Me and the Computer

Haven't used MS Office for a very long time now because Google Docs (and Openoffice) is good enough for my needs. And now they recently updated Google Docs with new features. Now, If only I could really feel comfortable knowing that a third party has access to my documents.

You are of course familiar with Microsoft Office. It is one of Microsoft's most successful product. OpenOffice is the Microsoft Office Alternative software offered by Sun Microsystems, Inc, now owned by Oracle Corporation. The first time I used Openoffice, I said to myself. What the hell?. This software is freaking ugly. Aside from aesthetic shortcomings, the software suffered from incompatibility with Microsoft Word and Excel File format which is still the dominant electronic document formats today. I uninstalled it because there was really no incentive for me to use it. For example, if I were to send a resume to a prospective employer, they are going to expect a Miscrosoft Word document format. And since OpenOffice was not compatible, the document I send will not appear as I've intended. Well that was two years ago. I recently tried Openoffice again and I found that it has greatly improved. It is no longer aesthetically distracting and seems to be more compat...

You might be wondering what it is like to attend online classes. Typically you will go to the website of your school. In the website they will give you access to their online training software .Using the software you will have access to lessons. These can be in a form of video, audio, or pdf documents. You will also have a chat software so you can attend live classes with your professor should you want to. There is also a forum where you can discuss with your classmates, do assignments and projects together. There is a web based software also to take your exams. This is how a typical online school operates. I have dedicated a site dedicated to this subject. Should you be interested in learning more about this topic, you can find my site at Distant Schools .

Now a days you can actually run a Graphics business using only free software. There are many others but below is a list of software that I am familiar with. 1. Gimp 2. Inkscape 3. Artweaver 4. Blender 5. Wings3D

If for some reason you needed to read an ISO image file in your hard disk instead of your CD drive, Microsoft has a free tool that allows you to create a virtual CD drive using your hard disk. You can find the program here . When you run this program it will create 3l files: vcdcontroltool.exe, vcdrom.sys, and readme.txt 1. You need to put vcdrom.sys in your C:\windows\system32\ 2. Run vcdcontroltool.exe 3. Click the install driver button and choose c:\windows\system32\vcdrom.sys 4. Then click the Start button and then the OK button 5. Click Add Drive button 6. Then click Mount button and choose the ISO image file in your hard disk After these steps you should be able to read the ISO image file as if it was a CD drive in your computer.

Aside from looking cryptic, it takes some experimentation to get the correct regular expression you need for a job. This is the kind of tasks that a testing tool would be of great help. Luckily there are a lot of tools available on the web. Here is one that I use: http://www.quanetic.com/regex.php

As much as I want to discourage anyone from using torrent servers, there are legitimate companies who uses it to distribute their files, like the publisher for the current MMORPG I'm playing, Cabal. For that I would recommend Halite . It's an opensource torrent client. Again the beauty of opensource software is that you can inspect the code to check if for any security risk.

Windows XP comes with a built in Zip program. But what if you need to handle RAR, TAR, and other compression algorithms. Fortunately, there is a powerful opensource archiving program at http://peazip.sourceforge.net/ I personally use this program and it's completely free.

One of the things you can do to keep your PC secure is to use a software firewall. You could download a free firewall with a built in antivirus software from Comodo . What it does is allow you to prevent unauthorized network traffic from going in and out of your PC. Personally this is how I use Comodo, I like to leave it at Proactive mode. What it does is popup a prompt whenever a program or service tries to run on my PC. So if ever I visit a malicious website and it tries to slip in a trojan, a message would pop telling me that the website is trying to write a program to a particular directory in my hard disk. This enables me to inspect and research whether the software it is trying to write is legal or not before I allow or block it.