Windows - Mac Font Equivalents

Just what I was looking for.

NY Times : Corrupted PC's Find New Home in the Dumpster

In the face of a constant stream of pop-up ads, malfunctioning programs and performance slowed to a crawl or a crash - the hallmarks of spyware and adware - throwing out a computer "is a rational response," said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, a Washington-based research group that studies the Internet's social impact.

Before anyone throws away computer, they should at least look at this:

http://www.goosee.com/puppy/

It's Flash Puppy that intrigues me. $20 -- and a bit of time -- and you're back and running. Need something more powerful, donate it to a worthy cause.

Of course, if you're not savvy enough to avoid a virus, you're probably not savvy enough to get Linux running -- in which case, it sounds a lot like a new niche for a non-profit.

Free File Hosting

Found this site the other day, but was just checking it out just now and it was throwing PHP errors at me. Maybe it's just one of those midnight update things.

Yahoo! offers free file-hosting with their briefcase page, but you have to be a premium member to be able to share any of the files with your friends.

Hard to find a free file -- just a place to dump small files so others can download them. This post explains why.

PHP Comparison Tables

Every once in a while, I'm trying to remember where I saw this. Linked on the PHP empty function page.

On Being the Right Size

By Haldane -- one of the forefathers of evolutionary psychology, if I remember correctly. [Wikipedia entry]

Brilliant little essay:

It is an elementary principle of aeronautics that the minimum speed needed to keep an aeroplane of a given shape in the air varies as the square root of its length. If its linear dimensions are increased four times, it must -fly twice as fast. Now the power needed for the minimum speed increases more rapidly than the weight of the machine. So the larger aeroplane, which weighs 64 times as much as the smaller, needs 128 times its horsepower to keep up. Applying the same principles to the birds, we find that the .limit to their size is soon reached. An angel whose muscles developed no more power weight for weight than those of an eagle or a pigeon would require a breast projecting for about four feet to house the muscles engaged in working its wings, while to economize in weight, its legs would have to be reduced to mere stilts. Actually a large bird such as an eagle or kite does not keep in the air mainly by moving its wings. It is generally to be seen soaring, that is to say balanced on a rising column of air. And even soaring becomes more and more difficult with increasing size. Were this not the case eagles might be as large as tigers and as formidable to man as hostile aeroplanes.

Discovered here.

Linux Shrugged

Just completed my first Linux install. A third-grader could have done it (and probably quicker.) A live CD version of Beatrix. Encountered a few snags:

1. Firefox downloading would keep canceling when my screen saver started. (Found this free utility to handle just this problem, but ended up just doing a FTP download here to be safe.)

2. Needed to change bios boot order. Kept reacting to slowly to get in the CMOS setup. Finally figured out how to get the CD to boot first, but then I discovered...

3. I didn't have a bootable CD. Needed to burn the ISO to CD as bootable disk, but Windows XP doesn't do that. Auditioned several ISO burners -- this was the smallest, simplest, and easiest to use: BurnCDCC.

Finally figured it all out, got it loaded and running. Only problem -- nowhere to save data.

Now I'm intrigued by this. Then it's on to drive partitioning.

Linux Install

My dad's computer (Win XP on an aging -- 3+ yr-old? -- box) is approaching inoperability because of scumware that's soaked in under IE. I'm thinking about reformating the hard drive and reinstalling XP. I was also contemplating adding a Linux partition, until I read this.

There must be an easier way.

4th of July

To celebrate the 4th of July, I planted peppers this morning.

References:
- garden terraces
- Land Mine