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NEWSLETTER ISSUE# 3 1. Money for Nuthin 2. Cyber Crimes 3. Google News 4. Freeware 5. RSS Feeds 6. Creative Commons 7. December-March Class Schedule 8. Unsubscribe Instructions ______________________________________________________ 1. MONEY FOR NUTHIN Whether you're getting rent income from an apartment you own or dividend income from the stock market, there's no better feeling than earning money without working. This is known as "passive income". Some recent developments on the Web have revived the dream of passive income from web sites. Google's AdSense program has generated a whole slew of passive income schemes. Google started offering AdSense about a year ago with the idea of putting its clients' advertisements on popular web sites beside www.google.com. Imagine, for example, that you have a very popular web site about classic Rolls Royce cars. You could contact Google and set up an AdSense account. Google would provide you with a little snippet of JavaScript to put on your web pages. That snippet of code would pull in ads from Google's database that would be similar to the ads you would see if you typed in "Rolls Royce classic" in Google's home page. For each ad that one of your customers clicks on, you would get paid a percentage of Google's revenue. The percentage you get is a secret closely held by Google, but most people estimate it at anywhere from 20% to 50% of the cost per click to the actual advertiser. Naturally, you'll earn more if your site relates to luxury automobiles than if it concerns hamster illnesses. The Terms of Service for Google's AdSense program are fairly restrictive -- after all, it's a clear temptation for you, and maybe for your hamster, to click on the ads that appear on your site, since you get paid for each click. If you can't get enough money from Google's AdSense program, you can try affiliate marketing. If you have a popular web site -- or you manage to get to the top of the search engines even without a popular web site -- you can become a sales affiliate of a company that will pay you for leads sent to their web site. For example, if you have a web site that attracts customers interested in alien abductions, you could contact the Alien Gift Shop in Roswell, New Mexico and propose that they pay you $1 for every person that clicks through your site to materialize at their site. That might work, but for it to be truly profitable, you'd have to spend all your time setting up similar deals in the alien gift industry. That's where "affiliate programs" come in. These companies are advertising matchmakers, pairing up the affiliates that have highly-trafficked web sites with the groups that wish to sell to the affiliate's audience. They include companies such as Commission Junction, Amazon, Tribal Fusion, Casale Media, Kanoodle, BrightAds, Fastclick, Burst Media, and RealTech Network. Some of these require that the customer actually complete the sale before they will credit the affiliate. Others only forward the click lead from the affiliate to the store and keep a tally of the total leads and payments. Finally, web hosting is a tried and true means of passive income. You can either host the sites yourself with a dedicated server, or you can resell a hosting service such as HostGator, which offers unlimited domains for the same monthly price ($25-$75). The advantage of a reseller is that they'll take care of technical glitches and provide a ton of features you wouldn't have the time to install yourself. The downside is that they'll usually charge you on a per-domain basis, which comes right off the top of your profits. Generally, you'll still have to field the technical support calls, but if you choose the right kind of customers, they may not require much of you. Expect a lot of "my email's not working" calls. How would you get customers to sign up with you as a web host? If you design web sites for many different clients, you may be able to convince some of them to host their sites with you, possibly in exchange for a discount on your services, or some monthly maintenance to change prices and products. Or, you could quote them a price lower than their existing web hosting. Many small businesses aren't aware that the prices for web hosting have dropped dramatically from $30/month to $4/month and less. ______________________________________________________ 2. CYBER CRIMES A new crop of crimes has sprouted recently: cyber extortion and blackmail. If run your web site on your own company servers and a significant value is attached to it being up and running 100% of the time, you may become an extortion target. It's one of the fastest growing internet-related crimes. It's fairly easy to knock out a web site with a "Denial of Service Attack" (DOS) by writing a script that endlessly queries a web server with requests for all its files. Even worse, a hacker could create an automated system for compromising other people's computers and then launch a "Distributed Denial of Service Attack" against your server. In this scenario, an army of these compromised "zombies" would flood your server with requests for files. Apparently most online casinos and betting sites have been threatened with this kind of attack against their sites. The next step for the hacker is to demand a $20,000 to $50,000 "protection fee" or else... A hacker might try extorting money from Google by threatening to program his/her zombies to fraudulently click on Google ads. These clicks would run up charges for Google's advertisers, reducing Google's usefulness as a marketing venue. How do the hackers collect the money? Mostly through bank accounts set up in countries with poor high-tech law enforcement or unfriendly relations with the U.S. Many of their victims also operate in the gray areas of U.S. legality, such as off-shore betting sites, so the law enforcement resources in the victim's country aren't as well-funded as those in the U.S. Blackmail is another option for cyber criminals. Imagine that a hacker manages to break in and steal the customer database of a small company. If the database contains unencrypted usernames, passwords, credit cards and email addresses, then it's bad news for the company. The hacker could threaten to email all the customers notifying them that their credit card had been stolen due to lax security from their vendor. Since people often use the same usernames and passwords for multiple types of accounts, a good percentage of those usernames and passwords that the hacker captured would also be valid for the customers' stock brokerage and bank accounts. ______________________________________________________ 3. GOOGLE NEWS Since the last newsletter, Google has IPO'd and is now represented on the stock market as GOOG. The price of the stock has almost doubled since its initial offering. Most of Google's income derives from the ads it serves on search results pages and its network of content partners (see AdSense above). Some people think its market position is cemented by its huge user base, while others think that all it will take is a better idea to unseat Google -- market dominance didn't protect either Yahoo or Alta Vista before Google came along. Google has recently launched Gmail, a new email service still in beta, interpreted by some as a measure to ensure the loyalty of a fickle customer base. The service runs as an ActiveX control, downloaded to your computer and executed as a lickety-split compiled program. Some processing is done on your computer, and some processing is done on Google's email server. This makes for a much faster email service than you find on Yahoo or Hotmail. The interface is spartan, in keeping with the Google's familiar look and feel. Google plans to make money from this service by inserting text ads on the right of the screen as you read your email. The ads are chosen to be relevant to the content of the email. If a friend emails you about their new Nike sneakers, you might see ads for Nike stores or sneaker discounts on the right of your screen as you read the email. In theory this should work better than Google's content ads (see on affiliate sites), since your email actually expresses your own interests, as opposed your interests inferred from the fact that you visited a particular site. In practice, though, people aren't researching buying products when they write emails to each other, so the ads tend to appear at a time when you're not in a buying mood. How do advertisers fare by having their ads displayed on content- relevant emails (and on AdSense)? This is known as "content-matching" in Google's advertising service, Adwords. The short answer is: badly! The click-through rates for content ads, in contrast with search- generated ads, are abysmally low. So low, in fact, that they seem to be random clicks from people with nothing better to surf to. Most advertisers yearn for the days when Overture would display the cost- per-click on the actual ads ("Cost to advertiser: 50 cents") -- it's probably not clear to most consumers that when they click on an ad in Google, they're costing an advertiser anywhere from 5 cents to 10 dollars! Desktop search is another feature Google has recently rolled out. The idea is simple: search your computer's files the same way you search Google's database. I've tried it and it worked like a charm -- much faster than Microsoft's built-in search, and you can also search the contents of the files, not just the filenames. Finally, Google very recently purchased a strange company called Keyhole. They offer a "magic carpet" ride that allows users to view and traverse "geospatial data" -- in other words, satellite images of your house, your street, and your city. Keyhole reminds you of those TV ads for Hummers where the camera zooms out from street level to outer space -- except with Keyhole, it's the reverse: you get to zoom in from outer space to any part of the world. It's surprising this kind of software has been made publicly available, given the current security climate. The level of detail in Keyhole allows you to see not only cars on the Golden Gate bridge, but also sensitive items such as the outlines of buildings in the Green Zone in Baghdad and their longitude/latitude coordinates. Some parts of the world do have lower resolutions, depending on satellite paths, though. ______________________________________________________ 4. FREEWARE OF THE MONTH We're always on the lookout for good free software. Here are some good ones to keep you busy: MICROSOFT SQL SERVER DESKTOP ENGINE (MSDE). The MSDE is a free but limited version of SQL Server. The limitations aren't severe, though: a maximum 2GB database size limit, and only five concurrent users allowed. There is no admin GUI, but you can download a free web gui called "SQL Web Data Administrator" that works with IIS or its own web server. SERVICE PACK 2 FIREWALL. One of the best reasons to install Service Pack 2 is the free firewall that comes with it. Similar to ZoneLabs firewall, it prompts you when programs attempt to open ports on your computer. Despite what you might have heard elsewhere, it was a breeze to download and install SP2, and it didn't break any of our existing programs and servers. FIREFOX WEB BROWSER. Firefox is just as good as Internet Explorer if not better. FireFox looks and acts like Internet Explorer; in fact, you can barely tell the difference after a while. It is a slim 4.7Megs and installs quickly, importing all the Internet Explorer bookmarks and cookies. One major drawback is the lack of a Google toolbar available for it. While it may not wipe out Internet Explorer's market share, it will certainly do some damage to Opera's. ECLIPSE and WEB MATRIX. These two development tools are freely downloadable and provide a quick means of generating Java and ASP.Net applications, respectively. CRIMSON EDITOR. Very similar to Textpad, this text editor allows external execution of scripts, syntax highlighting, and pattern- matching in searching/replacing. FREE ACCOUNTING. As the name applies, this is free bookkeeping software. It's got small bugs here and there, but has a surprising number of features with no real catch. The financial data is kept in an MSDE server, coincidentally. It is missing tax and government forms (e.g., 941, 940, 1099, W-2, W-4) features -- but otherwise, it is surprisingly comprehensive. FEEDREADER and SHARPREADER. RSS feed readers. See the article below about RSS. ______________________________________________________ 5. RSS FEEDS Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is an XML-based format for serving site content to client applications called "readers". For example, both CNET News and SlashDot offer RSS feeds to download their headlines. These headlines appear in your RSS reader, allowing you to quickly scan the headlines and then choose whether or not to download the entire article. You can set your reader to "subscribe" to particular sites, such as your local weather, industry news, political issues you follow, etc. Try it out! Just download and install FeedReader and then choose some feeds to subscribe to among those offered. If you wish, you can set up FeedReader will to pop up any unread headlines every 20 minutes. This an amazing use of technology to summarize and personalize information you find interesting. The downside is that the rss readers constantly query the feeds for new information, creating a constant stream of traffic that can slow server response. ______________________________________________________ 6. THE CREATIVE COMMONS Beyond strict copyrights, several new licensing agreements for documents, images, sounds/music, and videos are now becoming more widespread. An off-shoot of the open source programming movement, these replacements for copyright offer viewers the right to reproduce and/or modify original images and text, sometimes only requiring attribution to the original author. To see this in action, go to http://search.creativecommons.org and search for "Washington monument" with the "images" selection in the pulldown. You will see several web sites with photographs of the monument. Many of these can be used in your own marketing materials, some even without requiring attribution. ______________________________________________________

NEWSLETTER ISSUE# 2 1. Our Experience Subcontracting to India 2. Google Offers Email, Local Search, IPO 3. What Exactly is a Web Service? 4. Amaze your Friends with VBScript 5. Using OpenOffice Calc as a Calendar 6. Textpad Macro for File Bookmarks ______________________________________________________ *** LINK TO ACADEMYX ON YOUR INTRANET *** (shameless promotion) Do you have a list of training resources or approved vendors on your company intranet? Do you work for a big company? If your company has more than 100 employees, we'll give you an incentive to either get a link to us on your intranet or to prove that AcademyX is already listed there. All you have to do is send us a screen shot of the intranet page -- or convince your webmaster to add a link to us, and then send us a screen shot, and we'll give you $150 credit towards any AcademyX class! *** E-COMMERCE SEMINAR JUNE 5 AND 6 *** (shameless promotion) For our second shameless promotion, we'd like to draw your attention to the fact that we're offering a two-day E-commerce Seminar on the weekend of June 5 and 6. For the low low price of $495 we'll show you how to build and manage an online business. An expert instructor and internet entrepreneur with several successful online businesses will take you through case studies in choosing a business model, building your online store, and acquiring and retaining customers. _______________________________________________________ 1. OUR EXPERIENCE SUBCONTRACTING TO INDIA. "Annapoorna, do you have a minute to talk about the project?" Her reply via online chat: "2 minutes pls." Two minutes? What?? But I'm a paying client, don't I get more than two minutes?!! And that was how our experience off-shoring began to break down into a messy tale of unfulfilled obligations, poor oversight and wasted money. We had a client that asked for a relatively easy project turning some paper forms into web page forms and error-checking them before submittal. We figured this was an ideal opportunity to try out subcontracting a project to India. I wasted no time in logging on to www.elance.com to auction off the project to the most qualified bidder. It took a long time to write up the project details and learn Elance's system, about 5 hours total. Then we got about 15 bidders, of which only five had the requisite qualifications. We narrowed this to two, a one-man shop in Bombay and a company of 20 in Bangalore. Both had excellent feedback ratings from other customers. I was worried about the one-man operation getting too busy with other clients, but I was also concerned about the 20-person firm sticking me with a junior programmer. After weighing all the factors, we went with the 20-person firm, and awarded them the contract for $550, for a 10-page site with logins, sessions, and shopping carts saved in an MS Access database. Strangely, none of the bidders seemed to have phone numbers, so we could only communicate by email. I was worried about doing business only by email so I asked the winning bidder to give me a call at home at 10pm my time. About the appointed hour the phone in my apartment rings and I pick up and say hello. There is a long pause. "Yes?" -- that's him speaking, not me. I say "Yes, hello?", then he says "Yes?" again. Needless to say, the conversation didn't go too well. It felt like we were conversing through a walkie-talkie and there were long delays between when I would say things and when he would respond. I don't think the delays were caused by the international connection -- it seemed more as if my interlocutor was trying to grasp what I was saying and it took him a moment to decipher each sentence. My new subcontractor, Natesh, didn't speak English too well. It didn't matter much, because he managed to convey to me that he was assigning responsibility for my project to "Miss Annapoorna". I didn't want to be impolite and ask, but I wasn't sure if Annapoorna was her first or her last name. Initially the time difference was a problem, since the two sides were only awake in the evening and night San Francisco time. After a while, though, I liked the idea of them working while I was asleep and me checking the results the next day and sending them feedback in a smooth cycle. Natesh stressed that they preferred to communicate through email or Yahoo Instant Messenger. I was skeptical but I downloaded and installed Yahoo Instant Messenger and found that in fact he was often online during the evening my time. I was never sure, though, if the person typing into Yahoo IM was really Natesh, the project manager, or Miss Annapoorna, who was actually doing the work. At first I was amazed with the results! Within a day they had a nice-looking HTML skeleton of the site without the programming functionality. After another couple of days they had some minimal code that looked like their standard way of doing session shopcarts. Looking at it, though, I noticed that it wasn't exactly what I had asked for, and didn't cover the issue of clicking on the "Back" button and seeing the "Page has Expired" notice. They seemed content to continue working without much input from me, though, so I waited to see how it would develop. After a week, the site hadn't changed at all. I had suggested some minor changes, and Annapoorna had promised to do them, but nothing happened. Then I went on vacation for a couple of weeks. That's when things started going downhill. While on vacation I periodically checked email, gradually becoming aware of an absence of news from my Indian subcontractors. I sent them an email asking about the changes I had recently requested. They sent back a reply that was both brusque and hard to decipher. After returning from my two week vacation I reviewed the site to see if there had been any changes. No work had been done in three weeks! I was getting antsy and the client was too, so I sent Annapoorna a pointed reminder about how the deadline for the site launch was approaching and how the changes hadn't been made as promised. Two more days passed without a response from Annapoorna so I sent yet another, somewhat distressed email detailing all the stuff that remained to be done. After no response for a day, I decided to get rid of my new subcontractors and do the site myself. I sent them an email politely firing them, but ending with an upbeat " good luck with your other projects". I paid them for the work to date, adding up to about $400. The very next day when I got home I found two answering machine messages from Natesh apologizing profusely. He explained how the Christmas vacation had left them short-staffed and that my project had been shuffled among several people, that he took full responsibility, that it wouldn't happen again, that he was terribly sorry, etc. It was actually quite touching, a refreshing bit of business etiquette you probably wouldn't experience here in the United States. Either that, or they were afraid of the negative feedback I would leave for them on Elance. He also followed up with a couple of emails promising to finish the job for free. In the end, I finished the project myself after a couple of late nights. The $400 wasn't a complete waste since it was a learning experience. In the future, I'm going to insist on milestones, deadlines, and talking on the phone periodically. I have tried some smaller jobs with other off-shore contractors and my experience has been generally good, but not great. It seems like outsourcing to foreign subcontractors lends itself to big projects with lots of repetition. _______________________________________________________ 2. GOOGLE OFFERS LOCAL SEARCH, EMAIL, SHARES OF STOCK As predicted in this very newsletter, Google has started deploying its "Local Search" feature. If you type in a search term, such as "pizza restaurants in San Francisco" (make sure you mention the word "in"), you will see a link at the top of Google results called "Local Results". Google aggregates this from each region's local Yellow Pages (the paper version), in conjunction with online yellow pages such as Verizon's www.superpages.com. The quality of the results is fairly poor right now, and Google has been working on this for a while, so it's not clear if they'll be able to improve much on it. Our friends in Mountain View have also decided to start offering email services. In all likelihood, their reasoning for this was to develop brand loyalty from their user base. Once users start keeping their email with Google, they won't be able to switch as easily to new search engine competitors. Plus, Google will be able to serve many more of its little text ads, thus increasing its sales. On the one hand, this move positions them more as a portal and less as a search engine, so they will compete more openly with a fully developed portal such as Yahoo. On the other hand, adding email doesn't detract from their existing search capabilities, and it doesn't look like they'll clutter up their home page with links to all their additional services, so users will still be able to load Google's home page without all the links and ads that you see on Yahoo's home page. Google's promised email service, though currently vaporware, sounds better in several respects than Yahoo and Hotmail. Instead of Yahoo's skyscraper and Flash ads that grind up your computer's processor, the user will see small, content-relevant text ads similar to those on Google's current search results pages. Google also promises to give users a full 1 Gigabyte of storage so they'll never have to delete old email. It remains to be seen how well Google handles spam filtering. In case you haven't heard, soon Google will offer shares of stock to the public. It plans on running a "Dutch auction" where users can phone, fax, or order shares online. Before buying shares, bidders must open an account with one of Google's IPO bankers, Morgan Stanley or Credit Suisse First Boston. For more information, Search Engine Watch has a great article about the offering. _______________________________________________________ 3. WHAT EXACTLY IS A WEB SERVICE? You may have been hearing that "Web Services" are the wave of the future. The idea behind a web service is to provide programming on a pay-as-you-go basis. Before the Internet, programmers would create standalone applications and sell them for $40 to $500. The problem with that model was that there was no repeat business unless you could convince (or force) the customer to upgrade to the next version of the software, and even then they could always get a pirated version of the software for free. Salivating over the income streams produced by advertising on popular web sites, and realizing that web sites can't be pirated the way software can, clever internet entrepreneurs are trying to get repeat business by offering their software as a service that you can access across the internet on a cost-per-usage or cost-per-month basis. Typically a web service offers a small programming component that the customer can incorporate into their own web site or application, instead of re-writing it themselves. For example, if you want to take sell products on your web site, but you don't feel like programming all the variations for shipping cost based on product weight, delivery timeframe and customer location, you could have your shopping cart application connect to a "shipping calculation web service". Your application would submit to the web service some XML containing the particulars of the product weight, shipping option, and customer location, and the web service would send back some XML to your application containing information about the shipping cost. You might pay a monthly fee to use this web service, or you could pay on a per-usage basis. _______________________________________________________ 4. AMAZE YOUR FRIENDS WITH VBSCRIPT Most people don't realize that your Windows operating system has a programming language that you can use right away, without any installation. The language in question is VBScript, a component of the Windows Scripting Host, which comes built-in with Windows. It happens to be a favorite with virus-writers since it offers easy access to other Windows software (e.g., Outlook Email), but there's nothing stopping you from taking advantage of it for your own, presumably innocent, purposes. Try typing the following three lines of code into a text editor; then save the file as "test.vbs" on the Desktop, and double-click on it: age = InputBox("What is your age?") longevity = 100 - age MsgBox("You will live another " & longevity & " years.") You can do almost anything with VBScript: connect to databases, send off emails, change registry settings, etc. For a tutorial on VBScript, check out this web site. _______________________________________________________ 5. USING OPENOFFICE CALC AS A CALENDAR Need a calendar application like Outlook or Yahoo? We've been looking for a good free alternative that runs on the desktop, and finally hit upon an unlikely solution: using a spreadsheet. The free OpenOffice suite (www.openoffice.org) offers an Excel-compatible spreadsheet called "Calc" that you can easily adapt to become a flexible calendar. Simply launch Calc and type today's date in the top-left cell in the mm/dd/yy format. Then drag the bottom corner of that cell downwards until you've highlighted 60 other cells underneath it. When you let go, Calc should prefill those cells with consecutive dates. In the second column, next to each date, you can create a list of events or meetings on that date. To insert a carriage return without moving to the next cell, type Control-Alt + . You can color-code cells and the text within them to add emphasis to particular meetings. _______________________________________________________ 6. TEXTPAD MACRO FOR FILE BOOKMARKS Here at AcademyX we often refer to the same text files over and over again, such as the file that has our class dates and prices. There's no obvious way to bookmark a file in Textpad, so we created a Macro to accomplish that. To create this Macro, select the Macros->Record option, then File->Open, find your file and open it, and then select Macro->Stop Recording option. You should be prompted to save this Macro with a name that will then show up at the bottom of the Macros menu. Name the macro the same as the file name and -- voila -- you have a bookmark!

NEWSLETTER ISSUE# 1 Welcome to the first edition of "The X-Factor"! It may have been a while since you first took a class at AcademyX, so there's a lot to report. Here's what's covered in this issue: 1. AcademyX News: - We've Moved Offices - We've Added More Classes - Free Workshops - October Two-for-One Discount 2. Our Experience with Wireless 3. Free Software and Services of the Month 4. Database Tip: Using MS Access To View Data in MySQL 5. Textpad Tip: Macros to Comment/Uncomment Code 6. Search Engine Tips: Google's Geographic Search _______________________________________________________ 1. ACADEMYX NEWS WE'VE MOVED. After three years suffering under a lease signed at the apex of the dot-com boom, we recently moved from our old offices on Kearny Street to a high-rise directly across from the TransAmerica Pyramid. Our new, climate-controlled facilities are more spacious, better maintained, and our building includes amenities such as a basement parking lot, a first-floor deli, and 24-hour security guards. We've also invested in new furniture, projectors, software, workstations, and even some nice artwork for the walls. NEW COURSES. If you haven't been to our web site recently, you should know that we've added several new classes. One of the most popular additions has been our PHP/MySQL two-day course; others include Intermediate Flash and JavaScript. In partnership with other local training companies, we've also added courses such as: Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, Web Video and Audio, Macromedia Fireworks, Microsoft Access, and Visual Basic. In the near future we expect to offer new courses in Database Integration with Dreamweaver, Java/JSP, and .Net technologies. FREE WORKSHOPS. Several evening workshops are periodically offered for free by AcademyX. The "Web Technologies Overview" workshop addresses the issue of which programming language, web server, operating system, and database to use, depending on your budget, tech savvy, and traffic. In the "Search Engine Optimization" workshop you'll learn how to drive traffic to your site using Google and other search engines. The "Our Favorite Freeware" workshop illustrates our best finds in searching the Web for free stuff. Check our web site for upcoming dates. TWO-FOR-ONE DISCOUNT. From Oct. 1 to Oct. 31 of 2003, students registering for any of: JavaScript, Perl, ColdFusion, ASP, or XML classes can bring a friend for free. Note that this offer does not include all classes offered by AcademyX, nor those classes already purchased, whether individually, or via vouchers or a six-month pass. _______________________________________________________ 2. OUR EXPERIENCE WITH WIRELESS We recently tried a wireless network at AcademyX, mainly to avoid the construction costs of wiring our new offices. Initially it was surprisingly easy. We bought a $80 Netgear wireless router and connected it to our internet connection. Then we bought several wireless adapters of the type that plug directly into the USB port; these cost about $40 each. Without encryption, there were only two settings to get right: 1) the SSID, similar to a workgroup name for the wireless network and 2) the network mode (infrastructure or ad-hoc), for which we chose infrastructure; both settings must be configured in the router and the individual adaptors, Our first problem emerged when we realized that we had several Windows NT workstation and server operating systems, and they didn't support USB, so they wouldn't support the USB adaptors. Instead of getting wireless cards to install in the machine, we gave up and used some hubs and the existing NIC cards instead; we had to pay for some construction to pass a wire through one wall. The second problem involved getting Mac Airports to connect to our wireless router. Despite the cruel reality, Netgear's intransigent tech support insisted everything should, in theory, be working. After some frustration and web searching, we decided to download new firmware for the router and install it. Following Netgear's online documentation, this went smoothly and fixed the problem. The third problem involved the networking shares we had set up. Everything should have been as it was before -- the only thing that changed was the network adaptors -- the workgroups, shares and permissions hadn't been touched. However, no other computers were visible in the network. After some experimentation, we managed to find computers one at a time and map network drives to them, although they still weren't visible in our workgroup in the network. We were not optimistic about Netgear tech support providing a solution. This problem remains unsatisfactorily resolved. All in all, wireless technology didn't save us any time or money, although it's given us something to write about in our newsletter. _______________________________________________________ 3. FREE SOFTWARE AND SERVICES OF THE MONTH We're always downloading and installing freeware and using free online services, so we thought we'd share our favorites every month. Here are some that get daily use at AcademyX: * HTML Kit (www.chami.com) -- this text editor is perfect for web development * OpenOffice (www.openoffice.org) -- this is a free office suite like MS Office * TightVNC (www.tightvnc.com) -- similar to pcAnywhere, manipulate a remote desktop * Google Toolbar (toolbar.google.com) -- now it has a popup killer * Textpad (www.textpad.com) -- a great text editor, non-expiring evaluation copy * ArgoSoft servers (www.argosoft.com) -- mail, news, and FTP servers * NoFlash (www.geocities.jp/baryonlee/noflash/) -- eliminate Flash ads * ZoneAlarm (www.zonealarm.com) -- personal firewall software * Brinkster (www.brinkster.com) -- ASP-enabled web hosting, works with MS Access, email * W3 Validator (validator.w3.org) -- checks your web site's HTML for errors * DSL Reports (www.dslreports.com/stest) -- test your internet connection's speed * Dynamic DNS (www.dyndns.org) -- host a web site at home even with a dynamic IP * Atomz Site Search (www.atomz.com) -- free utility for searching your site _______________________________________________________ 4. DATABASE TIP: USING MS ACCESS TO VIEW DATA IN MYSQL If you're working with a remote database, you don't necessarily have to use SQL commands to view data in a telnet or SSH session. Many people think the only user-friendly solution is to build a couple of dynamic web pages with pulldowns and buttons to allow for easy remote access to the database. But a better solution is to use your own computer's MS Access database to link to the remote database server and display its data in elegant forms and reports. This solution also works for small teams working on the same centralized data (eliminating the need for a web site). To accomplish this with a remote MySQL server, you need to follow these steps: * Install the MyODBC Connector, available here: www.mysql.com/downloads/api-myodbc-3.51.html * Create a Data Source from Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> ODBC Data Sources - Use a System Data Source, with the driver being MyODBC, referencing the MySQL server * In MS Access, select "File->Get external data->link tables" - select "ODBC Datasources" at the bottom of the Files of Type... pulldown - select the "Machine data sources" tab and choose the DSN for MySQL server * Now create whatever forms and reports you need, the data remains centralized on the server! _______________________________________________________ 5. TEXTPAD TIP: ADDING A COMMENT/UNCOMMENT MACRO Macros are a useful, often-ignored feature of many text editors. A macro shows up as a menu item, and when selected, will perform a sequence of user-defined actions. The process of creating and applying a macro involves four steps: 1) starting the macro memorization process, 2) memorizing the macro commands, 3) saving the macro, and 4) invoking the macro. In our favorite, Textpad, here's how you can create macros that comment out text or uncomment text: * Create a sample file with a couple of lines of code * Highlight any two lines of text in the sample file * Select Macros->Record; The mouse icon should change to a tape cassette icon * Select Search->Replace... * Check the Conditions checkbox for "Regular Expression" * Check the button for "Selected Text" * For a COMMENT OUT macro, fill it out exactly as follows: Find what: ^$.$ Replace with: #\1 * For an UNCOMMENT macro, fill it out exactly as follows: Find what: ^# Replace with: * Press OK to perform the replacements on the highlighted text * Select Macros->Stop Recording * Save the macro as "comment" or "uncomment" * To try it out, highlight some text, then select Macros->Comment _______________________________________________________ 6. SEARCH ENGINE TIPS: GOOGLE'S GEOGRAPHIC SEARCH Wouldn't it be nice if search engines offered a feature to find web sites with a physical presence (e.g., retail) near a certain zip code? This is an idea that's been discussed for a long time and it looks like Google is about to implement it. You can see their beta demo at: http://labs.google.com/location. Although it's not clear if Google indexes this, you can also build a tag to identify your longitude and latitude here: http://geourl.org/add.html. Expect this to be a major development in search engine evolution. _______________________________________________________