Our friends at TweakXP have a top sites vote. You can vote for WinCustomize by going here:

http://topsites.tweakxp.com/rankem.asp?id=1063

Thanks!

Only a few more days left until Christmas vacation! My wife and I and sons (Alex pictured here) are pretty excited about the whole thing.

We're really excited to visit with friends and family during the holidays. I've got copies of Knights of the Old Republic, Pirates, and World of Warcraft to keep me busy.  My son Alex has a 7th level character running around WoW these days too.

No matter where you are though, we hope you have a Merry Christmas. Have a great time these next couple of weeks. I hope to have time to write a lot more during that time too.

In my Christmas letter I talked about liberal Democrats fleeing to Canada to escape "Jesus Land".  I've talked to some family members and friends who weren't familiar with this reference. So for those of them that visit my blog, here's what I was referring to:

Shortly after the election a bunch of far left wing bloggers and journalists started claiming that the only reason why Bush won is because the "Jesus Freaks" came out in force to vote for Bush. And so in their view we have a divided country with one side being "rational, thoughtful, intelligent" people who should break off and hook up with Canada and the other side a bunch of "moronic, reactionary religious nuts who are too blind to recognize what a Nazi Bush is" who should just form their own country and call it "jesus land".

And a John Kerry supporter then created this map to lampoon conservatives. I thought it was pretty funny but not for the same reasons. Where the Kerry supporters seemed to think it spoke a lot more proof, conservatives, such as myself who aren't even religious, found it amusing in demonstrating that those partiuclarly liberals just don't have a clue why they lost. So I decided to refer to it in my letter.

In my Christmas letter, I overestimated how many people had heard of this thing. They thought I had made up the concept of "Jesus Land" and map. I didn't.  I was poking fun at far left wing people who had crudely tried to stereotype Bush voters.

As online-game companies court new and wider audiences, many are running into an old problem: "griefers," a small but seemingly irradicable set of players who want nothing more than to murder, loot and otherwise frustrate the heck out of everyone else.

Social miscreants can do more than ruin the game for better-behaved competitors. They can hurt game companies' bottom line by driving away customers and burning up support lines. Problems related to grief players often account for 25 percent or more of customer service calls, according to game publishers.

Now an increasing number of companies are fighting back, using a combination of technology, sociology and psychology to limit griefer damage. Success could be important to the industry's growth, as companies seek to expand beyond the audience of hard-core players to more casual customers, many of whom are unlikely to tolerate bad experiences for long.

Read the whole thing from CNET's News.com

I get flamed. A lot.  In fact, as time goes on, I find I get flamed even in places I'm not.

For example, tonight I came across a link to an interview with Arlo Rose, the author of Konfabulator. While reading the comments, someone wrote a a response challenging why Konfabulator should get so much attention.  And the owners of the site claimed that the anonymous user was me. Apparently I am all knowing and all powerful and exist on every obscure website on the net.

Besides the usual annoyance of being falsely accused of doing something I consider pretty repugnant (those who know me know how I feel about anonymous detractors so being accused of doing that sort of thing is a double whammy). It really demonstrates that, at least in the customization community, that there are enough people that dislike me and what I do that they'll start believing I'm responsible for all the bad things out there.

In the OS/2 world, I still get brought up on occasion as a boogey man. Even this month on the Usenet group comp.os.os2.advocacy there were people blaming me (or Stardock) for destroying OS/2 (ah the power of google to find this stuff).  Apparently I am quite powerful.

In a single day I've seen myself blamed for buggy code in a Windows game, an OS/2 process killing utility, and a Widows desktop enhancement program while at the same time helping spread "FUD" about Linux and undermining the Mac market with our software that lets Windows users make Windows look like whatever they want. 

But the thing is, I'm just one guy. And while I try to keep track of a lot of things, I only know what's going on in a few selected places. Heck, I don't even know what's happening in the forums on JoeUser.com most of the time and that's supposedly my blog site.  That's why I get so incredulous when I get accused of having some influence or action in some obscure place like some website I rarely visit or some operating system I haven't used in 5 years or whatever.

Being falsely accused of something really bugs me. And and false accusations such as the one described here happen pretty regularly. It's almost like they want to pretend that they are worth more attention than they deserve.  But anyone who knows me at all knows that I don't shy away from criticizing things as myself. I take my lumps. Hence why I have so many detractors in the first place. <g>

Over the course of this year, I'll probably be decreasing my visibility markedly.  For one thing, I'm just tired of getting flamed. My thick skin is pretty ragged from constant flaming. We recently hired a net community liason who will slowly be interacting more with the whole desktop enhancement community. I'll probably eventually only frequent sites I have admin access of some kind which can put a quick end to those who want to impugn me.

Software developer Stardock has released a significant update to DesktopX today.  The world's most popular widget enabling program has found competition growing from programs such as Konfabulator, Avedesk and others.

While those programs do not support DesktopX's ability to build complete desktops and distribute them, they do support a robust "widget" architecture. Widgets in the desktop customization market are mini-programs that are designed to reside on your desktop. Where the desktop was once the exclusive home to icons, widgets (and DesktopX objects) allow users to extend the desktop functionality of Windows.

DesktopX widgets can be brought to the front with a function key (default is F9) or hidden entirely until needed (default is F10). But DesktopX widgets were previously not very configurable by end users. If a user wanted to change the color or tweak the shadow or even the Z-order, the user had to load DesktopX, import the widget, make the changes, and then re-export them.  With version 2.4, users can go to the properties of the DesktopX widget and change them directly.

"One of the key advantages DesktopX has over other widget-enabling programs is that DesktopX widgets are EXEs that can be run without running DesktopX.  However, many users requested the ability to be able to modify how those widgets functioned without having to import them into the DesktopX environment.  We consider 2.4 really the start on this journey," said Brad Wardell, Product Manager of DesktopX at Stardock. "Future versions will add labeling, and plugin configurability right into the context menu. Eventually a DesktopX widget will have all the advantages of a stand along program while using a fraction of the memory and resources that a typical stand alone program uses."

DesktopX 2.4 is a free download. Stardock provides an enhanced version that supports premium widgets as well as the ability to export content as widgets.  The enhanced version is available stand alone or as part of Stardock's overall suite of desktop enhancement utilities called Object Desktop.

Visit www.desktopx.net to get the new version of DesktopX.

Stardock has released an updated version of its popular desktop enhancement utility, DesktopX.

DesktopX 2.4 allows users to customize their widgets. Each widget has its own properties dialog that enables users to tweak the widget’s z-order, transparency, shadow, color, and whether it automatically runs on start-up or not.

Stardock also added in a host of user suggestions such as widgets saving their position, a cleaner, simpler configuration for DesktopX global settings, and includes an updated DXPlayer which allows users to remote control iTunes, Windows Media Player, ObjectMedia, Winamp and other popular media players from a widget or DesktopX object.

DesktopX is a revolutionary program that lets you enhance your Windows desktop by adding widgets, themes, animated icons, and much more to it. It is part of Stardock's Object Desktop suite of Windows customization utilities.

The program works by extending the Windows desktop to support live objects. These objects can be put together to make “widgets” (mini-applications) or used to build entire desktops. Since DesktopX itself has little overhead, users have total flexibility to decide how much or how little to change your Windows PC with it.

DesktopX has been used to create things ranging from MP3 players, calendars, PC game auto-start programs, computer interfaces in the movies, aquariums, kiosks, and much more.

DesktopX is a free download. Users can upgrade to an enhanced version which adds support for premium widgets and objects, desktop security, and widget creation. The enhanced version is available stand-alone for $19.95 or can be purchased as part of Object Desktop for $49.95. For more information visit http://www.desktopx.net

A top Microsoft executive is warning PeopleSoft customers that they might want to think about a technology shift, now that Oracle's acquisition has been approved.

"Oracle's acquisition of PeopleSoft may be moving forward, but difficult technology decisions lie ahead," Microsoft vice president Bill Veghte wrote Wednesday in the e-mail, which was seen by CNET News.com. "The ongoing challenges of owning and maintaining business applications remain unchanged."

Judge Leonie Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia granted Google's motion to dismiss a trademark-infringement complaint brought by Geico. The insurance company had charged Google with violating its trademarks by using the word "Geico" to trigger rival ads in sponsored search results. Geico claimed the practice diluted its trademarks and caused consumer confusion.

The judge said that "as a matter of law it is not trademark infringement to use trademarks as keywords to trigger advertising," said Michael Page, a partner at Keker & Van Nest, which represented Google.

The ruling is a triumph for Google in that it derives as much as 95 percent of its advertising revenue from keyword-triggered ads, which appear next to Web search results. Trademarks play a central role to the sale of such ads because people often use Web search to find products and services with common, trademarked brand names such as Nike or Geico.

The ruling also could inform similar trademark-infringement cases online, legal experts say. For example, Google is being sued by American Blind and Wallpaper for trademark infringement by its keyword ad program.

Read the whole thing: CNET's News.com

Early next year we are going to be creating multiple tiers of moderators.

For instance, we want to seperate forum moderators from skinning moderators.  The job of a particular forum moderator would be to keep their section (and sub-sections) reasonably on-topic as well as try to find interesting things to talk about.

These moderators would also be in charge of articles of the same category.  These are people who would write/post articles about OS Customization, Personal Computing, Tutorials, etc. that either they write or found on the net. These wouldn't necessarily be news posts but rather be article posts.  I posted a couple of articles tonight that show the kinds of articles we would be looking at.

So for starters we would want someone who would be in charge of OS Customization, someone in charge of General, and someone in charge of Personal Computing.  They would write articles and forum posts on these topics, make sure other topics were appropriate.  We generally shy away from being very strict on posting (i.e. we don't want to be riding people's every post, we just want to make sure the site remains a pleasant place to visit).

As these areas become mroe successful, we would then have sub-moderators who woudl be in charge of things like PersonalComputer->Hardware and PersonalComputer->Windows Software and so forth.

So who would be interested in this?