Posterous
Posterous is the dead simple way to put anything online using email ! I will try this out one of these days. Having a blackberry, this looks like a very good tool to keep blogging while I’m travelling. Are you using Posterous ?
Synchronizing mail on two computers
I use Thunderbird on several computers and need some way to synchronize messages on different computers. Luckily there are several different ways . Written for Thunderbird but also applies to Mozilla Suite / SeaMonkey.
Other suggestions are welcome:
Computer programming
Two must read books about computer programming:
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) is a textbook about general computer programming concepts from MIT Press written by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professors Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman, with Julie Sussman. Widely considered a classic text in computer science, it is also known as the Wizard Book (there is a wizard on the cover). Using a dialect of the Lisp programming language known as Scheme, the book explains core computer science concepts. The full text is freely available here (html). There is also an official SICP site, and also the MIT Open Courseware version of the SICP course to assist.
How to Design Programs (HtDP) is another very good textbook on the systematic design of computer programs published in 2001 by MIT Press. Like SICP, HtDP relies on a variant of the Scheme programming language. Indeed, it comes with its own programming environment, dubbed DrScheme. This book also comes with an own web site including the full text.
I think you should read these books BEFORE starting to learn programming languages.
Keyboard and Mouse shortcuts Firefox 3
A list of keyboard shortcuts and mouse shortcuts in Mozilla Firefox
The differences between GNU/Linux distributions
A lot of people have heard of GNU/Linux (more commonly referred to as just “Linux”) and are having trouble finding out what the differences are between different versions — or distributions — that are available. This article outlines the differences between several popular GNU/Linux distributions and similar operating systems. Dates from 2006, but still interesting for newbies.
Similar articles: Linux distributions at wikipedia – linux distribution selector – another linux distribution selector
Another reason not to buy Windows Vista
It seems Windows 7 is going to be available end 2009, or perhaps in 2010. So why should a Windows XP user buy Vista ? In another year or so, we’ll have a new system again. I can’t keep on buying this stuff. Linux users must be laughing now…
Quote
Question: I’m having problems with my Windows software. Will you help me?
Answer: Yes. Go to a DOS prompt and type “format c:”. Any problems you are experiencing will cease within a few minutes.
(source)
The Library in the New Age
Information is exploding so furiously around us and information technology is changing at such bewildering speed that we face a fundamental problem: How to orient ourselves in the new landscape? What, for example, will become of research libraries in the face of technological marvels such as Google? More by Robert Darnton at the NYRB.
The Turing Test
The Turing test (another good article at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) is a proposal for a test of a machine’s capability to demonstrate intelligence. Described by Alan Turing in the 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” it proceeds as follows: a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with one human and one machine, each of which try to appear human; if the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, then the machine is said to pass the test.
I understand that CAPTCHAS (= Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) are reverse Turing tests (because it is administered by a machine and targeted to a human, in contrast to the standard Turing test that is typically administered by a human and targeted to a machine). Before being allowed to do some action on a website, the user is presented with a alphanumerical characters in a distorted graphic image and asked to recognise it. This is intended to prevent automated systems from abusing the site. The assumption is that software sufficiently sophisticated to read the distorted image accurately does not exist (or is not available to the average user), so any system able to do so must be a human being.
No money left for software ?
You are on a tight budget and you want to buy a PC and software ? Than consider spending everything on a PC and nothing on software. There are lots of free alternatives that will satisfy the needs of 90% among you. A list…
But first some remarks
- The list is aimed at users with a Windows Operating system. Most computers come with a pre-installed version. Those who are working in a Unix(-like) environment don’t really need such a list (there are literally thousands of programs and packages included in the numerous free linux distributions), and Mac OS users, well, perhaps one of the readers can make a list ?
- We have excluded online software as most of this is still a bit basic (although there are some noteble exceptions like Google Reader e.g. — another idea for a list ?)
- I have limited my suggestions to 3 maximum per application.
Browsers
Windows comes with the browser Internet Explorer. But I would strongly suggest to install some free alternatives : Mozilla Firefox, Opera or Flock.
Communication, networking, internet
Email : again a Mozilla product,Thunderbird, an e-mail and news client to replace Microsoft Outlook. Possibly you could also add the Lightning extension that adds calendar and scheduling functionality.
Next Pidgin (formerly named Gaim), a multi-platform instant messaging client. The software supports many commonly used instant messaging protocols, allowing the user to log into various different services from one application.Interesting if you love to chat.
I would also suggest Skype. It’s a software program that allows users to make calls over the Internet to other Skype users free of charge (!). Calls to landlines and cell phones can be made for a fee (lower than with traditional means). Additional features include instant messaging, file transfer and video conferencing.
You might want an aggregator to read feeds from sites, blogs, podcasts, and vlogs. Install e.g. Sage, a news aggregator extension for the Firefox browser. It’s a bit basic, but it does what it’s supposed to do without too many bells. If you use Opera, you have an aggregator included already. The same goes for Thunderbird. If you want a more advanced feedreader, than I would definitely go for Feeddemon.
Filezilla is a cross-platform FTP client. Directory Opus and Notepad++ (see below) also include a FTP client, but I prefer Filezilla.
Office suites and document editing
OpenOffice.org comes with a word processor (Writer), a spreadsheet (Calc), a presentation program (Impress), a database program (Base), a vector graphics editor (Draw) and a tool for creating and editing mathematical formulae (Math). This open source office suit is a perfect alternative for Microsoft Office. Consider also OxygenOffice Professional which is sort of an enhanced version of OpenOffice.org and comes with extras like templates, cliparts, samples, fonts and VBA support.
Scribus is a desktop publishing (DTP) application known for its broad feature set of page layout features comparable to leading commercial applications such as Adobe PageMaker, QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign.
proTeXt is a free integrated development environment (IDE) for LaTeX which is a document markup language and document preparation system for the TeX typesetting program. It includes MiKTeX, a text editor ( TeXnicCenter),along with Ghostscript and GSview. I have posted the installation procedure some time ago.
Microsoft Windows systems come with the very simple text editor Notepad. I would recommend to install Notepad++, VIM or PSPad.
PDF (Portable Document Format) is a frequently used document format that requires a special reader. The obvious one is Adobe Reader. If you want to create pdf documents than you can install PDFCreator which allows the user to select PDFCreator as their printer, allowing almost any application to print to PDF. PDF can also be created with OpenOffice.Org and LaTeX. Editing exsiting PDF documents is a bit more ccomplicated. A free one is PDFedit which is an editor for Unix-like operating systems, but can be used on top of Windows if you install Cygwin. I will not start discussing the possibilities of using UNIX on Windows machines in this post as this is (a) a bit more complicated, and (b) there are numerous ways to use Unix software and Windows on the same hardware. As of version 0.46, Inkscape (see below) also allows PDF editing through an intermediate translation step involving poppler.
Security
This is a difficult one. If we stick to the idea of not spending money on software, than ClamWin is a free antivirus software worth considering. AVG is also used by many. If you would spend some money on software, than this is probably the first thing to look at. Professional security software is still way better than open source and/or free software. Look for BitDefender, Norton (slows your system sometimes) or Kaspersky.
Back-up and data management
Cobian Backup supports Unicode, FTP, compression (Zip, SQX), encryption (including Blowfish, Rijndael, DES, RSA-Rijndael), incremental and differential backup.It supports long file names (32.000 chars) on backups except on ZIP backup (256 only). The software may be installed as an application or a service running in the background. Multilingual support is done via user-submitted language files.
Install also 7-Zip, a free open source file archiver, instead of WinZip and WinRAR, which are the main proprietary competitors.
Windows Explorer is the Microsoft application that is part of the Microsoft Windows operating system since Windows 95 and that runs on top of the Windows operating system and provides a graphical user interface for accessing the file systems. I do not see a free system to replace this, but if you have already spend some money on security and you still have some left, than check out Directory Opus, especially if you have huge amounts of files (60 days free trial). It seems that Total Commander and SpeedCommander are good as well, but I have never tried these two.
Media
Where to start ? The choice is huge…
Audio editing/management/player : Audacity (editor), iTunes (management and player), VLC Mediaplayer (eh, player…)
Images : Irfanview is an image viewer that can view, edit, and convert image files (and play video/audio formats) or the very basic application Picasa
Video editing : Avidemux, Virtual Dub or VirtualDubMod. The latter is still available but I think that development has stopped. Still an option to consider.
Graphics : GIMP, a raster graphics editor used to process digital graphics and photographs and often described as a free alternative for Adobe Photoshop, Paint.net, another possible alternative for Photoshop but I prefer GIMP ; Inkscape, “an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format” ; Dia, a general-purpose diagramming software ; and Blender, a 3D animation program. This should allow you to do a lot of decent graphics work already.
Science
I will limit this to software for statistics and mathematics. If someone has experience with software in other scientific domains, let me know.
Statistics : PSPP, definitely and more or less a free alternative for SPSS. And yes, of course Gretl, an application for compiling and interpreting data mainly for econometrics.
Mathematics : SAGE, aimed at creating an “open source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica, and MATLAB”, Maxima, “a system for the manipulation of symbolic and numerical expressions, including differentiation, integration, Taylor series, Laplace transforms, ordinary differential equations, systems of linear equations, polynomials, and sets, lists, vectors, matrices, and tensors. Maxima yields high precision numeric results by using exact fractions, arbitrary precision integers, and arbitrarily precision floating point numbers. Maxima can plot functions and data in two and three dimensions”, and GNU Octave, to perform numerical computations and which is mostly compatible with MATLAB. I know I told you that I would limit suggestions to three, but let’s make an exception here. Have also a look at R and R Commander. R is a programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics.R Commander is a GUI for the R programming language. Extremely powerful !
Content Management Systems
CMS is perhaps not the best heading for software used for blogging, Wikis, and …CMS.
Let’s start with the blogging software: WordPress.com (hosted for free like this blog e.g.) and WordPress.org (to be hosted by you). Have a look here for other possibilities.
Next Wiki software. Again there are just too many options. Have a look at MediaWiki (used for Wikipedia), TWiki and PmWiki. Or check out the WikiMatrix for a comparaison of Wiki software.
With CMS we mean Web Content Management Systems in this overview. Or software that helps you publishing content to web sites. Have a look at Drupal and Joomla!
No heading
A nice piece of software is also FreeMind, a mind mapping application written in Java. It’s fun and useful at the same time !
You might have noticed that I didn’t include any P2P software. I haven’t seen any that I really like just yet (read : without junk).
And to end this post, one last piece of software : PortableApps. PortableApps.com is a compilation of free and open source applications founded by John T. Haller. The applications run directly from any storage equipment, like a flash drive, iPod, external hard drive, or directly from a computer. Ideal to have your favourite free software on a simple USB flash drive.
There are alternatives for most of the software I suggested in this list, and everyone has probably his own favourites. An endless discussion in some cases. I would however concentrate on one alternative and learn to use all of its features iso swapping software regularly just for some (mis-)perceived advantage.
Suggestions are of course welcome.
UPDATES:
Revo Uninstaller is not just an uninstall application, but it also includes other utilities and features that will help you clean your Windows based computer system. Very useful tool.
Wanted
I have a nice wifi network installed at home and 2 desktops and a laptop connected to the network. On top of that I have a PS3 connected as well. What I really need now is a central storage unit for my files (the typical documents, images, movies, music files) with an automatic back-up. I could of course use one of the desktops to act as, but I prefer to have an independent unit. The question is now what is the ideal hardware to do this ?
Something like this ? (via). Or this ?
Update: note to myself – go next weekend to Digame (Dutch link) in Leuven
Happy Anniversary
It was a serious contribution to the electronic lexicon. 
Twenty-five years ago, Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman says, he was the first to use three keystrokes – a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis – as a horizontal “smiley face” in a computer message. Article at Wired News.
Why I do not buy an iPhone
The iPhone is the talk of the town. Everyone seems to want one. Now I can’t see (yet) why I would too. First I use a Blackberry and it fits my current needs : phone, agenda, emails. Of course it would be nice to have a camera and a better access to web pages, but I do NOT absolutely need this.
A camera ? I prefer to use a real one like a Nikon D200. And if I wanted a phone with integrated camera, than I would think that the Nokia N95 is currently unbeatable. Access to web pages ? Most web pages aren’t adapted anyhow to a small screen and I just get frustated when I try it on a phone. So I call these 2 features ‘nice-to-have-but-not-necessary’.
I repeat : why should I get an iPhone ? I can’t see what the iPhone will improve w.r.t. the three functions I actually need and use on a daily basis, other that it has better looks. I have the impression that most (potential) buyers just want it because it’s hot and it’s Apple. Does this make me unhip ?
2 qubits in action, new step towards the quantum computer
Researchers at TU Delft have succeeded in carrying out calculations with two quantum bits, the building blocks of a possible future quantum computer. The Delft researchers are publishing an article about this important step towards a workable quantum computer in this week’s issue of Nature (Nature 447, 836 – 839 (14 Jun 2007). Press release by the TU Delft.
Browsers
Apple Safari 3 Public Beta was released today. I haven’t tried it yet, but will next weekend. Currently I am using Firefox as my default web browser, and Opera on occasion, and I see no real reason why I should change this (yet). Perhaps I’m lazy
See also this comparaison of web browsers.
Good Idea
TagsAhoy lets you search all your tags, across different sites, from one location. Supported sites include del.icio.us, Flickr, Gmail, Squirl, LibraryThing and Connotea, with more coming soon (well that’s what they say). I understand the ‘mind’ behind Tagsahoy is a certain John who works at LibraryThing.
RK sez : with all the tagging going on, this is a fine idea. Would be nice if you could also include searches on your harddrive.
Quantum Computer
A quantum computer is any device for computation that makes direct use of distinctively quantum mechanical phenomena, such as superposition and entanglement, to perform operations on data. In a classical (or conventional) computer, the amount of data is measured by bits; in a quantum computer, the data is measured by qubits.
The basic principle of quantum computation is that the quantum properties of particles can be used to represent and structure data, and that quantum mechanisms can be devised and built to perform operations with these data.
Though quantum computing is still in its infancy, experiments have been carried out in which quantum computational operations were executed on a very small number of qubits. Research in both theoretical and practical areas continues at a frantic pace, and many national government and military funding agencies support quantum computing research to develop quantum computers for both civilian and national security purposes, such as cryptanalysis.
It is widely believed that if large-scale quantum computers can be built, they will be able to solve certain problems asymptotically faster than any classical computer.
Read full article at Wikipedia.org including a very decent list of further reading references.
TLD
The right-most label in a domain name (e.g. www.icann.org) is referred to as its “top-level domain” (TLD). TLDs with two letters have been established for over 240 countries and external territories and are referred to as “country-code” TLDs or “ccTLDs.” A list of all ccTLDs can be found here. TLDs with three or more characters are referred to as “generic” TLDs, or “gTLDs.” A list of all gTLDs can be found here. Examples of gTLDs are .com, .org, .museum, etc. Now ICANN seeks public participation in process for evaluating and approving new Top-Level Domains. Let’s see. What about .art (museum does not serve all purposes), and .blog ?
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