files. And feature available include message queue/pause/resume and save session settings. The premise behind developing such a utility is even if other ports are blocked or firewalled, almost all Web connections have open SMTP/POP3 (which is why we see so many email-borne viruses). While on the subject of free software, make sure to download and install the free (for personal use) IE Spell utility. This integrates seamlessly with IE, and nearly as much so with MyIE2; even if you lose some functionality. This column is proofed using this plug-in which has since detected (and corrected) several avoidable boo-boos. Look forward next week to a sneak peek of a great free CD-Writing software. This supports CD-Data, CD-Audio, DVD and mixed session recording. It's much better than Nero, faster than Nero, and uses fewer system resources. So stay tuned. G Menon