Time for More Salad!

Inside you’ll find:

• Even more tips!
• Dozens of computer lessons and how-to information
• Basic information on using the Internet, Microsoft Office, Digital Photography, E-mail, and on and on
• Web page links, funny stuff, great on-line references, and just interesting places to go on the Internet
• Computer news, commentary, inside, and whacky predictions
• About a bazillion computer keyboard shortcuts
• Ways to make you a better computer user
• Humor and irreverence delivered in a most loving and kind way

Fun! Humor! Tips! Tricks! Gross impertinence!

Once again, Dan Gookin returns with his second self-published work, a year’s compilation of his free weekly computer newsletter, the Weekly Wambooli Salad. In this bound book you’ll find not only 52 full issues of the Salad, but once again you’ll be delighted by Dan’s insight, information, observation, recommendations and just lots of good stuff!   

Weekly Wambooli Salad is Dan’s free weekly newsletter, published electronically every Monday since 2001. What you have in your hands represents the archived copy of the newsletter’s third year(Volume III), including all newsletters from August 2003 through August of 2004. But that’s not all!

Unlike Volume II, this book has glorious illustrations! So even if you are a subscriber to the newsletter and have kept back issues, this book becomes a truly valuable desktop reference. Further, these pages have been beefed up with a fancy formatting and cross-references. What more could you want? A cheap price, you say? Well, it has that as well!

Whether you’re new to the Salad, an old hand, or just enjoy reading Dan’s other books, you’ll find this tome a rare and exciting treasure! Add it to your computer book library today!

Enjoy the Salad!

This Week''s Q&A

Q: How can you find an IP address when you know only the domain name. For example, from last week''s newsletter I''ve been using the HOSTS file to block access to my computer from various evil spammer organizations. What if I know that EVILSPAM.ORG is a domain name I want to block then how can I get their IP address?

A: The IP address is the secret code number — 123.456.789.0 — used internally by the Internet to represent a domain name. It''s like a phone number, though thanks to various Domain Name Servers (DNS), we can type in things like www.evilspam.org and get to a web page as opposed to having to remember a number like http://123.456.789.0/. Anyway!

If you have Windows XP, then you''''re fortunately enough to have a command line utility borrowed straight from UNIX: The NSLOOKUP command can be used to find the IP address(es) associated with any given domain name.

1. From the Start panel choose Programs>Accessories>Command Prompt.

2. Type NSLOOKUP, a space, then a domain name. For example:

NSLOOKUP WAMBOOLI.COM

The NSLOOKUP program then spits out your DNS server name and its address, followed by the domain you entered and its IP address, or 216.18.170.33 for WAMBOOLI.COM.

NSLOOKUP MICROSOFT.COM

The above command spits out several IP addresses, all of which are used by Microsoft to host various MICROSOFT.COM services for the Internet.

NSLOOKUP EVILSPAM.ORG

Unless someone has registered EVILSPAM.ORG, you''ll find that this domain name is not currently in use; the program tells you that it''s a "Non-existent domain."

There are other tools on the Internet you can use to discover a domain''s IP address. So if you have another version of Windows (which lacks the NSLOOKUP command), you can use these sites to find out which IP address goes with which domain:

h t t p : / / c e l l o . c s . u i u c . e d u / c g i - b in/slamm/ip2name

h t t p : / / w ww.dnsstuff.com/

h t t p : / / c c - w w w . u i a . a c . b e / ds/nslookup.html

This Week''s Ha-Ha

As Dave Barry once said, if you take a room full of monkeys with typewriters and wait three months the smell will be terrible: