Being a user that keeps around a copy of Adobe Acrobat 5.0 to install on my machines regardless of what new and improved versions Adobe comes out with, I am greatful to finally have an option (and I know of others that feel the same way). Foxit Software has Foxit Reader available for free download which appears promising.

It's not that I am against Adobe software. I use Photoshop, Premiere and Encore to name a few, and while they might take a bit to learn they are very powerful pieces of software. I'm sure Acrobat is powerful as well, but I've had nothing but problems with anything greater than version 5. I swear those newer downloads contain all but the kitchen sink. Anyway.

Thanks to Omar Shahine  for the link.

Seems like our CEO, Charlie Crystle has stirred up quite a buzz around the recent SalesForce outage (Silicon.com, CNet, ComputerWorld). You know it's made its rounds when you read it on Scoble's blog. There really is a point to be made here. I'm not necessarily convinced that SalesForce is bad just cause it has some occasional problems with it's uptime. They do need to make some improvements if they want to keep their customers though. The "outage" happened to be large enough to get the press on it, but we experience regular down times with SalesForce that hamper our sales process.

Back to the point... People and businesses are becoming more and more reliant on web services. This is great. There are a lot of benefits to them and they are mostly reliable. In my opinion, the fact that SalesForce can provide an uptime approaching 99% is incredible. But they are not perfect, and businesses relying on them without proper secondary systems in place are going to run into problems at one point or another. Take a natural disaster or large-scale power outage or even some technical problems at the local ISP level. I think there needs to be an offline option available for these times -- and if the web service provider doesn't offer them, then the customer needs to account for that in some way.

Even on a personal level, these outages can be a pain if you're not prepared. Recently the popular del.icio.us service was down for a bit. I use it on a daily basis to track my bookmarks. Not for those few days I didn't. I knew their website offers a way to store my bookmarks offline, but never took the few minutes to get them. In this case, maybe my business benefited from the outage :)

Something to consider... An approach we are taking for our software (GiftWorks) is a desktop client that works in both online and offline mode. In our case, the desktop client is fairly heavy but it doesn't have to be. The software uses online services when they are available and needed, but most of the work is done on the desktop. If the customer can't go online for any reason, they can't use our online services, but they can still do something. This is definitely not a new approach. Most email clients work the same way.

Ok. Here is an amusing site. The Web 2.0 Validator. Enter a URL and click the button to see how it rates in the Web 2.0 realm. I really got a lot of work to do for my site :) I'm only 3 out of 38. It's sad to say, but I'm actually falling behind my friend Steve. This cannot be.

(I think I just improved my rating with this post -- Dave Legg, Flickr, VC, Nitro, cool, Ruby, Rocketboom, del.icio.us, 30 Second Rule, public beta, mash-ups, startup -- 18 out of 38)

I ran across this article which talks about using a backdoor into Windows XP for changing passwords. The article says it was present up to and including SP1 versions of XP. It involves a special keystroke during the repair process that allows you to run commands as administrator. I can't imagine this would still be there in SP2. Has anyone tried this other than the author?

Here's another interesting Outlook tool created by the research team at Microsoft. It's called the "Social Network and Relationship Finder" but it goes by the name SNARF. It is free to download. SNARF is designed to provide a quick overview of unread mail, organized by its importance. The UI shows a series of different panes with unread mail in them; each pane shows a list of authors of messages. The importance of the unread email is determined by who sent it.

Look at the Outlook Mobile Manager post for another Microsoft Research project for managing email.

Thanks to Mike Swanson for pointing this out. Some of you may also remember Mike has a very cool (and very popular) Macro Wallpaper Collection.

For anyone who has to write regex expressions, this little tool will be quite helpful. I use regular expressions while programming, but I don't use them often enough to be able to just write them off the top of my head. I often find myself popping open a linux command line and testing the out there until I get what I'm looking for.

It's free for personal use. Download and try it out today.

Thanks to C82.net for his great site and "wildy useful web programs". Maybe you'll want to check out his others.

I read a good article this morning by Jeff Sandquist titled How I Get Things Done... which describes how he uses an outlook addin for organizing his email workflow. It is called the 'Getting Things Done In Outlook' addin.

Using a few simple toolbar buttons, the addin allows you to manage your emails in a timely manner. I haven't tried it out yet but I plan on doing so in the next week. Anybody out there have any experience with it? 

Until the box shadow CSS property is implemented, this is a great way to make cool looking shadows around HTML elements on your site. http://theshapeofdays.com/2005/11/my_contribution.html

This site has 6500 free TrueType (TTF) fonts. These are fonts you can download to your computer and use for free. There are some very nice ones in here and being part of a desktop software dev team, I think some of these may be used to produce more usable software. What fonts do you like?

Exploding Boy has put together a selection of free CSS tab designs that may come in handy as we are creating a library of designs for our GiftWorks hosted websites.

Now here is a very cool site if you're into music. Try Pandora from the guys that started the Music Genome Project. It's a clever little website that helps you discover new music.