The Misadventures of Dan

Peer into the mind of Dan as he tries to build an MP3 Player for his PDA and searches for the next thing in his life be it an electrical engineering job or graduate school.

Thursday, September 18, 2003

.:1:16:09 AM:.

Popup Killer Alternatives

Yet another e-mail sent out: :P

Dan's Guide to Killing Dreaded Popups (or Popup Killer Guide)

So ya wanna stop popups from popping up? We should probably define the terms, a popup really means a popup ad, meaning it contains some information you don't want to see. A popup can also be part of a website or webpage where it actually contains stuff you want-like a form or pictures, etc. There is a difference between the two; the former (the popup ad) usually popups when you load the page without you ever doing anything, the later displays a window when you click on something like a link

K I get it, now what?

There are multiple solutions of course :) But don't worry they're all easy to try out and best of all they're free! Woohoo! :) Here are some picks:

Again these aren't the only choices, there are others that you can look for

AnalogX POW

This program runs in the background (in your taskbar). As far as I can tell, its only for Windows and the other thing is you have to teach it to recognize the difference between the two popups. Meaning the popup ad has to show up at least once, you then click on the icon and add the popup window to the list. Be careful not to randomly add stuff or it will close your browser even if its not an ad. I think it checks the title of the window, Ads usually have the same title unless they're smart... Anyways its a free download so check it out.

Slimbrowser

This works like a plugin or a shell on top of Internet Explorer. You basically install it and then it lets you do a bunch of stuff including Popup killing. It usually distinguishes the ads as those windows you didn't click to open. It can do this by examining the HTML and Javascript code to see how the popup window opened. It has a bunch of other features like 'Tabbed Browsing'. This is a nice alternative if you don't want to take a step into to open source software. It does have the disadvantage that if you change or upgrade your Internet Explorer, you'll have to install it again-but its not much of a hassle.

Mozilla/Firebird

I personally use Mozilla Firebird as my regular browser. There are multiple reasons but in terms of popup killing-its beyond reproach. You can set it to allow certain sites to have popups that way, if you know a site has actual information on their popup they won't get blocked. If you go to Mozilla's main site, you need to download the latest Mozilla. This can be confusing but Mozilla to Mozilla Firebird is Internet Explorer to Slimbrowser. Meaning you need to download and install Mozilla first (its the one that's usually labelled Mozilla 1.XX where XX is a number) then download and install Firebird

Monday, September 15, 2003

.:1:29:18 AM:.

A plug for Judith Lam

The other day I had a chance to help out Judith; an amazing friend with with an amazing talent and voice. Her site was designed by a good friend yet another great artist! Go check them out. Try out some of her music and tell me its not good :P

.:1:24:51 AM:.

Busy Weekend

Spent some time at Di's new place checking out her computer situation. Also in talks about doing some stuff for EMI. I've been hearing a lot about slow computers and generally when someone tells you "Oh, my computer is slow do you know what may be wrong?" The first thing that comes to mind is spyware. Spyware and Adware are basically (little) programs that keep a record of things you do (hence the 'spy' in spyware) or displays popups windows without you having to surf to any pages with popups (hence the 'ad' in adware :D). This is insanely frustrating and I totally understand.

So what to do about spyware and adware? Well first of all you need a good adware spyware remover. They sort of work like anti-virus programs. They scan your computer and try to recognize malicious (lets just go out and say it... EVIL) programs by the way programs behave otherwise known as their signatures. These removers need to be updated just like your normal anti-virus programs. Adware is pretty good, they have a free version you can download and stuff. There are a few others but I haven't had the chance to try them out fully. Next, get a better browser. One that doesn't have as many holes as Internet Explorer such as Mozilla or Opera! Try a search for browser alternatives. Worse for worse you can uninstall them if you don't like them. Most people don't even know they exist.

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