I love OpenOffice, the free and open source productivity suite that does pretty much what I used to do with MS Office. But one feature I sorely miss is a real title case command that will capitalize every first letter in a group of highlighted words. Now I know OpenOffice wonks will point to the obscure “font effect” secretly tucked away in the bowels of the Style window, but I have two problems with that: 1) It’s unnecessarily complicated and 2) it doesn’t always work!
I RECENTLY received two hilarious videos that my nephew Thomas created using Photo Booth on the Mac. Unfortunately, the files were in Apple’s .mov format, and I wanted to burn them onto a CD as .avi files that my DVD player could play.
WHAT’S the fastest browser? If you guessed Google Chrome 6 or Safari 5.0, you’re in for a surprise. The current speed demon is Opera 10.6, the alpha test version from the Norwegian company, Opera Software (http://www.opera.com). The Download Squad Web site reports that Opera 10.6 scored 25 percent better than Google Chrome 6 (development build), using the Peacekeeper browser benchmark. In fact, Opera’s developers say 10.6 users can expect a 50 percent improvement in JavaScript performance and page loading.
No relief from black screen problem in Ubuntu 10.10
I downloaded the alpha test version of Ubuntu 10.10, hoping that the live CD would solve my video problem. Sadly, the problem remains. If the goal, as Mark Shuttleworth says, is for Ubuntu to “just work” then nobody with a fairly standard desktop setup should have to jump through hoops just to get a picture, rather than a black screen, on his monitor.
ONE of the supreme ironies of the last election was how vigorously some IT professionals opposed the government’s efforts to automate the process.
One of these was Gus Lagman, a former IBM executive and one of the founders of STI College, who urged the Commission on Elections (Comelec) to conduct a parallel, manual count. Another was Manuel Alcuaz Jr., a member of the Management Association of the Philippines, and who, like Lagman, was an IT consultant for the National Movement of Free Elections. Both were pioneers in the Philippine computer industry.
THE MagSafe charger for my MacBook died last week. It had given me some warning. Every so often, the power indicator on the magnetic connector would refuse to light up, and I would have to jiggle the cable to just the right position to get it working again. Finally, it had become so unreliable that I decided I had to buy a new one. After all, it’s hardly good form to start a three-hour lecture by fumbling with the cord of your power adapter for 10 minutes, hoping the charge light will come on while your battery is draining.
THE day I saw Tom Cruise waving his arms to manipulate video images on a transparent glass monitor in the 2002 science fiction movie Minority Report was the day I realized I had become a technological reactionary. While others were going, “Cool,” I was thinking, “What a waste of computing cycles.” As I watched Cruise “grab” hold of one screen with both hands and dramatically fling it away to discard it, I thought, “I can do the same thing much faster by clicking the close button on an application window.”
AFTER installing a new version of Ubuntu Linux, I always add a number of utilities that make my computing tasks easier. Most of these are not full-blown applications, per se, though some are really quite complex in their own right. Rather, the focus is on enhancing the capabilities of an already great operating system. The list of utilities has changed over the years, but some of my old favorites are still seeing a lot of action. All the utilities featured here can be installed through the Synaptic Package Manager.
LIKE it or not, the technology world is ruled by hype, and the epicenter of hype these days is Apple. Everywhere you look, it’s the iPhone this, or the iPhone that. There are applications for anything and everything, and we’re supposed to drool over them while we visit the Apple App Store and eagerly surrender our hard-earned money to the technology world’s equivalent of the Soup Nazi. Well, I’m not buying. I’ve seen the iPhone and it’s a cool, shiny device, but I don’t need it. How many people can say that?
MUCH as it pains me to say this, installing Ubuntu 10.4 on my desktop PC was a nightmare. For the last three years, I have been a firm supporter and dedicated user of Ubuntu, a user-friendly distribution of Linux that seemed to get better and better with each new release. A few months ago, I had been thoroughly impressed with the beta version of Ubuntu 10.4 or Lucid Lynx, when I installed it on my Acer netbook. Sadly, I cannot say the same thing when I tried to install the final release on my desktop PC (3GHz Intel Pentium D, 2GB RAM, 500GB hard disk, and GeForce 7100 GS).
IF you’re selling security, it’s probably a bad idea to send your customers’ computer systems crashing. Yet this is exactly what anti-virus vendor McAfee Inc. did last week when it released an updated virus definition file that crashed hundreds of thousands of Windows XP computers around the world.
IT’S been more than three years since the Linux Revolution blog declared that we need better presentation software. The call to action for open-source developers at the time certainly seemed timely. In 2006, if you had to create a business presentation on a Linux system, you didn’t have much choice but to use Impress, which came with the free and open-source OpenOffice.org productivity suite.
Digital Life is a blog that features a technology column by the same name that appears every Tuesday in Manila Standard Today, a national daily from the Philippines. This blog gives readers easy access to the column, which started in November 2002. Copyright 2009 Chin Wong.
THE MagSafe charger for my MacBook died last week. It had given me some warning. Every so often, the power indicator on the magnetic connector would refuse to light up, and I would have to jiggle the cable to just the right position to get it working again. Finally, it had become so unreliable that I decided I had to buy a new one. After all, it’s hardly good form to start a three-hour lecture by fumbling with the cord of your power adapter for 10 minutes, hoping the charge light will come on while your battery is draining.
AFTER installing a new version of Ubuntu Linux, I always add a number of utilities that make my computing tasks easier. Most of these are not full-blown applications, per se, though some are really quite complex in their own right. Rather, the focus is on enhancing the capabilities of an already great operating system. The list of utilities has changed over the years, but some of my old favorites are still seeing a lot of action. All the utilities featured here can be installed through the Synaptic Package Manager.
LIKE it or not, the technology world is ruled by hype, and the epicenter of hype these days is Apple. Everywhere you look, it’s the iPhone this, or the iPhone that. There are applications for anything and everything, and we’re supposed to drool over them while we visit the Apple App Store and eagerly surrender our hard-earned money to the technology world’s equivalent of the Soup Nazi. Well, I’m not buying. I’ve seen the iPhone and it’s a cool, shiny device, but I don’t need it. How many people can say that?
