I have been participating in a few traffic exhanges recently. Traffic exhanges are a resource for web site owners who wish to drive traffic to their site. Within, you will find pages that market to marketers. There is a dizzying array of web sites containing all in one online stores, automated marketing programs, downline programs, email responders, and more. It has been interesting learning about this world.

I have produced a modest list of these promotional tools. If you want to get more visitors to your website or blog, give some of these tools a try.

Promotional Tools

I just installed this program called Mmm, which I discovered recently. It makes the Windows contextual menu a lot simpler, and it loads faster. Windows seems to cache my contextual menu onto disk, and it takes a lot more time than it should to load the menu again. Hopefully this program will make the menu load faster, or always keep a copy of the menu in RAM.

I have this old Athlon 1400 machine that has been sitting around unused for a couple years. I finally decided to put a hard drive in it and set it up for Dani. After installing the hard drive and Windows 2000, I took the network card out of my ancient Mac clone and put it in the Athlon. The card was recognized by Windows, but it had an error code of 10 (device cannot start). I tried changing the drivers and fiddled with a bunch of other settings.

Today I bought a new 10/100 network card (D-Link DFE-530TX+). I installed it in the 3rd PCI slot. The first slot is blocked by the USB card, and the second is very close to the USB card.

My computer wouldn't boot. It keep beeping constantly and I got no video output. I unplugged all non-essential items (everything except the fans) from the motherboard and turned it on. Still beeping. I went through 5-10 cycles of changing connections and powering it up.

I was sure I had screwed up the computer, and I went online with my other oomputer to read the online manual. I have an ASUS A7M-266 motherboard. I went to Asus's website and opened the online manual PDF. It said the beeps I was having was due to no RAM being found.

I switched my DIMM from slot 1 to slot 2 and turned on the computer. It beeped normally. Hurray! I reconnected all the devices.

I booted up, Windows found the new card. I cancelled the new hardware wizard and installed the drivers from the CD. Everything appeared to go well, but I could not get online.

The computer's port on the router was lit up. I tried pinging my router. Didn't work. I changed most of the IP settings, nothing worked.

Finally I booted into Knoppix, the trusy diagnostic bootable CD. Knoppix couldn't get a net connection either.

At this point I am hoping I didn't fizzle-fry the card.

I took the NIC card out of it's slot and put it in the slot above it. It is about 2 mm away from the USB card. I booted up, installed the card's drivers again. This time it worked.

So now I am installing all the Windows patches and whatnot, and the computer should be ready for Dani when she wakes up.

I feel obligated to write something about eXeem. eXeem 0.20 was released recently. This is a significant program because it decentralizes BitTorrent. About one third of all Internet traffic are BitTorrent files. BitTorrent is an excellent way to transfer large files. This worries the MPAA because now movies are easier to download than ever, and newer technology will probably make it even easier.

Not too long ago, the MPAA followed in the path of the RIAA and threatened legal action. They went after the operators of BitTorrent "tracker" sites, which are like hubs of file sharing information. This was an easy victory over the targeted sites. A harder target would be the distributed nature of p2p.

eXeem comes into the picture because it turns every client into a tracker. Now there are not a few obvious targets for lawsuits, but thousands, or even millions, of people.

Yesterday I got this program called Spambayes after I learned about it on a tech site. Spambayes is a bayesian filter POP3 mail proxy. Simply put, it goes between your email program and your incoming mail server, and labels incoming mail as spam or ham.

Setup is pretty easy. You run the installer, which puts an icon in the taskbar. You set some server settings, then you configure your email program (I use Mozilla Thunderbird) to get email from the Spambayes proxy. Spambayes adds an extra header to messages so your email program can filter them.

The next step is to check your mail and train the filter. Training is done through a web based interface which displays all your new mail and how it is classified. You correct any mistakes, which is how it learns.

So far I like Spambayes better than Thunderbird's adaptive spam filters. It gives you more details about what it's doing. You can click on a message and display the words it contains, along with spam/ham probabilities for each word.

Spambayes is an excellent free program, and it has motivated me to sort out my email.

Give it a try:

spambayes.org

I read a post on slashdot about a program called Second Life, and I downloaded it shortly after. It was about 19 megs and the game is strictly broadband only, since it has to stream in lots of textures and 3d map data. I'd like to see more games that can only be played on broadband, because broadband is the future. Almost half of all American Interet Subscribers are now using broadband.

I created an account on secondlife.com. You get a 7 day trial, after which you can purchase a lifetime membership for $9.95. I plan on developing online real estate and selling some of my creations. Second Life has a scripting system I have yet to learn. From my experience with programming, I should be able to write some cool 3D programs to run in it. If my programs are good enough I could sell them for Linden dollars, which I could use to invest in more things. It's a neat little online economy.

I have some thoughts about the graphics engine in Second Life. The frame slows down a lot depending on the detail level that is on the screen. I got into Active Worlds a little in '97, and it seems similar. I guess all the programmer that right really fast engines are all working on FPS (first person shooter) games.

I played around with creating a few things with the built-in tools, I will have to learn how to build more complicated things.

I just crashed the program while trying to show Dani how to change the clothing of my character. The crash analysis program took a long time grinding the hard drive before it sent off the crash data. It took maybe 5 minutes of lagging my computer for this to finish.

I use a dual Athlon 1900+ system. Since it has dual processors, I got upset that one program was hogging both CPUs. I will play with Tom's Hardware Guide's task assignment manager later to see if that could help next time.

I juar read this article about CSS 3. Some neat stuff to look forward to. I especially like the opacity property. I am a big fan of graphics with transparencies.
http://www.evolt.org/article/CSS3_The_new_Frontier/17/60319/index.html

I read this article in which the author wonder whether we will see innovation in CSS in the next few years, since MicroSoft isn't coming out with a new Internet Explorer until 2006. I have a lot of problems with Internet Explorer when designing sites using CSS. I really wish it would support the background-attachment: fixed; attribute. I also would like to see a way to control the rate of scrolling in backgrounds. This would enable me to create some cool parallax scrolling effects. In conjunction with translucent PNG graphics, interesting semi worlds could be displayed right in the browser, without using Flash.
http://westciv.typepad.com/dog_or_higher/2004/05/plus_ca_change.html

I want to buy one of these laptops but it sold out in about a week. :( It now says there are no available online retailers. That sucks. That is the second time emachines has done this. I might have to just get an M6805 and a separate DVD burner.

Last night I had a dream about finally getting my new laptop. My brother was using it first and he put it on a tall shelf. I suspect that I was interacting with a younger version of my present brother Garett. I asked him where he left the power cord, he had left it on a stage where I think I was playing the drums.

Like millions of other people, I have downloaded krriger from the produkkt. It is awe-inspiring. This demo, only 96K, is smaller than many screenshots of the the game in action. I played through the whole demo and was riveted by the shadow effects and the number of textures they fit into such a tiny space. I will have to investigate this engine and try to write a demo. Once I get some faster internet I will try out all the latest demos.