Monthly Archive:: August 2004

To be Backwards for Compatibility

Editorial 65 Comments
Lately posted on Slashdot, an article written by Joel Spolsky mentioned the trouble through which Microsoft went to make each version of Windows backwards compatible. In one case, for the game Simcity, they even changed the way memory handling was done when running that application. You can find additional stories of software tricks that recent versions of Windows have to perform in order to run these bug-dependant applications on the web. After reading the story, I discussed with a couple of friends how weird this was and how Free Software completely avoids this problem.
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Mac OS X in a Windows world

macOS 64 Comments
Your chances of running a Mac officially in the workplace, unless your job description warrants it, are pretty close to zero. That doesn’t mean it can’t be done. A little sleuthing, a little know-how, and your colleagues will be asking why your computer is so much cooler and easier to use than theirs. Finally, there are some things that your Mac is going to have trouble doing. Corporate applications written specifically for Windows may run under Virtual PC. Then again, they may not, says PCWorld.
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PHP as a General-Purpose Language

General Development 49 Comments
Although most people use PHP primarily as a Web development scripting system, it possesses all the characteristics of a proper general-purpose language that can be useful in a variety of other environments. In this article, Marco Tabini illustrates how it's possible to use the command-line version of PHP to perform complex shell operations, such as manipulating data files, reading and parsing remote XML documents and scheduling important tasks through cron.
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Mozilla Releases Mozilla Sunbird 0.2a

Mozilla, Gecko 28 Comments
Along with the new Mozilla-Japan initiative and the release of Mozilla 1.8a3 (vote for it at GnomeFiles), the Mozilla team released Mozilla Sunbird 0.2a, a stand-alone calendaring application similar to iCal. These builds are the first to feature a new default theme, a new logo and the customizable toolbar functionality. Note that Sunbird is still an experimental technology preview that contain bugs.
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Freeware Suggestions under Windows

Windows 129 Comments
Recently I upgraded my home PC and I thought, well, how about loading it with only freeware/open source software (On top of Windows XP)? So I started looking around and found some excellent freeware, along with a lot of trash. It took some work to evaluate all the applications but in the end, it was worth it.
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Installing Qt Non-Commercial on Windows

Qt 27 Comments
The recent book C++ GUI Programming with Qt 3 contains complete distributions of a relatively-current (3.2.1) version of Qt for Linux, Mac and Windows. Installing Qt on Windows wasn't easy, though--certainly not as easy as one would expect. I ran into a number of little quirks that took a surprisingly long time to resolve. These issues aren't Trolltech's fault, just little gotchas to be aware of--but they are frustrating if you don't know how to deal with them.
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