Get Firefox if you’re not using it alreadyEssayez Firefox si vous ne l’avez pas déjà

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.

Ces jours-ci, le meilleur navigateur web s’appelle Firefox. Ce navigateur est gratuit, ajoute plusieurs fonctionnalités intéressantes que Internet Explorer n’a pas et est moins souvent la cible de virus que IE. Pour toutes ces raisons, vous devriez vraiment considérer un changement de IE vers Firefox pour naviguer le web. La version 1.5 vient de sortir. Essayez-le et vous ne le regretterez pas.

Finally found an image viewer to replace ACDSee

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.

A look at the next Windows, Vista

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.

Google Earth

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.

Getting rid of spyware

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.

Software to get complete system information

I have stumbled upon a great tool to perform system hardware inventories. It is a tool called Everest Home Edition. This will give you tons of information on your CPU, memory and all of the other components in your system that Windows does not tell you about.

Firefox 1.0 released

The 1.0 version of Mozilla Firefox has been released yesterday. If you have not tried this incredible browser yet, download it and give it a shot. It has many convenient features like tabbed browsing and a nice download manager, and the download is less than 5 MB! Once you get used to it, you won’t be able to use IE again.

Desktop without Microsoft

Well, I spent my week-end making my desktop less Microsoft-based. I first installed Mozilla Thunderbird, a nice e-mail client from the Mozilla project. It’s quite fast and cannot fall victim to some script viruses that Outlook Express can easily fall for.

Next in line was Mozilla Firebird. This browser has been gettign some rave reviews lately. It is very performant, based on the Netscape architecture, and supports many cool features like tabbed browsing.

Finally, I started trying out OpenOffice.org 1.1. This is an open-source freeware equivalent to Microsoft Office. I’ve written one DVD critique with it so far and must say I am quite impressed.

I’ll keep you posted on my use of these tools and if I keep using them.

w.bloggar

I have just found this cool software called w.bloggar that can be used to edit your Web Logs on many sites, such as Blogger which I am using. You just need to specify the service you’re using, along with your user name and password, and you can then create new posts, edit old ones, and have access to a lot of nice editing capabilities at the same time.