Archive for January, 2008

À la carte?

January 19, 2008 No comments

I have been having a fiddle with WINE recently (more on that, later) and my Applications menu started to look a spot messy and I was failing to find a way to clean things up. It turns out that I was looking for something called Alacarte to do the deed and it does it well too. After running it from the command line, I finally its place under System>Preferences. It was titled Main Menu, which may explain why a spot of googling was needed. That my mind was tired when first trying to find what I needed didn’t help either.

Alacarte on Ubuntu Studio 7.10

Linux, Operating Systems, Software

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A year in the making…

January 17, 2008 No comments

It was a year ago that I set this blog in train. Then, I was exploring the possibilities offered by WordPress.com. After some months, I decided that I wanted to make my own decisions rather than have them so I went independent in June. Between those dates, some big launches took my attention: Windows Vista, Office 2007 & CS3 come to mind. All the while, my experience of UNIX, Oracle and other such matters kept growing more and more. In the latter half of the year, I finally made the leap from Windows to Linux on the home computing front, a decision that taught me a lot and one that I don’t regret. Other subjects featured from time to time as well and my musings on web development and blogging made their appearance too. 2007 was a packed year on the technology front and 2008 is only just getting under way. There’s a Vista laptop and I am already picking up ideas for posts, though I am not going to force them out like I might have tried to do last year. 2008 may be a spot more leisurely but I hope that it’s just as interesting.

Site News

A second post today?

January 16, 2008 No comments

I know what I said about a post every two days but something has entered my head that seems timely. Things seem to starting up for 2008 and my getting a swathe of post ideas is only one of them. Today, Sun has bought up MySQL, the database that stores these ponderings for posterity, and Oracle has finally got its hands on Bea, the people behind the Weblogic software with which I have had an indirect brush for a lot of 2007.

Software, Web Technologies

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New version of SAS on the way

January 16, 2008 No comments

This is something of a newsflash posting but this morning’s issue of the SAS Tech Report newsletter has said at last when SAS 9.2 is expected to be released. SAS have been talking a bit about 9.2 but dates were elusive and, to a point, they still are. Nevertheless, hearing the Q1 of this year is the time slot for the unveiling is better than knowing nothing at all. Am I alone in wondering if it is coming later than was planned?

Programming

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Desktop.ini on the desktop?

January 14, 2008 No comments

Being an experienced computer, I set Windows Explorer to display hidden files when using a Windows PC. However, on my Vista-empowered laptop, that causes two desktop.ini files to appear on the desktop, one for all users and one for my user account. And displaying hidden files does not  seem to be something that you can do on a folder by folder basis. With XP, this did not cause hidden files to appear on your desktop like this so the behaviour could be seen as a step backwards. A spot of googling exposed me to some trite suggestions regarding re-hiding files again but deleting them seems to be the only way out. In spite of the dire warnings being issued, there didn’t seem to be any untoward problems caused by my actions. I’ll see if they stay away but episodes like this do make me wonder if it is time for Microsoft to stop treating us like idiots and give us things that work the in which we want them to function. Well, I’m glad that Linux is the lynchpin of my home computing world…

Operating Systems, Software, Windows

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What? No DNG?

January 9, 2008 No comments

Google’s Picasa is now available for Linux so I decided to give it a spin. The availability of downloadable DEB packages made installation a piece of cake. It has ported using WINE so the look and feel is very much of the Windows world. The functionality is similar too and it can seek out image files on your PC. However, it didn’t find any DNG files for me and that surprised me because DNG could become the standard raw camera format for digital imaging. The lack of support for proprietary formats like Canon’s CRW might be understandable but I like to review the raw image files before committing to editing them and Picasa will not suffice for this purpose, leading me to stick with what I already use.

Graphics, Imaging, Linux, Operating Systems, Software

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