Although we switched to Apple computers some time ago, most of our friends and acquaintances have PCs running older versions of Windows. Which means I spend quite a bit of time sorting them out when problems arise. Gina Trapini lists steps she took this Christmas, to make Mom’s PC usable again. The PCs I have had to fix haven’t been as bad as her mother-in-law’s, thank goodness.
Over Christmas, it rained and was soggy under foot. Yesterday it went colder and snowed. Today we decided to go for a walk in the woods on the other side of the main road, a few hundred metres away.
Reminder to self: Simian Design has a useful conversion table for all the HTML character entities, which will save lugging O’Reilly’s Dynamic HTML down from the book shelf every time I need to look one up.
Take a look at R. Gardiner’s blog nyclondon.com/blog for some great pictures taken with a pinhole camera shooting on polaroid film. They need long exposures: typically 2-25 minutes.
As well as the polaroid pinhole pictures, there are excellent conventional photographs and this interesting picture of the London Underground lines superimposed on an aerial photograph of London. Worth a look!
One thing which everyone seems to have a preference about, is whether links on a site open in the same window or in an new window.
I have always opened external links in a new window. If this drives you crazy, you can now choose how all links on the main blog page should open. Just use the tick-box in the top right.
I have updated the last few day’s posts to open in the same window by default. If you prefer older posts to open in the same window, you will need to tick and then un-tick the box to change the setting. I will post all external links to open in the same window in future.
(Stolen from Armina’s Journal)
To quote from the announcement:
NeoOffice/J 1.1 Beta is a new release that adds several new features and fixes many bugs that were in the previous release. The new features are listed below:There’s enough new features there to make it worth getting, and my first impression is that it is quite a bit faster than the previous version.
In addition, NeoOffice/J 1.1 Beta includes new, professional quality icons and uses the OpenOffice.org 1.1.3 code.
- Aqua menus
- Mouse wheel support
- Text drag-and-drop support
- Smaller PDF files
- Support for 40 languages
To get the new release, visit the NeoOffice/J download site at http://www.planamesa.com/neojava/download.php and download it from any of our mirror sites.
OOo is what we use 99,5% of the time at home. It’s very compatible with Microsoft Office and handles some moderately complex spreadsheets and serial letters very well. We actually use NeoOffice/J, which Patrick Luby and Edward Peterlin maintain – a repackaged version which uses a Java wrapper to allow your Mac fonts and printers to be used natively in OS X, without having to convert them to run under Darwin.
However, the main reason for this post is to point out that an OO0 version 2 preview is available for Windows and Linux, and it has had a very positive review over on The Inquirer’s web site. It is packed with changes. If you don’t mind working with beta version software, it warrants a closer look – the more people who look now, and report bugs they find, the better the final version will be.
There is, by the way, an interesting marketing strategy document available from OOo’s website, covering their plans for the next 5 years. They are aiming to increase their market share from around 2% now, to 50% by 2010.
Alternet picks through recent reports from various sources to piece together a picture of how Fallujah may be run by the Americans and the local Iraqi government – after they are able to disengage from the ongoing fighting there.
This measure and its underlying purpose:
Fallujans are to wear their universal identity cards in plain sight at all times. The ID cards will, according to Dahr Jamail’s information, be made into badges that contain the individual’s home address. This sort of system has no purpose except to allow for the monitoring of everyone in the city, so that ongoing American patrols can quickly determine if someone is not a registered citizen or is suspiciously far from their home neighborhood.is not so very different from this one, is it? The one allows identification of the friend at a glance, the other allows the “enemy” to be identified. Welcome to democracy as defined by the neo-conservatives in the American government.
For those of you who want a long, healthy life, I offer you fish, garlic, almonds, fruit and vegetables, dark chocolate, and to finish, a glass of wine.
(Since we don’t eat meat, that’s probably not too far from what we will actually be eating.)
Peer to peer (P2P) applications are used to allow users to share information in a network. Some, such as Napster, need centralized servers to maintain an index of who is offering what data where, others are more decentralised. Ed Felton has written a P2P application in only 15 lines code, each containing eighty characters or less. The program was developed to show how easy it is to develop a P2P application, as Ed says:
I wrote TinyP2P to illustrate the difficulty of regulating peer-to-peer applications. Peer-to-peer apps can be very simple, and any moderately skilled programmer can write one, so attempts to ban their creation would be fruitless.My goal in creating this program is not to facilitate copyright infringement. I do not condone copyright infringement. Nothing about the program’s design is optimized for the sharing of infringing files. The program is useful mainly as a proof of concept. A more practical program would be faster, more secure, and more resilient against failure.