TidBITS#671/17-Mar-03
=====================
Every so often, a utility comes along that is so useful and so
well-implemented that it's painful to use Macs that don't have
it. For Adam, that utility is LaunchBar, a simple yet powerful
application launcher with great potential. Also this week, we
offer Mac OS X troubleshooting advice wrapped in a plea for a
Conflict Catcher-like utility, discuss the release of BBEdit
7.0.3, note Chimera's renaming, and mourn the demise of
Caffeine Software.
Topics:
MailBITS/17-Mar-03
Tools We Use: LaunchBar
Wanted: Conflict Catcher for Mac OS X
<http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-671.html>
<ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/issues/2003/TidBITS#671_17-Mar-03.etx>
Copyright 2003 TidBITS Electronic Publishing. All rights reserved.
Information: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Comments: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
---------------------------------------------------------------
This issue of TidBITS sponsored in part by:
* READERS LIKE YOU! Help keep TidBITS going via our voluntary <------ NEW!
contribution program. Special thanks this week to Tak Kameoka,
Stephen Carson, and Charles Hayden-Gilbert for their support!
<http://www.tidbits.com/about/support/contributors.html>
* SMALL DOG ELECTRONICS: G4 PowerBooks On Sale! <-------------------- NEW!
PowerBook G4/667 only $1,849! | PowerBook G4/800 only $2,299!
PowerBook 15-inch G4/1 GHz with SuperDrive $2,499!
Visit: <http://www.smalldog.com/tb/> 802-496-7171
* SIX DEGREES: Automatically link messages, files and people so <---- NEW!
you can navigate through projects quickly. Great timesaver!
Works with Microsoft Entourage and Outlook. Free trial version!
=======> <http://www.creo.com/sixdegrees/index.asp?id=tidbits>
* Memory To Go -- We have RAM for all your Macintosh memory needs! <- NEW!
PowerBook 12" & Flat iMac DDR ---> 256MB: $37 or 512MB: $109
iBook/Titanium ------------------> 256MB: $40 or 512MB: $112
Mention TidBITS $2 off shipping! <http://www.memorytogo.com/tb>
---------------------------------------------------------------
MailBITS/17-Mar-03
------------------
**BBEdit 7.0.3 Squashes Bugs** -- Bare Bones Software has released
BBEdit 7.0.3, a minor but worthwhile update to their powerful text
and HTML editing software. Along with a number of bug fixes (see
the full release notes for a complete list), BBEdit 7.0.3 provides
a new option in the "Text Files: Opening" preference panel that
optionally links character set encoding to the HTML or XML
character set of the file. (Being able to turn that option off
should let BBEdit open documents which contain data that can't be
correctly represented - something we do daily here at TidBITS!)
BBEdit 7.0.3 also works around a limitation in Macromedia
Dreamweaver MX so non-ASCII characters can correctly be passed
back and forth to BBEdit, and turns off the default application
preference for QuickTime playback to permit BBEdit to open items
(such as .m3u and SMIL files) that QuickTime considers its own.
Two other improved features: there's a new HTML placeholder for
inserting the short user name in Mac OS X, and the Close Current
Tag command is a bit smarter. The BBEdit 7.0.3 update is free to
registered users and is a 15.1 MB download. [ACE]
<http://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/>
<http://www.barebones.com/support/bbedit/current_notes.shtml>
<http://www.barebones.com/support/bbedit/updates.shtml>
**Caffeine Software Suspends Operations** -- On 03-Mar-03,
Caffeine Software, makers of TIFFany, Curator, Cycles, and the
elegant PixelNhance, suspended operations. The note on Caffeine
Software's home page gives no indication as to why the company
closed down, and our inquiries haven't turned up any additional
information. After a week or so, Caffeine Software modified the
home page to add a link to a 57.1 MB disk image containing the
latest official versions of all their applications. If you don't
own TIFFany, it's still possible to request a trial license from
Caffeine Software's license server, although I don't know if it
will actually expire in a month as it claimed. Their other
applications are free as far as I can tell, and are fully
functional. I'm mainly sad to see PixelNhance go; it's a slick
and simple image-editing program with a fun interface that makes
an excellent addition to iPhoto's editing tools. Still, I'm
pleased that Caffeine Software saw fit to make their programs
available at the end in this way; perhaps they'll see life again
at a new company. [ACE]
<http://www.caffeinesoft.com/>
**Chimera Becomes Camino** -- For legal reasons, the Mac OS X open
source Web browser known as Chimera has been renamed Camino, and
the team has released version 0.7. New features in Camino 0.7
include a Download Manager, compatibility with URL Manager Pro
thanks to support for the Menu Sharing Protocol, a global history
of visited sites in the sidebar, a Send Link menu item for mailing
links, support for dragging of images and links to other
applications and to the Desktop, the capability to show local
FTP and Web servers via Rendezvous, and many more improvements
that you can read about in the full release notes. Although I
like Camino's tabbed browsing and sprightly performance, after
living with Camino as my default browser for a week, I find myself
longing for Safari's raw speed and Google search field, and for
Internet Explorer's subscriptions and industry-leading URL auto-
completion. Still, it's great to see the Camino team continuing
to add features and improve the browser - competition helps
the entire field continue to evolve and improve. Camino 0.7
is a 7.6 MB download. [ACE]
<http://mozilla.org/projects/camino/>
<http://mozilla.org/projects/camino/releasenotes.html>
Tools We Use: LaunchBar
-----------------------
by Adam C. Engst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Way back in the dawn of computing, there was a word processor
called WordStar. Many people who used it heavily claimed that its
keyboard controls had become embedded in their fingertips, but I
never quite understood what they meant. Thanks to the Mac OS X
utility LaunchBar, written by Norbert Heger of Objective
Development, I now know what they were talking about.
LaunchBar is a launcher utility. Apple provides plenty of ways
of launching applications in Mac OS X, such as double-clicking
application or document icons in the Finder, clicking icons in the
Dock, or choosing an item from the Recent Items menu. But all of
these approaches - and most other launcher utilities - fall down
in one way or another.
Double-clicking an application is easy and obvious, but it
requires that you navigate to that application in the Finder,
which in turn requires that you know where the application is
located. Clicking icons in the Dock works fine for a small number
of frequently used applications, but only for a small number, and
you must set them up in advance. The Recent Items menu implements
an undeniably good idea - speeding access to those items you
happen to have used in the recent past - but as soon as you want
to launch an application that's not in the Recent Applications
list, you're back to hunting through the Finder. Worse, you
never know if a seldom-used application will be in that list
until you look.
LaunchBar solves all of these problems.
**Type to Launch** -- Although there are multiple ways to activate
LaunchBar, such as clicking its menu bar icon, Dock icon, or
window, the way most people use it is by pressing a system-wide
keyboard shortcut. You can pick from five pre-defined
possibilities; I use Command-Space. Once you've activated
LaunchBar, you type a few characters from the name of the
application you want to launch, verify briefly in LaunchBar's
unobtrusive window that it has associated your typing with the
correct application, and press Return. The entire process takes
only a second, no matter what application you may be launching.
Let's compare LaunchBar's approach with the other methods of
launching applications. Because LaunchBar automatically scans
your hard disk for applications when it launches, it always knows
exactly which ones you have installed, and it lets you launch any
of them without the least bit of hunting through folders in the
Finder. Since it scans automatically, you don't have to set it
up explicitly, as you do with the Dock and many other launcher
utilities (although you can control where it looks when scanning
for new items to make available for launching - more on that
in a bit). And finally, it doesn't care if you last launched
an application yesterday or a year ago - the last access time
has almost no meaning to LaunchBar.
LaunchBar also doesn't stop at launching applications. It can open
documents in their associated applications. It can open folders
in the Finder, and you can even navigate through folders with the
arrow keys right in LaunchBar. It can open specific preference
panes in System Preferences, or specific tools in Karelia's
Watson. It can open bookmarks from any Web browser in your default
Web browser or, in the latest version of LaunchBar, in a specific
Web browser. It can even "launch" email addresses; that is, it can
create a new email message to the selected address using your
default email program.
<http://www.karelia.com/watson/>
You're probably wondering how LaunchBar knows that if you type BB
that you want it to launch BBEdit. The answer is simple - it's
magic. Okay, it just seems that way - it's actually an intelligent
adaptive algorithm, which means that LaunchBar makes an educated
guess. It's pretty good - if I type IPNM, it guesses correctly at
IPNetMonitor X. The problem comes when the abbreviation you type
can reasonably match multiple applications, documents, bookmarks,
or email addresses, at which point you must scroll through the
list of choices LaunchBar displays and pick the correct one.
So, if I type RE and want Retrospect Express, I have to pick
it manually once or twice so LaunchBar knows that I don't want
Retrospect, or Retrospect Client, or ResEdit, or one of the
zillion Kagi Register applications from numerous shareware
programs on my hard disk. And yes, there's a way to specify
mappings that LaunchBar could never guess, such as MAIL for
Microsoft Entourage.
This adaptive algorithm is what sets LaunchBar apart. When it's
just starting fresh, it makes intelligent guesses, but when it
guesses wrong, it learns from its mistakes and constantly adapts
itself to the user's idiosyncrasies. It's also forgiving - I make
typing errors in my abbreviations all the time, but as long as
LaunchBar does the right thing, I'm happy. At worst, my mistake
will force me to teach LaunchBar about a different abbreviation
mapping later.
Using LaunchBar's keyboard-based approach to launching files turns
out to be incredibly quick, but even better, it turns out to be
fairly universal. Like all Mac users, Tonya arranges her Mac the
way she wants, which always befuddles me when I sit down at it.
No longer do I have to ask where she's stored something or use
Find to locate it. Now I just hit Command-Space on her Mac,
type an abbreviation, and let LaunchBar work its usual magic.
So, LaunchBar actually helps provide a consistent interface for
multiple Macs that may be set up in very different ways behind
the scenes.
**Configuration** -- Where does LaunchBar find the set of
applications, documents, and folders to match to abbreviations
you type? If you choose Open Configuration from LaunchBar's
Configuration menu, you see a somewhat complex window that shows
just which folders LaunchBar scans. You can add folders or files
by dragging them into the window, and you can turn the pre-defined
folders on and off with the checkbox next to each one. For
instance, since I have Apple's Developer Tools installed,
LaunchBar was set to let me open large numbers of developer
documentation files; since I'm not interested in opening them
quickly or having them compete for my abbreviations, I simply
turned them off. (On the other side of the coin, Contributing
Editor Matt Neuburg said that without LaunchBar's special
awareness of the Cocoa documentation files, it would be basically
impossible for him to do any development work at all.) I did,
however, add all my Eudora address book files in the Nicknames
folder, since LaunchBar didn't know about them by default.
Realistically, I suspect most users will never even delve into
LaunchBar's Configuration window, but if you find it constantly
suggesting items you never want to see again, a trip into the
Configuration window to disable or delete the folder that holds
those files is worth the effort.
**Further Refinements** -- Within this basic functionality,
LaunchBar offers numerous tweaks that most users probably won't
use, but which can make a huge difference for those that can
utilize them. If you press Option-Return after selecting an
application, LaunchBar hides all other applications while
launching. Press Command-Return, and LaunchBar shows the selected
application in the Finder. LaunchBar supports drag & drop, so
you can drag a file to LaunchBar's window to open it with the
selected application, and you can even start dragging, then type
LaunchBar's activation key and the necessary abbreviation, then
drop the file on LaunchBar's window. This could be handy for
opening an HTML file with BBEdit, for instance, when double-
clicking would normally open in Safari. Drag & drop can also be
used with folders to move or copy files, make aliases and so on.
For those who dislike the Dock and keep it hidden, LaunchBar can
show a list of running applications. Press LaunchBar's keyboard
shortcut twice; once the list is visible, you can arrow through
it, click the mouse, or use a scroll wheel to select an
application, after which releasing the Command key brings
it to the front.
**Extending the Metaphor** -- LaunchBar usually supports bookmarks
and email addresses by looking into the bookmark or address book
files for the various Web browsers and email programs. However, in
situations where it can't read the program's special file format
(as with Outlook Express, Entourage, and Mailsmith), you can work
around the problem by exporting a text file and telling LaunchBar
to scan that file for email addresses.
But this gets one to thinking. Wouldn't it be nice to find a phone
number or postal address for someone in your contact database by
typing an abbreviation for their name? LaunchBar could display all
contact information for that person, and it could perhaps send
selected bits of that information to different applications. So,
pressing E might create a new email address in your default email
program, pressing P might dial the phone using your modem, and
pressing A could put the postal address on the clipboard for
pasting into other applications.
Those features would be welcome, but even cooler would be an
XML-based abstraction layer that would let anyone teach LaunchBar
how to understand new types of data and act on them, perhaps using
AppleScript to send the information to the desired application.
**Crossing the Bar** -- I'll admit it. I'm utterly addicted, and
like those WordStar fans of yesteryear, I find myself typing
Command-Space on just about any Mac I'm using. And when it doesn't
work because LaunchBar isn't installed, I feel like an addict
denied his fix. I'm even unreasonably irritated when the Mac is
running Mac OS 9 and couldn't possibly be running LaunchBar.
LaunchBar has worked its way into my neurons, and I'm all the more
productive because of it. It's absolutely worth a try, and that's
especially true if you use lots of applications, you're primarily
a keyboard user, or you're coming to Mac OS X from the Unix
command-line world.
LaunchBar 3.2.9 costs $20 for individuals, $40 for business users,
and there's a trial version available that gives you LaunchBar's
full feature set, but only works for seven activations per
session. It's a tiny 246K download.
<http://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/>
PayBITS: If learning about LaunchBar makes using Mac OS X as easy
for you as it did for Adam, why not drop him a few bucks in thanks?
<https://www.paypal.com/xclick/business=ace%40tidbits.com>
<http://www.amazon.com/paypage/PWJBFZMFO7LKH>
Read more about PayBITS: <http://www.tidbits.com/paybits/>
Wanted: Conflict Catcher for Mac OS X
-------------------------------------
by Adam C. Engst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Here's the good news. Mac OS X doesn't suffer from the same sort
of conflicts that Mac OS 9 did. You will seldom, if ever, find
that installing a new piece of software causes some other program
to act in an unnatural, demon-possessed fashion. Apple promised
that level of reliability, and they delivered.
Now here's the bad news. Mac OS X has its own soft underbelly, and
an appropriate bit of file corruption in the wrong place can cause
all sorts of wacky problems that can be devilishly difficult to
track down. Here are a few quick examples I've experienced.
When I upgraded Tonya's Power Mac G4 (QuickSilver) to Jaguar,
using the Archive & Install option to get a nice clean version,
the Finder would launch, then quit, launch, then quit. The Mac was
unusable, or it would have been if Tonya hadn't had a second user
account that she used for documentation. When I logged into that
second user, everything worked fine. To make a long story short,
I discovered that moving Tonya's ~/Library/Preferences folder out
to the Desktop and logging in again solved the problem (remember
from Kirk McElhearn's command line articles that the ~ is a
shortcut for your user's home folder). Then, a note from Fetch
author Jim Matthews on a mailing list I'm on saved me from the
tedious effort of tracking down the culprit, which turned out
to be the com.apple.LaunchServices.plist file. I logged in as
the root user, deleted that file, and Tonya was able to log in
to her Mac again. Marital strife ("You did what to my Mac?!?")
narrowly averted!
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbser=1238>
This turned out not to be an isolated incident. Aside from Jim
having had the same problem, when my parents upgraded their Power
Mac G4 Cube to Jaguar, the problem happened again with my mother's
account, necessitating an unscheduled evening visit to restore the
Mac to working order. Once again, I enabled the root user, deleted
com.apple.LaunchServices.plist, and the problem was gone. It even
renewed my parents' faith in my skills and their belief that my
expensive education hadn't been for naught. Phew!
A similar problem appeared on my Mac recently as well. I wrote
about the Maxtor Personal Storage 5000 FireWire hard drives for
Macworld a few months back because the Maxtor drives have this
neat button that, when pushed, launches Retrospect Express and
performs a backup. But at some point, well after I'd handed in my
review to Macworld, the buttons on a pair of Maxtor drives stopped
working, first when using my iBook and somewhat later on my Power
Mac G4. Eventually I managed to get in touch with the right people
at Maxtor, and after they were unable to reproduce the problem,
it was escalated to the programmer who had written the driver
for the button, John Brisbin. John and I verified that everything
was installed correctly, and that the driver and notification
application were loaded and running, but it still wasn't working.
<http://www.maxtor.com/en/products/external/personal_storage_5000/>
Then came the moment of insight. John had me check to see if the
Retrospect Express plug-in that did the work was set to launch
Retrospect Express in the "Open with" pane of the Get Info window.
It wasn't... on either machine, and in fact, the pop-up menu
offering other choices for programs that could open the plug-in
contained utterly random files that weren't even applications.
On his recommendation, I first threw out my user's
~/Library/Caches/com.apple.LaunchServices.UserCache.csstore file,
which is a cache of file types that are associated with specific
applications for the user, and when that didn't help, I tossed
/Library/Caches/com.apple.LaunchServices.LocalCache.csstore, which
is the system-level cache of associations that apply to all users.
A restart was necessary at that point, but when the Mac came back
up, the plug-in knew it was linked to Retrospect Express again,
and the button worked perfectly.
Two final minor examples. Just a few days ago, someone complained
to me that iPhoto wouldn't show his Keywords window, and another
person complained that their copy of iPhoto no longer played
slideshows. In both cases, throwing out the com.apple.iPhoto.plist
file in ~/Library/Preferences eliminated the problem instantly.
**Why We Need Conflict Catcher** -- You can see where I'm going
with all this. We may no longer have conflicts between programs
in the same way we did with Mac OS 9, but it's clear that Mac OS X
and its applications are just as vulnerable to problems in their
support files as they ever were. There's nothing new here -
corrupted preferences files caused all sorts of problems in
Mac OS 9 too.
What has changed is that Mac OS X has so many more files, and
stores them in so many more locations, that it's difficult to
determine where the problem may lie. Let me tell you another
story that illustrates this.
A few days ago, the text in my Eudora toolbar and InDesign
palettes, both of which use the Geneva font, suddenly became
horribly ugly and jagged, although Geneva-formatted text in other
applications looked fine. I didn't do anything that could have
caused that change as far as I knew, so I immediately chalked it
up to a corrupted preference file or font cache file. Logging into
the second user on my Mac proved that the problem was related to
my user's settings, since the problem didn't occur in Eudora or
InDesign for that user.
But then I spent about 45 minutes pulling preferences files,
fonts, cache files and more, all in vain. I even extracted my
user's entire Library folder and let Mac OS X rebuild a new one;
no change. The entire process was becoming highly frustrating,
as I had to make a change, log out, log back in, launch InDesign,
verify the problem still existed, and move on to the next test. I
consulted Ted Landau's excellent book, Mac OS X Disaster Relief,
which suggested deleting the system font cache. Even that didn't
help. Finally, while reading Ted's discussion, I had the
brainstorm that perhaps something had happened to my font
smoothing settings. That was it - somehow the "Turn off text
smoothing for font sizes" setting in the General preferences pane
had been reset to 9 point, whereas it had to be set to 8 point
for Eudora toolbars and InDesign palettes to look good. All my
rebuilding of preferences files didn't help because it kept going
back to 9 point. If I'd had a tool like Conflict Catcher that
could have eliminated all the preference and cache files from
the equation quickly, troubleshooting wouldn't have taken nearly
as long.
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/032116847X/tidbitselectro00>
I hope all these stories make it clear why we need a utility that
can automate standard troubleshooting procedures. In short, we
need Casady & Greene's Conflict Catcher, but we need it for Mac OS
X. Conflict Catcher has basically all the necessary functionality
for Mac OS 9, and as much as I'm sure people thought it wouldn't
be needed under Mac OS X, recent experience shows the opposite.
For those that aren't familiar with it, Conflict Catcher speeds
up troubleshooting conflicts in Mac OS 9 by moving files out of
functional folders (Control Panels, Extensions, Fonts,
Preferences, and any others you specify) to disable them. Then
you reboot, verify if the problem exists or has disappeared, and
continue the process. Conflict Catcher keeps narrowing the set
of possible culprits until, after some number of reboots, it
can point the finger directly at one or more problematic files.
Obviously, Conflict Catcher in Mac OS X would have to look at
various different preferences and cache folders, act as root to
move certain files, and automate the verification step, but
those are all functions that the program had under Mac OS 9.
<http://www.conflictcatcher.com/>
Automating the process of disabling and re-enabling files isn't
rocket science, and an enterprising shareware developer could
easily step into the gap here. It would be great to go beyond
what Conflict Catcher could do and apply some intelligence to the
otherwise brute-force process as well, so you could say that your
problem related to iPhoto, for instance, and it would take a quick
first pass on disabling those files most likely to be related to
iPhoto. We'll be discussing what such features a troubleshooting
tool should have on TidBITS Talk; feel free to join in.
<http://www.tidbits.com/search/talk.html>
**Go to the Root** -- While we're on the topic of troubleshooting,
let's talk briefly about the root user that figured in my first
two examples. For those who don't know, the root user is a user
that exists on your Mac and that has access to every file. There's
nothing the root user can't do, and that makes it as dangerous
as it is useful. When you're logged in as the root user, nothing
prevents you from deleting even files that Mac OS X needs to
operate. So, although it's reasonable to use the root user on
occasion, it's important that you do so only when necessary,
and leave it disabled the rest of the time.
How do you access the root user? Launch NetInfo Manager from
the Utilities folder inside your Applications folder. From the
Security menu, choose Authenticate, and enter your administrator
password. Go back to the Security menu and choose Enable Root
User. If necessary, NetInfo Manager prompts you to give the
root user a non-trivial password. Open System Preferences,
click the Accounts icon (not My Account!) and turn off
"Log in automatically" (you may have to click the lock button
at the bottom to make changes). Turning off automatic login
isn't necessary, but I find it's a good reminder to disable
the root user when you're done. Now log out, and in the login
window, log in as "root" (you may need to click the Other button
to get username and password fields). Once you're logged in as
root, you can delete files in any user's folder, so be careful.
Do what you need to do, log out and back in to test your changes,
and then disable the root user in NetInfo Manager by choosing
Authenticate from the Security menu, entering your administrator
password, and choosing Disable Root User from the Security menu.
Then return to the Accounts preferences pane and turn automatic
login back on if you want.
For those Unix-heads wondering why I chose to enable the root
user in NetInfo Manager rather than use the sudo command from the
command line to delete the offending file, in both of these cases,
I didn't know exactly what file to delete at first, and I needed
the flexibility of the Finder. Had I known for sure what I had to
do, the command line might have been faster.
**Split Personalities** -- I want to leave you with a
recommendation I now make to everyone who uses Mac OS X. These
and other problems have convinced me that you simply _must_ create
another user on your system with administrator privileges. You
don't have to use it for anything other than troubleshooting, and
in fact you shouldn't use it much at all. I call mine "Ghost in
the Machine" (ghost for short), and I give it the same password
as my main account so I don't forget it.
When you're faced with some sort of a problem, log out, and log
into your ghost account to see if the problem is still there. It's
a lot like holding down the Shift key in Mac OS 9 to boot without
extensions. If the problem is gone, you know it's somehow specific
to your user, which lets you limit your troubleshooting to files
that could affect only one user on the system (basically, look in
your ~/Library folder). If the problem still exists, you know it's
not limited to your user, and you should look higher up, such as
in /Library and /System/Library).
If you can tell that a problem affects all users, it's worth
rebooting with the Shift key down to perform a Safe Boot and put
Mac OS X into Safe Mode, which does a number of things. First,
Safe Boot forces a disk check equivalent to using Disk Utility's
Repair Disk function or booting in single user mode by holding
down Command-S at startup, then entering "fsck -fy" at the command
line. Safe Boot also loads only required kernel extensions and
runs only Apple-installed startup items in /Library/Startup Items
and /System/Library/Startup Items (note that these startup items
are different from login items, which are applications and
documents opened at startup by each user). There's no need to
run in Safe Mode normally, but it's a handy way to perform a disk
check and verify that no third party kernel extensions or startup
items are causing your problems.
The problems we encounter in Mac OS X may be new, but the ways we
troubleshoot those problems remain much the same. All we need is
the knowledge of how to apply those troubleshooting methods and
the tools and techniques to make troubleshooting something anyone
can do. Otherwise, many people will be echoing my father when he
asked, "And just how would we have fixed this problem if you
hadn't been around?"
PayBITS: Are Adam's troubleshooting tips in this article going
to save your bacon someday? Say thanks in advance via PayBITS!
<https://www.paypal.com/xclick/business=ace%40tidbits.com>
<http://www.amazon.com/paypage/PJY14IW7KVKSN>
Read more about PayBITS: <http://www.tidbits.com/paybits/>
$$
Non-profit, non-commercial publications may reprint articles if
full credit is given. Others please contact us. We don't guarantee
accuracy of articles. Caveat lector. Publication, product, and
company names may be registered trademarks of their companies.
This file is formatted as setext. For more information send email
to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. A file will be returned shortly.
For information: how to subscribe, where to find back issues,
and more, email <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. TidBITS ISSN 1090-7017.
Send comments and editorial submissions to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Back issues available at: <http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/>
And: <ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/issues/>
Full text searching available at: <http://www.tidbits.com/search/>
-------------------------------------------------------------------
