Linux
gregladen | February 16, 2008Run Internet Explorer. Why would you want to do this? Well, normally, you would not, but there are some enterprise applications that stubbornly, and stupidly, insist on running in IE. I avoid such circumstances, and I lobby to undo such decisions when I can. But if you need to run IE, well, it's like having diarrhea and really having to go ... you gotta do it.
Or, if you are in the web design biz, this could be useful to test sites. You really have to test your sites on IE because, so often, Microsoft IE breaks web sites that were not designed in a way that panders to Microsoft's…
gregladen | February 15, 2008Choose from a very wide range of software in certain application areas. For instance, the range of text editors and HTML editors is larger than in other systems. I'm comparing the free Linux applications to the non-free Windows applications. If you count only free applications on both systems, the difference is even greater.
Most (many?) major programming languages are available on Linux, at no cost. These versions of the programming languages are either similar to or superior to the versions found on other systems, for the most part, as far as I can tell. (There will be exceptions, and…
gregladen | February 14, 2008Choose among a wide range of cool desktops. These are not "skins" or mods like in Windows. These are entirely different desktop systems that each have their unique characteristics.
What this means is that you can choose a desktop that does a lot of work for you ... like my main home computer, which is fairly tricked out. I've got drawers that contain icons to avoid clutter on a task bar, I've got a taskbar on the top and a task panel on the bottom, the weather and a box to put words to look up in a dictionary, and other cool stuff is on the task bar.
I've got a second installation in a…
gregladen | February 5, 2008Concentrate a bunch of geeks in the Boston Area (like, at MIT), and eventually one of them will get a driver's license and discover how bad the traffic is. And invent something...
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), researchers are testing a Linux-based automotive telematics system intended to reduce traffic congestion. CarTel is a distributed, GPS-enabled mobile sensor network that uses WiFi "opportunistically" to exploit brief windows of coverage to update a central traffic analysis program.
[source]
Meanwhile, in California, where people just have a different view of the…
gregladen | February 4, 2008... until you've read this.
I have been using Vista for well over a year now (since Beta 1). Of course Vista is slow, its bloated (over 10x the size of XP), aero kills system performance (even though this should be done on the video card), networking is pathetically slow, etc etc. We all know Vista sucks.
But recently my blood has been set to a rolling boil by the fact that most of my games just don't work in Vista. At all. Its so bad that out of spite I have decided to make a list of games that work better in Linux under Wine than in Vista. These are games that were originally written to run…
gregladen | January 25, 2008
Jan 25
Robert Burns born, 1759
Jan 25
Virginia Woolf born, 1882
Jan 25
W. Somerset Maugham born, 1874
Jan 25
Conversion of St Paul
Jan 25
First U.S. meeting of ALGOL definition committee, 1958
Jan 25
Passing of Gandalf
Jan 25*
Parashat Yitro
Jan 25
Bob Dylan plays the second "Hurricane" benefit, in the Astrodome, 1978
Jan 26
EDVAC demonstrated, 1952
Jan 26
Sydney, New South Wales settled, 1788
Jan 26
Australia Day in Australia
Jan 26
Republic Day in India
gregladen | January 21, 2008
Jan 21
Lenin died, 1924
Jan 21
Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson born in Clarksburg, VA, 1824
Jan 21
Our Lady of Altagracia in Dominican Republic
Jan 21*
Lee-Jackson Day in Virginia (3rd Monday)
Jan 21*
Robert E. Lee's Birthday in Alabama & Mississippi (3rd Monday)
Jan 21*
Martin Luther King Day (3rd Monday of January)
Jan 21
Anniversary Day (Wellington)
Jan 21
Austrian troops invade the Belgian United States, 1790
Jan 22
Sir Francis Bacon born, 1561
Jan 22
Sam Cooke is born in Chicago, 1935
gregladen | January 17, 2008
Jan 17
Benjamin Franklin born in Boston, 1706
Jan 17
Justice Dept. begins IBM anti-trust suit, 1969 (drops it, January 8, 1982)
Jan 17
Fellowship reaches Lorien
Jan 17
Led Zeppelin's first album is released, 1969
Jan 17
Aujourd'hui, c'est la St(e) Roseline.
Jan 18
Grey whale migration, California
Jan 18
Revolution Day in Tunisia
gregladen | January 12, 2008Or, one of those 1960s flowers similar to bathtub decals. Who cares, it runs Linux and is only $199.00 US.
It'll have an Intel Celeron processor, a 945GC chipset, 512MB of memory and either a 60GB or 80GB hard drive. What it won't have: an optical drive or a PCI Express slot. Despite that, it's a pretty good-looking box, and comes in red, blue, white, and black, each with a different icon stamped on the front.
Details here.
gregladen | January 6, 2008
Jan 06
Millard Fillmore's birthday (let's party!)
Jan 06
Children's Day in Uruguay
Jan 06
Belgium becomes a federal state, 1993
Jan 07
Christmas in Ethiopia
Jan 07
Pioneer's Day in Liberia
gregladen | January 3, 2008Is below the fold...
Jan 03
Apple Computer founded, 1977
Jan 03
New Year's Holiday in Scotland
Jan 03
Revolution Day in Upper Volta
Jan 03
Steven Stills is born in Dallas, 1945
Jan 04
George Washington Carver born in Missouri, 1864
Jan 04
Jakob Grimm born, 1785
Jan 04
Wilhelm Beer born, 1797, first astronomer to map Mars
Jan 04
Quadrantid meteor shower (look north)
Jan 04
Independence Day in Burma
Jan 04
Martyrs Day in Zaire
Jan 04
Jazz great Charlie Mingus dies at 57 in Cuernavaca, Mexico, 1979
Jan 04
Joey Hess releases the first issue of DWN, 1999
Jan 04
Jakob…
gregladen | January 2, 2008Desktop Publishing; Running MS Office; Some Games
Scribus is an OpenSource desktop publishing application that runs on Linux and the Mac as well as other systems such as that one from Redmond. I don't use DTP very much these days, but I've played around a little with Scribus. Here you will find a detailed review of the software.
I have run Microsoft Office under Crossover. Crossover is a commercialized version of WINE, which in turn is an OpenSource application that allows you to run Windows software. My impression has always been that WINE is not even nearly "grandma-ready" but I found…
gregladen | January 1, 2008Today's Linux Calendar.
Jan 01
J.D. Salinger born, 1919
Jan 01
Paul Revere born in Boston, 1735
Jan 01
Circumcision of Christ
Jan 01
AT&T officially divests its local Bell companies, 1984
Jan 01
The Epoch (Time 0 for UNIX systems, Midnight GMT, 1970)
Jan 01
Macintosh Epoch, Midnight 1904
Jan 01
Anniversary of the Triumph of the Revolution in Cuba
Jan 01
Castro expels Cuban President Batista, 1959
Jan 01
Churchill delivers his "Iron Curtain" speech, 1947
Jan 01
First Rose Bowl; Michigan 49 - Stanford 0, 1902
Jan 01
Beginning of the Year in Japan
Jan 01
Independence Day in…
gregladen | December 29, 2007From Slashot:
"Computers and handheld devices running default GNU Linux or Unix OSes have swept Amazon's 'best of' list for 2007, according BusinessWire.com for 28 December 2007. Best selling computer? The Nokia Internet Tablet PC, running Linux. Best reviewed computer? The Apple MacBook Pro notebook PC. Most wished for computer? Asus Eee 4G-Galaxy 7-inch PC mobile Internet device, which comes with Xandros Linux pre-installed. And last, but not least, the most frequently gifted computer: The Apple MacBook notebook PC."
wOOt!!!
gregladen | December 29, 2007On steroids....
Dec 29
Battle of Wounded knee, 1890
Dec 29
Civic Holidays (3 days) in Costa Rica
Dec 30
First Los Angeles freeway dedicated, 1940
Dec 30
Anniversary of the Democratic Republic of Madagascar in Madagascar
gregladen | December 25, 2007
Dec 25
Isaac Newton (Sir) born in Grantham, England, 1642
Dec 25
Fellowship begins Quest
Dec 25
Birthday of Quaid-i-Azam in Pakistan
Dec 25
Children's Day in Congo
Dec 25
Christmas
Dec 26
Chas. Babbage born, 1791
Dec 26
St Stephen (Boxing Day)
Dec 26
DPMA founded, 1951
Dec 26
Boxing Day
Dec 26
Feast of Our Theotokos in Greece
Dec 26
St. Stephen's Day
Dec 26
Bank Holiday in Canada, Rep. of Ireland, and UK
Dec 26
Day of Goodwill in South Africa
Dec 26
Proclamation Day holiday (SA)
gregladen | December 23, 2007Edited for brevity ...
Dec 23
Joseph Smith born, 1805
Dec 23
Emperor's Birthday in Japan
Dec 23
Victory Day in Egypt
Dec 23*
Hanukkah (Fourth day)
Dec 23
First G&S collaboration, Thespis, 1871
Dec 24
KKK formed in Pulaski, Tenn, 1865
Dec 24
Christmas Eve
gregladen | December 21, 2007
Dec 21
Benjamin Disraeli born, 1804
Dec 21
Phileas Fogg completes his trip around the world in less than 80 days
Dec 21
Women gain the right to vote in South Australia, 1894
Dec 21
Women gain the right to hold political office in South Australia, 1894
Dec 21
Frank Zappa is born in Baltimore, 1940
Dec 21
Yule (Norse for "wheel") - Germanic 12-day feast
Dec 21*
Winteranfang
Dec 21*
Winter Solstice
Dec 22
Giacomo Puccini born, 1858
gregladen | December 19, 2007A SiCortex SC648 supercomputer and a Linux cluster of 648 CPU's and a TB of main memory woudl draw about 1,200 watts. That's gotta widen your Carbon Footprint!
Unless, of course, you are a bunch of crazy MIT students withe bicycles, and you've got generators attached to the bikes.
A team of ten MIT students powered a supercomputer for twenty minutes by pedalling bicycles. They duly claimed the world record for human-powered computing (HPC).
...
An SC648 chip, with six processors on it, draws around 8 watts of power, which compares to a typical notebook computer CPU needing 100 watts,…