State of FOSS Review 2007

It’s the end of the year, and my office is empty, so seems like as good a time as any to reflect on the past year of FOSS developments. Noteworthy Happenings Ubuntu 7.04 and 7.10 were released: While perhaps not as revolutionary as the original Ubuntu releases, these releases represented incremental improvements, and solid steps […]

Display price update

Over a year ago, I wrote up a quick and dirty analysis of display prices. Seems like a good time to revisit that now. First, I’ll note the differences in prices since last time: A Dell 30 inch (3007WFP-HC) is now $1189 (down from $1700 for the non-HC version) Apple’s 30 inch is now $1800 […]

Stick with what works

It seems like a lot of people are learning this lesson with Vista these days. There are very few applications that require Vista, and XP works fine for most people, so why upgrade? There’s really no harm in waiting, while the ISV’s, hardware vendors, and MS sort it all out. Personally, I’m terrible at this. […]

Drupal's "edit own" permission and Input Formats

I spent too much time tracking this one down today, so here’s a note for posterity. Drupal lets you create “roles” that are essentially permission sets for different kinds of users. One of the permissions in these roles is to allow users to edit content that they authored. I had this enabled for the “content […]

Awesome: Windows batch file ugliness

So I got around to writing some startup batch scripts that try to mount some network drives. The net use command is easy enough to use, but I ran into a separate problem. If the machine starts up too fast, then the network isn’t up yet, so net use fails. So I started looking for […]

Poor man's high resolution monitor

Many people have been waiting for high PPI monitors for a long time. There’s a brief period a few years back where laptop companies offered WUXGA 15.4 inch screens, but it appears those monitors proved unpopular among the general population who still had to deal with tiny fonts in windows. The poor man’s way of […]