Computing
j7uy5 | August 2, 2007
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">Microsoft
(the company, not the cat) is planning
to introduce a free,
href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070801/tc_nm/microsoft_works_dc_1;_ylt=AvNzaQ0YzHMN8HgffxSZzmYE1vAI">adware
version of Microsoft Works.
Works is their stripped-down version of Microsoft
Office. Works already
comes bundled with many newly-purchased Windows machines.
Most people are not aware of paying for it anyway.
The
version they are planning come conveniently pre-loaded with
advertisements stored on the hard drive. When the user
connects to the Internet, more ads are…
j7uy5 | August 2, 2007HR 2102 IH -- Free Flow of Information Act of 2007
US Reps Rick
Boucher,
href="http://mikepence.house.gov/">Mike Pence,
rel="tag" href="http://www.house.gov/conyers/">John
Conyers,
rel="tag">Howard Coble,
href="http://yarmuth.house.gov/" rel="tag">John
Yarmuth, and
rel="tag">Greg Walden have introduced a bill that
would provide some protections to blogger-journalists.
HR 2102 IH, the
href="http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c110%3AH.R.2102%3A">Free
Flow of Information Act of 2007, so far has only
been approved by the House
Judiciary Committee.
The…
j7uy5 | June 17, 2007
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">
href="http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070608-afirst-look-at-firefox-3-alpha-5-gran-paradiso.html">Firefox
3 (
href="http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/3.0a1/releasenotes/">Gran
Paradiso) should be available in beta form in late July 2007.
There is no firm release schedule for the gold version. The most anticipated feature will be a new way to store bookmarks.
Both the interface and the internal code will be changed.
Sort of like in del.ico.us, bookmarks can be given tags.
Unlike del.ico.us, you will still use folders.
Such a…
j7uy5 | June 16, 2007Problem:
Flat tire, wheel won't come off.
Backgound: This problem came my way today.
A friend had a flat tire, but was not able to get the wheel
off.
The solution...
Solution:
Turn on computer. Google "remove stuck car wheel". Find
advice: loosen lug nuts by 4 or 5 turns. Drive car back and
forth a few feet, a few times. Get out and change tire.
Outcome: Happy motoring!
j7uy5 | June 10, 2007I am
not skilled enough to do this, but maybe someone out there is.
What I want is a utility that will take a bit of html, such
as for the sidebar in a blog, generate a image file that looks just
like the html would if it were rendered on a web page, then find all
the links and map them to that image file.
Then when a blog page loads, instead of calling up a gazillion little
picture files and running a bunch of little java scripts, it would just
need to load that one image. It seems as though that would be
a lot faster. Of course it should be smart enough to know
when it needs to…
j7uy5 | June 3, 2007I am working on my next post, the one about amoxapine. But sssshhhh, I'm using Kubuntu. Heresy, I know, but what do you expect? It's Sunday.
j7uy5 | May 14, 2007Speaking
of open-source software, I recall posting a while back when
the percentage of visits to Corpus Callosum, by users of Internet
Explorer, dropped below 50%.
Now, it is 24%. Roughly parallels President Bush's approval
rating. I wonder what those two stats would look like on a
graph over time.
j7uy5 | May 14, 2007
From CNN Money:
href="http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/05/28/100033867/">Microsoft
takes on the free world
Microsoft claims that free software like Linux, which runs a
big chunk of corporate America, violates 235 of its patents. It wants
royalties from distributors and users. Users like you, maybe.
Fortune's Roger Parloff reports.
FORTUNE Magazine
By Roger Parloff, Fortune senior editor
May 13 2007: 1:06 PM EDT
Free
software is great, and corporate America loves it. It's often
high-quality stuff that can be downloaded free off the Internet and
then…
j7uy5 | April 8, 2007This
was at Barnes and Noble, in
href="http://www.linuxuser.co.uk/">Linux User &
Developer. I learned that
href="http://www.peugeot.com/">Peugot (the
second-largest auto maker in Europe) plans to install Linux for their
2,500 servers. That is not particularly surprising.
What is more, they plan to install Linux on their 20,000
desktop machines!
The
href="http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/ict/studies/publications.htm"
rel="tag">European Commission has published a
study:
href="http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/ict/policy/doc/2006-11-20-flossimpact.pdf">Study
on the…
j7uy5 | April 7, 2007
Obviously a follow-up to my last post,
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/04/why_blog.php">Why
Blog?
Like the Why Blog? post, this is partly a repetition of something I
posted before, at least once. But some of these points bear
repeating, if only to remind myself.
One thing is that I always use an
href="http://www.nvu.com/index.php">free-standing editor
to write posts. The reason is simple: it lets me save
frequently, and to save to my own disk. I'm less likely to
lose something I'd rather not lose. Of course I also use
Firefox, too. No need to elaborate on…
j7uy5 | April 4, 2007 I
was just reading about
href="http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2109401,00.asp">Firefox
3.0,
which is supposed to have features that would simplify building and
using web-based applications. I'll be curious to see how this
plays
out. Will it make things leaner and more efficient, or just
lead to
more bloated stuff? Could go either way.
With planning, it could be flexible. If you want bells and
whistles,
you can get them. If not, leave them out. That is
how software ought
to be. Half to wait until the second half of the year just to
see the beta, though, and longer to see…
j7uy5 | March 10, 2007What
would happen if Tux went to a famous portrait artist to get a
makeover?
href="http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/modigliani/">Modigliani
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botticelli">Botticelli
This was done using the method
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2006/07/patches_modiglianized.php">described
previously.
j7uy5 | March 7, 2007I've heard of case modding, but this is just going too
far:
What is this? It is a full-featured web server in a compact
case. How is this possible?
...(below the fold)
Basically, it is a one-chip solution. Not entirely, the
server runs on one chip and there are a couple of memory chips to
support it. Here is the back view, in case you don't believe
it's possible:
Details here.
It's really that simple.
j7uy5 | February 25, 2007I know that the SB site can be overwhelming; there is a lot here, and
it can take a lot of time to go through it all. Now, for
those of you who like to use feeds, e.g. Google Reader, you can get a
"Select" view of what might be the best posts. The method for
choosing them is secret. But unlike other "Select" services,
this one is free.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/scienceblogs/ScienceblogsSelect
If unsure how to use this, try going to www.google.com/reader, either
sign in or create an account, then click Add Subscription, then copy
and past the link above.
There are many other ways to do…
j7uy5 | February 18, 2007I am still trying to figure out what this means: "Available under the
GPL Licence and in exclusivity for Mandriva Linux, Metisse differs from
a classic 3D desktop ..." Usually you don't see the terms "GPL"
and "exclusivity" in the same sentence.
Anyway, Mandriva appears to be on the verge of some innovative ways of
using the computer workspace.
The story is here;
the videos are more informative than the static images.
I haven't tried it, but anyone can try it by downloading and burning
the live CD. The folks at Mandriva may be on to something
here. They say it enforces work…
j7uy5 | January 8, 2007You might think that developing a system for EMR would be fairly
straightforward. After all, some of the things that computers
are
really good for, are the storing, retrieval, and display of
information. But somehow, developing a system that actually
works AND
is easy to use in a hospital environment, has proven to be rather
challenging.
Reading a post on the blog,
href="http://infoisfree.blogspot.com/2006/12/it-in-hospital-main-hospital-i-work-at.html">Information
is Free (so help yourself.) I was reminded of a few thoughts
I've been meaning to disseminate. This is on the topic of…
j7uy5 | December 26, 2006It's kind of technical, but interesting if you care about the inner
workings of the machine you are using to read this post.
Microsoft Vista has built in an elaborate system to prevent
copying of protected digital content. In so doing, Microsoft
has imposted stringent requirements on hardware manufacturers.
They also have created a system that will have built-in
performance penalties. The digital content will have to be
encrypted and decrypted many times, as it passes from the DVD drive, to
the CPU, the sound card, the video card. All that adds
overhead to the various processors. It…
j7uy5 | December 17, 2006Our system, who art on raised tile,
Hallowed be thy OS.
Thy portage come, thy emerge be done,
On servers, as it is on workstations.
Give us this day, our daily sync,
And forgive us our broken ebuilds,
As we forgive those who break ebuilds against us.
Lead us not into dependency frustration,
But deliver us from rpm evil.
For thine is the make.conf, the USE flags,
And the profile forever...
Gentoo.
Sincerely,
Jason Johnson
Unix Systems Admin
Oracle Corporation
href="http://www.sabayonlinux.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=245&Itemid=2">source
j7uy5 | December 9, 2006In June, I put up a post noting that open-source browsers accounted for
more than 50% of the hits at ScienceBlogs. At that time,
Firefox was 48.17%. Since then, Microsoft released IE7, which
includes a tabbed interface, and other enhancements that Firefox (and
others, e.g. Opera and Safari) have had for a long time. I
wondered if Microsoft would get some of their market share back.
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2006/06/scienceblogs_browser_share_fir.php">
ScienceBlogs Browser Share as of June 2006
Now, six months later, we see that Microsoft continues its
slump...…