“The Croods” is a caveman movie from DreamWorks Animation that comes out March 22. The subject may be paleolithic, but the technology approach may well be cutting edge.

“Croods” is a digital product of about 250 billion pixels, with high-definition sound that, along with the images and story, is designed to maximize emotional manipulation of the audience. It is the end point of a process involving hundreds of artists and engineers working in a closely organized system that DreamWorks has been working on for years.

Making a movie with a half-million digital files, containing things like hair waving in the wind or cliffs crumbling into dust, took several years of planning, writing and drawing. It also meant searching for efficiency in the face of escalating costs. Since 2006, DreamWorks Animation has released more than a dozen movies costing at least $130 million. “We’re hoping to reduce that expense while adding more to the experience,” says Lincoln Wallen, the chief technical officer at DreamWorks Animation. “A modern digital environment, whatever the business, has to be distributed and agile.”

Google’s various offices and campuses around the globe reflect the company’s overarching philosophy, which is nothing less than “to create the happiest, most productive workplace in the world,” according to a Google spokesman, Jordan Newman. But do its unorthodox workplaces and lavish perks yield the kind of creativity it prides itself on, and Yahoo obviously hopes to foster?

OutlookTools is a support and advanced settings tool for Microsoft Office Outlook. It gives you easy access to Outlook settings and data folders and allows you to change settings that are normally only possible through the registry.

The program is NOT an add-in to Outlook. It runs separately, and allows you to make the desired changes. I was able to unblock some file extensions and have access to them in Outlook.

I’m posting about this with the hopes that someone will leave a comment about what they did to fix the problem. I’ve tried every suggestion I’ve come across, and so far it still doesn’t work for me when connected through RDP.

Well, if Google doesn’t bow to the pressure, we’ll have to find another web-based feed reader. I haven’t found one that is as good as Google Reader, but I’m still looking. Here are some of the web pages and other blog postings that I’ve checked out so far:

• Marketing Land – 12 Google Reader Alternatives
• Listly – Google Reader / RSS Reader Alternatives
• Smashing Reader – Google Reader alternative (an alternative that is supposed to be revealed this week)

Rio is mixing technology with tradition to provide tourists information about the city by embedding bar codes into the black and white mosaic sidewalks that are icons of the city.

The first two-dimensional bar codes, or QR codes, as they’re known, were installed Friday at Arpoador, a massive boulder that rises at the end of Ipanema beach. The image was built into the sidewalk with the same black and white stones that decorate sidewalks around town with mosaics of waves, fish and abstract images.

The launch attracted onlookers, who downloaded an application to their smartphones or tablets and photographed the icon. The app read the code and they were then taken to a website that gave them information in Portuguese, Spanish or English, and a map of the area.

There is a picture with the article, and the QR code tiles look pretty cool.

“The first line of my obituary is going to mention the smiley face,” says Scott Fahlman, who would rather be remembered for his research into artificial intelligence. But like it or not, Fahlman has become famous for three keystrokes. In 1982, as a young professor at Carnegie Mellon University, he realized the need for a symbol to temper the bickering that plagued online forums. The Internet was just a baby then, and yet already flame wars raged. Fahlman decided that a smiley face could be useful as a “joke marker” (as he called it) to take the sting out of mocking statements or pranks. And so he hunted around the keyboard for a way to make the face. “But what do you use for eyes?” he wondered. Once he found the colon, the rest was easy. He dashed his suggestion off to friends. “I didn’t even proofread the message,” he says.

“It’s the ‘Hey, you! Listen to me’ key,” says Jack Dennerlein of the Harvard School of Public Health. According to Dennerlein, an expert on how humans interact with computers, the escape key helped drive the computer revolution of the 1970s and ’80s. “It says to the computer: ‘Stop what you’re doing. I need to take control.’ ” In other words, it reminds the machine that it has a human master. If the astronauts in “2001: A Space Odyssey” had an ESC key, Dennerlein points out, they could have stopped the rogue computer Hal in an instant.

Anyway, we are finally migrating to Active Directory, and one of the big challenges is login scripts. Novell 4.11 had an easy way to setup login scripts, but Active Directory is much more complicated. I know there are 3rd party utilities that will do things, but why pay if you don’t have to?! There are lots of resources on the Internet to help with developing login scripts, but one of the best is from Richard L. Mueller, a Microsoft MVP. He has a “free code” page that includes a bunch of login script samples that look like they are a great place to start.