Pain and Glory from the Trenches of the IT World

Today I read an article introducing a service called booBox. booBox apparently allows web site owners to try to sell the items they are writing about. Like the article suggests, it’s probably best to try out their demo for yourself. For their demo, if you click on the image of an iPod, for example, it will bring up an overlay showing images of similar or related items that can then be purchased from Amazon.

I recently saw a post about mission critical systems running on Windows at Slashdot. That particular post is about the use of Windows on computers running or involved with various medical systems, and it suggests that Windows isn’t a suitable operating system for such uses. I’d tend to agree.

Links to a couple of my articles have apparently been submitted to that Digg site. I’ve heard enough about it recently, so I thought I’d check it out. It looks like an interesting site, I suppose. I just don’t have enough time to make much use of it, however, so I don’t think I’ll bother joining.

It’s not often that we find a good post at Slashdot, but today I did find this one that writes about the necessity of word processing software. It’s a pretty short post, so I’d like you to go read it for yourself. Some of the points that it makes are really sensible, and unfortunately I think they are so straightforward that most people miss them completely.

I aggregate feeds from a number of blogs and newsgroups on a daily basis. For quite a while I had been a user of Akregator, just because it came with KDE, which I use as my desktop environment. But then I had heard some good things about Liferea. Unlike Akregator, it is built around the GTK+ toolkit.

With consumer-grade 3D graphics hardware becoming better on a daily basis, it’s no wonder that people have considered the idea of a three dimensional desktop. I read an article today comparing two such desktops, Project Looking Glass and Beryl. While my experience using such systems is fairly limited, I have to express some skepticism about whether or not they bring any productivity gains.

As seems to have happened every year around this time for a number of years now, we have some people writing that this upcoming year will not be a good year for Linux and the open source community, and others suggesting it will be a year of major growth.

Recently I wrote an article about why I prefer open source software. My main reason, for those who have not read the article, is one of quality. Now, “quality” is one of those words that means different things to different people in different situations. This may be the main reason why it’s a contentious subject to discuss.

When considering the present needs of most home users, Sun’s ZFS is no doubt overkill. Developed for Sun’s powerful Solaris operating environment, ZFS brings truly advanced filesystem technologies to the masses. For some background with respect to the benefits and capabilities that ZFS offers, I’d have to recommend an article I read today that briefly introduces ZFS. With recent versions of Mac OS X reportedly offering some degree of ZFS support, it will likely see increasing use on what can be considered typical home computers.

Over the years I have used a wide variety of UNIX-like systems. And if there’s one essential program that a person in such a situation should know, it’s vi. The task it performs (text editing) is quite essential, and it is available on virtually every platform. Even if you don’t use it as your everyday text editor, the use of vi is still a vital skill to have.