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It took a couple of weeks for Microsoft to get confirmation, but yesterday they did go on record and released a warning about Microsoft Word that’s running on Windows 2000, XP and Server 2003 SP1. Microsoft originally seemed to think there was little threat, but after receiving several legitimate complaints (from companies like Symantec and Panda Security) they acknowledged that the .mdb file (and even .mdb file format blocking in Outlook) and the Jet Database Engine were vulnerable to targeted attacks.

At the moment, there’s no fix available, but Microsoft is working on it. The next regularly scheduled patch release day isn’t until April 8th, but we’ll get notification sooner if Microsoft determines that enough users are being impacted. In the meantime, Jet should be disabled or .mdb files should be blocked at the gateway. And by the way, if you’re an Apple user running Word like me, you too should update when our Microsoft brethren do

Source, H/T: Uncle Monster

Microsoft plans to launch a free plugin next year for Microsoft Word 2003 and 2007 next year that will add a “Save as DAISY” feature to the word processor.

What’s DAISY? It stands for Digital Accessible Information System, and it’s essentially a format for converting text to speech. This isn’t one of those parlor tricks for getting your computer to say “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.” Rather, DAISY is an open format used by computer programs and hardware devices like the PlexTalk PTN1 that blind people can use to listen to books and text.

Microsoft plans to host the Open XML to DAISY XML translator on open-source project management site SourceForge, meaning independent developers will be able to look at the code and come up with their own translators and plugins.

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A smart move by HP …

HP has released a few new tools for website publishers and bloggers for printing options that site visitors and readers can utilize, called the Tabblo Print Toolkit.

With the Tabblo Print toolkit, developers can add printing functionality into existing websites that will take their site content and reformat it in a fashion that is more attractive for printing and reading options. The blog printing widget is part of the Tabblo Print Toolkit release, and lets readers pick and choose (with check boxes) which posts they’d like to print. It’s currently available as a plug-in for WordPress and Movable Type.

This way of offering tools for publishers that extends features to the end reader is a great way for HP to further penetrate industries, and improves the way in which web content can be shared offline, giving more control to the end user. Tools such as this could eventually be impactful on other third party services that offer printing options, such as Sharedbook. continue reading…

I’d like to introduce someone: Ike Pigott. He’s a local blogger that I ran across on Twitter some time ago. I’ve been following his blog, Occam’s RazR, for a while now. He works for Red Cross and has an extensive background in communications.

He’s recently set himself upon a personal quest to utilize the online tools and social media for disaster relief and aid. He’s created the Red Cross Online Disaster Portal and opened the Red Cross Twitter Channel.

The idea is that people in evacuation zones could “follow” the Red Cross Twitter feed from their cell phones, and find out about shelter locations and service delivery sites.

I think it’s a great idea, and I’m personally excited to be able to see first-hand the mediums that we have available to us today being put to use for such a great cause. This will be especially handy for us locally with hurricane season coming up, as well as tornado season!

If you are interested in helping out or would like more information, please contact Ike. I’m sure that he’d love to hear from you and could use any and all help sent his way!

In a little over a week WordPress 2.2 will be released, April 22nd to be exact. It will be an evolutionary release, with not too much changing, but a few improvements that might make some people happy.

Thinks like:

• Tagging support
• Permalink redirection
• Improved comment editing
• phpmailer was integrated
• Atom 1.0 support for feed
• Atom API support
• Additional XML-RPC APIs for pages and such

I was hoping for something more, but with a 120 day release cycle, I guess there is only so much time to add new features and make sure they work correctly.

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Solodox, which launched in alpha last month, is a free web-based word processor and project management application. It allows users to create and store documents online and collaborate with others in real-time. The word processor is similar to its competitors, but where I feel Solodox stands out is in its project management. Solodox users can create project documents and work on them in an interface much like Microsoft Project. It’s not an exact replica of Microsoft Project, but it has the main functionality where users add tasks in an Excel like interface and view progress in a calendar view.

Unfortunately, if you use anything other than Internet Explorer, you cannot use Solodox (except for registering – of course). But, I have read there will be additional browser support once the alpha stage has passed. I also found the application to be a bit sluggish at times and sometimes taking as much as a minute to load.

The Solodox interface has a similar look and feel to Microsoft Explorer. You can find a navigation bar at the top, folders and tags on the left, and documents on the right. Each document also gets associated with an icon so you can easily tell what kind of file it is (word document, project, or template). Users will also find that they can use the application and edit documents in Engish, Japanese, and Chinese. Google Docs, Zoho Writer, and AjaxWrite have yet to accomplish this, although they do provide multilingual support when editing a document. continue reading…