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Archive for August, 2006

Small Businesses should pay attention to Open Souce

Published by
Ken
at 31 August, 2006 in Using Open Source. 0 Comments

Found this article, Your Open Souce Plan on CIO Magazine (via Open Source Applications for Windows). The interesting point about this article is that it was written 3 years ago.

The article focused on the enterprise and how CIO are paying attention to open source, epsecially on the server end.

Open source is helping turn significant chunks of the IT infrastructure into commodities by offering alternatives to proprietary software.

Well, I believe small business owners should pay attention as well. Whether on the infrastructure or on the desktop.

IT or technology has over the years shifted from a supplementary role to an enabling role. It means that IT is no longer be a nice to have but a need to have.

For small business owners effective and resourceful leverage of open source softwares could become a competitive advantage.

Popularity: 17%

Google offers Free Hosted Applications

Published by
Ken
at 29 August, 2006 in Hosted Applications, Chat & E-mail and Related elsewhere. 2 Comments

Red Herring reported that Google is Offering Productivity Apps. I know for a fact that this is not new since I have been using “GMail for your domain” on one of my domain for some time now. The new addition to the suite is Page Creator.

Google Apps for Your Domain is what is known as hosted applications. Hosted application is a new trend that is gaining attention and acceptance in the software arena.

Besides free and opensource softwares that you can download run on your own computers, free hosted applications is also another source of softwares that small business can turn to.

Continue reading ‘Google offers Free Hosted Applications’

Popularity: 20%

What do you put on a new PC?

Published by
Ken
at 28 August, 2006 in Using Open Source and Editorial. 7 Comments

We just order a new PC for the office. As the guy go about installing the necessary softwares, I reflect on what went into the desktop and how I could influence and introduce opensource applications into the software mix.

Operating system : Windows XP

As much as I want to use Linux as the office desktop platform, Windows XP is still the dominant OS. The learning curve is too steep for the staff to climb. Time is also a factor.

My plan is to allocate time for one of the programmer to explore Linux. Already he had setup a FreeBSD server in the office.

Office productivity : Microsoft Office, Open Office

MS Office is also very much ingrained. Most user learnt to use it in school and is very familiar with it.

I have Open Office installed. My observation is that it us easier to get a non-tech person or less compute-savvy user to start using OO. They do not have much prior experience so learning OO or MS Office isn’t too much of a difference to them.

Browser: Firefox

Firefox is installed and set as the default browser. Especally for the less savvy user, using IE is a potential hole for exploit and melware.

Whenever someone got infected by melware through IE, they are reminded to use Firefox.

File archiver : 7-zip

Graphic viewer: Irfanview

Anti-virus: ClamWin

Development tools: XAMPP, TortiseSVN, WinMerge

What opensource softwares do you install on your new system?

Popularity: 31%

Read CD/DVD without a drive using Daemon Tools

Published by
Ken
at 25 August, 2006 in Audio & Video and Utilities & Drivers. 0 Comments

DAEMONS Tools Imagine this, you have two CDs and you need to alternately access data or you need to run program from the CD. You have only one CD drive.

Frustrating? Not anymore. DAEMONS Tools comes to the rescue.

Daemon-Tools is a virtual CD emulator or sometime known as CD image mounter.

Sounds techy, what does it do? Well, it does a two things that might be very interesting to you as a user.

  1. It allows reading a CD without a CD drive
  2. It allows reading multiple CDs at the same time

Effectively, Daemon Tools emulate (or “pretend to be”) a CD or DVD drive. So you can read the content of a CD/DVD without a drive. The mounted CD image will appears as a drive letter just like a normal CD. Normal file operations can be perform on it just like any CD.

Continue reading ‘Read CD/DVD without a drive using Daemon Tools’

Popularity: 77%

WordWeb - a dictionary to use offline

Published by
Ken
at 21 August, 2006 in Business & Productivity. 2 Comments

With almost all my waking hours spent online daily, it is tempting to think that every tools needed on the desktop can be found online, in just a few clicks.

Take the example of the dictionary. I don’t even own a physical dictionary now. On Firefox, I just use the Dictionary Search (at the top right corner) or use the shortcut to look up unknown words.

The only time when all these fail is when the Internet connection is down or when I’m offline.

So this is where WordWeb comes in handy.

WordWeb Free

Continue reading ‘WordWeb - a dictionary to use offline’

Popularity: 17%

VLC - One player to play them all

Published by
Ken
at 18 August, 2006 in Audio & Video. 0 Comments

VLCVLC media player (initially known as VideoLAN Client) is a replacement for media players like Microsoft Media Player. Granted, Media Player is good and is also free. Functionality wise there may be no reason to replace it. But philosophy wise, I have three.

One, as an open source supporter and believer, I want to use as many open source applications as possible for all my desktop functions.

Two, I dislike the way applications like Media Player and Real Player intrude and make assumptions about my usage preference. No movie trailers or latest news please. I just want to play my media files. No prompting to update or to download media information, I can look for it if needed, thank you.

Three, dispite the pages of privacy policies (that nobody reads), I am not comforted. There isn’t any clue as to what information are being captured and sent in the background.

As an open source application, VLC does not need to market or promote anything. It sticks to its job and does it well.

Continue reading ‘VLC - One player to play them all’

Popularity: 11%

A Notepad Replacement

Published by
Ken
at 16 August, 2006 in Desktop Enhancement. 0 Comments

The original Notepad shipped with Windows is probably the handiest program of all times, small, fast, without frills! Notepad2 tries to follow this principle, it’s a small, fast and free text editor with syntax highlighting for HTML and other common languages.

- Notepad2

I have to agree with the author. For a quick edit, Notepad2 is without peer. Small and fast, all the most used features are there. Powerful search and replace, open large file, syntax coloring, line number, change file format, support UTF-8 encoding.

It is just one file, so there is no install involved and can directly replace the Windows Notepad.

There are 2 ways to run the program - separately as a standalone program or as a Notepad replacement.

Notepad 2

Continue reading ‘A Notepad Replacement’

Popularity: 10%

No more Office, Open Office

Published by
Ken
at 14 August, 2006 in Business & Productivity. 10 Comments

OpenOfficeOne of the stronghold of commercial software - Miscrosoft Office, had been firmly brokened!

Open Office had been installed on my desktop for close to a year now, begnning with the 1.9 beta version.

From my experience, Open Office is more than capable to handle all the day to day requirement of document processing of a small business owner.

Take a look at Writer, Calc and Impress, they can do all of what you have been doing with Word, Excel and Powerpoint.

Writer, Word replacement.

Open Office Writer

Calc, Excel replacement.

Open Office Calc

Impress, PowerPoint replacement.

Open Office Impress

Continue reading ‘No more Office, Open Office’

Popularity: 23%

ifranview - graphic viewer par excellence

Published by
Ken
at 12 August, 2006 in Digital Imaging. 4 Comments

Irfanview is another one of those cool program that does everything it needs to do and then more. Best of all, it’s free!

Irfanview started as a graphic image viewer but has now become more than that. It can do simple image manipulations like resizing, changing format, applying effects and screen capture (screenshots on this site are captured with Irfanview). With plugins it can even play media files like mp3 and avi.

irfnview

Continue reading ‘ifranview - graphic viewer par excellence’

Popularity: 38%

Firefox shortcut - the best thing since bookmark

Published by
Ken
at 10 August, 2006 in Tips & Tutorials. 9 Comments

One thing about opensource software is that many features are added but never mentioned. In commercial software, every feature gets hyped as the best thing since [fill in the blank ].

Here’s one nice little feature that I use alot on Firefox.

  1. Go to Bookmarks and right on any bookmark.
  2. Select Properties.
  3. Under Keyword: enter a short keyword.
    For example for freebizware.com, I entered fbw.
  4. Click OK to save it.
    saving Firefox shortcut
  5. Enter the keyword on the address bar (or URL bar - the thingy that you key in the web address).
  6. Hit Enter.
    Enter the keyword

Cool! Most of my favourite sites are now keyworded.

Popularity: 69%