8.30.2005

Free Opera license

As part of their 10th anniversary celebration, the folks at Opera Software are giving away free registration codes for the Opera browser. If you're a Web developer and want to be able to test in Opera — or if you simply want to try it out — this is a good opportunity to get what I assume is an ad-free version of their popular browser.

Jon Galloway blogs that this offer is good only until 12 AM PDT August 31, so if you're interested hurry on over to the Opera Party page or go directly to the free registration page.

8.25.2005

ISTool 5.1.5

If you use Inno Setup you owe it to yourself to also use the companion tool ISTool, which provides a phenomenally useful GUI interface to your Inno Setup scripts. ISTool v5.1.5 was just released, keeping up its tradition of staying in sync with the latest version of Inno Setup itself.

8.18.2005

Inno Setup 5.1.5 Released

Inno Setup version 5.1.5 has been released and is available for download at jrsoftware.org/isdl.php. Read what's new in this latest point release at jrsoftware.org/files/is5-whatsnew.htm.

It's been nearly three months since v5.1.4 came out, which was the first non-beta version to support the installation of 64-bit applications on 64-bit versions of Windows. This product is very stable and has been for quite some time, but it continues to receive tweaks and enhancements.

8.12.2005

Deja View, or Why Too Many RSS Feeds May Not Be A Good Thing

In the beginning, there was RSS. Along came a good feed reader, and my daily work-related surfing habits changed dramatically: 30-60 minutes every day of browsing individual websites to keep up with what's happening were replaced by 5-10 minutes of scanning headlines and occasionally reading a complete story.

Time was saved. Life was good.

But that was then, and this is now. It's no exaggeration to say the number of RSS feeds out there has grown exponentially in 2005. This is largely due to two factors: blogs, and publishers adding RSS feeds to websites that didn't have them before.

Naturally, as the number of feeds proliferated, so did the population of my Favorite Feeds folder. One year ago, there were probably 10-15 feeds I looked at every day. Today, there are easily over a hundred. My 5-10 minutes of scanning headlines has ballooned to 20-30 minutes of reading feed updates. Twice a day. And that's just to stay current: never mind the forays into new and interesting feeds that crop up all the time.

Information overload is very real these days.

What makes it worse, I'm seeing a growing amount of overlap among feeds. For one thing, many news feeds pick up the same story. Then somebody who sees that new item blogs about it, and somebody else sees that blog and posts a reference to it. And so on. I find myself seeing the same material, in one way or another, more than once on a regular basis.

Call it Deja View: the feeling of "haven't I seen this someplace before?"

Is this happening to you, too?

At least one solution is obvious, albeit painful: cut back on the number of feeds I'm reading every day. It's not an easy decision to make, but it's probably inevitable. The risk of missing something important has to be weighed against the benefit of gaining back some valuable time.

I have no idea which feeds I'll stop reading regularly. But I'm going to have to start somewhere. Tempus fugit.

8.10.2005

Amyuni PDF Converter 2.50d bug fix

Among other issues it addresses, Amyuni PDF Converter 2.50d includes a fix for a bug that sometimes caused Adobe® Reader® 7.0 to encounter errors when attempting to render images in a PDF file created by an earlier version of the Amyuni PDF Converter. In my experience this problem showed up frequently in Web pages I'd captured to PDF. According to Amyuni's release notes for version 2.50d, the issue is specific to Acrobat® version 7.