Now that HTML5 support has grown, and Apple continues to resist Flash on their IOS devices, it may be advantageous to make use of the newer markup standard in your web applications.
There are currently three separate methods to convert your Flash applications:
Here’s another great reason to use Linux over Windows. Ksplice Uptrack provides for runtime patching of the Linux kernel without rebooting of the machine. This has great advantages where you need to maintain the security of a server but have limited opportunites to reboot due to SLA’s (Service Level Agreements). Ubuntu Linux was the first supported operating system, other variants are now available too, though often for a fee.
I’ve been using an old Linksys WRT-54G (version 2.0) for years, while Linksys released a few firmware updates over the years, none of them really added any new functionality. Thankfully, they had released the source code to the open-source community and several excellent releases have been made available.
Additions such as real-time monitoring/graphing, boosting wireless transmitter power, QoS (Quality of Service) and WOL (Wake-on-LAN) have been added making the router and network much more useful and valuable.
The most prominent versions are:
NOTE: There are several branches on both of these, you can read more at their respective websites.
I was easily able to update from the Linksys firmware (4.21.1) to Tomato 1.25 in only a few minutes, it was even capable of saving my existing configuration making the transition that much easier!
Happy Networking
Through the years, I’ve had to develop, maintain and support software on a variety of systems. Unfortunately, it’s often impossible to maintain specific software versions or configurations installed on physical machines. In the realm of web development, this becomes increasingly complex because of the rapid release of multiple browser versions.
To aid in testing, I’ve found that it’s often best to run these configurations in Virtual Machines, I’ve used VirtualPC and VMWare in the past, but have recently become a fan of Sun‘s OpenSource release of VirtualBox as it runs on a wide variety of host systems and supports most x86 based operating systems as clients.
Cheers
While it was not technically a personal computer, the Atari 2600 was one of the first pieces of technology that I had experience with in my youth. I’ll likely outline the progression of machines/operating systems in a future post.
I’ve heard about Stella for quite a while, but never had any time to fiddle with it. Recently I found that Ubuntu includes an installer for it and took a chance look. Other versions are available for MacOS and Windows.
I also found a few websites that contain ROM images for the emulator and was playing some of my old games in a matter of minutes.
For those legal types out there… I actually do own the games that I played, in fact, they are currently boxed up in my basement.
References:
Happy Retro Gaming!!!
At one time, FTP was the only means available to move large files, times have changed but the need still exists, especially for developers like myself.
For years I’ve happily used FileZilla for my FTP needs, the client is available on most platforms. There is also a server available for Windows as most Linux variants already provide FTP.
Happy file transfers!
I am surprised that I have failed to neglect this topic for such a long time.
Some of the most common business applications in use are in the Microsoft Office suite, notably Word, Excel and PowerPoint. If you’ve ever had to purchase this package at retail prices, you were probably amazed at just how expensive this package is, particularly when you only use a small portion of the functionality that they each provide.
The alternative is to use compatible software; originally this meant that you relied on one of many packages that were available in the free-domain. Sun has it’s StarOffice suite which was later released as OpenOffice which over several releases has become the Gold Standard for office suites. It is available on most platforms and is regularly updated. Many features even outperform the Microsoft offerings, my favorite of which is to save just about any document in PDF format.
Cheers
After months of anticipation and three Release Candidates, the new version of Firefox is now available for download. (Due to demand, servers are still a bit slow, so just keep trying and you will eventually get it!).
Most common developer plugins were updated to support FF3 in the last week or so:
Cheers!
So, a family member has recently approached me about virus scan products for Windows. It seems that, while he runs a commercial product, it’s a little dated and he does not keep up on the frequent updates, unfortunately this has put him into a position where his computer was infected and has become almost unusable. Using the same commercial products he’s unable to clean up the mess and has already lost many files.
I’ve been a convert to Avast for several years and even run it on my servers to scan for malicious content, it’s both free for non-commercial use and updates automatically.
Other products worth considering:
For Windows:
Unix/Linux:
Mac OS/X:
Cheers!
I’ve had to do my share of hard-drive recoveries over the years and have found the tools provided by DiskInternals to be invaluable in several occurances.
I’d previously used their NTFS Reader software to recover files from bad partitions after multi-booting to an older Windows operating system drive on the same machine.
Now I’ve found that they offer an EXT2/EXT3 Reader to allow Windows to access Linux partitions.
This is great for less-technical users that experience fatal errors in their operating systems as there’s now a relatively simple way to access the ‘familiar’ Windows tooling to recover files on the ‘bad’ partition. For the power-user, this affords a means for people making the switch to Linux a means in which to access their files in Windows in the off chance that they have to use software not usable under WINE.
Product Pages:
NOTE: Similar tooling exists to read Mac HPFS partitions, that topic saved for a later post!
Cheers!