geekage

Firefox Tip of the Day

I believe this is a relatively little known feature of Firefox, but I use it every day, and you will too.

Basically it turns your address bar into a multi-purpose application. The best way to see what I'm talking about is to just try this for yourself.

New site design

Make comments and suggestions on the CSS for this site

Million Dollar Homepage

This is a pretty clever gimmick.

This kid has already generated tens of thousands of dollars by selling barely visible advertisements on his Million Dollar Homepage.

Cure for Windows: Part I

User frustration with M$ products is not waning. I recently started using an XP box for work (not by choice :), and wouldn't even know where to begin in describing that experience. Let's just say that I'm re-familiarizing myself with the hardware reset button.

A friend of mine recently complained to me about the frustrations with her XP box. I played around with it for a bit. It's a decent set of hardware, fairly new. I'd expect it to run circles around my own older Linux box at home, even after cutting my expecations in half because it was running XP. But this thing was definitely cursed. I'm not familiar with the latest Windows problems, but I suspect this machine had been overrun with spy/mal/ad ware: popups every few minutes (whether web browsing or not); mysterious spikes in disk I/O, mem useage, etc...

There's only one fix for a broken Windows box, and that's a clean re-install. My friend is relatively new to computers. This is in fact her first computer. I figured it might be an opportunity to introduce her to Linux. She'd seen my computer and noted the responsiveness, the lack of pop-ads, the fact that I was never forced to reboot. I told her that she could have the same experience if she ran Linux.

She agreed, and I picked the most user-friendly, stable distro of Linux that I'm aware of: Xandros.

It's Saturday and sunny and my dog is fidgety, so rather than sit here and finish this, I will continue it later. The results of this experiment will be revealed.

The State of Operating Systems: Sad

I've used MacOS, Windows, Solaris, FreeBSD and Linux. For the last ten years, I've been in search of the perfect computer operating system. While I'm a software programmer and an amateur geek, I also use my computer to send email, browse the web, view movies and sounds and images. Ultimately, I believe a computer should be like a modern car: it runs reliabley and well for long periods of time as long as regular service is performed. Well, the difference being that your computer should require much less service than any car. Crackers are always learning new exploits, and so the programs on your system are subject to security fixes, and that's fine. A computer with an automated method of updating itself should be utterly, perfectly reliable.

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