Matt’s Cuppa

Day three of Cognos Training, sick of iPhone news, Microsoft Word vulnerability

We all hate re-installing Windows. Let’s face it, not even most die-hard geeks crack open a beverage and break out a fresh copy of their operating system for fun. As frustrating as it is, I end up spending an afternoon with the blue screen about every six months or so. An whole afternoon? Absolutely, if you include the time it takes installing drivers and re-creating all my system settings.

What if there was a way that to install Windows XP AND all the drivers and tweaks you usually have to do by hand automatically? Would you use a tool like this? What if Microsoft said it was illegal? Would you agree? Would you still use it?

Check out this post about a (legal?) tool that helps you manage your XP install. What do you think?

www.downloadsquad.com/2008/06/24/tiny-xp-rev-09-windows-xp-with-cuise-control/

Did you know that FastStone Capture is a excellent screen capture and
annotation utility that I use almost every day? The latest version is
shareware, but you can download the last free version at
http://www.portablefreeware.com/.

Here’s a great list from down under of the Top 100 web-based applications that has totally sucked the time out of my morning: http://rossdawsonblog.com/…aunch.html

It’s always nice see an open source proponent get headline coverage. Interesting to see where this eventually goes. Will it become another mobile phone debacle, with Europe on one standard and the U.S. on another?

Sent from Express News
BRUSSELS, Belgium - The EU’s top antitrust official called Tuesday on member governments to use open-source software, an apparent jab at Microsoft Corp.’s proprietary technology.

"No citizen or company should be forced or encouraged to choose a closed technology over an open one, through a government having made that choice first," European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said at a conference organized by OpenForum Europe, a nonprofit group that advocates open standards.

By AOIFE WHITE AP Business Writer

There is an interesting <a href="http://avc.blogs.com/…nd-bl.html">post</a> today on A VC about the evolution of blogging. I concur with the author when he states that he hates the term ‘Blogging 2.0′, but for lack of a better term I’ll roll with it.

His point is that conversations are occurring in the microblogosphere that may or may not make their way back to the traditional blogosphere, and in turn are not picked up by blog aggregators like Techmeme. It’s an interesting issue. Web applications such as Twitter (when it’s not down) or Pownce are bringing our conversation much closer to real-time. In comparison, traditional blogs are not as responsive to real-time events.

It begs the question of if and how we track these scattered 140 character bits of conversation. Is it worthwhile, or do we wait until the conversation filters back to the blogosphere, and thus to aggregators like Techmeme?

My final thought is that I am convinced that we are moving into the world of citizen-journalism 2.0. Web applications like Twitter, Skype, Brightkite, YouTube, and many others provide the means to mobilize our news collection. As-it-happens microjournalism is here. The question is no longer how to capture an event, but rather how to collect events scattered across applications and communities.

Did you know that CCleaner (www.ccleaner.com) is a free application that removes temp files, clears your internet cache, and cleans up your registry? Did you know that there is a portable version that can be run from a flash drive?