Web Bugs and HTML formatted mail in general caught my attention last month. If your email software supports HTML style messages, as most do, then you can send and receive email messages that look just like web pages. Microsoft’s Outlook Express makes it easy to put pictures, links and formatted text in such messages, but if you want some of the other things like sound and items created with Java Script you have to be able to do the coding yourself.

To be able to enter the code, you need to be able to work with the source code. If you do not see three tabs in your New Message window saying Edit, Source and Preview, click on the View menu item and make sure Source Edit is checked. You should then have a Source tab. Click on it to see and modify the HTML source code of the message.

So what does this have to do with web bugs? Well, if I insert the following Java Script into the message’s source code

every time this message is read, it will go to my web site and download the file a00100.gif. I will then be able to look at my web site server log file and determine when the file was accessed and by what IP address(es). The person who read the email will, however, not be aware of this since the file is a 1 pixel graphic that is very small and white and, thus, doesn’t show up on his white email page.

Norton AntiVirus versus Microsoft Publisher When using Microsoft Publisher, I can simply right click on text in a text box (like the article you are now reading) and bring it up in Microsoft Word for editing. That is I could before I installed the newest version of Norton AntiVirus.

When I attempted to bring up Word, I got a message something like: A Word Story Editing error occurred……. A search at Microsoft for such text revealed that it was a conflict with Norton AntiVirus. They gave a solution which was also repeated at the Norton site. The only problem was that the solution didn’t work—as other people had told them in the discussion forum that Norton was hosting on such problems. I added my two cents worth and received the response that it should work.

The supposed solution was to unregister the DLL Officeav.dll using regsvr32 /u "C:\program Files\Norton\AntiVirus\Officeav.dll" in the Windows Run text box. After going back and forth with Norton via email for a day with no improvement, I decided to simply rename the DLL by putting a $ in front of the name so that it couldn’t be found. That solved the problem.

Apparently on some systems simply unregistering the DLL worked, but possibly because I am using Win Me it took more drastic action in my case. Who knows?

Taskbar Stuck I went to help a new client with her computer problems, and the first thing I noticed was that her Windows Taskbar was on the right side of the screen and could not be moved — even though moving and resizing of the Taskbar was enabled in the Taskbar’s advanced properties. A search at http://search.microsoft.com revealed that the solution was to simply restart Windows in Safe Mode, then shut down and then restart Windows as usual—and they were correct this time.

Show Desktop Icon Missing The next problem was that there was no Show Desktop icon on the Taskbar. You know, the icon you can click on to minimize all open windows so that you have your desktop back. Well, I could find nothing at Microsoft on this, but http://www.deja.com/usenet came through with several newsgroup articles with the solution. The solution was:

Find the Show Desktop file in C:\windows\system and drag it to the appropriate place on the Taskbar. Nothing to it when you know what to do.

Map A new meeting site—in June—requires a new location map. I have created one, and you can view it at our web site at http://www.tpcug.org/images/library_map.jpg. If you can’t type in all that, there is a link to it on the Announcements page.

For the curious, to make the map, I first open a mapping program like Street Atlas USA, view the area I want a map of and copy the screen to the Clipboard. Next I open a "drawing" program, Adobe Illustrator, and paste the map in from the Clipboard. I make this map a non-editable layer and create a new layer on which to do my drawing, where I then trace all the streets I want over the streets on the non-editable layer. Add a little Clipart and street names and make the original layer invisible, and I am done. u