Essential Apps (PC edition)

After numerous Blue Screens of Death in my work Win XP system, I have had to start with a clean slate.

Though I don't quite have the luxury of choosing Linux or Mac, like Mark Pilgrim or Tim Bray or Rich Burridge, I still use quite a few open source apps in my day to day work. If the 10 years I spent at Sun taught me anything, it had to be how to work/survive with OpenSource software. Unfortunately, many of my colleagues and clients still use WinXP and I have to be guaranteed to be able to exchange data with them, and have my system be supported. Thus, I have to use WinXP and MS Office for some things, as well as some non-open source apps.

Due to the re-install, I've narrowed the list of essential apps I want installed on my new system. Here are my essential PC apps:

1. Google Pack
2. Mozilla Firefox
3. Mozilla Thunderbird
4. oXygen XML Editor
5. GVIM
6. Google Desktop
7. Trillian
8. FoxIt Reader
9. CygWin
10. Gimp
11. TurboXML

In the past, I've also used jEdit, but now exclusively oXygen... I would also consider using OpenOffice, but as I mentioned, I'm required to use MS Office. I also wish they made Omnigraffle for Win...
and now for the fun apps:

12. iTunes
13. Picasa
14. WebShots
15. Google Earth

For essential Firefox extensions, I use:

1. Web Developer
2. X-Ray
3. IE Tab
4. del.icio.us
5. DownloadThemAll!
6. Forecastfox
7. Adblock
8. Google Browser Sync

What other essential WinXP apps should I be considering?

Thanks to Nederhoed, it looks like I should give Inkscape a try. I think Rich Burridge had also recommended FreeMind. Any others?

UPDATE:Plaxo and SnagIt are some additional apps I've found essential!

Categories: General

IPBuddys: a new eComic!

My son, Connor, has created a pretty cool comic series about two computers in the networked world. The computers? Right now, a PC laptop and an iMac. Perhaps at some point he can add our old Pentium II-266 tower and 486 desktop!

Originally, he wanted to call it "Saturday.COM", but that name is currently taken, even though that URL doesn't seem to respond. I tried to help him come up with a new name, and eventually settled on "IPBuddys".

He's publishing on Blogger for now. If you have any suggestions of a better place to publish a comic, send me a comment!

You can view IPBuddys at: http://www.ipbuddys.com. What an amazing time we live in, where even an 8-year-old can share his creativity with the world!

Categories: General, family

Docbook template for Word, StarOffice, OpenOffice

There was a posting to the docbook-apps list at Oasis about a standard word template where the styles map to a docbook element (even if not 1:1) so that only one stylesheet need be written to convert the output to Simplified Docbook.

Dan Gilleland replied that even though it's for Simplified, it can be extended to full DocBook. He posted the link to O'reilly's site, where you will find:

Microsoft Word for the PC or Mac, tagged according to our paragraph and character style template that is available at ftp://ftp.ora.com/pub/frame/templates/mswd/temp98.doc. Note that you should also be able to use this template for programs such as OpenOffice and StarOffice.

Thank you to Uratsuki for the link correction: ftp://ftp.ora.com/pub/frame/templates/mswd/.

I've got to try this in OO, and will report back...

See also: DocBook