Here's an interesting Wall Street Journal article about a new feature of Windows XP's Internet Explorer. IE will dynamically add links to a web page with the links pointing to various Microsoft services. These "Smart Tags" can also be used by companies to add their links to the pages you are viewing. Somewhat like what I was talking about a few days ago with embedded ads, this will be a way for Microsoft and others to "enhance" your Internet experience.

It makes me ashame for having *any* Microsoft product on my computer. And I'm really tempted to trash Internet Explorer, which would cripple my web experience. Ah, if only iCab were SSL were fixed! I miss Netscape 4.7. Didn't have the most up-to-date features but it was still very nice.

This reminds me that no other web browser does histories well. In just about every browser, when you go to a page it saves it as an entry in some Go menu, listing the pages in chronological order. What Netscape does better is that it has a separate history for each window, so the Go menu changes depending on the window. I tend to have several windows open, each on a separate "track" -- news or sports or work or just browsing or reading -- and it's nice to be able to go back on each track without having to sift through a menu with entries for another track.

Another thing Netscape did well was that when you do go to a previous page via the Go menu, the history "current page" pointer is set to the page you just went to. So now you can go forward or backward exactly along the path you had before. With Internet Explorer you can choose an old page in the Go menu and it re-adds it as the topmost entry in the Go menu. You can't go forward and when you go back you go back to the page you were in last, rather than the page you were in last when you were at this page before. (It's hard to explain but it's very intuitive.)

iCab is a little worse than Internet Explorer. It has the same history behaviour as IE but the Go menu is split up by days, so to get to recent entries you have a submenu to navigate to.

There was also news that AOL/Time Warner is going to refocus Netscape as some sort of Internet hub company. Whatever it is, it doesn't look good for the future of Netscape Navigator, although version 6 was already a bad sign for the once dominant browser...

I finally got the OTM working with Mac OS X's Java 2. It required updating some of our libraries to Java 2 compatible versions. I run the applications from Terminal so that console output goes to the Terminal window instead of the Console window (where it would be mixed with the output of the other Java applications). I haven't used it much but it seems quite stable and at least I haven't had any kernel panics. There are a couple of bugs still, which may require me fixing other people's code for Java 2, not a pleasant prospect. Now I'm waiting for System 9.2 before I reformat the old System partition...

Hmm, at the rate I'm spending money on postage, it looks like I'll have committed $200 to $300 to give away my old stuff. Mailing items USPS first class is not that cheap and some games are surprisingly heavy. Still, at least they're going to people who'll appreciate them and I made room in my closets...

Meanwhile at work, our Vice President asked everyone in the division to take vacation time this quarter (June through August). He suggested the July 4th week would be a good time. Now, most everyone in the trenches had no idea how this would help our bottom line. When I related this to Shannon, he said that vacation time is a liability for a company, which counts in the Profit and Loss, so if everyone takes vacation it'll reduce Loss which makes it look better. This only really helps for one quarter, so it's usually only done if a company thinks that an economic downturn is temporary.