7th Time's The Charm

Let me tell you something you might already know:  Windows Vista stink­s like las­t night's diapers.  I gave it a good college try, I really did. I ran it for something like 6 months.  I felt like this was the wave of the future, and I needed to learn how to love it.  But I ain't got that kind of love in me, so a couple weeks ago, I decided to make yet another go at a Linux desktop.

Same Old Hag In A Brand New Dress

It's been running a couple weeks without any massive outages, so I guess I should announce the obvious:  I've upgraded the website to Drupal 5.1.  And it really didn't hurt that much.

Songbird

Way back in 2002, I stumbled across a nifty new browser named "Phoenix", then at version "0.3".  I thought it was slicker than greased Crisco, and I let all my friends know.  I was among the first (relatively speaking) to recognize the good thing that was to become Firefox, and I've been loving it ever since.  I mention this little blast from the past to establish my street cred and and set the table for the new kid in town:  Songbird.

PDFs Don't Have To Bite

You ever get a PDF attachment from someone?  You double-click it and, if you don't have a reader installed, you have to got to Adobe and download it and takes forever.  It's, like, 50 megs and tries to install their crappy download tool, and a few spy-ware apps and asks you if you've found God and other intrusive junk.  Then you have launch that hog, and it spends the rest of your natural born life loading libraries before it finally displays your document.  Every other time you load it, it tries to get you to upgrade to their latest version with no appreciable difference other than your own creeping senility.  But there is another way.

ajaxWrite

I told myself I'd publish no more links until I actually created some genuine content of my own, but this is just too cool.  Imagine a web based application the does just about everything MS Word does using CSS, XML, and JavaScript (the much-hyped "AJAX" stack).  Including editing Word documents.  For free.

Backing Up Your Back-Ups

Alwin Lee (I have no idea who he is) said, “Save early, save often.” But what happens if your hard drive bursts into flames and takes with it The Great American Novel you been working on since college? Well, you cry like a little girl, of course.

That's why I like back-ups. And back-ups of my back-ups. And generational archives of my backed-up back-ups. And ... Well, you get my gist.

ClamAV & ClamWin

ClamAV is a GPL'd command line virus scanner that plugs what had been one of the last remaining major functional holes in Linux desktop. Most major distros now offer it as option on install now, and it can be set to update itself or scan your mounts or whatever with a cron job. It does just about everything Norton AV or other similar products does, just uglier (or invisibly). Recently, for giggles, I've been running it on several of my Windows PCs, as well.