Through the years I’ve run many versions of Microsoft Windows. For the last two and one-half years I’ve had Apple Macs, so I’ve used both OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard. I don’t even know how many different desktop Linux distributions I’ve installed, but I’ve certainly installed Linux at least…
This article and something I saw earlier on the web today reminded me that not everyone is aware of office productivity suites for the Mac that are available for no cost. Microsoft grants Mac Office 11th-hour reprieve ComputerWorld / Gregg Keizer Just a day before Microsoft was to have retired…
I’ve been on vacation this week, so blog posts have been rare, but here’s an article from earlier this year and some links to note taking and writing software for the Mac that I think are interesting. Also, check out Literature & Latte (love the name) for more links. Bringing…
Although I’ve previously published the slides for the talk I gave at LinuxWorld 2008 in San Francisco, I thought it might be useful to add some additional comments in the blog about each of the eight predictions I made. This is not the full text of what I said nor…
Although I’ve previously published the slides for the talk I gave at LinuxWorld 2008 in San Francisco, I thought it might be useful to add some additional comments in the blog about each of the eight predictions I made. This is not the full text of what I said nor…
I’m participating in this now-closed-to-new-people trial to use a MacBook Pro for work. It’s going very well, thank you. I just got off the phone with one of my colleagues who is doing LinuxWorld planning and he suggested I set it up to dual boot Ubuntu. I had considered this…
Normally I would just provide a Diigo link to this if it weren’t something I’ve been saying a lot in talks. Over at InformationWeek, Serdar Yegulaip was a piece called “Shuttleworth’s Ubuntu Ambitions: Challenge the Mac”. He quotes Mark Shuttleworth saying in a Datamation article: … our goal, very simply,…
On March 11 I decided to move away from using Microsoft Windows XP as my primary work operating system on my IBM-supplied Thinkpad T60p. I’ve offered progress reports on how I was getting along. Through all of this I kept a reduced Windows XP partition on the machine “just in…
Not much to report of late on my experience after giving up Windows XP cold turkey. I’m using the IBM Open Client for Linux on Red Hat RHEL 5.1 and it all pretty much works. I haven’t used Windows at all for any reason in over three weeks, though I’ve…
I had to go back to last week to see how many days it has been since I last used Windows (Day 1 and Day 2). Part of the reason I forgot was that, well, I was busy and getting work done. I wasn’t thinking about not using Windows. I…
Yesterday I installed a second monitor on my desktop Mac. It’s a 20″ model of May, 2007, vintage running OS X 10.5.2 Leopard. I had an old flat panel monitor with a VGA cable that I wasn’t using anymore and decided to try it out on the Mac. The key…
My work laptop is a Lenovo Thinkpad T60p that came with Windows XP and all sorts of IBM software that allows me to access my Lotus Notes email and get through the corporate firewall. As soon as I got it, I split the disk in half and have had various…
Thus far this year I have given my opinions about the top ten priorities for open standards and open source in 2008. With this post I’m going to continue the series and give my ideas for virtual worlds like Second Life, Active Worlds, and so forth. First let me say…
Yesterday I upgraded my Mac to OS X Leopard. It pretty much went like this: around 6:45 AM I put in the Leopard DVD and reconfirmed the previous registration information I had given to Apple. It then asked if it could verify the DVD to make sure it did not…
I’m not sure exactly when it was released, but NeoOffice 2.2.1, and adaptation of OpenOffice.org for the Mac, is now available for download. The available languages are listed as Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Spanish, and Vietnamese.
See the press release “IBM joins the OpenOffice.org community to develop and promote OpenOffice.org technology”. It says, in part, 10 September 2007 — The OpenOffice.org community today announced that IBM will be joining the community to collaborate on the development of OpenOffice.org software. IBM will be making initial code contributions…
Apple is allowing users to download a free trial version of iWork ’08 that works for 30 days. Evidently its support for OOXML is read-only, and not complete at that. This means, to be explicit, that you can read some OOXML documents but not write them out again. I suppose…
This just popped up via Google Alerts and digg: “Apple Support for Open Document Format.” If it supported ODF, I would certainly buy a copy of iWorks for my Mac. Conversely, if it supports OOXML but not ODF, I will not buy it.
As a followup to my entry yesterday about Apple’s possible marketing strategy with respect to iTunes and Safari on Windows, I want to give you a pointer to an article in Forbes by Brian Caulfield called “Microsoft Versus Google: Apple Wins.” Brian says, in part, Better still, from Apple’s point…
Over in the New York Times, there’s an article about how Apple has released a beta of Safari 3 for Windows. I think this is good news, but then I like browsers. I have Firefox, IE, Opera, and now Safari on the lone Windows machine I use.
In the first three parts of this series, I’ve looked at my basic requirements for virtual worlds, the need for more artificial intelligence, and some scenarios for moving information and assets among virtual worlds. This requirement is much faster to describe, and it is simply that the virtual world client…
Would you use software that came with the following warning: WARNING: THIS SOFTWARE MAY CRASH AND MAY DESTROY YOUR DATA DO NOT USE THIS SOFTWARE FOR REAL WORK IN A PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT
Over on ZDNet, Christopher Dawson rekindles the old Apple Macintosh debate in his piece “Macintosh…Help me understand why.” I’ve observed these discussions from a distance for over twenty years, but they were always abstract to me since I didn’t own nor particularly have any experience with a Mac. I do…
I don’t know, maybe this will mean something to me in 20 years. These are effects, people, not my usual appearance.
The good news is that since the Mac OS X is based on the BSD flavor of Unix, it comes with things like PHP and Apache. The bad news is that both are pathetically backlevel. This is fixable, however, and I played with various options late last night. Right now…
I don’t consider myself completely typical in my use of IT, but I do get around enough to see what is happening in the industry, in universities, and even in airports around the world. I’ve observed the following:
Per my last post, I now have an iMac. My previous home environment was a Windows XP/Ubuntu Linux dual boot machine. Now dual boot situations work, but they’re a bit of a pain, because you often find you want exactly the other environment for some task. I know I could…
Per a previous entry, I was strongly considering purchasing an iMac. I did it. I’ve been moving over my data from the Windows XP machine to the iMac and setting up applications. I’ll be chronicling this process, the good and the bad, in future entries. After I get everything off…
Last December I published an entry called “My future home open desktop: The resolution” where I talked about the steps I was going to take to have my primary home machine only running GNU/Linux, specifically the Ubuntu distro. Since then I’ve been doing some software substitutions on the Windows desktop…
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