02Dec

Command Line Software Management

One of the nice things about a Debian-based Linux distribution is that it is easy to pull a piece of software onto your system from a repository using either apt-get or aptitude. Some may prefer to have a GUI but I find that the command line offers certain extra transparency that stops the “what’s it [...]

19Nov

Consolidation

For a while, the Windows computing side of my life has been spread across far too many versions of the pervasive operating systems with the list including 2000 (desktop and server), XP, 2003 Server, Vista and 7; 9x hasn’t been part of my life for what feels like an age. At home, XP has been [...]

15Dec

java.net.MalformedURLException: unknown protocol: j

I know that that there better things to call a blog post than to use part of an error message that I got from Saxonica‘s Saxon while I was converting XML files into PHP equivalents for the visitor information section of my main website. I use the open source Saxon-B rather than the commercial Saxon-SA [...]

20Nov

The irritation of a 4 GB file size limitation

I recently got myself a 500GB Western Digital My Book, an external hard drive in other words. Bizarrely, the thing is formatted using the FAT32 file system. I appreciate that backward compatibility for Windows 9x might seem desirable but using NTFS would be more understandable, particularly given that the last of the 9x line, Windows ME, [...]

08Nov

Importing bookmarks into Firefox

Moving from one operating system to another like I have means that a certain amount of migration is in order. I have already talked about migrating my email but there are lesser acts too. One of these is carrying across bookmarks into the new world. This should be an easy thing to achieve and, for [...]

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