E-Musings Mon Immorata

Stopping Stumbling Around Learn about a free download manager with a difference, updated Firefox and Thunderbird versions, new Opera, free photo management, Outlook search and Acrobat optimization utilities If you are looking for a download manager, do consider Free Download Manager (FDM). This combines the usual file download and FTP site explorer. With an HTTP (web) site explorer, web site spider, site manager and a scheduler. Each feature is represented as a separate window tab. The Scheduler allows you to not only schedule downloads. But can substitute for Windows Task Schedule and launch other programs. The Site Manager tracks sites from which files have been downloaded. By default entries are temporary connections. And despite saving some sites for later re-use I was unable to open them in the Site Explorer. The HTML Spider lets you to download an entire site for offline access. FDM has 3 download modes: heavy (8 threads), medium (4 threads) and light (1 thread) as the default settings. But you can customize the number of download streams, simultaneous connections to a server and active downloads too. You can also define a bandwidth speed limit for each mode. Choose to download files by FTP in passive mode and define a proxy server (separately for HTTP and FTP) on an application-wide or download specific basis. You can also query the host server for file size on a per-download basis. This is a great usability enhancement for users with limited-bandwidth connections who don't want to try and download files exceeding a specific size. I try and avoid grabbing files larger than 8 MB from my home computer. Downloads can be sorted by category and status. And each category (Group) can have a defined folder to save to. When you use FDM, I recommend using categories because all files downloaded in FDM including web sites grabbed with the HTML spider are reflected in the file download pane! I also find FDM's ability to reduce the number of active threads if browser activity is detected very handy. The software integrates with MSIE, Netscape and Opera. But there's a known bug with Mozilla/Firefox that causes the latter to crash if you attempt to use FDM to download a file. Instead keep FDM active and rich-click to capture a download link to the Windows Clipboard. Then add the file as a new download in FDM. Both Firefox and Thunderbird were updated last week to Version 0.9.3 to resolve some recently discovered security vulnerabilities. Security web site also Secunia offers a study about how insecure Firefox is when compared with MSIE. According to this, Firefox experienced 10 vulnerabilities in comparison to 7 in MSIE in the same 4-month period. If you're interested, Secunia also offer an application-specific Vulnerability Tracking Service trial. But besides resolving the 'holes' both products have improved in other aspects. They now use Windows resources better. And Thunderbird 0.7.3 import Outlook/Outlook Express account settings and messages without stumbling. While users like this writer with more than one primary Net connection and mail account, you'll need to manually define an outgoing (SMPT) mail server for each account. But for almost everyone else, Thunderbird's default settings do very well. And although this client can also access news groups. With most of the latter so flooded by spam and redundant message posts, I tend to use Google Groups to locate pertinent information on demand. Firefox 0.9.3 is very neat. But like previous Firefox builds tends not to work with older version-specific extensions. However, my workaround is to install 0.9.3 directly over an older build with extensions configured. Then you can the best of the old with the advantages of the new. And without losing cookies, cache contents, site history, or your customized settings. But last week's caveat about download sources remains. I've also found that the official Mozilla Firefox nightly builds still off the 0.9.1+ branch! Firefox 1.0RC1 is planned for a mid-September 2004 release. And I'm trying to track down a build to test. You can view the details about what's planned for this release. As an Outlook user, I've always been plagued by an inability to search for content across all my multiple mail folders and PST files. The free Lookout add-in (requires .Net Framework 1.x installed) not only allows me to build an index for my PST files, but also the contents of mapped-in IMPA folders, Exchange servers and common Windows file types like .DOC, .XLS, .RTF, and .TXT. And although the company was recently acquired by Microsoft. Its platform will become the base of a new super MSN search utility. If you use Outlook (2000/XP/2003) get the add-in while you can. If you have a digital camera so check out Google's free Picasa photo organizer. The software can either remain resident and download and manage images from a connected camera. Or you can download on demand then sort out images. Included are some limited photo-editing tools as well. If you work for a company whose network team revels in using the proxy server to block everything but web access. Despair no more. Microsoft is Beta testing a web browser-based MSN Web Messenger client. Of course, if your company proxy blocks access to the MSN site, you still won't get access. But for most users, this is a really handy tool. There's also a recently updated Opera 7.54 build. The changes include a JavaScript problem that made it possible to show one URL in the address bar but load a different URL in the page (Secunia Advisory SA12028) [resolved in v7.53], deny write-access to properties on objects from scripts failing a standard origin check, resolves critical vulnerability reported in GreyMagic Security Advisory GM#008-OP, blocks access to file:/ URLs from documents that are not themselves loaded from file:/ URLs, as well as a problem in the file download manager and in the browser cache. And finally, a quick bit about Acrobat SpeedUp, a free Acrobat optimization utility. By default, the latter insists on initializing more than 25 plugins -- most not required by users -- at startup. And the optimization works: once installed, opening a 53 kb eBook PDF file in Acrobat Reader 6.0.2 took a matter of seconds. Up from nearly 45 seconds and 95% CPU utilization on my Celeron 300 MHz with 128 MB RAM. The optimizer supports Acrobat 3 onwards. That's it for this week. Stay Safe! Click Here to Email Me