Today we are very happy to feature an interview with Aaron Hillegass, the famous tech instructor from the Big Nerd Ranch. We have reviewed his Mac OS X books in the past and this time we are going to talk about the actual process of the classes going on in the ranch every so often.

Microsoft has released the single largest number of patches since it has started doing monthly updates. The dozen updates include patches for Office XP, IE 6, and Media Player and MSN Messenger. Also, a glitch in the latest version of Microsoft's Tablet PC software is causing significant performance problems for those running the new operating system, the company has confirmed.

Unfortunately, the cute FreeBSD daemon is sometimes treated with misunderstanding in the religious and cultural context. That's why The FreeBSD Project is announcing a public competition for the new logo design. You can find the rules of the competition in this document. Update: There is now a petition to keep Beastie, however FreeBSD's own Robert Watson emailed us to inform us that they are "seeking a new logo, but not a new mascot", so that petition is really reduntant. Update 2: Rob Watson writes:

Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 Release Candidate 2 has been released, more info here.

As I have browsed this site and others like it, I have often seen comments like "The only way to secure a Windows box is to not connect it to the Internet!" and "How can you stand to use Windows when you have to run tons of apps such as spyware removers and spend hours trying to keep it secure?" Some people have even gone as far as to say that it is literally impossible to secure Windows. Well, I'm here to tell you that not only is it possible, it's actually quite trivial! It requires very little effort and you can do it without running a buttload of security apps and without spending a dime.

For over six years I have been hunting for a Linux distro that would allow me to replace my Windows installation. I've tried many versions of RedHat and Mandrake, and more recently, Gnoppix, Kanotix, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Knoppix. In my evaluations, I would start with high hopes that the latest and greatest distro would install smoothly, support my hardware, and create a genuinely usable system, but none of them really worked--until now. I recently came across the first distro that satisfied all my requirements: Ubuntu.