Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

...wasn't anywhere near as painful as I thought it would be. In fact, all I had to do was slot in the spare D-Link 802.11 card (after checking the Sharp site to see that it was supported), fill in a simple configuration form, and launch the built-in browser. The engineers at Sharp have done a great job here. The Zaurus implementation of Opera is by far the best PDA browser I've seen, too - it's fast, supports most Javascript (does the roll out menus on our site) and renders HTML and images well, even when using page scaling.

It wasn't always this easy: I remember, way back in the early 90's sat in my lab for a couple of days tweaking Linux kernels and moving jumper switches to get the UK Online firewall built. At one point I even had to go and buy a new (more compatible) set of network cards as that was easier than making all the changes that were needed. Ah, today's geeks, they don't know how good they have it now and how hard it was for us all those years ago....

The Monterey Bay Aquarium has a webcam in its sea otter enclosure (among several other cams).

Now, which is cuter, a sea otter or one of the Jordan Tribe? On grounds of self-preservation, I'm not going to comment - I've met Iggy...

...the Internet-enabled alarm clock that checks to see how long it will take you to get into work.

However I'd want it to check a few other things - the size of the mail queue on the server, the number of new postings on CiX, and the number of items waiting on my friends page - because, they all have to be looked at before I get out the house!

Doc Searl's blog pointed me at this amazing NASA picture, taken from JPL of the contrails from an evening launch of a rocket from Vandenburg AFB in California.

I used to be a fan of PFE, the Programmer's File Editor. It was a good tool at the time, and it was a sad day when its developer decided to move on to other things. Since then I've been struggling to find a good free text editor for Windows. I spent a while with one or two professional tools, but they were't small, lightweight applications I could quickly download onto clients' machines when I needed something with a bit more power than Notepad.

Today I came across Crimson. Not only is it freeware, but it has plenty of modern features, including the ability to integrate compilers and display command line outputs, as well as a built in file explorer, and syntax hightlighting for most of the languages I'm likely to use. And it's only an 800KB download.

Somehow, I think it's likely to become a standard part of my Windows utility installation...