Updates, Upgrades, and Cleaning House

By Jerry Pournelle

October 25, 2004

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Macromedia Contribute 3

We just got Contribute 3 today, so we haven't had long to deal with it, but it does seem to clear up one of the major problems I had with carrying the Mac as my main computer on trips.

I do a lot of work on the road. I try to keep up with my novels—a page a day is a book in a year—and of course there's so much e-mail that if I let it get ahead of me I may never catch up. There's also my web page, The View From Chaos Manor where I record my own thoughts, and perhaps more importantly, post mail I find interesting. It may be immodest, but I think I have the most interesting mail of anyone in the computer industry.

At home this is simple. I use Microsoft FrontPage 2003 in connection with Outlook 2003. For security reasons, all Outlook messages are converted to plaintext before I see them. In plaintext any included links are still there, but I have to actually want to go look at the place the link points to before I will see it. I only follow links from people I know, or places I am pretty sure of. Incidentally, this is probably the most dangerous thing I do, and using a default browser other than Internet Explorer for this purpose seems indicated. Anyway, once I determine a letter should be posted, I can copy it, and use the paste special feature in FrontPage to transfer it to the mail section of my web site. Then I can add comments if I so choose, and send that page up to the Mazin Zidane server where my site is so admirably maintained. The whole process takes only seconds (plus whatever thought I put into the reply) and I am very used to doing things that way.

When I began to travel with the Mac, I soon discovered that there isn't a good Mac substitute for Microsoft FrontPage, and FrontPage doesn't run on a Mac except in emulation where it ran far too slow in the last version of the Mac PC program. Incidentally, that may have changed: We are getting a new version of the VirtualPC software, and we'll see.

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