Well, Yahoo! has developed a new Web 2.0 beta version of its “My Yahoo!” interface. So far, I’m not impressed. Here are some gripes I have about the “upgrade”:

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This will be a very quick post, as I don’t have a whole lot to say. However, something I’ve noticed recently is that there are so many new developments in technology every day but they’re not always necessarily a good thing.

Two things that come to mind right away are digital cameras and digital media players.

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For those of us accustomed to working with Perl and PHP, VBScript can really throw you for a loop. However, because so many medium-sized corporations, government departments and educational institutions are using in-house Windows-based Web servers, we have to learn it.

One of the things that really threw me off was the fact that there are no pre-built functions in VBScript. Since I have no access to the server itself (I’m the Web developer, not the IT guy), I can’t install any add-ins or anything on the server. I have to deal with what I’ve got, and what I’ve got is the base package that comes with Windows Server.

I know there are a lot of other developers in the same position, so I thought I would start sharing some of the helpful tools I come across while working on various projects in VBScript.

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So, I’m finally ready to write a review of Windows Vista. After buying a new computer a few months ago, and playing with Vista quite a bit, I feel I can wrtie a decent overview of the pros and cons that come along with it.

I will be forthright in saying that I am not a huge fan of Microsoft. If I could get along in the business world without having to use Microsoft products, I would be perfectly happy working directly through a Linux build and working entirely with free, open-source software.

That said, I have been a Microsoft user for over 20 years. I have been using Microsoft products since the days when DOS was the main operating system for PC users. I have quite a bit of experience in Windows, and have used Windows 3.1, Windows 98 (and SE), Windows ME and Windows XP extensively. I have fooled around with Windows Server 2000 and a few other MS operating systems. With all that said, I hope you will recognize that I am being as objective as possible.

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CenterNetworks, which, I suppose, is now considered the “parent” site of HTMLCenter, has been quietly redesigned. Although the previous design was attractive, and there was not really anything inherently wrong with it, the new design is quite a bit better.

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It’s very rare that I find a nice piece of payware that’s actually worth paying for. There are the handful of applications that you absolutely have to have in order to survive in the business world (Windows, the Office applications, etc.) and then there are those that are unique.

Camtasia Studio is one of the latter. As far as I can find, there is no freeware equivalent out there. For those of us that work with presentations on a regular basis, Camtasia seems like an absolutely invaluable application.

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Leprakawn posted a link in the HTMLCenter forums to a neat little Flash animation. The title of the Flash animation is “Animator vs. Animation”. It’s a cool animation postulating what it would be like if a character in a Flash animation were to come to life and start attacking the mouse pointer.

The creator also made a sequel called “Animator vs. Animation II”. This one is a bit more abstract and a lot more fun. In this animation, the character escapes the Flash window and fun ensues throughout the user’s desktop.

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I realize that 99% of the population is absolutely enamored with everything “i”, including iPods, iTunes, iPhones, etc. I, however, am not part of that 99%. Therefore, I’ve decided to post my rant against iTunes. Within this entry, I will outline a list of the portions of iTunes that really “grind my gears” (to put it the way Peter Griffin did in an episode of Family Guy).

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For those of you that have ever used VBScript to pull information out of an XML file or out of a database, you may have noticed some strange characters showing up on your pages. From what I’ve read online, this is a result of dealing with incorrect character sets through your XML or your database. However, I have not really found a decent fix for the problem.

Everything I find online mentions using UTF8 as your character set, but I haven’t really found a concrete method to do this. In my real life example, I tried setting the character set within my XML file as UTF8, but that didn’t solve the problem.

So, I got to the root of the problem myself. I figured out which characters were not displaying properly, and I decided to fix them on the back end.

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A few months ago, I received a newsletter in my e-mail inbox. How I got on their list, I really couldn’t tell you. I don’t know if they sent out a massive spam campaign, or if I signed up with an affiliate, unknowingly opening myself up to these types of messages, etc.

However, the newsletter was not typical of the spam I normally receive. It was actually full of pretty decent, interesting information.

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