Category: software

spring cleaning

I mentioned in a blog post about a month ago that I had found a receipt for a copy of OS/2 that I had bought in 1994. Well, I was doing some spring cleaning today, and I found that copy of OS/2, along with several OS/2 books and other old computer books. I threw them all out, sad to say. It’s a small apartment I live in, and there’s no room to keep outdated software, or books about outdated software, lying around. Goodbye OS/2, dBase IV, Clipper 5.2, Lotus 123 for DOS, and Novell 3.11. I’ll miss you. Or not, in some cases.

KeePass

I entered some more stuff into KeePass tonight. I’m up to the letter “B” now. Hoo boy, do I have a way to go. In looking through my Vault database, I realize now that I’ve been using Vault at least since 1999, which certainly explains why there’s so much stuff in there. In all that time, I’ve never had a problem with Vault’s database getting corrupted or anything like that. Oh, and I’ve always been able to run the program just by taking my c:vault directory from one machine to another. Nice and easy.

I’m almost talking myself into keeping it, but I need to remember that it does absolutely no encryption and isn’t cross-platform. Of course, now that I think about it, I haven’t tried KeePass on the Vista laptop yet. I should probably make sure it works under Vista before I enter too much stuff in there!

password managers

I was going to try copying all my passwords from Vault to KeePass tonight. I really like Vault, but it uses an unencrypted database, and it’s not cross-platform. KeePass runs on both PC and Mac (via KeePassX), and uses good encryption. Unfortunately, I just figured out that I have a little over 200 passwords in my Vault file. It’s going to take quite a while to do all that copying and pasting. Vault isn’t really structured like KeePass either, so there’s no easy way I could cobble together an export/import program. I have to decide whether or not I want to bite the bullet on this right now, or wait. I guess it’ll only get worse if I wait, right?

eEye Blink

I tried out the free Blink Personal Edition software from eEye today on my home computer. I have a lot of respect for eEye, so I was hoping this would be a good piece of software. Unfortunately, I had compatibility problems with a couple of apps right away, and a noticable bit of system slowdown. If I had time to work through this stuff, it might prove to be a good app. I really don’t have the time to mess around with it much right now though. For now, I’m still just using F-Prot anti-virus and Spybot S&D for spyware.

Ray Noorda

I just found out that Ray Noorda died today. The linked article calls him the “father of network computing,” and I guess that’s accurate. I used NetWare for years, starting with version 2.15c, I think, in the early nineties. I earned my CNE certification when NetWare 3 was big. I switched allegiance from NetWare to Windows NT grudgingly, in the late nineties, and by that time, Noorda was gone from Novell.

The obituary on the Canopy site says “In lieu of flowers, the family requests that each one of us put in a little extra effort today to enable someone to reach their fullest potential in their work — that’s what Ray would have done.” I’ll try.

podcatchers

I’ve been using Juice to download and manage podcasts on my Mac for quite some time now. When Apple added podcast support to iTunes, I though about just using that, but there are a few things I don’t like about the way iTunes does stuff. Also, iTunes doesn’t have BitTorrent support, and a couple of the podcasts I subscribe to use BT. Juice is pretty good, but it’s a bit slow on my machine, and there are a few quirks. I’d like to try out Transistr, but it’s been in “coming soon” mode since January, I think. This recent blog post indicates that they’re making progress on it, though. I don’t know if there are any other good podcatchers for the Mac.

Adium

Some time ago, I tried to set up an IM client on my Mac that would connect to my company’s Sametime server. It might have been an older version of Adium, or it might have been Mercury. I can’t quite remember. Either way, I couldn’t get it to work, and just gave up. Well, I took another shot at it today, this time using the current version of Aduim, and it worked like a charm.

The official Sametime client for Mac is in beta right now. It looks pretty good, from what I’ve seen, but it’s nice to have something that works well in the meantime.

goodbye Vista

I decided to give up on Vista for now. I restored the backup of my original XP install on my laptop. (Done with Acronis True Image, by the way.) I think if I had a much more powerful laptop, the Vista beta might be usable, but it’s just too slow on a 2-year-old Gateway machine, with 512 MB of RAM and a low-end video card.

I am still looking forward to the final release of Vista, but I doubt I’d upgrade either my desktop or laptop to Vista; I’ll need to wait until the next time I buy new machines.

Free Anti-Virus Protection

Just for yuks, I sent off for an activation code for Active Virus Shield, AOL’s new free anti-virus software. I’m not sure if I can talk myself into actually installing it on one of my own machines, though. I’m kind of scared to put anything related to AOL on my computers. Given their previous history, I’m afraid I might never get it off again.