Record as I Am

Tech && Soccer && PHP Coding - More Bolivian than America expected.

Jamesr on Column Two sets the bar pretty high when he observes that it costs $5 million to write a CMS. On the face of it, I can't argue with it.  The temptation with writing one from scratch is that it so easy, and tempting, to have something functional with a pretty minimal investment (say less than $100k, heck, one marathon coding weekend of a halfway talented/dangerous programmer.

Nokia's N770 and N800 tablet PCs were developed with a conscious decision to use as much open source software as feasible.  This decision had tremendous benefits in cost savings, code quality, flexibilty, and zero licensing costs.  You can read the white paper    HT:

Jason has discovered the goodness of APT for managing installed software on a Linux box. You gotta respect a tool that lets you upgrade pretty much your entire distribution with one command: apt-get dist-upgrade .

A new version of Sharpreader is out, grab it from sharpreader.net. It's been my Windows RSS Aggregator of choice and uses the 3-paned outlook style UI to display feeds and items. Best sounding improvements: Systray popup notification and reduced memory usage.

I've just finished upgrading my sister's pc, which we use to share a dial-up connection, to Mandrake 9.1. ( Yes-dialup, I'm 2 miles from AOL's headquarters and the closest to broadband that I can get is wireless or satellite.) I can't say that the install was a piece of cake - the installer crashed on me a couple times until I ran it in advanced mode, and although I did an upgrade first I had to go back and do a complete install for the distribution.

In this email, Steve Balmer outlines the growing threat Linux poses to Microsoft. Or spun another way, some competition might force them to have to make a better product. There are some other amusing ideas too.

Sounds like there's no reason to upgrade Adobe PDF viewer.

The insults start at the download: They changed the name to Adobe Reader. Haha, a very clever exercise in corporate branding. WTF did they think.