Tag Archives: software

What’s *not* wrong with setup.exe?

Jeff Atwood asks “What’s wrong with setup.exe?”
Short answer: That depends on the implementation. Truth is, most of them are plain awful.
It should be simple, but all too often there are too many steps, too many unnecessary technical questions, reboots required, and worst of all, multiple attempts to up-sell to a paid version and nagging “register [...]

Tool of the Day: Synergy

I do website development. I also care that my websites should display correctly, or at least be usable, on a wide range of browsers and platforms. This comes at a cost of course: to get the full-on cross-platform experience, you’ll need the full-on cross-platform setup.
You could use virtual machines (rather slow in my experience, even [...]

Tool of the Day: console (Windows)

Sometimes I’m stuck with using Windows. Fortunately Cygwin helps out and gives me a nice Unix-y command line where I can get things done in a way I’m comfortable with.
But, the default Windows command line tool found in XP is, frankly, awful. It dates back to Windows 95 (or at least, it looks and feels [...]

WLAN control, release 3

WLAN Control release 3 was just put up on Sourceforge.
Oooh at the shiny new features (change MAC address, multiple cards).
Aaah at the bugfixes.
Boo at the still-stinky documentation.
Then download it, already!

Mouseless computing

Using the mouse has always bugged me a little, ever since the days of AmigaOS 1.3. I’ve always been used to keeping hands on the keyboard (my old Spectrum +3 has the slightly textured plastic worn smooth where my palms rested!) and having to reach over, grab the mouse, aim the pointer at something, and [...]

Pretty (and) useful

I’m a sucker for eye-candy in my PC desktop. Drop shadows, rounded buttons, all that good stuff. But not at the expense of speed or stability. After all, I have to actually use the computer. But what if I could have eye candy, use less CPU time for basic desktop operations, and gain some neat [...]

Triple booting MacBook: OS X, Ubuntu Edgy, Windows XP

This week I had the opportunity to play with a MacBook. Well, by “play” I really mean “get it to triple boot”. Sadly, its sleek whiteness doesn’t belong to me.
OS X is the main OS, Windows XP is needed for work, and Linux is there as a tinkertoy.

More IE stuff

For continued IE 6 testing (some people will still use it, after all, and it helps if they can at least see something readable on the commercial sites I help manage), I downloaded the standalone version from evolt.org, and it turns out that the old hound doesn’t do a bad job of rendering this site. [...]

Browser Update Day: Firefox 2 and IE 7 mini-review

I figured I’ll need to know what to expect with Firefox 2 (which I was looking forward to) and Internet Explorer 7 (yawn). So, I took the plunge today and installed both on my workstation in the office.

Diary of a retro-developer

I’ve been thinking of reawakening a hobbyist project which I started a few years ago and never quite managed to put the effort into. Developing, and perhaps publishing, a game for an “old-school” system. In this case, the computer of my youth, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum.
This is not, in fact, as insane an idea as [...]