Category Archives: Software

I've always thought that I would want to run windows under Linux, thus my interest in things like cygwin has always been sort of low.

But these Cooperative Linux folks seem set on making Linux-under-windows a viable idea. After all, “Cygwin is not a way to run native linux apps on Windows. You have to rebuild your application from source if you want to get it running on Windows.” But with cooperative linux, maybe not?

Dog on its hind legs, or something cool? I can't quite tell, although it seems to me that Linux under Windows would not be nearly as robust as the other way around.

Firefox 1.01 is available for download. It a security fix, and degrades performance on internationalized domain names — that, so far, most US web users won't need — to protect against some types of misleading site names.

Some time in the last two years those charming wonderful pro-competitive people at Microsoft have removed Word's ability to save a file as Wordperfect. I rarely use Word, and if I need to read a Word file into WP I could always have WP do it for me, but I don't like to be herded like this. Silently degrading my software's capabilities is NOT NICE.

Fortunately, there's Graham Mayor's WordPerfect converter for Word which reinstates the old functionality.

Groupware Bad. Everyone in certain circles is going to link to this, so I almost didn't, but then I figured that I seem to have an unusually diverse set of readers — legal, technical, political and others — so why not.

You have to love lines like,

If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy.

…which captures one of the problems here at UM: software that sells command and control for the sysops is much more likely be deployed than stuff that lets us actually do stuff.

As for this remark, I'm sure it will be quoted a lot:

So I said, narrow the focus. Your “use case” should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?

That got me a look like I had just sprouted a third head, but bear with me, because I think that it's not only crude but insightful. “How will this software get my users laid” should be on the minds of anyone writing social software (and these days, almost all software is social software).

“Social software” is about making it easy for people to do other things that make them happy: meeting, communicating, and hooking up.

The last graph even strikes me as true.

(spotted via the insightful Many2Many social software blog)

Nvu (N-view —> “new view”, geddit?), my favorite souped-up HTML editor is now in 1.0 Beta pre-Release 3 (Version 0.81).

Seems to work well, even though it's not 1.0 yet.

Thanks to a recommendation from Ed Bott, I'm adding Copernic Desktop Search to my list of what belongs on the faculty desktop.

Anything else I should be adding?