Hosting for just $3.88/month! Find out MORE!

Archive for the 'Free Desktop' Category

Firefox and China websites

Published on 23 November, 2005 in China, Free Desktop and Online. 0 Comments

One the the biggest frustration to Firefox users in China is the many websites that are still coded specifically for Internet Explorer (IE).

Often there is no indication to the requirement. The transaction will just work until the very last step and simply failed. All one may get is a blank screen or an unrelated error message.

This is not just for small website but major websites, banks, government sites. We can forgive small sites for not spending extra effort on browser compatibility. But it is simply bigotry for the big well funded sites.

Back home in Singapore, Citibank website had been supporting Netscape and Firefox for a long time. So do all the banks (DBS, UOB, OCBC) that I use and government sites like CPF.

Oh well, end of rant, have to fire up IE and redo the transaction again.

Firefox 1.5 RC2

Published on 12 November, 2005 in Free Desktop. 0 Comments

Hot on the heel of Firefox 1.5 RC1, RC2 is just released. Of course for those running 1.5, this is old news since the moment Firefox is fired up, it detects upgrade, downloads necessary files and prompts for install.

Wonder what you are missing?

Update:  More on using free softwares in business at Free Biz Ware.

OpenOffice 2.0简体中文版

Published on 10 November, 2005 in Free Desktop. 0 Comments

OpenOffice 2.0 had been officially released for a few weeks now. My beta release was upgraded last week. Yesterday, I downloaded the simplified chinese version and installed on one of the company’s computer.

Someone should setup a OpenOffice mirror in China. Took me a long time to download the whole package. Also I noticed that there seems to be more Traditional Chinese than Simplifed Chinese content on OpenOffice.org website. With the readily available of cheap office suites, perhaps mainland is not as keen on an open source alternative.

Anyway, I am going to do my small part and introduce OpenOffice to my Chinese colleagues.

Word and Excel are too deeply entrenched even though they probably cannot distinguish Word from Writer. Suggestion of a change in application will very likely raise skeptism and subtle relunctance. So my plan of attack is from Impress, Draw or Base.

More report of the progress here. Stay tuned.

Update:  More on using free softwares in business at Free Biz Ware.

FireFox 1.5 RC1

Published on 3 November, 2005 in Free Desktop. 0 Comments

Firefox upgraded to 1.5RC1. I had been using Firefox beta for a while, visually and user experience wise I find nothing much different from 1.0 Firefox. The emphasis here is visually. Under the hood there are major changes, at the risk of repeating Mozilla.org, here are the changes:

  • Automated update to streamline product upgrades.
  • Faster browser navigation.
  • Drag and drop for browser tabs.
  • Improvements to popup blocking.
  • Clear Private Data feature.
  • Answers.com added to search engine list.
  • Descriptive error pages, redesigned options menu, and RSS discovery.
  • Better accessibility support.
  • Report a broken Web site wizard.
  • Better support for Mac OS X.

Today I experienced the streamline upgrade. Must say it is pretty neat. No save to disk, exit running Firefox, doubleclick to install process. Firefox 1.5 detects the upgrade, downloaded it and prompt to restart. Done.

Try it.

Update:  More on using free softwares in business at Free Biz Ware.

Trace and Merge changes with WinMerge

Published on 30 October, 2005 in Development and Free Desktop. 0 Comments

WinMerge is of those application that really make a great difference in development productivity.

It look daunting to use at first sight, but don’t let the look deceive you. Once you start using it, you wonder how you send those years not having something like it.

WinMerge is a visual text file differencing and merging tool. What that means is that it compares 2 text files and show the difference between the 2 files. It also has the ability to merge the differences.

This is best understood by a hands on experience. Just take a file, make some changes and save it to another filename. Open the 2 files for comparison in WinMerge. WinMerge will show where the changes had been made and offers a host of options to merge the changes.

WinMerge is very useful when working in a team or with a version control system like Subversion.

What I like about ?

  • Comparing entire directory
  • Intuitive to use
  • Very simple to merge change

Room for improvement

  • When comparing more complex file changes, the alignment between some changes are not matching.

Where to get it?

http://winmerge.sourceforge.net/

Current version: 2.4
Function: Visual text file differencing and merging tool

Exporting Pegasus Mail to Thunderbird

Published on 13 October, 2005 in Free Desktop. 0 Comments

(updated at Free Biz Ware)

Since moving from Pegasus Mail to Thunderbird, the old mail had been tucked away. Today it turned out that I need a very old email to recover an old account password. A good excuse to take the time and export all the old mail to Thunderbird. (Not to mention saving the password in to KeePass.)

There are 2 ways to do it

  1. copy mail folders
  2. use IMAP

The first way is fine if there is not may folders to export. Unfortunately that was not my case. It took a great deal of frustration before thinking of the second way.

Here’s how.

Copying the Mail folders

Thunderbird mail file is actually the unix mailbox format. Pegasus is also able to store in this format although it is not the default, so some work is required. Steps as follows,

  1. Start Pegasus Mail.
  2. Create folder in Pegasus in Unix Mailbox Format.
    • In the Folders windows click Add…
    • Message folder select Unix Mailbox Format
  3. Copy your email from the original folder to this folder.
  4. Go to the Pegasus Mail folder on the system.
  5. Locate a file name like UNXnnnnn.MBX (eg. UNX06097.MBX)
    Sorting files by modify date would help here.
  6. Copy this file to Thunderbird folder on the system
    probably
    C:\Documents and Settings\user\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\default\xxxxxxxx.slt\Mail\mail_account
  7. Start Thunderbird.
  8. A new folder with name UNXnnnnn.MBX should appear in your mail account with all the mails.
  9. Repeat for all other folders.

By the time I reached the 7th folders, I realise this is not the way to go. There are still 100s of folders and I can spend the whole night.

Using IMAP

IMAP to the rescue.

In order to do this you first got to have an IMAP account. My hosting at Fusion Flux happened to support it. Cool!

Here’s how.

  1. Set up Pegasus Mail to connect to the IMAP account.
    Tools -> IMAP profile… -> New…
  2. Fill up the required settings and connect to the IMAP server
  3. At this point, if the connection is successful, an IMAP mailbox will appear
  4. Create folders in the IMAP mailbox
  5. Copy messages to the IMAP folders
  6. Start Thunderbird and connect to the IMAP account.
  7. Copy folders from IMAP account to local filesystem.

One warning, if you are copying large folder and/or using IMAP over SSL, the process can be pretty slow. But at least the copying can work in the background.

Hope this help those migrating from Pegasus Mail to Thunderbird.

The case against Open Office

Published on 5 October, 2005 in Free Desktop, Online and Open Source. 0 Comments

Two editorial commentary:

ZDNet - In defense of OpenOffice.org

eWeek -
Massachusetts Makes Dumb Move Official

A case of Microsoft doing Blog marketing? Well one can only speculate. There’s nothing new in buying media opinion, happens in the paper, happens in the blog.

At the same time, saying something controversial like what they did generate more responses (Ou admitted 400) than a run-of-the-mill piece. Remember, these magazines are in the business of creating readership.

Judge for yourself.

GMail read my mind!

Published on 4 October, 2005 in Free Desktop and Online. 0 Comments

Just two days ago I lamented that autosave must be the most sorely missed feature in web application. With Ajax it should be easy to implement it.

Look what I see on logging into GMail today,

GMail implemented auto-save

Well, I’m not the only one having work lost that’s for sure. Good work Google.

Password Safe to KeePass

Published on 2 October, 2005 in Free Desktop. 0 Comments

I am switching from Password Safe to KeePass. After using Password Safe for a many months now, there are some things about it that kept nagging me to change.


First, it does not have a Chinese interface. Not that I use chinese interface on my desktop but I really like to use one that support Chinese so that I could recommend it to Chinese friends.

Second, it’s interface kept getting in the way. Can’t say exactly what it is but it is uncomfortable.

Third, KeePass interface and website really look much better. Well, like it or not, we do judge a book by its cover.

I found KeePass a while back. A typical change-resister, I was reluctant to learn a new software and didn’t make the switch. Easpecially afer so many passwords were already stored and Password Safe was OK after using for a short while.

The reason for finally making the switch today is unclear. Maybe it was because I found KeePass listed as one of the top SourceForge project. Something must be right about it. Another look at the nice website, I was sold.

Importing from Password Safe database

After some false start the data was imported from Password Safe database.
If you are importing from Password Safe to KeePass, this is what you need to do:

  1. Use the Password Safe function to export to CSV file
    (File -> Export To -> Plain Text)
  2. Import the text file into KeePass
    (File->Import From->PWSafe v2 TXT file)

The mistake I made was to import the encrypted datafile which produces garbage.

First impression

Look aside, the interface is a much welcomed changed. Left-right-bottom Tree-Content-Data windows layout is well thought out.

With a long list of entries, in Password Safe I had to scroll all the way up and down and double click to see account data. The KeePass layout makes it very easy and fast to find and see data.

KeePass also seems to have more feature. I say so not because I had used any but from the look of the menus and the setup.

For example in setting up a new password database, there is a very fancy interface to generate password from mouse movement!

So far so good. Now I’m going to organise the entries and start look at those nice icons.

What I like about ?

  • Nice interface
  • Good information layout
  • Did I mention Chinese language pack?

Where to get it?

http://keepass.sourceforge.net/

Current version: 1.03
Function: Password management utility

On to free development softwares

Published on 28 September, 2005 in Development, Free Desktop and Open Source. 0 Comments

Since software developers are typically people in the know and are more savvy, my angle will be more of sharing and exploring ideas, tips and experiences. This is something new I’m trying.

First a quick round up of free softwares I am using and where the strong holds are still to be broken.

Category
Currently using
Free?
Open Source?
 Alternative
Programming PHP
Y
Y
  
Programming Perl
Y
Y
  
Programming Ruby
Y
Y
  
Version control SVN
Y
Y
  
Version control client TortoiseSVN
Y
Y
  
Code editor Vim
Y
Y
  
SSH Putty
Y
Y
  
SFTP/FTP Filezilla
Y
Y
  
IDE Eclipse
Y
Y
  
Webserver Apache
Y
Y
  
Webserver package XAMPP
Y
Y
  
Compare/merging Winmerge
Y
Y
  
Design IDE Dreamweaver
N
N
 Nvu
Photo/Graphics Gimp Y Y  

Anything else I missed?