Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

There’s been a lot of things happening this week. Not the least being the possibility of a swine flu pandemic. Read on for a scientific explanation of swine flu.

General Microsoft News

• Amit has written article explaining How to Download Images from an Outlook Email.Tip – one of the options works for PowerPoint also.
• Sarah Perez lets us know that PhotoZoom Becomes DeepZoomPix. This is now using Silverlight. I believe this technology has also changed inside PhotoSynth in order to allow Mac users better access to the technology.
• She also lets us know how to Twitter in Excel – how to actually run twitter in side an Excel client.
• Windows 7 Beta keys are still available. The Release Candidate itself is due shortly. From the Windows Team Blog:

I’m pleased to share that the RC is on track for April 30th for  download by MSDN and TechNet subscribers. Broader, public availability will begin on May 5th. Link for rest of article.

Today’s list of cool tools and weird things is brought to you by – well actually just me. But Kitty can hold her iPhone next to her Dell Laptop showing that she loves both PC and Apple. and yes pink is her favourite colour!

Lets start off with some Microsoft Technologies

Amit has written a good how to article explaining How to Insert Images in a Word Document without Embedding

john has written about his ongoing OneNote testing as part of the OneNote development team in at Microsoft. Interesting stuff. We love OneNote here – its our primary team communication tool (after Outlook) and we use Livemesh to synchronise our shared notebooks with our team spread around the world.

www.ferrari.com is written using Sharepoint Designer (now being offered for free) and is published with a Sharepoint Backend. Awesome! I like the 612 Scaglietti best.

Philip writes Exchange Integrated Outlook – Recovering Deleted Items. A good detailed how to.

Weird and wonderful

Cake Wrecks has some photos of awesome cake decorating – Stargate style!

Security vulnerabilities were announced today in Microsoft Excel and also in Drupal.

See the Official MS security advisory (968272), and the explanation by ars technica.

Our advice for now would be to be EXTREMELY careful when opening any Excel spreadsheet, Word document or PowerPoint file that is emailed to you. Rule of thumb – if you don’t know the person who set you a file (any file) NEVER open it. If you weren’t expecting the file from someone you do know then email or call them and ask them if they sent you it and if so what it is BEFORE opening it. I trust that MS will release the appropriate patch shortly.

The Drupal security vulnerabilities have been announced on the Drupal website and upgrades and patches released for both version 5 and 6.

For our Jethro Consultants Web hosting customers this means an immediate patch for those who are on maintenance contracts with us, and for those who are not they pay us by the hour to apply. We get to those as soon as we can. We are also busy upgrading our own websites.

I am one of those people who say they hate clutter yet live surrounded by it. My father and grandfather are and were the same. “Ship shape and Bristol fashion”, “a place for everything and everything in its place” they would say.