Dylan Greene dot com

I downloaded Skype when Scoble first blogged about it on September 12, 2003. I didn't use it because I was afraid - it came from the same team that brought us the spyware/adware hell called Kazaa.

At Gnomedex I was one of a few people that didn't use Skype. Arieanna Foley of Blogaholics and BloggingHelp said she gets all of consulting jobs through Skype. KK+ of Bryght asked me what my Skype address was. That was it. I finally installed it.

My user account is dylan_greene.

Then things went bad... I was going to have it import my Outlook 2003 contacts, but instead I got this fun error:

Access violation at address 00BD3F80 in module 'Skype.exe'. Read of address 049BC000.

What does that mean? What am I supposed to do?

I'm going to try this (conflict with DEP - Data Execution Prevention - the only match on Skype's suppot site), but it requires a reboot, which I don't feel like doing. I already rebooted once this quarter.

Skype (or Windows, not sure who is really responsible for the error message) - can you make your error text a tad more understandable? Thanks!

Wondering where all your hard drive space went? WinDirStat is a free open source program that shows you your disk usage statistics and helps you clean up unneeded files.

The bottom half of the screen is called a treemap, a concept invented by Ben Shneiderman, who happened to be my human-computer interaction professor at Maryland.

In the above treemap you can see that large blue rectangle taking up a lot of space. According to the key on the top right, that is my VirtualPC virtual machine image, which I used to play with an early build of Longhorn. I would have forgotten about that huge file if it weren't for this program.

More information and download: http://windirstat.sourceforge.net/

I've always wanted a way to synchronize my Internet Explorer bookmarks and Firefox favorites across my work computer and home computer, plus my laptop and Media Center PC. All of the machines are behind some form of firewall.

At months of testing different programs, I found the perfect one, and as a bonus, it happens to be free. It's simply called SyncIt and available here: http://www.2go.com.br.

There's no special UI or tool to use. You bookmark pages using your favorite browser as normal. Every few hours SyncIt looks for changes computer and in your private 2go account for changes. If it finds changes it uploads them to the server and downloads the new bookmarks. It also tracks deleted and moved bookmark.

It's great being able to bookmark a page on one machine and not worry about figuring out which machine I used to find that cool page.

I get a lot of email. Over 1000 messages a day. Most of that is spam.

I've tried many different spam-fighting solutions, and selected my favorite... CloudMark SafetyBar.

Instead of using algorithms that try to guess what spam mail looks like, it uses it's vast network of users to tell it what is spam. If enough people flag an email as spam, it's spam for everybody. If enough people say it's not spam, then it's not spam. Pretty simple.

1. It's integrated into Outlook and Outlook Express. I prefer Outlook 2003.
2. Simple UI. On the rare case it misses an email, just press the "Block Spam" button and it goes away.
3. Low CPU usage. Some programs will practically freeze your computer as they examine each email.

The current version has some problems that others I tried didn't solve either. It doesn't block empty emails, and it sometimes misses emails that just contain a graphic.

I recommend giving CloudMark SafetyBar a try, they let you use it for a month for free.

• Screenshots and how it works.
• Download For Outlook and Outlook Express.
• Info for Exchange.
• Support Forums.

For reading blogs I use IntraVnews, which sucks new RSS feed content into folders in Outlook. The two programs work great together in that they do not interferer with each another, but some day I might want my RSS feeds to be spam checked as well, and that doesn't seem possible yet.

Blogger Corey Gouker wrote a plug-in for Internet Explorer called FlashBang which disables Flash when you don't want it.  This blocks all of those annoying Flash-based ads, including those that appear over the text you are trying to read. 

I'm using it now and it works great. 

Corey gave me credit for the name - it was originally called TorchFlash.

More info about FlashBang.