I welcome efforts by companies such as Microsoft and Sun to embrace openness.  Sun gets it.  They've released Java under the GPL license.  That's a significant contribution to my software freedom, and I will always appreciate Sun for doing so.  As a result, I know I can involve myself in Java as deeply as I need, and never fear my software freedoms can be taken.

I was in the market for a laptop, and if I am anything, it's a frugal gadget geek.  I'm always buying gadgets, but I'm cheap about it.  Buy.com had a deal on refurbished HP DV9627CL laptops for $700.  While that's not cheap, it's a pretty loaded laptop, with a 17 inch widescreen, dual core 64bit processor, 2 GB memory, 200 GB HDD, and so on.  This thing isn't super portable, but it's well equipped for a developer like me. 

When I decided to buy an Asus Eee I had a hard time finding one.  Amazon was sold out.  Buy.com was sold out.  Many of the smaller websites I found were also sold out, and claimed they would be in stock again on some future date.

For her birthday, I bought Leslee an Asus Eee (pronounced E).  I've had my eye out for an ultraportable laptop for her for a while.  So far, I'd only found very expensive ultraportables.  When this came out, and was available in the $350-400 range, I jumped at it.  For some, the fact that it runs Linux might be a deterrent, but definitely not for me.

Leslee's homework on her Asus Eee in Open Office

Currently, I have a simple copyright at the bottom of my website.  I want to replace that with something like a Creative Commons license. 

I recently ran into this video on Gizmodo.  It was a promo video for an early version of Windows called Windows 386.  The ad is so funny, it's almost hard to believe it's supposed to be serious. Perhaps the advertising is the reason I never heard of Windows 386.  I thought I'd cross post it here so I can always go back to my blog when I want a good laugh.

I'm trying out Flock as my default browser this week. For those that are new to Flock, it is a browser built from Firefox, but focused on adding features for social networking types of activities.  Such as built-in support for editing your blog, or adding photos to services like Flickr.

Overall, I really do like it. I haven't decided whether I'll use it as my primary browser long term. I'm going to give it more time.

Sophos recently recommended computer users switch to Macintosh.  They recommended it because Windows users are being hit with malware more and more each year, and only one case of malware is known on Macintosh. 

Okay, this is driving me nuts.  Many podcasters don't use consistent tags.  Their various episodes all have different tags for Artist, Album, and Genre.  If I find a pocast I like and download the past year's worth of podcasts, they are all scattered throughout my MP3 player and I have a terrible time finding them all buried among my 5000 tracks of music.

After a very long time offline, my web/mail server is back online.

I recently moved in with a roomate who already had a DSL modem. I bought a wireless 802.11g router, plugged it into the DSL modem, and voila, Internet access for all. But for some reason, no matter what I did, I couldn't expose the www, pop3 and smtp ports to incoming requests. I tried everything, and fought with the router over and over.