Andrew Grygus has some important information on Software Licensing at his site.

One thing that is surprising to some people: Microsoft licenses are often not transferrable. If you donate a computer to a charity, the copy of Windows on the computer is non-transferrable. The charity will have to buy a new copy of Windows. Unfortunately, most donated computers don't have the CPU speed, RAM, or hard disk spece to run current versions of Windows. You might think that Microsoft would shy away from the PR disaster of raiding charities. You would be wrong.

posted by Mike Huber at 1:31 PM

Color picker for web sites

This tool is a page with sliders that control the page color, with a text display of the code for the current color. As you change the color by moving the sliders, the code changes. Once you have the color you want, you can copy and paste the code into your HTML.

This is one of the very few good uses of Flash technology that I've seen.

I got the address from a message Steve Winnicki posted on HATT, a mailing list for help authors.

posted by Mike Huber at 10:28 AM

This is a duplicate entry - I accidentaly posted the DadaDodo thing twice, and there is no delete option. But there is an edit option.
posted by Mike Huber at 1:59 PM

DadaDodo

OK, This particular thing has no valid use that I can think of.
It builds random texts that resemble input documents. You feed it documents, and it finds probability patterns. Then it uses those patterns to string together random words into sentences.

Why is that a good thing? I don't know. But somehow, it is.

DadaDodo
posted by Mike Huber at 1:59 PM

Dicer

Dicer is a very nifty utility for chopping up graphics.

Why would I want to chop up a graphic?

One way to design a web site is to have a graphic designer lay it out as a big graphic, and then have a web developer (could be the same person) build a site that looks like the graphic, using bits of the graphic where necessary. I use Dicer to chop the graphic up into usable pieces.

How does it work?

It reads and displays a graphic, and then you click where the vertical and horizontal cuts go, to make a grid. Dicer then produces an series of JPG or GIF files chopped from the grid, and an HTML table. If you display the HTML table in a web browser, it looks just like the original image. The grid is also saved to disk, so if you need to chop another picture exactly the same way, you can. This is an excellent way to build mouseovers and other effects that rely on replacing one graphic with another.

The details

Dicer is freeware. It runs on Windows. Download it.
posted by Mike Huber at 3:14 PM

Some PHP links

This page has quite a few links for information about the PHP language.
PHP is a scripting language for web use. A PHP program is usualy used to generate web pages. When you see a URL that ends with ".php" or ".php3" or something similar, it is probably generated by a PHP program.
posted by Mike Huber at 7:23 AM

Web site for help authors

This site claims that "Here you will find the world's largest selection of WinHelp and HTML Help related files and hints."

I don't know about that, it's a very big world and I haven't seen most of it. But it is a very good site for information about, and software for, creating Windows help files in both the WinHelp and HTML based forms.

Josef Becker has collected quite a few very good links and presented them in both English and German (German appears to be his first language, but the English is quite good. No "all your base are belong to us" here.
posted by Mike Huber at 2:51 PM

CSS Reference

HTMLHelp.com has A pretty good reference for Style Sheets.

posted by Mike Huber at 2:51 PM