Thursday, November 27, 2003

Political Correctness sinks to new lows!

I just had to comment on this:

"L.A. Official: Computer Labels Offensive
Nov 26, 10:32 PM (ET)

LOS ANGELES (AP) - A county official has asked computer and video equipment vendors to consider eliminating the terms "master" and "slave" from equipment because they may be considered offensive."

The full article is here.

Saturday, November 22, 2003

Would Microsoft have the guts to do this?

I got the following email from the Debian Linux mailing list :

The Debian Project http://www.debian.org/
November 21st, 2003

Some Debian Project machines compromised

This is a very unfortunate incident to report about. Some Debian servers were found to have been compromised in the last 24 hours. The archive is not affected by this compromise!

In particular the following machines have been affected:
. master (Bug Tracking System)
. murphy (mailing lists)
. gluck (web, cvs)
. klecker (security, non-us, web search, www-master)

Some of these services are currently not available as the machines undergo close inspection. Some services have been moved to other machines (www.debian.org for example).

The security archive will be verified from trusted sources before it will become available again.

We apologise for the disruptions of some services over the next few days. We are working on restoring the services and verifying the content of our archives.

Contact Information
-------------------
For further information, please visit the Debian web pages at http://www.debian.org/; or contact press@debian.org.

Would Microsoft ever send out an email like this?

Friday, November 21, 2003

Finding an old Web Browser

After setting up my old Pentium 233Mhz laptop for wireless internet, I wanted to upgrade the version of Internet Explorer. All Microsoft wanted to offer me was Internet Explorer 6.0, which from my experience does not play nice with Windows 98.

Anyway, using my favorite search engine, AllTheWeb, I found Internet Explorer 5.5 Service Pack 2 here. Interestingly enough, I got there via Daniel Petri's MCSEworld webpage.

Saturday, November 15, 2003

Cool Palm

This weekend I got to try out the Tungsten C handheld (unfortunately not mine). It is one awesome handheld computer. The keyboard is much better thought out than the one on my Sony NX60 (how did I get from a Palm M505 to a Sony NX60 - that's another story). You can do most of the things you need to from the keyboard. I did not figure out a way to select words, but then again I haven't read the manual (yet). I did not really test out the speed, but the oodles of available memory just made me itch to load all the programs I could - hey, it would be 30Mb gone before you could blink!
What really was great was the wireless capability. It really is great to check your email, browse the web and check the weather forecast from a PDA.

Wednesday, November 12, 2003

Going Wireless

Well, I finally bought a wireless Router for my Cable connection, a 802.11b DI-514 Air 2.4GHz Wireless Router, as well as a wireless network card for my aging Laptop (a Taiwanese clone 233Mhz Pentium MMX). Setting it up was pretty simple, the instructions were good.

Deciding on the wireless router route (!) was helped by plenty of tips on PracticallyNetworked. Some of their articles are slightly out of date (no mention of 802.11g technology), but still good advice.

Setting it up was pretty simple, the instructions were good. An article in PC Magazine a few issues back gave some good tips.

Tuesday, November 11, 2003

More from the blunt edge...

My desktop computer is not what you would call leading edge. In fact, considering the workstations I use at work, it hardly even seems to qualify as blunt edge.
The specs are quite depressing actually:
Compaq Presario 5461
500 MHz AMD K-6 processor (with 3DNow! technology - I can't remember what 3DNow is except it was something extra added to the processor by AMD. (Info here if you are interested)
10.0 GB Hard Drive - I've since added a 20Gb Hard drive
64 MB 100 MHz SyncDRAM - which has been upgraded to 192Mb RAM - 8Mb is used as video memory.
CD-RW 4x2x24 Drive - a big selling point at the time - which has since been replaced by a CD-RW 48x24x48 Drive, the latest and fastest piece of hardware on the machine.

On this machine I'm currently running two Windows 98SE partitions on the second hard drive, Xandros Desktop Linux (I would highly recommend this Linux distro to anyone wanting to move from Windows to Linux), and Windows XP Professional, which gives decent performance on this machine.
To run all of these Operating Systems, I use a freeware utility called XOSL (Extended Operating System Loader). The original website (www.xosl.org) is down, but XOSL is available at ranish.com. Please read the manual and the FAQ and anything else before using this excellent tool! There is also a user group on Yahoo.

Thursday, November 06, 2003

Palm development tool updated

I see that version 4.1 of CASL with support for Palm OS 5.0 has finally been released. (See CASLsoft)
CASL features a Visual Development environment and a high-level programming language slightly similar to
Delphi (Object Pascal). It can create programs for both the Palm and Windows Mobile (PocketPC 2002/2003) platforms.
It was initially scheduled for release at the end of September this year.