Jul
27
This post has a stupid title
Filed Under Software | 8 Comments
I've switched from IE to Firefox, Outlook 2003 to Thunderbird, and Word 2003 to AbiWord, and now I desperately need to replace Excel 2003. Any ideas?
EDIT> OH DUH — Gnumeric. Sheesh. How silly of me. AbiWord and Gnumeric are pieces of GNOME Office.
EDIT 2>> Actually no, this just isn't up to spec. I need something better than this! This isn't even native, it's GTK+/Win32, which has always been kinda weird anyway (what with the non-standard dialogs and widget graphics that are inconsistent with the look of my operating system...)
EDIT 3>> Chose latest OpenOffice beta. See my last comment for more info. :P
Jul
25
:P
Filed Under General | Leave a Comment
July 21st, 2005: Microsoft patents emoticons.
Jul
25
Spinrite
Filed Under Software, Technical | Leave a Comment
Spinrite is an amazing piece of software. By directly manipulating, interacting with, and statistically analyzing the magnetic fields on the surfaces of disks, Spinrite can recover its underlying damaged data, or at least as much as your drive will allow you to see.
At some point or another, all drives will develop weak sectors. Weak sectors are electromagnetic anomalies that live in the surface of the platter or magnetic media, usually caused by one of several factors:
- Electromagnetic influence by adjacent sectors (such as overly strong signals, which warp weak spots)
- "Sector crawl", where the heads no longer exactly line up with the sectors as originally written, or heads which are closer or further away than before
- Other factors which you'll discover through research :P
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7684
http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm
The program is well worth it for the magic it can do ($89 USD), so I suggest that if you are concerned about the longevity of your hard drives (and even floppies), you should pick up this program.
Jul
24
Tux Factory
Filed Under General | Leave a Comment
Jul
23
OS X
Filed Under Software | Leave a Comment
Holy shit, this site is amazing. Try to use Firefox if you can, it is probably most compatible. Ironically, I got a report that the site worked like crap in OS X itself [but it was from ToastyX, and nobody cares what ToastyX thinks] Oh, and I'm referring to the site itself, not the OS X total conversion kit that makes Windows look like OS X. I hate all those OS X theme packages because they always get something wrong, and the Aqua theme only looks good on Mac; it looks like shit on Windows.
See it:
FlyakiteOSX
Jul
22
Musix - Imogen Heap/Frou Frou
Filed Under Music | 10 Comments
Imogen Heap/Frou Frou is(/are?) excellent.
The best songs:
Imogen - Speak for yourself - 01 - Headlock
Imogen - Speak for yourself - 04 - Loose ends (kinda weird)
Imogen - Speak for yourself - 05 - Hide and seek (awesome a cappella - first caught my ear at the end of season 2 of The O.C.)
Imogen - Speak for yourself - 07 - Daylight Robbery (fucking ROCKS, literally)
Frou Frou - Details - 04 - Must be dreaming (breakbeaty goodness)
Jul
22
Windows Vista
Filed Under Software | 3 Comments
WTF? What a shitty name. Even worse than "XP".
Update - 07-25-05 (mm/dd/yy):
According to The Seattle Times, Microsoft is stepping on the toes of fellow Redmond software developer, Vista.
Jul
21
Office and OpenXML
Filed Under Software | Leave a Comment
Microsoft, in a huge changeup from the norm, has decided to default Office 12 to save its files in OpenXML format. The files will no longer be binary, no longer proprietary. This is astonishing to me. :P
Jul
20
Sysinternals
Filed Under Software, Technical | Leave a Comment
Sysinternals is one of my favorite tech sites, because their utilities are simply genius [and without them, my job would be 10x harder], and Mark's blog is fun to read, because he explains issues he has in-depth. He almost always uses a Sysinternals program to bail himself out of a sticky situation, so it's kind of a nice self-serving blog (in a good way) ;)
I don't know much about Bruce, but I bet he's a genius too. Microsoft respects the hell out of those two, and so do I. Sysinternals products are mentioned, and even recommended, in numerous MSKBs.
Visit Mark Russinovich's blog here: http://www.sysinternals.com/Blog/
Visit their utilities section, too. Specifically, Autoruns and Rootkitrevealer, which are two amazing pieces of software that just keep getting better.
Jul
16
Search the internet, in 0.05
Filed Under Hack | 2 Comments
Results 1 - 10 of about 4,120,000,000 for *.*. (0.05 seconds) [results vary depending on the current google server being queried]
I just stumbled across something astonishing. A query so simple, yet so elegant...
Just a few minutes ago, I discovered that if I type:
*-*
or
*.* - [Thanks ToastyX!]
in the query box at google, I can search the entire internet.
But seriously — the results are crazy. See for yourself! : http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=%2B*-*&btnG=Search
Seems it works on froogle, too.
Everything is highlighted. All of your terms have been matched!
[See also: http://www.google.com/search?q=%2B*-*&hl=en&lr=&start=4120000000&sa=N (notice the number overflow - 1073741824]
Now for my next questions: what determines the order? Where are these results being pulled from? Why this order?