Free Tivos:

The digital video recorder company on Friday will give away 40GB Series 2 recorders to Comcast customers who bring their cable bill and a gift for The Family Giving Tree charity to TiVo headquarters in Alviso, Calif. The giveaway will last from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., or until they run out of units, and will be limited to one recorder per household.

Service fees are not included the giveaway, which is only for first-time TiVo owners.

I've got WordPerfect 5 on 5-inch floppies. There aren't even any dead computers in my house with floppy drives that big. I suppose it's time to send the discs to the great disk drive in teh sky.

Okay, my old employer is giving me back access to my email and other computer clusters for 24 hours. So I have download ALL of my email archives and other files in this period of time.

I can do the computer file stuff. It will be a pain, but I can manage it.

However, the IMAP email is a PITA. Anyone know if there is a way through Eudora, Thunderbird, or other program where I can download all the IMAP folders together and without needing to do it folder by folder?

Is there anyone who knows Javascript around here?

It's for something I can look up in an O'Reilly book if I can manage to hold the book without repeatedly hitting myself over the head with it....

eta: I think my real problem is that I need to go for a walk. Or else get lunch. Maybe both.

Adware cannibals feast on each other

Companies that use free software downloads to target Web surfers with annoying ads are turning on each other to keep customers--and the cash they generate--for themselves.

The tactic is in the spotlight in a little-noticed legal dispute unfolding in Seattle. Caribbean-based ad company Avenue Media last month accused New York-based DirectRevenue of using competing software to detect and delete Avenue Media's Internet Optimizer program from its customers' computers.

According to the Nov. 24 complaint, DirectRevenue's software detects Internet Optimizer and then sends a command to "kill" the program, a process that deletes its files from the PC registry and from the computer altogether. Avenue Media said DirectRevenue's tactics have caused it to lose about 1 million customers--about half its installed base--and as much as $10,000 a day in revenue.

Hee hee. Let's hope they all destroy each other....

Okay, so if anyone needs to know how to download IMAP email folders quickly, Mozilla's Thunderbird works a whole lot better than Eudora.

Avenue Media said DirectRevenue's tactics have caused it to lose about 1 million customers--about half its installed base--and as much as $10,000 a day in revenue.

Interesting how they refer to the victims who've unwittingly downloaded their spyware as "customers."

Anyone know how to outsmart an internet form that insists on adding a backslash in front of an apostrophe?

What sort of form? Does it add the backslash when you type the apostrophe? Or when the form reloads after you've entered stuff?

If it's the latter... then it's a bug in the display of the page you're on, but whatever you entered should be OK.

Databases such as MySQL will add a backslash to "escape" an apostrophe to avoid confusion with the apostrophes that are used to delineate the beginning and end of a field. (Otherwise, if you enter "Bob's Drive In" it would be stored as 'Bob's Drive In' and the software would think it should just be 'Bob') When the saved data is presented to the user the backslash should be stripped out by the code of the page you're on, but it's still stored with the backslash.

eta: but if you have to resubmit the form, you should still take the backslash out.

eta2: gotta run....

It is the latter. Okay, I'll submit it as is.