After Firefox managed to create itself a nice niche amongst web browser, there is now a new kid on the block: Google Chrome. I think that it was inevitable to see Google release their own browser after seeing all of the great online applications that they have developed over the years.

I installed Chrome myself this afternoon and have been quite impressed with the fast page load times, the nice user interface thougths (my favorite so far is the bookmark toolbar that integrates itself to your start page and then disappears when you start navigating) and other little tidbits (loading messages appearing and disappearing in the corner of the browser, etc…).

Here is a quick snapshot so you can get an idea of what it looks like:

I’ve been thinking about making my home computer completely use open source or free software for a long time now. After finding open source alternatives for the majority of the desktop applications that I am using on Windows, I have made the final leap and converted my machine to use Ubuntu Linux.

Before starting down on this path, the first thing that I did was to download the Ubuntu Live 6.10 CD. After downloading and burning this CD image, you can boot your computer in Linux straight off the CD-ROM without making any modifications to your system. This virtual computer automatically recognizes your internet connection, contains a ton of applications like a web browser, office suite, image editor and hard disk partition manager.

Once I was satisfied with what I saw, I made some space on my hard drive and performed the Ubuntu installation. This went very smoothly and I was up and running very quickly. All of the applications that I mentioned in the previous paragraph were automatically installed (OpenOffice.org, Firefox, GIMP and many others) so I did not have to worry about setting all of these up like I would have to on a Windows system.

Once I was up and running, the next step was to install other tools that I need that don’t come as part of the base installation. Ubuntu is great for this since it contains a tool called the Synaptic Package Manager. This tools connects to the internet and gives you a list of applications available for download and installation. You find the tool you are looking for, select it and the operating system takes care of installing and configuring the tool for you. It even keeps track of updates to all of your installed software and tells you when new versions are out! Windows and Mac OS should follow in these steps.

Of course, Linux is still not for everyone. I had to struggle to get my TV output activated on my video card where such an operation would have been trivial under Windows. A few other tools also had their quirks to install and run. But overall, I’ve been able to get everything running smoothly.

Here is a picture of my desktop so you can see a few application that I would typically use and what it looks like.

A few weeks ago, a colleague mentioned how annoyed he was at always making typos when typing e-mail addresses of employees within our company (@engenuitytech.com). After doing a quick web search on my favorite site (sourceforge.net), I found a wonderful utility that solved his problem and also hads many interesting feature. HotKeyBind can be used to assign special functionality to any key or key combination on the keyboard.

These functionalities include typing text, starting an application and many other tasks. Of course, you want to be careful not to assign functionlity to keys commonly used by other applications, such as the F1 key that usually bring up help, but there are only a few of these exceptions to be careful about.

To make things even better, this is open source freeware! You will find a link to this and many other useful free application here.

I often talk about RSS since I find that it is the most helpful creation on the web in the past few years. I recently stumbled on a site that is starting a movement to standardize the RSS feed icon to put on web sites. Currently, there are a ton of different icons that are used to designate an RSS feed so it is difficult for people to quickly identify an icon as a feed. Here is the icon in question:

As you can see, I added that icon to the sidebar on the left side of the site. For more information on the standard or to download the icon in different sizes and formats, take a look at feedicons.com.

If you’re like me, you like to keep up-to-date with many different topics on many different web site and you find that it takes a long time to go from site to site to read all the news as they get posted. As well, you might always be on different computers so you don’t always have access to bookmarks to remember all of the sites that you like to read.

A great solution to this problem has emerged in the past few years in the form of RSS or Atom feeds. These are small text files that many web sites make available for people to download. They contain a list of the most recent news, usually accompanied with the first few lines of the news item. Many news and information sites publish data in RSS form including CNN, the BBC, Slashdot and tons of others around the net. To find them, look for the words RSS, News Feed or XML on the front page.

RSS feeds can be read in a multitide of ways, including browsers like Firefox. However, a really nice way that I have found recently is using a web site called Bloglines.com. On this site, you can register all of the RSS feeds that you are interested in. The site will then regularly get the latest news from your sites of choice. When you go and read your page on bloglines, you get all the new pieces of information from all of the sites that you read on a single page. No need to run around, no need to remember addresses, no need to remember which news you read and which ones you did not. Here is a small preview of the interface:

If you give it a shot, let me know what you think.

These days, the best browser to use is called Firefox. This web browser is free, introduces many new features that Internet Explorer does not have, and is less prone to be the target of Spyware than IE. For all of these reason, you should really consider switching from IE to Firefox to surf the web. Version 1.5 just came out. Give it a try and you will never go back.

My quest to only run Open Source freeware or standard freeware applications on my computer is going well, but there are still a few applications for which I have not found a replacement. In a recent web search, I recently found a good image viewer to replace ACDSee. I mainly use a tool like this to view images quickly and to rotate the images from my digital camera. Like many of you, I use Picasa to store and view my pictures, but find it very annoying that changes made in Picasa don’t change the actual files on the hard drive.

The replacement that I found is called FastStone viewer and is a freeware application. It contains all of the features that I was looking for and is very fast to startup and load images. I have added this tool to my list of freeware tools.

The new name of the next version of Windows has been recently announced, it will be called Windows Vista. A first beta was recently release to a small number of external testers to get some feedback on the product. You can read an in-depth review of the beta on the Windows Supersite, a great Windows news site. A lot of the changes mainly seem to be superficial interface changes (although some things are quite pretty), but there are also a few deeper features that will be interesting to see in action. One thing I’m wondering is what will the system requirements be with so much going on graphically on-screen.

I have been introduced to another wonderful tool from Google recently called Google Earth. I was already blown away by Google Maps, with its smooth scrolling maps and satellite imaging. However, Google Earth just blows that out of the water. On startup, the application simply shows you the planet. You can then enter an address and it will zoom to that street address, dynamically loading one image after another to get the correct resolution. It kind of feels like the imaging that they had in the movie Enemy of the State with Will Smith. The other nice thing is that the databases accessed by the client also contain 3-D information on buildings located in the major american cities. It is therefore possible to see the New York cityscape in 3-D with overlaid information about streets, restaurants and hotels. Quite a sight. And as usual with Google software, this is completely free!

I don’t usually post images in my entries but a picture is worth a thousand words as they say, so here is a picture of the tool in action, showing the Chicago Aquarium where I went for my vacation last month.

I spent Thursday night remotely working on a computer belonging to a friend of my wife’s, riddled with spyware, trojans and viruses. The first problem seen was that Internet Explorer would not work at all. When starting it, it would simply display a page saying that the page request could not be found. Classic behaviour of spyware.

My first step was to send her a copy of Mozilla Firefox, my favorite reliable browser from the Mozilla foundation. With this, I was then able to access the internet again. I then went on to download Ad-Aware SE, a good spyware killer. I started running a scan using it. A few second after starting the scan, a dialog showed up, saying that the computer would be shutting in 60 seconds, as requested through an RPC call from a service on the system. I was not sure what to do at first and the machine rebooted.

After some research on the web (and two or three reboots trying different things out), I found that the shutdown command probably came from the pest I was trying to remove, which might be the MS Blaster worm or other known worms. I also found that it was possible to stop the shutdown of the computer during the countdown by running the command:

shutdown.exe -a

You can run this command from the Start | Run menu or by creating a simple batch file. Once the shutdown was aborted, I was able to run Ad-Aware and remove most of the problems. I then ran a scan with Spybot Search & Destroy and got rid of the rest of the problems. Finally, a good scan from AVG Anti-Virus caught some last remaining problems and the machine was clean and ready to go.

I learned something with this darn shutdown command that I won’t forget.