But, enough from me, watch the video and see Tidy Favorites in action. If you fancy winning a free license for the full version, subscribe to the Sciencetext Tech Talk ezine and drop me a line from the email with which you subscribed and I’ll enter you in the draw to win one of a bunch of free licenses.

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Tidy Favorites

rundll32.exe is an internal program used by Windows to run yet other internal programs known as DLLs (dynamic link libraries) which are needed by the operating system and your programs (Word, Outlook, Internet Explorer, OpenOffice, Thunderbird, Firefox, or whatever to function). It loads up the DLL into memory and then triggers specific functions from the DLL module.

To see what else is running on your machine and what programs are using them you might like to try Sysinternal’s Process Explorer, which was recently acquired by Micro$oft and is available for free download here.

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What is rundll32.exe

Another cleaning tool I heard about years ago, but had long since forgotten goes by the obvious name of Windows Clean Up! Running this tool not longer after a CCleaner session revealed I had 9005 files of a temporary nature hogging half a gigabyte of disk space.

Needless to say, I feel much better having swept those out. Although with a fairly new 250 gigabyte hard drive in my laptop, that half a gig is just a fraction of the available space, but clearing out unwanted files means you can run a more efficient machine as there are less fragments for other spring-cleaning tools such as defraggler to struggle with.

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Spring Clean Your PC

But, today, is one of those days, so instead of an essay here’s a list of the top ten summer successes as measured by visitors reaching the site from Sciencetext short URLs, which are used on social media sites, such as Twitter:

1. Riding the Google Wave
2. Shorten Your URLs
3. Publish Your Blog on Kindle
4. China Blocks Twitter
5. Geek Chart
6. Google Wave Singularity University
7. Metallica, Napster, and Marx
8. Bing Is Not Google
9. Who Owns Your Avatar?
10. 10 Security Problems and 10 Security Solutions

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Summer Successes

Firefox 3.5 does seem to perform better than previous versions and didn’t take long to start up from a cold start. When I saved the draft of this page it seemed to refresh within a split second, whereas on 3.1, I’d normally wait several seconds before I could carry on writing or editing in Wordpress. That’s a much appreciated boost for me.

Mozilla says improvements are partly due to its new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine. They are also due to improvements in the Gecko layout engine, which include speculative parsing for faster content rendering. Firefox has also improved security and privacy features, including the now obligatory “Private Browsing Mode,” (equivalent to Chrome’s Incognito tab).

“Geo” is the current buzz word of the day and Firefox now has the ability to provide location aware browsing using web standards for geolocation. Additionally, it supports new web technologies such as HTML5 video and audio elements, downloadable fonts and other new CSS properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 offline data storage for applications, and SVG transforms, for those interested in the technical aspects.

If your web browser is mission critical, don’t download it just yet, this is a beta, well officially it’s a release candidate, which is like the final, final beta. Either way, before you install, make sure you’ve backed up your favorites, bookmarks, settings etc.

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New in Firefox 3.5

Is this yet another attempt by Google to destabilize Microsoft’s so-called “decision engine” Bing and Wolfram Alpha’s information calculator? Bing is fast grabbing market share from the big G. Apparently, a single percent of market share in search is worth a $1 billion, so every % gained by MS is a significant loss to Google. The announcement of Google Wave probably rebutted some of Microsoft’s efforts and even Opera with the recently announced Opera Unite server within a browser system seems part of the move towards an advanced form of the web.

However, don’t go flipping when you discover you cannot login to the Google News Flipper just yet, it’s still under lock and key ad accessible only internally for the privileged few in the Googleplex. Any day now.

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Google Flipper

Web designers have recently begun to look at how to optimize websites for male and female users. Unfortunately, making a male-female distinction panders to the stereotype of men as autonomous, self-interested and goal-oriented hunters and of women as understanding, compassionate nurturers keen to build social bonds. However, such stereotypes, as is always the case with stereotypes apply only very loosely and at worst are debilitating fictions that lead to prejudice and the marginalization of parts of society.

Many men are self-reliant and independent, but so too are many women. Lots of women are expert at developing interpersonal relations and creating social harmony, but then so are many men. Likewise, as far as the Web is concerned, the stereotypical male, is an independent hunter, seeking information relevant to him and minimizing effort whereas women are more interested in using the internet as a tool for maintaining social bonds. Both stereotypes fail miserably to account for the behavior of the vast majority of us of whatever sex or gender.

Maureen Hupfer and Brian Detlor DeGroote of the School of Business, at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, have looked closely at studies of sex differences and how this impacts website design and use and found the received wisdom to be sadly lacking. As part of their research, they carried out an online survey, which asked questions about preferred type of website navigation, breadcrumbs, dropdown menus, notification agents, saved searches and the like.

The survey collected website feature importance ratings and measured “Self-Orientation”, whether the user was more stereotypically “male” regardless of actual gender, and “Other-Orientation” whether they were more social in behavior and so more stereotypically “female”. They found that measuring these personality traits was a much better predictor of web behavior and the success of a given design as opposed to the user’s actual biological sex.

The implications of these results for web designers, marketers and e-commerce are immense. Rather than focusing on whether a visitor is a man or a woman, companies could engage and serve their customers far more effectively if they were able to understand the individual’s “Self” and “Other” orientation. Indeed, companies that “get” this concept will “enjoy an important strategic advantage”, the researchers say.

Unlike conventional media and distribution channels, web-based communication and retailing allows marketers to engage with their customers at a one-to-one level, albeit usually only in the virtual sense. Companies that understand the difference between their users regardless of gender can present web features that meet their individual information gathering and processing styles.

Maureen E. Hupfer, & Brian Detlor (2009). Sex, gender and self-concept: predicting web shopping site design preferences Int. J. Electronic Business, 7 (3), 217-236

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Trouble with Sex on the Internet

It seems, however, that they are piping all the “non-safe” surfing results to a different domain – explicit.bing.net – which means that network owners can filter that domain at the internet router level and so prevent anyone (their children, students, employees) from accessing those results.

Of course, Sciencetext readers know all about filtering at the router thanks to previous posts about OpenDNS.

One thing that puzzles me though about all these pr0n filters, is who at Microsoft, or any other company, decides what is unacceptable viewing? If it’s an individual then that individual’s morals may not be the same as yours or mine (to paraphrase Mick Jagger). If it’s an algorithmic filter that simply looks for NSFW words then it could be filtering out legitimate sites that discuss sexuality and sexual health and not just the truly NSFW stuff. I don’t plan to test it too much, either way, but it’s just a thought…

Others discussing Bing’s Ding Dong filter

• Bing Filtering Capabilities Evolve
• Bing vs. Google rematch after Microsoft upgrades explicit filtering
• Bing search makes porn easy to filter out
• Bing ‘better’ than Google for advertisers

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Bing Filtering Ding Dong

In the report are mentions of digital TV (which many parts of the country already have), how the BBC is funded and how commercial TV companies might cream off some of the so-called TV Licence fee to cover the public service broadcasting obligations and more, the analog radio switch off (2015), and the revelation that broadband access (at 2 megabits per second) is almost as vital as a supply of fresh water and power to Brits.

Meanwhile, action points in summary below:

• Universal access to broadband by 2012
• Investment fund for next generation of “superfast” broadband for whole of UK
• Digital Radio Upgrade by 2015
• Accelerating current and next generation mobile coverage and services
• Proposed new biannual assessment role for telecoms regulator Ofcom

Other more woolly parts of the action plan include:

• Three year National Plan to improve digital participation
• Programme of Digital Switchover in public services
• A new Digital Inclusion Champion: Martha Lane Fox (originally of Lastminute.com fame)
• Revised Digital remit for Channel 4 and key role for BBC
• Guaranteed funding for three years for targeted marketing and outreach
• Robust legal and regulatory framework to combat Digital Piracy
• Digital Test Beds to promote innovation, experimentation and learning around creation and monetization of digital content
• TV Licence Fee: consultation on contained contestability, primarily to secure news in the nations, regions and locally
• A new direction for Channel 4, championing new talent across all digital media
• Guidance note and clarification on the media merger regime and an enhanced evidence role for the regulator in local mergers
• Support for Independently Funded News Consortia

The full report…all nine chapters….yaaaaawn…can be found here or here as a Word doc.

While all of this may not seem immediately relevant to anyone outside the UK, there are two areas that may have an impact: First, changes to the BBC could affect the way programs are made and news gathered and so impact partner TV companies and organizations elsewhere in the world. Secondly, the way the UK tackles digital piracy might inform the strategies other governments under pressure from commercial lobbyists.

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Digital Britain Main Points

With Opera 10, the relatively little-known, but pioneering web browser, comes a new approach to extending what people can do online. The system apparently exploits harnesses today’s fast connections (unless you’ve been throttled by your internet provider) and hardware to let you share and connect online in ways that was not possible before. It’s probably no coincidence that Opera has released this system just as Google Wave emerges, there does seem to be some overlap, certainly with the concept of essentially running everything within a browser (which means platform independence and mobile use)

Opera Unite lets you share data, photos, music, notes and other files (just the legal ones please). It lets you run chat rooms and host entire web sites, but it also enhances your privacy. Services can be accessed from any web browser regardless of whether you’re at work, at home, or out and about. To get started, you simply enable Unite from within Opera 10*.

Opera Unite has a built in media player, a web server, a photo sharing system, file sharing, a refrigerator (for refrigerator) magnets and sticky notes), a lounge (for hanging out).

According to Opera’s Lawrence Eng: “Opera Unite applications can be just about anything. It’s up to developers, companies, entrepeneurs, end users, and anyone with a vision of what the interpersonal Web really means, to take that vision and build the next generation of applications to bring people together online in brand new ways.”

*Older readers will remember Opera 1, which used to fit on to a single 3.5″ floppy disk. Younger readers will probably not know what a floppy disk is…

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Opera Unite