irrelevancy

As a Linux user, keeping programs up to date or even bleeding edge is very easy. Plus I usually refresh the operating system every six months as a new version comes out. Work is a different story. We use Windows XP on all the machines and I generally try to keep the systems very stable. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like a fine Linux distribution like Ubuntu, where all the programs are kept up-to-date through the standard repositories or the fantastic PPA archives.

I’ve used Secunia’s website many times for research papers or curiosity and just recently noticed their Personal Software Inspector. I tried it out of curiosity and it was amazing how many programs were astoundingly out-of-date. Software I use frequently usually has an auto-updater or notifier (Firefox, Pidgin, OpenOffice, etc), but there’s a lot of little ones I either don’t use often or don’t think to check for upgrades.

Not only does Secunia’s PSI scan your entire system and tell you what needs to be updated, they also make it very easy to fix, having options to directly download the new version and other niceties. It can also start at boot and actively monitor software changes. Also, pretty graphs and statistics.

Secunia PSI

I still want Flash to fade away, but at least Adobe is acting more responsibly. It’s not quite open source and has done nothing to alleviate concerns over performance and security, the latter of which may affect just about everyone.

I don’t usually get excited about Adobe products. They’re either restrictively expensive or horrible little scourges of the Web. Which is why I let news of Adobe AIR fly right by. I appreciate what I think they are trying to do. It’s certainly nice having a development platform accessible to the three major desktop operating systems. The few applications I’ve read about looked pretty slick.

In my never-ending quest for the perfect Twitter client, I installed AIR to check out the Spaz Twitter client. I tried it first on XP (work machine), and it’s very nice. Slick, but it is an early version and there are some little bugs here and there. AIR is still in beta for Linux and installed fine on this notebook running Ubuntu 8.04. AIR was nice enough to make sure that Firefox knew how to handle AIR application installs from the web, so Spaz was painless to install.

The AIR installer defaulted to ‘/opt/spaz’, which would have been okay except that it wasn’t initialized by a process that would give the installer root privileges, so I changed it to ‘/home/user/Programs/’ where I keep programs I install myself. Also, the fonts were not nearly as sharp as they were on XP. It was not affected by the sub-pixel hinting enabled by the desktop environment (the picture below was smoothed a bit from the jpg conversion, so it doesn’t look as bad). It may be looking specifically for Microsoft fonts, found in the ‘msttcorefonts’ package, which is not installed as web pages will use those instead of the lovely fonts installed by default. Also, the Spaz client took up ~30MB of memory, roughly the same as the Firefox instance that was running at the time.

I may use Spaz at home on my desktop, but it certainly isn’t ideal for this notebook due to memory limitations (a too-often recurring theme).

Spaz Twitter client under Ubuntu Hardy

I find it funny that the content from Ricky Gervais’ feed comes from a host named ‘plumplard’.

I wanted to put up some gallery software to make it easier to share pictures. After a cursory search, I found this Plogger, which was very nice. It was simple to use, but came with a couple tiny annoyances. First, an image goes into an album and an album goes into a collection. I just don’t need that level of organization and only seems to cause more clicks to get to the content. Also, I would have preferred to be able to password-protect certain albums or whatever and Plogger didn’t seem to offer any sort of that functionality.

Dear friend Minna mentioned that she had been using ZenPhoto for a project. It’s a small download and easy to set up, which only took me a couple minutes. It doesn’t use compulsory collections for organization, instead offering optional sub-albums, which I prefer. Also, it features protected albums.

You can find the (currently desolate) gallery here: Irrelevancy Web Gallery. I’ve resolved (I don’t think that’s the right word if I haven’t actually started doing it by now) to carry my camera around more often, so I hope to populate the gallery before too long.

Oh, and WordPress’ gallery looks to be coming along nicely.