Technology

When people talk about signing PDFs, they can mean two things: attaching a digital signature to the file or placing a graphic representation of their signature on the document. Often what people really want to do is the latter.

Don't know if it means they're shipping, but I was charged for my iPad 3G today. Apple's site still shows a late April delivery date. It won't be too soon for me!

[Update 3/27/2010: False alarm—they must have just been checking the credit card. The authorization expired.]

[Update 4/29/2010: Now it's coming—I just received a shipping notification!]

It isn't that we shouldn't be doing things we don't want others to see, it's that perhaps we shouldn't be doing them all in one place, with a provider that tracks and correlates absolutely everything we do in our lives.

And some people worry about the cookies that are stored on their computer.

Rich Mogull: Google, Privacy, and You

I've been using OpenDNS for some time now, mainly for faster DNS queries which result in faster website connect times. Something that's annoyed me, though, is that OpenDNS always shows, for example, "Did you mean 'donmorris.com'" when I type just "donmorris" in my browser's location bar. Seems like they could figure that out, but instead they want to show me a bunch of ads whenever I don't provide the TLD (.com, .net, etc.).

I had the opportunity to download Windows 7 Ultimate this weekend and install it on my Mac. You might not be aware that Microsoft is offering to let you try Windows 7 for an entire year for free; the Release Candidate is about as close to the real thing as we're going to get until October and won't expire until June 1, 2010.

A couple months ago my Palm Treo 650 finally ticked me off enough that I stopped using it and went back to my previous phone, a Sanyo that I stopped using when I upgraded to a smartphone. I had originally purchased the Treo despite poor reviews by existing users; I had used a Palm for years and wanted to stick with a hardware/software platform I was familiar with.

Remeniscent of their previous tactics, Network Solutions has been engaging in a practice known as "front-running" domain names. When someone uses their whois service to look up a domain name (to see if it's available), Network Solutions immediately registers that domain name, making it inaccessible to those using a competing registrar to obtain the domain name.