8 Ways to Sunday

Stuffed Guys — a scrappy little software company headquartered in Moscow — has their sights set squarely on two of the sacred cows of Web 2.0: Chicago-based web application company 37signals and Google, the 800-pound gorilla of search, traffic analysis, e-mail, and whatever else they feel like doing this week.

Who are these Russian madmen, and what exactly have they got up their sleeves? More importantly, can their products help your business or organization?   (more…)

Nanobox has posted a brief list of CSS hacks that can work to isolate Microsoft’s forthcoming Internet Explorer 7 web browser.

The author, David Hammond, applies a bit of flame retardant to his post by taking great pains to explain how conditional comments are really the best way to manage your IE-only CSS. I’ve found, however, that using CSS hacks in combination with conditional comments is a great way to both keep your main CSS files hack-free and to reduce the headaches of dealing with IE-specific stylesheets.

For example, a couple of sites I’ve worked on / am working on use CSS files both for IE7 only and for IE6 and under. Using David’s *+html hack, however, would allow me to target certain rules in an IE-only stylesheet just at IE7. Very handy, indeed.

Over in the TextDrive forums today, I discovered a contest being held at Interknox to name a band. If you pick the winning name, you get a pre-release copy of the band’s album.

My suggestions seem to have gotten stuck in IK’s moderation queue thanks to all the links, so you won’t find them in the comments just yet. They’re listed below, so that you may marvel at my awesome creativity :

Elemental Pornstars

For some reason, this is the first thing that occurred to me as I was listening to the demo track that was offered for inspiration. Appears to be completely unused by anyone (no Google hits), perhaps for good reason.

The Riff Gypsies

I like the sound of it, but I’m pretty sure there’s a band named The Gypsies already out there.

Hammer ‘n Tongs

Has a nice double meaning that goes along with the band’s sound, but is already used for the name of a UK video production company.

Flabergast

Doesn’t seem to be in use by a band, at least not according to Google.

Flabergasm

The word is out there, but not associated with a band. Drawback: makes the band sound like a group of fat fetishists.

Head on over to the Interknox post about the contest, download the demo track, and take a shot at naming that band.

TBS has cooked up a few amusing promos for their Lord of the Rings showings this weekend. Here’s my personal favorite, via YouTube:

Since when does TBS do slash fanfic?

Update

Turns out the embedded video above doesn’t agree with the Opera web browser. Opera users can still watch the commercial on the YouTube site, however.

Windows Startup Inspector has an easy-to-use interface (click to enlarge)

I’ve been using Windows Startup Inspectorfor for over a year now. It’s a great tool that I’d recommend to any intermediate or advanced Windows user. It not only helps you reign in the hidden startup tasks that can bog down your computer’s performance, but also provides valuable advice on what can be safely discarded.

Startup Inspector goes far beyond similar tools, which just list your startup tasks without providing further explanation. Press the “consult” button in the toolbar, and Startup Inspector fetches information from an online database of known startup programs. Each of the startup programs on your own computer are then flagged with an easy-to-interpret icon that tells you whether they are essential, optional, dangerous, or unknown:

Click image to enlarge

Armed with this information, it’s easy to disable undesired startup tasks and even re-enable them later if you change your mind.

The first time I used Startup Inspector I noticed an immediate improvement in my computer’s performance. With so much software today installing “stealth” tasks that start along with Windows and run in the background, a tool like this is essential. Startup Inspector is easily the best of the bunch — and it’s free.

It’s important to note that, while Startup Inspector is very good at what it does, it is not an anti-spyware tool. To get complete spyware protection for Windows XP, I’d recommend Microsoft’s own Windows Defender (currently in beta). If you use an older version of Windows, try Spybot Search & Destroy or Lavasoft Ad-Aware. Both of the non-Microsoft programs provide very good spyware protection, but Windows Defender is geared more toward the novice user. If you’re an advanced user who is often called upon to help your less-savvy friends, I’d recommend installing Windows Defender on their machines once you’ve finished cleaning them up with the other tools.