One of the more recent crazes on the Internet is online auctions, where people can offer junk, antiques, or collector’s items for sale to anyone who wants to bid on them. But be careful! Besides having to deal with fraudulent bids from people who have no money or intention of buying an item up for auction, consumers have to watch out for con artists selling their own fraudulent items. The simplest con game is to offer an item for auction that does....

The genesis of the computer revolution was in a machine. The genesis of our programming languages thus tends to look like that machine.But computers are not so much machines as they are mind amplification tools (“bicycles for the mind,” as Steve Jobs is fond of saying) and a different kind of expressive medium. As a result, the tools are beginning to look less like machines and more like parts of our minds, and also like other expressive medium....

Sometimes stealing an entire computer may be too obvious or difficult, but stealing the components inside may be a lot easier. After all, anyone can tell when a computer suddenly disappears from a desk, but who will notice when a computer suddenly loses a hard drive, a video card, an external Zip drive, a trackball, or a memory chip? To stop someone from walking off with an external device, such as an external hard drive or computer speakers, you can glue a ....

If you write macros that other people in your organization use, you should be aware of the Macro Security settings in Excel (and in all Office applications). These settings control the messages you receive when you open a workbook that contains macros; they ask if it’s okay to enable them. In the good old days, developers didn’t have to worry about such things. But with the advent of macro viruses, you now need to take such user-level security settings into account....

Before you build your Web site, you may want to consider its organization. While more than likely you have thought of many ways of organizing your Web site’s structure, you have probably thought about it from a navigational perspective. In addition to thinking about it from that angle, I would suggest that you also think about your Web site’s structure from a maintenance point of view. What can you do to make your Web site easier to maintain? What conventions will ....