Over the last 18 months or so I’ve been moving slowly and steadily towards using exclusively open source software.  I’ve replaced Windows with Ubuntu, abandoned Internet Explorer for Firefox, Microsoft Outlook for Thunderbird, etcetera.  However there have been a few proprietary programs that have been exceptionally difficult to locate equivalents for in the open source realm – and Visio is one of them.
I’m hoping the discovery I just uncovered will resolve that long-standing hole in my suite of programs.  Known as Dia, the program:
“…is roughly inspired by the commercial Windows …

I spent the entire day today in the realm of proprietary software setting up my MacBook laptop to run Windows XP Professional via Bootcamp. Having now used Virtual Machines and Parallel/Dual-Boot installations on a couple of machines I wanted to take a few minutes to share my experiences and thoughts on the subject.
For those of you not familiar with the concepts, Virtual Machines or vmware and parallel installations are two different methods of running multiple operating systems from a single computer. This can be done either on a …

In a post entitled “Linux green activisits unite!” ZDNet discusses the upcoming Installfest for Schools initiative being held by LinuxWorld and Untangle this August 4-7.
As ZDNet explains:
Volunteers at the tradeshow will install Linux and open source software (including Ubuntu 8.04, Firefox, OpenOFfice and more) on donated and recycled computers from the Alameda County Computer Resource Center. Most of the models will be Pentium III systems with 256 megabytes of RAM and a 20-gigabyte hard drive. The whole shebang, which could be up to 1,000 systems at the end of the …

I’m still processing the implications of Michael Arrington’s Twitter post TechCrunch today; or perhaps more accurately the reader response to it.  The post features a single word – Twitter! – with no other content to speak of whatsoever.  Despite this the post has received 345 comments (as of this post) and what appears to be a series of interwoven discussion threads.
I’m in two minds about all this – one part curious, the other concerned.
The Curiosity
The curiosity stems from the fundamental question why a post that offers no substance whatsoever can …

I have to say I admire the folks at Twitter for the transparency they’re trying to provide into the nature of the ongoing outage debacles that have befallen the application of late.
According to a recent post on the Twitter Blog released Wednesday, May 21, 2008:
“We’ve gone through our various databases, caches, web servers, daemons, and despite some increased traffic activity across the board, all systems are running nominally. The truth is we’re not sure what’s happening. It seems to be occurring in-between these parts.
We’re busy working on instrumenting and adding …