Software: Wine and VMWare

Wine has recently made it to beta status, after 12 years of development! To quote from the official press release:

"The Wine Project, the community of free software developers dedicated to opening Linux and other POSIX compatible operating systems to Windows applications, today announced the completion of the core architecture for Wine, an open-source project that allows Windows applications to run natively on Linux. Now available as Wine version 0.9, the tools and libraries are functionally complete and ready for commercial testing and optimization."

I've had mixed success in the past trying to run software with Wine, especially because often it was impossible to run the installer for a piece of software. There has been a lot of work in that area, so we'll see.

If you're interested in running Linux apps on Windows (or Linux on Linux or ...), you might want to try out the new free VMWare Player. I installed the viewer for Windows and installed the Browser Appliance, which is a Ubuntu Linux image with Firefox installed. The best thing is that you can update the image to add software, as you can with any Ubuntu distribution (within the limits of the 800 Mb image).

The only major limitation with the player seems to be that you can't create images, but otherwise it works great. I can see it would be useful to try out new software without corrupting an existing install and also for browsing in a 'quarantined' environment. VMWare seems also to be pushing the viewer as something that will help with software distribution. i.e. you make an image with your new software completely configured and give it to a customer with the viewer to run it.

I can see parallels with Adobe's PDF format, which has become very successful because of the presence of a 'free' viewer.

Firefox: FoxClocks Firefox Extension

With my recent travels I've had to keep track of a few different timezones at once. I've also been thinking about writing a Firefox extension to help me with this, but I had a look at the latest extensions for Firefox and somebody has already done it!

The FoxClocks Firefox extension can keep track of multiple places at once as shown below in the status bar of Firefox. I'm keeping track of Sydney, London and New York times and dates. The extension also integrates with Google Earth and is very configurable.

Software: OpenOffice.org 2.0 released

OpenOffice.org has finally released 2.0. After testing a few pre-releases I've found it to be significantly faster and prettier than 1.x, but I haven't had to use it for any real work so I'm not sure how it compares to Microsoft Office.

IT: Zimbra Web Email

Zimbra is a web email system that also includes contacts and calendar information. It is similar to the Outlook Web Access client that Microsoft provides to access information on an Exchange server. It is a pretty good implementation that apparently took about 2 years to develop, but most interestingly it is also Open Source.

Here's a screenshot showing it working in Firefox. Note the context-sensitive menus.

IT: Blogs I Read (automatic)

I had a list of blogs that I was reading as part of my blogger template, but I found I wasn't updating it to reflect my current list of interesting blogs. I've also been using a nice blog collection tool called akregator, which is a KDE program, so I figured maybe there was a way to get the list of feeds from akregator and to turn them into HTML.

From within akregator I was able to export as Outline Processor Markup Language (OPML), which is in a nice XML format. The problem then became how to convert my OPML file into HTML for easy reading on the web. XSLT was designed for just this purpose, so I installed XLSTPROC in a minute or two (there are similar tools for Windows including Msxml) and I had all the tools I needed.

To make things even easier, I had a quick search on the web and was able to find a nice stylesheet for the conversion at Netcrucible. With a few modifications to turn the list of blogs into hyperlinks and to remove the atom.xml or other extra filenames, I now have a nice list I can update quickly and easily. Take a look here.

All I need to do now is to add a cron job to regenerate and upload this file at regular intervals. I'll post the updated .xslt file when I've tweaked it a little more.

As an aside, if you prefer to use an online blog aggregator like Bloglines, you can autogenerate your blog reading list as follows.

The Wedding: Bridal Registry

Tonight we went to David Jones to setup a bridal registry. We were asked to read some information about the whole process and then had to sign off to say that we understood the delivery process and all the rest. We were asked a bunch of questions and then given a booklet to go and collect items in the store.

To my shock, it contained spots to write down the barcode, colour, size, item number and description of all items! Now call me crazy, but surely it would be quicker for them to have a system whereby we used a barcode scanner or a PDA to somehow select items that we're interested in? As it is now, we have to manually enter all the details in and the bridal registry assistant has to manually match our entries back to their existing database.

I would have thought it would be cheaper and quicker for the store, let alone us, to use a better technology for the bridal registry. As it was, we spent about 2.5 hours in the store and still haven't really added a lot of gift options to our registry. Much more manual barcode writing is still to be done...

Flying: Realtime flight tracker

While sitting in LAX waiting for a flight I discovered a real-time flight tracker. It provides an estimate in map form of where a flight is using radar data. Pretty interesting for longer flights.