Monday, 15 January 2007 by marstinson.

I was playing around with the Miranda instant messaging client (free download from sourceforge.net). It’s an interesting little utility because it works with several IM services (Yahoo!, AOL, MSN, ICQ, IRC, and Jabber). I haven’t really been into instant messaging for years, though I do use one occasionally. But a multi-protocol client seemed worth checking out, so I did.

My first impression was that it’s definitely plain. Absolutely no eye-candy. Since the version is still less than 1.0, I’m figuring that’s probably to be expected. But in any event, it’s always what’s under the hood that counts the most. First off, Miranda is everything it purports to be. It hooks into all of those services simultaneously, so it’s a kind of one-stop chat device. At least moderately cool, IMO.

As I said earlier, I haven’t really used IMs for years. But over the years, I’ve IM’d on almost all of those services. I was surprised to find that my Yahoo account was still active, even though I haven’t used it in years. And my AOL screen name was still active and working, even though I stopped using AOL more than eight years ago.

That’s a scary thought when you really stop to ponder it (which I did). How many services that you no longer use are still out there just waiting for you to log in again? How much of your personal information is still sitting on someone’s server just waiting for your friendly neighborhood hacker and you’d never know about it because you don’t use that service any more?

I don’t believe there is any legal requirement to do so, but shouldn’t a standard industry practice be to purge client information after a certain period of inactivity? I have no idea what a reasonable period might be, but it’s a sobering thought to know that an account that has been inactive for more than eight years was just sitting there waiting. I was fortunate that there was no major personal information associated with it because I had been very sparing in the information I provided (just an email address and my state and the email address died when I left AOL). But still, what if I HAD provided all of the information that AOL wanted? Scary.

Posted in Applications, Computers | No Comments »

Sunday, 19 November 2006 by marstinson.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I use the Outlook Journal quite a bit. One item that has annoyed me about it is the number of Journal categories that I don’t use and the lack of any capability inside of Outlook to add/remove/change those categories. For example, there are several categories of Journal entries that are suitable for use in an office environment where you use Exchange, but nowhere else. All is not lost, however. You can change the categories (at least a bit) to suit your needs. This involves editing the registry, however, so it is best done with a great deal of caution.

Make a system restore point before proceeding and definitely back up the portion of the registry that you’re going to change before you make any changes. To do this, go to the registry key where you’re going to make changes, right-click on the parent folder and select “Export”. Save the resulting .reg file somewhere easy to locate (it’s only going to be a few kilobytes of data). You can reimport the old data by double-clicking it.

Unless you really feel like messing up everyone else who uses your computer, make the changes in the following registry key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Outlook\Journaling

The sub-keys are the categories for the Journal. You can rename them as you like, although you’ll may want to tinker a bit with the large and small icon entries to get the icon you want associated with it. I have not really messed with those, but as long as you have a good backup… Whatever you do, DO NOT CHANGE OR DELETE PHONE CALL. This is the default category and Outlook has hissy fits when it can’t find it. You can totally hoze yourself by messing with it, so just leave it alone.

Note that you are making changes in the HKEY_CURRENT_USER hive, so whatever changes you make will only affect the currently logged-on account. Which means, oh great guru, that you can create a dummy user account, log on with that account, mess with those entries all you want, get them looking and behaving the way you want them to, export the changes and then import them with the account that you really want to change. Afterward, you can just delete the dummy account and its profile.

Again, make sure that you create a system restore point before making ANY registry changes and create a backup of the registry keys that you’re going to change BEFORE you change them (after you change them would be a good idea, too, but only if they’re working correctly).

Posted in Applications, Computers | No Comments »