Posts Tagged ‘open-source’
Wednesday, June 24th, 2009
Through the years, I’ve had to develop, maintain and support software on a variety of systems. Unfortunately, it’s often impossible to maintain specific software versions or configurations installed on physical machines. In the realm of web development, this becomes increasingly complex because of the rapid release of multiple browser versions.
To aid in testing, I’ve found that it’s often best to run these configurations in Virtual Machines, I’ve used VirtualPC and VMWare in the past, but have recently become a fan of Sun’s OpenSource release of VirtualBox as it runs on a wide variety of host systems and supports most x86 based operating systems as clients.
Cheers
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Tags: browser, emulation, emulator, free, hardware, open-source, operating system, testing, virtual, virtualization, virtualpc, vm, vmware
Posted in WebStandards, Work | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 29th, 2009
While it was not technically a personal computer, the Atari 2600 was one of the first pieces of technology that I had experience with in my youth. I’ll likely outline the progression of machines/operating systems in a future post.
I’ve heard about Stella for quite a while, but never had any time to fiddle with it. Recently I found that Ubuntu includes an installer for it and took a chance look. Other versions are available for MacOS and Windows.
I also found a few websites that contain ROM images for the emulator and was playing some of my old games in a matter of minutes.
For those legal types out there… I actually do own the games that I played, in fact, they are currently boxed up in my basement.
References:
Happy Retro Gaming!!!
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Tags: 2600, arcade, atari, emulation, emulator, free, gaming, linux, open-source, stella, ubuntu, windows
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Tuesday, February 17th, 2009
At one time, FTP was the only means available to move large files, times have changed but the need still exists, especially for developers like myself.
For years I’ve happily used FileZilla for my FTP needs, the client is available on most platforms. There is also a server available for Windows as most Linux variants already provide FTP.
Happy file transfers!
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Tags: client, filezilla, free, ftp, linux, open-source, server, ubuntu, windows
Posted in WebStandards, Work | No Comments »
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008
I am surprised that I have failed to neglect this topic for such a long time.
Some of the most common business applications in use are in the Microsoft Office suite, notably Word, Excel and PowerPoint. If you’ve ever had to purchase this package at retail prices, you were probably amazed at just how expensive this package is, particularly when you only use a small portion of the functionality that they each provide.
The alternative is to use compatible software; originally this meant that you relied on one of many packages that were available in the free-domain. Sun has it’s StarOffice suite which was later released as OpenOffice which over several releases has become the Gold Standard for office suites. It is available on most platforms and is regularly updated. Many features even outperform the Microsoft offerings, my favorite of which is to save just about any document in PDF format.
Cheers
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Tags: excel, free, microsoft, office, open-source, powerpoint, word
Posted in Life, Work | No Comments »
Wednesday, August 8th, 2007
As an old UNIX developer, I spent a significant portion of my work experience using VI, as my development environment became more focused on Windows, I used Homesite for developing text formatted documents. I’ve found that the current offerings from Eclipse and other IDE’s are notoriously bad at displaying the source of many document types, particularly JSP, HTML, XML, JAVA, JS and CSS files; where you often want to see exactly how a document is structured. Additional spaces, tabs and carriage returns can cause display formatting issues and wasted bandwidth in many cases.
Many of my peers are fans of TextPad, but I’ve found Notepad++ to be quite up to the task:
- it is available for Windows and LINUX
- supports auto-formatting of many text file types
- can ‘replace’ the default Source-HTML viewer in MSIE.
http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net
Happy coding!
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Tags: code, editor, free, linux, notepad, open-source, text, vi, windows
Posted in Work | No Comments »
Monday, July 30th, 2007
For years I was an advocate of PKZip and WinZip (That I own a “floppy” disk of), but after discovering the advantages and freedom of open-source, I discovered 7Zip.
7-Zip is a file archiver with the high compression ratio. The program supports 7z, ZIP, CAB, RAR, ARJ, LZH, CHM, GZIP, BZIP2, Z, TAR, CPIO, RPM and DEB formats.
While it’s only available on Windows, similar software is native on most other Operating Systems, Microsoft added only meager support in Windows XP (which in fact often crashes machines).
References:
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Tags: 7z, cab, compression, ear, free, gz, jar, open-source, rar, tar, war, zip
Posted in Work | No Comments »
Friday, July 13th, 2007
One of the first applications I ever saw on a (original) IBM-PC was planetarium. Additionally, in my “Navy Days” I became quite interested in astronomy, as the skies are never quite as clear as they are in the middle of the ocean!
Stellarium is a free open source and cross-platform planetarium for your computer. It shows a photo-realistic sky full of stars, constellations, planets, nebulas in realtime 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope. Other items like ground, landscape, atmosphere, and constellation illustrations can also be added. You can even see the Sun and Moon in their actual locations.
Notable is that you can also update the existing star charts with improved information so that even more stars can be seen in the application.
References:
Another good competitor that you may prefer more for various reasons is Celestia, it can be found at:
Happy sky-gazing, even if it’s only virtual!
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Tags: astronomy, free, open-source, planetarium, sky, space, stars
Posted in Life | No Comments »
Monday, June 18th, 2007
There’s a lot of free software out there, but just like with Instant Messaging software you have to install many of them to be flexible.
Examples:
Several years ago I stumbled upon the VideoLAN Client (aka VLC) when researching methods to stream video from my ReplayTV (Tivo predecessor/clone) to my laptop as the files were in MPEG4 format and my previous clients didn’t support it.
I urge you to check it out as it’s an all in one solution, so that you don’t need all of that other bloat-ware installed.
G’day!
P.S. – I should add that this plays most video and audio formats and is available on most platforms, not just Windows.
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Tags: audio, client, free, open-source, player, streaming, video, vlc
Posted in Life | No Comments »
Tuesday, May 23rd, 2006
This came as a shock to me a while back, when i started evaluating an upgrade to Apache 2.2 from Apache 2.0.58. It seems that PHP doesn’t ship with a handler for Apache 2.2, as such after a huge headache and little bit of searching I found this article and downloads available at http://www.apachelounge.com/
It should also be added that other great binary assets are available at these sites/
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Tags: apache, free, open-source, php, server, wamp, windows
Posted in WebStandards, Work | No Comments »