Technology

Darwin Streaming Server: Lessons Learned

by

I spent a couple of days messing around with Darwin Streaming Server, the open source port of Apple’s Quicktime Streaming Server. Here’s what I learned from my poking and prodding of Darwin installed on a Redhat Linux box: Darwin streams over port 7070 by default. There’s an option to have it stream over :80, but … Read more

Debugging Firefox Extensions

by

I got to spend too much time the last two days fighting the good fight while trying to update and redeploy a Firefox extension that creates a toolbar of popular links for the college where I work. Firefox toolbar are nifty creatures, but they can be finicky. To start, in order to even offer one … Read more

Web 2.x: The Scratchpad

by

I’m giving a brownbag presentation on what’s new on the Web at work tomorrow, looking at the best of what’s come out since this time last year. What follows are the rough draft of my notes. I’ve persnally used about half of these sites; the rest were suggested by the Tribe on Twitter. I’m still … Read more

Stumbling through a Second Life

by

Jumping into Second Life is like jumping into a void, albeit one populated with the remnants of a half million flea markets. Moving around is awkward, and not just because your avatar inevitably looks like its been nailed to a set of wooden planks. The world’s interface makes it difficult to figure out how to … Read more

Spreadsheets with Open Office

by

After a few days of working with Open Office’s word processor, it was time to turn to the spreadsheet. I don’t work with spreadsheets much at home, but I do have a few specialized uses for them. One of those is a campaign manager for my Mutants & Masterminds campaign – I use it to … Read more

Early NeoOffice Foibles

by

My first few days on NeoOffice haven’t turned up any major problems, but I have encountered a couple of foibles. Most of these are personal preferences, but I think most heavy Word users while find them to be similarly annoying Bullets: Word had me spoiled; simply typing an asterisk before a sentence and hitting return … Read more

NeoOffice: Stop the Productivity Mind Tricks

by

Firing up NeoOffice and using it to write a few quick documents, the first thing I noticed was how slick and Aquafied it was — it feels like a Mac OS X native application, which is a major advantage over Open-Office-under-X11 approach that I took earlier. I also quickly began to assemble a list of … Read more

The Open Office Experiment

by

Open Office is a free, open-source alternative to Microsoft Office. Based on Sun’s Star Office, Open Office has been around for a number of years, and has proved fairly popular with the geeks, particularly those who dislike being beholden to Microsoft, Apple or any other proprietary software developer. It’s the predominant office productivity suite on … Read more