It seemed that I just blinked and there were updates to the Mozilla products:
Firefox 1.02 with several security fixes.
Thunderbird 1.0.2 mail client
The Mozilla Suite version 1.7.6
I must have been sleeping, because I've only just heard that the Mozilla Foundation plans to stop further development of the Mozilla Suite, according to an article in PCWorld, as well as this mozillaZine posting.
Also, the official "Transition Plan" from Mozilla.
Saturday, March 26, 2005
Saturday, March 19, 2005
1.5 million TEs
That's 1.5 million Palm Tungsten Es.
Among all the verbiage of PalmOne's Financial results is the interesting point that 1.5 million units of the Tungsten E handheld computer have been sold in the 14 months it's been on the market and it has consistently been the best-selling handheld in the United States since its introduction.
Among all the verbiage of PalmOne's Financial results is the interesting point that 1.5 million units of the Tungsten E handheld computer have been sold in the 14 months it's been on the market and it has consistently been the best-selling handheld in the United States since its introduction.
Friday, March 18, 2005
Links...
Yesterday I mentioned the Facer and Today launchers without giving the links
Facer Launcher can be found at Pocket Craft.
Today can be found at FreewarePalm (beware - popups)
Of course that's the freeware Today, not to be confused with the shareware TodayPLUS, which is at this Flashy website
Facer Launcher can be found at Pocket Craft.
Today can be found at FreewarePalm (beware - popups)
Of course that's the freeware Today, not to be confused with the shareware TodayPLUS, which is at this Flashy website
Thursday, March 17, 2005
Shareware Launchers
For the uninitiated, the idea of a replacment Application Launcher may seem strange, but in the Palm world a good Launcher program can really improve the user interface.
LaunchPlug has some good tips about Launchers, although it is a bit outdated - most of the products it mentions now support PalmOS 5.x.
I've used ZLauncher for quite some time, I initially bought it for the sheer utility - it was about the same price as PowerRUN at that stage (PowerRUN enhances launching programs from a memory card, saving precious RAM on a handheld), and as well as doing what PowerRUN does ZLauncher has a decent File Manager and numerous other features. I can't say that I'm really into Background pictures and customized icons on my Sony handheld, but if I wanted to ZLauncher would allow me to go to town.
Yesterday I tried MegaLauncher 5.5 from Megasoft 2000, just out of curiosity, and I was very impressed, It has an intuitive interface, and I really liked the way the To Do and DateBook items can be displayed. Unfortunately it seems that it uses a lot more RAM than ZLauncher, which is really a pity.
The latest generation of Launchers give the PalmOS a "Windows" interface, like Hi-Launcher (check out their awfully colorful website here) and Win Launcher
Others, like Facer, and Today, emulate the Today screen of PocketPCs
LaunchPlug has some good tips about Launchers, although it is a bit outdated - most of the products it mentions now support PalmOS 5.x.
I've used ZLauncher for quite some time, I initially bought it for the sheer utility - it was about the same price as PowerRUN at that stage (PowerRUN enhances launching programs from a memory card, saving precious RAM on a handheld), and as well as doing what PowerRUN does ZLauncher has a decent File Manager and numerous other features. I can't say that I'm really into Background pictures and customized icons on my Sony handheld, but if I wanted to ZLauncher would allow me to go to town.
Yesterday I tried MegaLauncher 5.5 from Megasoft 2000, just out of curiosity, and I was very impressed, It has an intuitive interface, and I really liked the way the To Do and DateBook items can be displayed. Unfortunately it seems that it uses a lot more RAM than ZLauncher, which is really a pity.
The latest generation of Launchers give the PalmOS a "Windows" interface, like Hi-Launcher (check out their awfully colorful website here) and Win Launcher
Others, like Facer, and Today, emulate the Today screen of PocketPCs
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
Free Palm software
I tried out some other freeware Palm programs:
DES Journal
According to the program documentation:
"DES Journal is a small PalmOS application that is designed to aid in keeping a journal".
The program stores its journal data in the Datebook, which is a fairly good idea for getting data to the desktop. Other than that, there's not much else to it. I prefer eDiary though, which allows the Journal to be protected with a password.
Of course, IMHO, the best Journal/Diary type program out there is DayNotez. It's not free, but is incredibly versatile.
Maximus
Their description:
"Maximus is a Palm supplement - personal organizer for home and business use. The wide choice of icons, colors, groups, etc. presents only few of the features that will help you better organize and visualize your daily activities."
Hard to nail this one down. It has a very pretty interface, but it seems awfully difficult to enter anything into the program. It stayed on my handheld for a while (because, it's so pretty and colorful) before I finally deleted it.
Pretty Maximus
DES Journal
According to the program documentation:
"DES Journal is a small PalmOS application that is designed to aid in keeping a journal".
The program stores its journal data in the Datebook, which is a fairly good idea for getting data to the desktop. Other than that, there's not much else to it. I prefer eDiary though, which allows the Journal to be protected with a password.
Of course, IMHO, the best Journal/Diary type program out there is DayNotez. It's not free, but is incredibly versatile.
Maximus
Their description:
"Maximus is a Palm supplement - personal organizer for home and business use. The wide choice of icons, colors, groups, etc. presents only few of the features that will help you better organize and visualize your daily activities."
Hard to nail this one down. It has a very pretty interface, but it seems awfully difficult to enter anything into the program. It stayed on my handheld for a while (because, it's so pretty and colorful) before I finally deleted it.
Pretty Maximus
Saturday, March 12, 2005
Well done
I've just been trying out a freeware Launcher for the Palm called iSpin. If for some reason you want your Palm to look like Windows XP, iSpin will do it.
Unfortunately I installed some other freeware programs just afterward, one of which is clashed with iSpin and caused my handheld to crash (Fatal Reset - Soft Reset). Kudos to the developer(s) of iSpin though, as the program detects that it crashed last time it was run and asks if you want to continue. Of course if you say yes it crashes again, but if you say no you get out of what could be a nasty loop-de-loop situation.
Unfortunately I installed some other freeware programs just afterward, one of which is clashed with iSpin and caused my handheld to crash (Fatal Reset - Soft Reset). Kudos to the developer(s) of iSpin though, as the program detects that it crashed last time it was run and asks if you want to continue. Of course if you say yes it crashes again, but if you say no you get out of what could be a nasty loop-de-loop situation.
Monday, March 07, 2005
Free Clipper
After looking at The Basic to C Translator (BCX) the other day, I was wondering about Harbour - which I had last seen sometime ago.
Harbour is a free software compiler for the xBase superset language often referred to as Clipper (the language that is implemented by the compiler CA-Clipper). Clipper is a one of the myriad of "4GL" (Fourth Generation Language) xBase compilers that grew out of the now defunct Ashton-Tate's dBase III and dBase III plus. Ashton-Tate was bought by Borland in 1990 or 1991 (depending on which source you look at)
Clipper was also the second programming language I was trained to use after mainframe COBOL (Unfortunately I never got to really use it, but that's a different story).
Clipper's main failing was that there was never a Windows version. Richey's Delphi Box has a quote that "Clipper would be the greatest dBASE-Compiler (if it were Win-able..)"
Instead of "Clipper for Windows", CA in all it's wisdom re-designed the language from scratch, calling it "Visual Objects". Now this was a great idea in theory, because with this powerful new Windows Development tool you could do OOP (Object-Orientated Programming). If fact, if I remember correctly, you had to do Object-Orientated Design as well. This was great, but unfortunately Clipper for Windows this wasn't. All DOS-based Clipper programs had to be completely re-written to run on
Windows. This was no good. Now it appears that CA has dumped Visual Objects
Unlike Clipper, Harbour compiles and run on MS-DOS, MS-Windows, OS/2, GNU/Linux and FreeBSD. There is a variant of Harbour called xHarbour (extended Harbour). To confuse things, although xHarbour is an Open Source project, there is also a commercial version of Harbour, called xHarbour Builder.
Harbour is a free software compiler for the xBase superset language often referred to as Clipper (the language that is implemented by the compiler CA-Clipper). Clipper is a one of the myriad of "4GL" (Fourth Generation Language) xBase compilers that grew out of the now defunct Ashton-Tate's dBase III and dBase III plus. Ashton-Tate was bought by Borland in 1990 or 1991 (depending on which source you look at)
Clipper was also the second programming language I was trained to use after mainframe COBOL (Unfortunately I never got to really use it, but that's a different story).
Clipper's main failing was that there was never a Windows version. Richey's Delphi Box has a quote that "Clipper would be the greatest dBASE-Compiler (if it were Win-able..)"
Instead of "Clipper for Windows", CA in all it's wisdom re-designed the language from scratch, calling it "Visual Objects". Now this was a great idea in theory, because with this powerful new Windows Development tool you could do OOP (Object-Orientated Programming). If fact, if I remember correctly, you had to do Object-Orientated Design as well. This was great, but unfortunately Clipper for Windows this wasn't. All DOS-based Clipper programs had to be completely re-written to run on
Windows. This was no good. Now it appears that CA has dumped Visual Objects
Unlike Clipper, Harbour compiles and run on MS-DOS, MS-Windows, OS/2, GNU/Linux and FreeBSD. There is a variant of Harbour called xHarbour (extended Harbour). To confuse things, although xHarbour is an Open Source project, there is also a commercial version of Harbour, called xHarbour Builder.
Wednesday, March 02, 2005
Can't beat the price
I was looking at some free/freeware programming language compilers on freeprogrammingresources, and came across XBasic which I'd tried but given up on - even though it's a multi-platform Basic.
XBLite, which only runs on Windows looks a bit more promising, but I haven't tried it yet.
One I have tried is BCX, the Freeware Basic to C Translator. I wrote a utility for myself in BCX (you write in Basic, and then in one step the code is translated into C and compiled with a C compiler). At that stage I was too spoiled by Visual Basic's visual design environment, and got frustrated when I needed to create a user interface. So I rewrote the utility in Delphi 3 in less than half the time. (Delphi is similar to Visual Basic except for the language, which is Object Pascal).
The original BCX is available here, and there is a newer "GPL'ed" version on SourceForge, as well as the BCX DevSuite Pro which includes a C compiler and some Form designers.
Of course BCX is free, and Delphi isn't.
XBLite, which only runs on Windows looks a bit more promising, but I haven't tried it yet.
One I have tried is BCX, the Freeware Basic to C Translator. I wrote a utility for myself in BCX (you write in Basic, and then in one step the code is translated into C and compiled with a C compiler). At that stage I was too spoiled by Visual Basic's visual design environment, and got frustrated when I needed to create a user interface. So I rewrote the utility in Delphi 3 in less than half the time. (Delphi is similar to Visual Basic except for the language, which is Object Pascal).
The original BCX is available here, and there is a newer "GPL'ed" version on SourceForge, as well as the BCX DevSuite Pro which includes a C compiler and some Form designers.
Of course BCX is free, and Delphi isn't.
Monday, February 28, 2005
DVD Burned
As I'd mentioned in February (see "Backwards and forwards in tech" and "Yer lyin'" here), the combination CD/DVD writer on my main PC Desktop machine was playing up. I could write to CDs, but re-writable CDs and DVDs gave me weird burn errors.
There were three possible reasons for this.
The first being a hardware problem on the CD/DVD writer, especially since the machine was no longer under warranty.
The second, and one I initially thought was more likely, was a conflict in drivers.
I had a problem if that was the case - I'd lost my original Restore CDs, so I had to order them from support (for $20!).
That was well and good, but I really don't want to restore my PC to it's original out of the box state, and then re-install all the software. I could apparently restore the original OS to another partition - but that wasn't foolproof. I needed a backup first...Catch 22.
Then I tested writing to a DVD from a clean Windows 2000 partition with Nero, and it failed. This was on media recommended by the DVD drive manufacturer (up until now I didn't realize there was such a thing as recommended media lists). That meant one of two things - the hardware was failing, or the firmware needed updating. I looked for firmware upgrades, but there weren't any official ones. For a while I limped along with a DVD writer which sometimes could write CDs.
Then I began thinking of replacing the DVD writer. An Internal one would be cheaper, but would only work on the machine I installed it into. Why not an external DVD writer, which could work with both my desktop and Notebook. Why Not!
After looking at the Mad Dog MegaSTOR 7-in-1 8X Dual Layer DVD Writer (which was on special at CompUSA for $99, but was a NEC drive like my current one and had a so-so review in buddhaslanroom.com), the Lite-On SOHW-1633SX External Dual Layer DVD±RW Writer, and then the Plextor PX-708UF External Multi Format DVD Burner. Based on the review of the Plextor PX-708UF, I bought the I bought the Plextor External Dual-Layer DVD Burner:
Plextor PX-716UF DVD±RW DL Writer
There were three possible reasons for this.
The first being a hardware problem on the CD/DVD writer, especially since the machine was no longer under warranty.
The second, and one I initially thought was more likely, was a conflict in drivers.
I had a problem if that was the case - I'd lost my original Restore CDs, so I had to order them from support (for $20!).
That was well and good, but I really don't want to restore my PC to it's original out of the box state, and then re-install all the software. I could apparently restore the original OS to another partition - but that wasn't foolproof. I needed a backup first...Catch 22.
Then I tested writing to a DVD from a clean Windows 2000 partition with Nero, and it failed. This was on media recommended by the DVD drive manufacturer (up until now I didn't realize there was such a thing as recommended media lists). That meant one of two things - the hardware was failing, or the firmware needed updating. I looked for firmware upgrades, but there weren't any official ones. For a while I limped along with a DVD writer which sometimes could write CDs.
Then I began thinking of replacing the DVD writer. An Internal one would be cheaper, but would only work on the machine I installed it into. Why not an external DVD writer, which could work with both my desktop and Notebook. Why Not!
After looking at the Mad Dog MegaSTOR 7-in-1 8X Dual Layer DVD Writer (which was on special at CompUSA for $99, but was a NEC drive like my current one and had a so-so review in buddhaslanroom.com), the Lite-On SOHW-1633SX External Dual Layer DVD±RW Writer, and then the Plextor PX-708UF External Multi Format DVD Burner. Based on the review of the Plextor PX-708UF, I bought the I bought the Plextor External Dual-Layer DVD Burner:
Plextor PX-716UF DVD±RW DL Writer
Friday, February 25, 2005
NotMail
Hotmail Glitch Snarls Pay Service according to My Way News.
My account still appears to be working...
My account still appears to be working...
Tuesday, February 22, 2005
Hello Norton
Okay, I'm only one day into using the Norton Internet Security Suite 2005, but so far it is miles better than McAfee. Configuring Anti-Spam for Outlook was a breeze compared to McAfee. In McAfee I had to set the localhost in the Email client - Norton just asked "Do you want to configure this email client?", and then went and did it.
Okay, maybe I'm biased, but this is despite a bad experience with Norton Internet Security 2003. After being on my PC for a for months, MS ActiveSync suddenly stopped working. When I uninstalled NIS 2003, it worked again. I only decided to try Norton again after reading that Symantec have changed the way their firewall rules are created since the 2003 version. I've also had the Norton Personal Firewall 2004 running on my old Desktop PC for several months without any problems.
Okay, maybe I'm biased, but this is despite a bad experience with Norton Internet Security 2003. After being on my PC for a for months, MS ActiveSync suddenly stopped working. When I uninstalled NIS 2003, it worked again. I only decided to try Norton again after reading that Symantec have changed the way their firewall rules are created since the 2003 version. I've also had the Norton Personal Firewall 2004 running on my old Desktop PC for several months without any problems.
Monday, February 21, 2005
Bye bye McAfee
My McAfee Internet Security update subscription only expires in 2 days time, but I just couldn't wait, so I un-installed it and installed Norton Internet Security Suite 2005 about half an hour ago.
NIS only needed one reboot during the updates!
NIS only needed one reboot during the updates!
Stumble-surfing
I've mentioned this before, but it bears mentioning again:
StumbleUpon is a great way to surf the Web.
It's main component is a downloadable toolbar which works with most Browsers (Mozilla, Firefox, Netscape and even Internet Explorer) and on a number of Operating Systems.
Basically, once you've downloaded and installed the toolbar, you choose topics which you are interested in (the more the better).
Then you just click the "Stumble" button on your browser to begin channel surfing - and give a "Thumbs Up" or "Thumbs Down" to the websites you like or dislike, and surf on.
It's really great fun.
StumbleUpon is a great way to surf the Web.
It's main component is a downloadable toolbar which works with most Browsers (Mozilla, Firefox, Netscape and even Internet Explorer) and on a number of Operating Systems.
Basically, once you've downloaded and installed the toolbar, you choose topics which you are interested in (the more the better).
Then you just click the "Stumble" button on your browser to begin channel surfing - and give a "Thumbs Up" or "Thumbs Down" to the websites you like or dislike, and surf on.
It's really great fun.
Saturday, February 19, 2005
Just re-install
Hopefully this is the last stupid update message from the McAfee Internet Security suite I'll see (like I'm really going to re-install McAfee VirusScan):
On Monday I'm planning to uninstall it and install Norton Internet Security 2005.
On Monday I'm planning to uninstall it and install Norton Internet Security 2005.
Given Up
Okay, that's it. The non-booting Windows 2000 Partition on my Desktop computer just wasn't responding to any TLC. I tried editing the boot.ini file, copying a new Ntoskrnl.exe, but to no avail. I've wasted enough time on it, and since all I had on that partition were programs, I have deleted it with Partition Magic.
Now I just have to re-install a few dozen programs...
Now I just have to re-install a few dozen programs...
Friday, February 18, 2005
Monday, February 14, 2005
Online bookmarks
They're not new, but this one has an interesting name Spurl
- rhymes with hurl but has some really cool features AND works with Opera, Mozilla/Firefox, Netscape and Safari across Windows, Linux and MacOS.
Oh, and Internet Explorer as well.
P.S.
This
post
is
to
move
the
previous
one
down
a
bit
so
it
doesn't
interfere
as
much
with
the
links
on
the
right
(until the next post, that is).
->
- rhymes with hurl but has some really cool features AND works with Opera, Mozilla/Firefox, Netscape and Safari across Windows, Linux and MacOS.
Oh, and Internet Explorer as well.
P.S.
This
post
is
to
move
the
previous
one
down
a
bit
so
it
doesn't
interfere
as
much
with
the
links
on
the
right
(until the next post, that is).
->
Wednesday, February 09, 2005
Tagging for Teens
RFID (radio frequency identification) badges for students at a Californian school cause an uproar - see My Way News
Tuesday, February 08, 2005
Backwards and forwards in tech
Yesterday I had more CD burner woes - I could not continue writing to a multisession CDR started with Nero 6.6 Ultra Edition.
A few days ago I could do this with a CDR started with Nero 6.3 Ultra Edition. No amount of rebooting would help Nero recognize the CD as a multisession CDR
Now today, it worked!
A few days ago I could do this with a CDR started with Nero 6.3 Ultra Edition. No amount of rebooting would help Nero recognize the CD as a multisession CDR
Now today, it worked!
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