Daily Cup of Tech

When someone talks about free software, Microsoft is not the first company name that generally comes to mind. But, according to The Road to Know Where: Ultimate List of Free Windows Software from Microsoft, this is exactly what Microsoft is doing.

This is an impressive list of files and applications that will make any freeware junkie drool!

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One of my pet peeves revolves around computer programs that chug merrily along, quietly doing their thing. Meanwhile, I’m on the other side of the screen wondering what in the world is going on! This is why it is very important to provide quality feedback to your program users.

In Providing User Feedback In AutoIt, I describe the five basic ways that AutoIt provides developers to interact with the users. I also give examples of each, showing how they would display similar data.

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The ability to use an MD5 checksum to encrypt a password or check whether or not a file downloaded properly is very useful. This is probably why so many people are searching the Internet trying to find out how to do exactly this. Well, look no further as I have written Perform MD5 Using AutoIt. It outlines the three different ways that you can generate MD5 checksum with AutoIt along with working examples.

Let me know what you think about this article and the supplied code.

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Google is looking at the Internet through different eyes. Less than perfect eyes. They have an experimental new service called Google Accessible Search that helps visually impared Internet users find websites that are easier for them to read.

In a press release, search engine optimization company USWeb has some concerns about this new view. They are indicating that some of the old ways of optimizing your website may not be enough to get you high rankings with this new Google tool. This also means that you could be inadvertently be cutting out and entire demigraphic area.

Definitely food for thought.

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I recently read on LifeHacker Foxit Software has released a new version of a wonderful freeware application called Foxit Reader. It is a full fledge PDF reader that does not require installation and it does not write to the registry. This means that you can run it directly from your USB drive without needing to install it on the host machine. Another nice benefit of Foxit Reader is that is load much faster than Adobe Acrobat Reader and takes up a lot less space on your computer.

With all that being said, there are a few things that you can do with Adobe Acrobat Reader that you can’t with Foxit Reader but I have never really needed any of these capabilities. But, I will leave it up to you to decide. Here are the download links for both applications:

• Foxit Reader
• Adobe Acrobat Reader

I’d be interested to hear the results of your comparisons.

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