A smattering of opinions on technology, books, business, and culture. Now in its 4th technology iteration.
06 January 2005
Software I’ve tried recently:
* GamesKnoppix. Yawn. Buggy and mostly in german. Games aren’t anything to write home about. * Acrobat Reader 7.0. Recommended. Loads much faster than prior versions. * MT 3.14. I don’t really notice much but it was an easy upgrade. * Tag&Rename 3.2Beta. Yawn. Complicated and wasn’t very good at figuring out tags for my mystery tracks (mostly classical cds or low volume compilations) * A9 toolbar for firefox. Works fine but I just can’t get in the a9 mood. * MS antispyware beta. Recommended – found a couple problems on my machine that others hadn’t, and has free signature updates. * Tweaks to speed up firefox. Despite the caveats, they worked for me. * Spell check for firefox. I’m usually ok on spelling but a nice tool to have. * True Launch Bar. Nice that it is a transparent upgrade to the quicklaunch bar. But a little overpowering.
Software I’d like to try:
* Great smallware list. I love these little utilities. * 46 best freeware utilities. Another good list. * Sokkit -- solves a need for me, easy install/config of AMP on windows.
Intriguing readings on software:
* Public ontologies. I don’t think end users will ever put keywords/classifications on all their output – but I do think a shared public ontology that can advise free text searching is pretty useful. When I search for “theatrical lighting control”, i’d love it if the search engines could benefit from the collective wisdom of the net and realize that “dmx” and “dmx-512” might be useful synonyms for my search, for instance. * Bayesian tutorial and code. Cool. * p2p in 15 lines of code. Unstoppable. * One man’s advice on how to better secure your system.