Finding a decent Linux distro
I recently acquired (thanks Mum & Dad) a new Dell Inspiron 530 computer, and one of the first things I do in such circumstances (which don’t come that often, admittedly) is to install Linux...
Category: Tech
Bush, Google and censorship
BBC NEWS: White House plans open government An interesting report on how the Obama government intends to open up the White House website to search engines. Under Bush, they "blocked" search engines from indexing...
My letter’s in the Technology Guardian
The technology supplement to the Guardian published a letter from me today, concerning the "no clue" nature of Apple's attitude to low-cost computer kit. You can read what they published here, but here's what...
Why I still haven’t replaced my Mac
AppleInsider | Steve Jobs on Apple's cash, NetBooks, Apple TV, and cheap PCs A couple of years ago I wrote this, a reply to a series of articles on OSNews on why the author...
C++: the Ugly Useful Programming Language
Eric Raymond, author of the [Computer] Jargon File, The Cathedral and The Bazaar and a number of well-used but little-known pieces of software, is working on a book, putatively titled Why C++ Is Not Our Favorite Programming Language. In his recent announcement, he lays out why he wants to “harpoon the Great White Whale of programming languages”. I will lay out why it remains mine, and more to the point, why it endures despite the existence of alternatives such as Java.
LugRadio Live 2008 reviewed
LugRadio Live 2008 pictures Last Saturday I went to what was billed as the last ever LugRadio performance. LugRadio is (or rather was) a podcast produced by the Wolverhampton Linux Users’ Group, and since...
The nightmare of upgrading Windows Vista
For years until last December, I avoided installing any version of Windows on my personal computers; I had a Mac, which I used for things like word processing, and a Linux-based PC which I...
Return to openSUSE
Last week, I replaced the Linux distribution on my laptop’s hard drive; I had been using Fedora 9, and I replaced it with openSUSE version 11. SUSE was the first Linux distro I tried...
Round-up: Irshad Manji, moons in mosques, the OLPC fiasco, Pauline Campbell, Obama versus Agar, Undercover Mosque
Top Muslim blog piece this week, in my opinion, was brother Marc Manley's piece, The Trouble With Muslim Pundits today. While the establishment are busy fêting the likes of Ed and Maajid here in...
Brain dead technology
In today’s Guardian Media supplement, there was a familiar range of complaints about the new DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting, or something like that) radio system, among them the fact that the radio units are...
Mandriva One 2008: brain dead
In the last few weeks there has been the usual flurry of new Linux distribution releases. Ubuntu’s new one, Gutsy Gibbon, came out in October; SUSE released version 10.3, Mandriva have just put out...
My impressions of Movable Type 4
Last week I installed the new version of Movable Type, version 4. Six Apart have made much fanfare, understandably because it's quite an overhaul of the software, and the look and feel of the...
The current crop of Linux distributions
Last month the British Linux magazine, Linux Format, did a big comparison of the current crop of Linux packages or distributions (distros for short), concentrating on the ten most popular as measured by DistroWatch....
My new computer
A couple of weeks ago I got myself a new computer – or rather, a new old computer. I did not actually want to, because apart from one particular habit, my computer was performing...
Thinking of getting the MS Office demo?
This is something I read on the Planet KDE blog I use to gather news for my other blog: an account of what the author found when she downloaded the recent Microsoft Office demo....
Cyberporn and credit card fraud
Operation Ore flawed by fraud – Guardian Unlimited Technology This tells the story of a witch-hunt against supposed downloaders of child porn who were jailed for the offence in the UK on the basis...
Do blogs need codes of conduct?
O'Reilly Radar: Draft Blogger's Code of Conduct I'm really quite surprised that it's taken the recent "Kathy Sierra affair" ([1], [2]) for the blogging community to get around to drawing up a "code of...
Windows Vista: slow, slow, slow
I'm just typing my first ever blog entry on a computer running Windows Vista, on my uncle's new Dell. And really, it's the most appallingly slow piece of software I've ever used. (I'm using...
News picks
Further to UZ's post linking a NYT article on fighting email spam, the Guardian's technology supplement today printed an article on a new front in the malware wars: programs which cripple your computer while...
Photoshop Ailments
Last month I got myself a digital camera with money I'd been given by relatives for my 30th birthday (£30 each from most of them, and I have plenty of aunts and uncles on...