Most people who run Windows XP should rely on Windows Update and be done with it. But if you support multiple computers in a small office, or if you build computers for fun or profit, you might benefit from this expert-level article: Microsoft Windows XP Hotfix Installation and Deployment Guide.

Sensitive Light Wallpaper has some drop-dead-gorgeous images, all free and all sized for use at common desktop resolutions.

The prolific and perspicacious Marc Orchant has moved to The Office Weblog. Marc’s posts on his old blog have been consistently excellent — he’s turned me on to more interesting Office add-ons than anyone in the past six months. He now has the backing of Weblogs Inc., and I wish him the best of luck. Add this one to your list of must-read feeds!

In his remarks at Microsoft’s CEO Summit 2004, Bill Gates made it clear that he thinks blogging is cool. And he actually took a shot at explaining RSS.

Another new phenomenon … is one that started outside of the business space, more in the corporate or technical enthusiast space, a thing called blogging. And a standard around that that notifies you that something has changed called RSS.

This is a very interesting thing, because whenever you want to send e-mail you always have to sit there and think who do I copy on this. There might be people who might be interested in it or might feel like if it gets forwarded to them they’ll wonder why I didn’t put their name on it. But, then again, I don’t want to interrupt them or make them think this is some deeply profound thing that I’m saying, but they might want to know. And so, you have a tough time deciding how broadly to send it out.

Then again, if you just put information on a Web site, then people don’t know to come visit that Web site, and it’s very painful to keep visiting somebody’s Web site and it never changes. It’s very typical that a lot of the Web sites you go to that are personal in nature just eventually go completely stale and you waste time looking at it.

And so, what blogging and these notifications are about is that you make it very easy to write something that you can think of, like an e-mail, , but it goes up onto a Web site. And then people who care about that get a little notification. And so, for example, if you care about dozens of people whenever they write about a certain topic, you can have that notification come into your Inbox and it will be in a different folder and so only when you’re interested in browsing about that topic do you go in and follow those, and it doesn’t interfere with your normal Inbox.

This site has an RSS feed. Judging by my referrer logs, quite a few people are using RSS readers to stay current with this site. If you’re not using an RSS reader, and instead you visit this site in your Web browser, I’d be interested in knowing why. Leave a comment here, or send me a note.

Personally, I think e-mail newsletters are almost useless anymore. Thanks to spam and the countermeasures we’re forced to use to block unsolicited material, it’s impossible for any publisher or marketer to reliably deliver a product via e-mail. Can you imagine how long a daily newspaper would survive if 30% of all copies never arrived?

RSS is exciting. I think within two years you will see people turning blogs and RSS feeds into legitimate, profit-making, fast-growing businesses. Meanwhile, the popularity of e-mail newsletters is going to shrink. They won’t disappear, but they’ll become far less important.

Oh, and based on what Bill G. said, I would certainly expect Longhorn to have some serious RSS reading and authoring capabilities built into it.

Google has published a list of Software Principles that it wants to promulgate as a formal definition of the term spyware.

I’ve said before that I’m troubled by the casual use of this word, and I think this debate is healthy. I’d sure rather see some form of definition before the U.S. Congress charges into the fray with something incredibly stupid, especially a weak law that would preempt well-crafted state laws.

Excerpts from Google’s “proposed principles”:

• We believe software should not trick you into installing it.
• When an application is installed or enabled, it should inform you of its principal and significant functions.
• It should be easy for you to figure out how to disable or delete an application.
• Applications that affect or change your user experience should make clear they are the reason for those changes.
• If an application collects or transmits your personal information such as your address, you should know.
• Application providers should not allow their products to be bundled with applications that do not meet these guidelines.

Now, Google has a vested interest in this subject, because it doesn’t want its add-ins to be affected by an ill-considered ban. Still, it’s a good starting point for a discussion.

(via Techdirt)

In fact, we crazy people who write computer books would have been a rich pool of test subjects. Boing Boing reports: Hourly shots of coffee beat a cup

Tossing back two shots of coffee each hour may provide more sustainable stimulation than gulping down a large cup in the morning, scientists from Rush University Medical Center report in the journal Sleep. In the study, sixteen men stayed in windowless rooms for nearly a month while the researchers screwed with their circadian rhythms. From a Scientific American article about the findings:

“In the new study, the scientists… tested the effects of administering an hourly, low dose of caffeine equivalent to about two ounces of coffee to one group, while the second group received a placebo. The caffeinated men performed better on cognitive tests than the control individuals did, and dozed off less often. And though they received the same cumulative dose as subjects in previous, single-dose studies, taking many small doses minimized some of the negative side effects that caffeine can have, such as tremors.”