Tagged "software"

For the last few years, I’ve always wanted to budget properly and see where my money was going. But like all habits that are good for you, looking after your finances takes time, care and attention. I started off by researching the market for budgeting software. A lot of the prepackged software out there was very US-centric, including Quicken, Microsoft Money and Mint.com. I eventually settled on and bought a license for You Need a Budget, because: it had a budgeting methodology, very good Euro support and was cross platform with Adobe Air.

I recently read an article that posed the question “Does your dock reflect your priorities?” - which is an interesting question. Further breaking that idea down leads to: What apps do I need the most? What apps should be next (or be higher priority)? iPhone dock Phone app: pretty self explanatory Safari: Still the best mobile browser I think (though if Google ever gets going on a proper Chrome browser for Android that may change) Tweetbot: I like Twitter the most of the social networks and tweetbot is the Swiss army knife if twitter clients Music (aka.

I spend a lot of my day in heavy development tools such as Eclipse1, but often for editing simple XML I just want a quick tool to make fast changes. If I use the CLI (or Linux) it’ll be Vim, if I’m on Mac it’ll be Textmate but on Windows it’s Notepad++. I haven’t found an editor on Windows as clean as Notepad++ (if you use a tool professionally, you get to know it’s quirks pretty fast) for editing text of any kind.

I haven’t been posting much lately because I have been working hard to improve the experience of visiting this website. You may ask what does that mean? - well it is simple. I love going to websites that are uncluttered, provide useful information and are to the point. It’s also small things like having a really fast page load time. So here’s a flavour of some of what I have been working on lately…

One topic that rarely gets coverage that I’ve seen is how women get along in male dominated environments, such as Computer Science. For me it has never mattered someone’s gender - I love using, tweaking and learning about computers and if you share that interest - the more, the better! It has been shown very young children are conditioned from a very young age by gender rules - shown by Prof.

What are Desktop Environments? Wikipedia defines it as: In graphical computing, a desktop environment (DE) commonly refers to a style of graphical user interface …… A desktop environment typically consists of icons, windows, toolbars, folders, wallpapers, and desktop widgets. (See WIMP.) I would add a file manager and browser to this list also! Let’s look at the two most popular consumer Operating Systems (in three variants) and their Desktop Environments:

Last year was me celebrating four years of using the best operating system out there: Linux and the best distro Ubuntu. Ubuntu was my first foray in to Linux; and I haven’t left it since; although I have tried all the other major distros. I started with the first version of Ubuntu; Warthy Warthog: Warthy had a text only installer and it took me quite a while to not only get used to the idea of this strange operating system; but the fear of leaving Windows-land where all that power usage knowledge would mean nothing.

Recently I downloaded the Kubuntu packages of the new KDE 4.2 beta 2. For those of you who don’t know; KDE is the K Desktop Environment; which includes a window manager (KWin), common desktop applications, its own menu (Kickoff), browser (Konqueror), file manager (dolphin) etc. Basically it is the most popular desktop environment on Linux next to Gnome. *KDE 4.2 Beta 2 with Kickoff Menu visible **What is so special about KDE?

Open Source star of the blogging world…

I just purchased an Amarok hoodie andt-shirt; and I couldn’t be happier supporting one of my favourite open source projects! What makes it so good? Have you ever heard of Amarok? Chances are if your an OS X or Windows user; you haven’t. All this is about to change! The amarok team are busy porting it from it’s UNIX underpinnings to Windows and OS X. Whats to like about Amarok then?

Here’s a few items I’d like to share with everyone as I find them extremely useful, hopefully you will too, thats if you have never used them! My Top 10 Apps of 2007 in descending order: 10. Spybot Search and Destroy Always a must on spyware infested Windows XP installs I come across (Unfortunately all to often). It removes a lot of the bad stuff, and my most used feature is system startup section, as I can stop all that crud from loading and slowing everything to a crawl.

Well first of all, there has been some blog updates, inspired no less by my Grandfather! He’s at a fragile old age, so he can’t read the screen all too well. This is not a problem however, as he sets all fonts to 16 and higher in Firefox (which is out of beta and into version 2.0!). That got me thinking, as I really struggled to read this page being marginally away from the screen, as I am a [Keratoconus][] sufferer.

I feel I need to confess why I am buying a MacBook, have I turned soft to my Open Source/Free Software ways? No, definately 100% NOT. I’ll explain why: I think Apple Computer has an incredible product in Mac OSx. For anyone who has not used it before, pop into a 3G store and ask to have a go. When someone releases a good a product as that, they deserve money, in my opinion.

Hope you like the new look Duey Finsters. Like Google style hoo-pah, we are still in “Beta” mode (or is it “Alpha”? Depends on who you ask!). I would be extremely grateful for people to report issues, with the folloxing browsers IE 5.5, 6 & 7, Opera 9, Firefox 1.5.X , Mozilla 1.X , Safari on all platforms Windows, Linux and Mac (BSD if you want!). Great news also in ranking, the site has gone from 8.

Only now is it truly becoming clear, their is [serious money in Open Source][]/ With Mozilla reported to have made tens of millions of dollars. One blogger reported 70m was made by the corporation, with a Mozilla insider confirming thats a reasonable ballpark figure. Christopher Blizzard, board member of Mozilla, had this to say on his blog: Blizzard added that an earnings figure of $72m (£41m) quoted on some blogs was incorrect.

One of the biggest complaints of Linux is that software doesn’t install to well, or is very difficult to install. “Dependency Hell” (When software relies on other bits of software to work), used to be quite commonplace. Ubuntu has cleaned a lot of dependency hell up, and a new program for installing software from the internet, is included in the new version, due to be released 1st June 2006. That’s when I discovered a little gem called Klik for many Linux distributions.