Original ExistDifferently.com Weblog of David, a Christian Network and Systems Manager, with topics ranging from Apologetics to Worldview, and some crypto, open source, programming, opinion, and daily life thrown in between.

Sun, 2006-07-30 (Jul 30)

Google Talk now does File Transfers and more!

Filed under: Blog,chat,Google Talk,GTalk,im,In The News,Internet,Networking,Software,upgrade — David @ 16:21

Hooray! Google Talk (their instant messaging application using a jabber compatible back-end) has finally released an update that lets you do file transfers to/from other users, as well as leave voicemails if they’re offline (and you have a microphone) and display what music you’re currently listening to in your Google Talk status. The new version is numbered 1.0.0.95, which doesn’t show up unless you really look for it :-)
Only some users have gotten the update with the automatic upgrade feature (they roll out new features a few users at a time generally, and this is no different), but if you want the upgrade now, you can grab it from http://dl.google.com/googletalk/googletalk-setup-testing.exe and start transferring!

There’s a good review of the features (how to use them, how well do they work?) over at BigBlueBall.com.

Fri, 2006-06-30 (Jun 30)

Firefox, MSI’s and the Enterprise

Filed under: Mozilla,Open Source,Software — David @ 23:28

Well, I was going to post this as a comment over on Robert Accettura’s Fun With Wordage blog. It’s really long. So now it’s here, with a link :-) (Since I remembered my password to this blog and have a bit of time…I suppose I’ll have to post some more now, it’s been a while!)

Read this post first as this is a reply (originally written as a comment on his site, addressed to Robert directly, and moved directly here due to length):

Interesting post, given that I spent a decent chunk of time investigating similar solutions for the church where I’m the Network and Systems Manager! I found some good info, not relating to updates necessarily, but on MSI installs in particular since I want to deploy with Active Directory.

It took me some Googling, but I ended up at a really useful page called Firefox:2.0 Institutional Deployment. I tried implementing nearly all of the MSI-related options on this page today to some extent. The documentation of details (an FAQ) for each solution is pretty sparse in general so I had to test to see it in action.

The most fully developed solution for deployment seems to come from Front Motion, with their two releases, Mozilla Firefox MSI, which is an AD-deployable MSI of the straight Firefox install (just a repackage), although it has some really nice features, such as (pulled from their site): (more…)

Sun, 2004-11-21 (Nov 21)

Fixin’ Family Computers

Filed under: General,Internet,Open Source,Software,Tech (General) — David @ 20:40

Found a good post about what software people are installing on their parents/relatives computers when they go home for thanksgiving. One benefit to me of living at home still: I can keep the family computers set up and in tip-top shape so they never get to the “spend five hours fixing everything that’s wrong” phase (and five hours is sometimes an understatement!).

Anyway, the “post is over at Slashdot”:http://slashdot.org/articles/04/11/19/2331210.shtml?tid=126 and it’s interesting when some of the comments are about why some people won’t fix family/friends computers any more. They have some pretty darned good reasons, too. I can sympathize, although I am blessed to have an immediate family who has really learned a lot about what to do and not to do on the computer. Friends run the gamut though, as far as tech-savvy goes. But, I don’t mind helping most people out if it doesn’t take a huge amount of my already limited time, and I especially don’t mind if they are willing to learn how not to cause problems in the first place, instead of me cleaning up and them re-trashing. I especially like those that I’ve convinced to switch to “Firefox”:http://firefox.scriptek.com/ but I do have a couple of utilities that will lock down IE a bit more to prevent some spyware/adware. I’ll have to put together a little “install this stuff to help fix your computer” post here sometime; now’s not the time.

I do like that some people have started supporting Linux only (at least when they do free support), as it’s really more secure in my opinion, or at least easier to get that way from a default install. It can be just as bad, true, but I won’t get into that argument here. For now, Windows runs too much stuff that Linux either won’t run or would take a lot of time to get running, for most of my uses (however Linux rocks as a server!).
(more…)

Tue, 2004-11-16 (Nov 16)

Bible Software and Annon

Filed under: Bible Software,Christian News,Politics,Religion,World News — David @ 01:28

Found a cool site made by “Ken Ristau”:http://anduril.ca/aboutme.html over at “anduril.ca”:http://www.anduril.ca tonight. Good blog with some especially interesting entries on recent politics, I really like the insights on “Kofi Annon’s opinion on how to maintain security in Iraq”:http://anduril.ca/blog/2004/11/kofi-letter-to-allawi.html, along with a great section with “Bible software reviews”:http://anduril.ca/christian/bible-software.html” that is actually how I found the site.

He’s also written some “good”:http://www.christianweek.org/stories/vol15/no18/ristau.html “articles”:http://www.faithtoday.ca/article_viewer.asp?Article_ID=122 on selecting Bible Software and how it can be an improvement to traditional study methods. For those who want something for free (more than free software like “e-Sword”:http://www.e-sword.net and “The SWORD Project”:http://www.crosswire.org/sword/), I suggest checking out the resources he’s linked at his “Bible Study Tools”:http://anduril.ca/christian/bible-tools.html page, it does a good job of finding good online resources without having to wade through even a relatively small Google search.

He also has another blog entry with more links than I have time to read with information about what’s really going on in Iraq, the UN’s Oil-for-Food program, and lots of other “good world news/political info”:http://anduril.ca/blog/2004/10/necessary-links.html. If you’re looking for good sites, I haven’t checked his links out but based on the rest of his site I would probably enjoy them at least.

One last mention…”his link to the Aleppo Codex Online”:http://anduril.ca/blog/2004/10/aleppo-codex-online.html sends you to an awesome site (even more so if you happen to read Hebrew) with an original Hebrew Bible text for you to take a look at and read about. I haven’t had time to get to this one yet either, but consider this link in my post here a bookmark for return…

Overall I’m impressed with his site and the resources he’s found and compiled for others. Sure, Google will get you to all of them eventually, but when a human does the looking and gives you some picks with some original info to boot, jump on it!

Powered by WordPress