Category Archives: Reviews

Fallout 3

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I just finished Fallout 3′s story mode.  I’m nowhere near done playing it, but I’m excited to finally be through the main single player story.  Fallout is developed by Bethesda, and based on the same gameplay engine as The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, which was a great game as well.  I was playing the Xbox 360 version, and heard that the PC version was just as good.  According to Gamespot, Fallout 3 for the Playstation 3 looks pretty bad.  The graphics almost look washed out, so beware.

I’m trying not to give away any spoilers, but it’s hard to do that and give an adequare review.  The game is based in Washington D.C. after the nuclear war entailed in the previous Fallout games.  You’re recognized as the “Vault Dweller” by virtually everyone you come by.  The whole purpose of the game is to follow in your father’s footsteps and complete a mission that he left Vault 101, your home, to do.  I played a good character, but the engine allows for an open ended play – good or evil.  I’ll probably play a mean character next.

Mac vs. PC vs. Windows vs. Linux vs. Huh?

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Alright. I’ve finally decided to break down the pros and cons of Macs, PCs, Linux, Windows, etc. First off, I’d like to say that none of these platforms are apples to apples. Each one has advantages and disadvantages. There are also some interesting dynamics to some of the rivalries that some people just don’t think about. Every side in this debate has its elitist fanatics, which is fine by me. I like to play neutral. Each platform has its benefits and drawbacks. Finding the right combination of benefits and drawbacks is what will ultimately satisfy end users.

Macs

Macs are great stable products. For those of you that say they never freeze… you’re full of it. They do freeze, just like any other computer. They are probably LESS likely to freeze than something like Linux running on a top-of-the-line laptop, but fundamentally, you can expect the to freeze up periodically like ANY electronic device.

Macs run so well because the hardware and software are developed by the same company. This lends itself to a great end user experience, but winds up much like AOL (don’t get me started). Users are confined to the user experience outlined by apple, unless the occasional developer comes along and expands the experience (go Adobe!).

Unfortunately software is less prevalent on Macs for a few reasons: the first being the cost of the developers kit. Developing on the native Mac platform costs developers money, which doesn’t foster the kind of interest you see in other communities, such as the Linux community. The secondary reason software is less prevalent on Macs is simply a function of market share. Many developers just don’t see the right ROI from the Apple platform.

The function of market share that stifles development on the Mac platform also makes it less lucrative for hackers and other malicious deviants to develop harmful software targeted at Mac users. This helps increase stability on the platform, allowing for a better user experience. Trust me. If Apple had as much of a market share as Microsoft, they would have just as many problems with malicious software.

Overall, Macs are a great hardware / software combination, not unlike a cell phone or game console. Due to the lack of software available on the platform, they aren’t great for large business environments or niche users, especially in the accounting and legal fields.

PCs

As far as I’m concerned, a PC is just hardware. It’s a collection of standards that collectively make a “PC.” Windows, Linux, and yes Mac OS X (albeit glitchy) can all run on these systems. The debate between Macs and PCs is somewhat superficial in that it’s not apples to apples. It’s apples to potatoes. They’re not even in the same food group. Macs are essentially made up of the same standards based hardware that PCs are, but the scope of the hardware is much narrower and tested much more thoroughly to work with Apple operating systems.

Because the PC is an open platform, development is much more prevalent. Operating systems optimized for the open PC environment are much more flexible and consumers have more choice over where they would like to purchase their hardware. As a consumer, I can chose to buy hardware from Dell, HP, Gateway, or build a machine myself. If I want a Mac, I get one made by Apple. Sure, I can buy it from a reseller, but Apple made and distributed it.

Windows

Windows is a great operating system – despite what some may say. Windows XP is a great, stable operating system. Windows Vista, although it had a rough start, is coming along nicely. I like some of the new features in Vista, such as live switching to Administrator, the new performance monitor, and their integrated indexing / search. Now that driver support has gotten much better, Vista has my stamp of approval for home users. I almost trust it enough for businesses, but not just yet. As a general rule, I don’t recommend something for business until 18 to 24 months out.

Now this is where people tend to over generalize. Microsoft doesn’t compete directly with Apple – in that they don’t create hardware for Windows. I think that is an anti-trust thing, but I’m not sure. Microsoft actually benefits from some of the recent changes with OS X Leopard. When people run Boot Camp, they must purchase a copy of Windows to run on it. Microsoft still collects those revenues. I’d love to try out a an Apple running OS X Leopard with Boot Camp and Windows Vista, but alas I’m still too poor.

Linux

Oh Linux. This is probably the operating system with the most elitists (look in the comments), the most distributions, and the most bugs. It’s still not quite user friendly enough for home use, although Ubuntu comes close. Driver support sucks too. How is it that Linux thrives so well then? It’s free. It’s open. When configured correctly, it’s the most stable operating system for ultra specific applications.

To be honest, I’m not a huge fan of Linux, because when ever I try to do something it’s like pulling teeth. I usually try to do the “learn by immersion” thing every once in a while, but end up switching back to Windows because something just becomes impossible. That being said, I understand that it has some huge benefits. I use it for my web servers. It makes a great platform for Oracle and MySQL. It’s also great for creating specific machines that complete unique tasks on an on-going basis. I have one customer that has a machine that just checks an email box periodically and prints out what ever it receives (don’t even get me started on the paper waste thing).

Conclusion

Basically I think comparing all of the aforementioned is like comparing apples, potatoes, steak, and air. They’re all food, but after that, they all have benefits and drawbacks, but fundamentally they’re completely different. Please shoot holes this theory. Why is one better than the other?

WordPress Plugin: Sociable

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There is a great plugin for WordPress to easily allow users to submit your site content to popular social sites. It’s called Sociable. It was recommended to me by MsDanielle. She just recently installed the same plugin on her site, and I thought it worked quite well. When you’re submitting an article for the first time, it brings you to the submission page of each site with the information already pre-filled. This is great for making it easy for users to submit your content (or for you to submit it yourself).

To install, just download the zip file from their website, extract it, and upload the directory to your WordPress plugins directory. Go to your plugins tab and activate it, and you’re all set. You can manipulate the plugin settings to represent the social networks that make the most sense to you.

A Great Photographer’s Website

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Beech TreeDiana Gonsalves is a talented black and white photographer from Johnson, Vermont.  I’m going to be redoing her website sometime in the near future.  And by near, I mean when I get around to it.

Some of the things we’re going to try and do include: updating the look and feel, adding a gallery, increasing the search engine optimization of the entire site, and making it easier for her to update.  The whole project should be pretty straight forward.

I’ll let you know when the project is done!

For now, check out the website here:

www.photosbydi.com

Hulu: Free Online Television, Finally

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I was surfing around the net the other day when I stumbled across a pretty cool web service company started as a joint venture by Fox and NBC. The whole purpose of the site, hulu.com, is to provide premium content, usually in the form of television shows on their respective networks. The show offerings have intermittent commercials, but significantly less than regular television. I’ve been testing various flavors of the service for a few days now, and I’m rather impressed. I’ve watched every episode of The Loop, one of my favorite shows, as well as House, The Simpsons, Battlestar Gallactica, Chuck, and CSI.

There is a waiting list for the private beta, and I have yet to find a reliable reference that states when the public beta will be available. I would suggest registering at their site anyways if you’re interested, as the word on the street is that they’re releasing memberships to the private beta in stages.

OpenHulu

Hulu allows you to embed full episodes in your website, not unlike the way YouTube allows you to embed content. Using this feature, OpenHulu has embedded as many videos as possible in their site and organized it in a not-so-aesthetically pleasing interface, but for the most part it works. I’ve found that one drawback to this method is that often times episodes become unavailable. I think that is a function of Hulu moving their permalinks on the main site, but I’m not sure.

The min/max video size on this site seems to be two different streams as well. This means that you must start the video in the maximized mode to watch it, which is kind of annoying if you’re half way through a video and want to change views. Bandwidth also seems to be intermittently slow on the embedded content, when comparing it to content streamed by one of their partners. This is probably a function of traffic prioritization for their main site and partners.

Overall, OpenHulu offers more episodes than official Hulu partners, but the quality of the site and instability of the content is a bit aggravating at times.

MSN TV and Other Hulu Partners

Not surprisingly, MSN TV has access to Hulu content, most likely through their NBC channels. This seemed to be the best organized and most stable (in terms of bandwidth) version of the Hulu offering outside of their main site. It is fully functional, free, and available to everyone. Hulu also offers content through other companies, like MySpace, Yahoo!, and AOL.

Conclusion

I think this is a great service, and I’m impressed to see that online television is becoming a great thing. I wish ABC and CBS would jump on the bandwagon and offer content through Hulu. That would make my Satellite TV obsolete. I know CBS offers content through InnerTube, but the content is very limited.I also wish that all of the networks would provide ALL of their shows online for viewing, so that I could catch back episodes (like Lost on ABC).

If you know of any other online television platforms (that are legal), let me know!

Google Calendar / Outlook Sync

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I’ve been looking for a way to sync my Google / Outlook 2007 calendar for a bit (2 ways), and the built in Outlook features allow you to add an internet calendar, but it needs to be public and doesn’t show in your calendar view on your email page. it’s also one way. I found a solution that worked, but it was sort of a hack job, so I didn’t really stand behind it.

THEN! I noticed “Sync with Microsoft Outlook™ calendarNew!” in the top right area of my calendar. It took me about 2 seconds to decide to click the link and download the application. This thing is great! If you can’t see the URL on your Google Calendar, go here:

http://www.google.com…answer.py?answer=89955

Let me know if you have any issues in the comments.  I’m interested in what they might be.

-JKT

Update: If you’re using Windows Vista and Outlook 2007, for some reason, sometimes the application cannot connect and sync for the first time if you have Outlook open. Just close Outlook and sync for the first time. Voila!

Top Ten Free Applications

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 Overview

I thought I’d voice my opinion on what I thought the best free applications are.  I have also tried to diversify the industries in which these software packages are to keep a nice balance of recommendations.  I’ve even included games.  There are a lot of great applications out there beyond these, but I decided to limit myself to just ten.

Criteria

In order for software to be on this list, I make some assumptions and limitations.  I have some basic requirements.  For software to be on my top ten, it must be cross platform (I’m limiting this to Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X), stable, and easy to use.  Software as a Service doesn’t count because the service may stop at some point.  It isn’t licensed to you, so you have no control over when it is and isn’t available.

1. Firefox

Firefox is actually my favorite web browser, free or not.  I think it is the best success story of the open source market.  In general I’m very impressed with the Mozilla Foundation.  The plugins are great.  I find it very useful to use plugins that manage downloads, add web development functionality, and provide integrated information inside the browser.

Given my criteria, IE and Safari don’t make the cut because they aren’t available across all three platforms.  It is true that with Wine you can use IE and Safari on Linux, but this breaks the “easy to use” criteria.  I know that Safari and Konqueror use the same engine, but they’re not the same product.

2. Fedora Core

Although Fedora Core isn’t cross platform, it runs on PC and Mac boxes, so I think it counts.  It’s a great, stable, free, and easy to use operating system developed by Red Hat.  It’s my favorite distribution of Linux because of it’s similarity to Red Hat Linux – which I use in enterprise installations.

3. OpenOffice.org

This is a great alternative to Microsoft Office.  I think that it does a great job replacing Word and Excel, but lacks a bit in the drawing, presentation, and database arena.  These sections of the program are getting better every year, and I expect that great advancements will be made on these parts of the program in the future.  Realistically most cases where I recommend OpenOffice.org, I am recommending it for the Word / Excel – like features.  This is another true success story for open source software in terms of gaining market share and project activity.  Good job!

4. Tremulous

This is a great 3D Shooter game.  I believe it’s based on the Quake 2 or 3 engine, but I’m not sure.  It’s basically aliens versus humans.  There is currently only LAN and Internet Play (no single player) due to problems developing AI.  I think the concept for the game is great, and a lot of great ideas work out really well.  The alien team can actually walk on walls and ceilings without too much effort.  The user base is quite large, so internet games are always fast paced and exciting.  There are hardly ever any lulls where there aren’t many players online.

5. Thunderbird

When paired with OpenOffice.org, one can completely replace the MS Office suite.  This would take the place of Outlook.  I like its basic functionality.  If you’re looking for a specific feature, you can look through their extensive plugin gallery for what you need.  There is even a SunBird calendar plugin.  I like its adaptive junk mail controls and filtering.  Anecdotally, I think it works better than my Outlook 2007 spam filter.  It’s another high quality product from Mozilla.

6. Notepad++

Text editors is a tough category.  It comes down to features, because all text editors are based around the same basic principal.  There are often great SDKs and text editors depending on what language you’re programming in, so I had to pick my favorite all-around text editor.

I do a lot of text editing, and Notepad++ is one of the best text editors I have used.  Yes, it fails the cross platform test, but I just love it so much.  When I’m using Linux, I use gedit or vi, and when I’m using Macs, I just use TextEdit.  It’s great because it lets me “minimize” DOM elements – which is probably my favorite feature.  It saves the state of documents when I close it too.  My only issue with Notepad++ is in Windows Vista whenever I open it, I get whacked by UAC, but it’s just an extra click.  I’m sure it will be resolved at some point.

7. FileZilla

Everyone needs an FTP Client and/or server.  I love both sides of Filezilla because it is simple.  Filezilla server could use some anti-hammering catches, but that’s just about it.

8. XAMPP

I had originally thought about listing Apache, MySQL, and PHP as applications that were great and free, but then I realized I could list XAMPP and cover them all, while satisfying the usability criteria.  Apache has the greatest market share for web servers and there is a reason why.  It’s secure, it’s lightweight, and it’s powerful.  MySQL contends with the big dogs in the database arena quite well, and it’s my favorite database.  WAMP used to be my favorite all-in-one, but XAMPP trumped that with its cross platform release and the addition of Perl.

9. VNC

Remote Desktop management is a must for people who work with clients across any sort of distance (be it miles or just a few doors down).  Being able to take over a computer while the user is watching is an extremely valuable tool.  My favorite distribution of VNC is TightVNC, but UltraVNC and the others are useful depending on what I need.

10. GnuCash

This is great accounting software.  I think that accounting courses in college should use this software as the basis for teaching students.  It makes two column accounting very easy and intuitive.  This is what I use to do my personal finances.

MP3Tag, VLC Media Player, Azureus, and various other distributions of Linux were on my list of software, but didn’t make the top ten.  What do you think should be on this list?

Technorati & Digg

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I’ve heard the buzz about Technorati and Digg around before, and I wanted to check them out. Technorati is a website for keeping track of blogs and Digg is basically an aggregator for news stories, largely based on popularity. I thought I’d check them out.

Here are my Technorati and Digg profiles.

Technorati

At first it was a little unclear to me what the site was all about, but I finally figured out that it is basically a blog aggregator that rates blogs based on authority. Authority is driven by users who subscribe to that blog.

Digg

I thought the Digg site was very intuitive, and its purpose was immediately clear to me. I think it had the most immediate effect on my traffic as well. I think Digg might actually be a more useful product, because it forces writers to write consistently good articles to get them Dugg. This is in contrast to Technorati where an established blogger can produce low quality content for a while, but still sustain authority. That being said, if said blogger produces poor content for too long, I suspect their authority would drop.

My Conclusion

I think Technorati is a good place to find good writers, but Digg is a good place to find good articles relevant to a certain subject.

Google Sites Leaves me Bored AND Confused

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Overview

Google Sites is a product recently released by Google to create a place for colleagues to collaborate. I think it is meant to work something like a cross between Microsoft’s ultra complex SharePoint, and MySpace. The idea is to give users flexible control over their sites look and feel, while making it easy for users with out development or design skills to launch a functional work space. Once the site is created, users can collaborate in that “space.”

Joining

This is pretty straight forward. Just navigate to the Google Sites main page and set up an account. Your organization will need to be a member – using Google Apps. This can be a bit of a hassle if you aren’t the admin for your organization. I think this is Google’s way to combat the lash back from IT staff.

Setting Up a New Site

From the Dashboard, just click “Create New Site,” and you’ll be prompted for some basic information like: a site name, category, and description. You can also set who you’d like to collaborate with and pick a pre-defined theme from a rather bland selection of pre-made templates. When you’re done playing with these options, click “Create Site.” Your new site is online!

Using Your Site

Now that your site has been created, you can start using it. A nice place to start is with the “Edit Page” button just above the default “Home” page. This converts the whole page to a text area and title bar that are editable. You can place whatever content you want in there now, with standard options like bold, italics, underlines, links, bullets, etc. Click save when you’re done, and the page is published. You also have the option of attaching files and leaving comments.

Just next to the “Edit” button is a “Create New Page” button. This is where you can create new pages and add them the the “parent -> child” tree that the site is built on. Just below this area is the navigation menu, with a conveniently available site map, which is dynamically built, based on the pages you’ve created.

Tweaking Your Site

Really dialing in your site is where the fun begins. In the top right of your browser window, you can click “Site settings” and be taken to a page where you can edit site sharing settings, the appearance, and “other stuff.” The most interesting part is the appearance settings, where you can modify things like colors, fonts, and background images for different sections of the page. You can also modify your theme or site elements here.

Site elements are like widgets on the left bar next to the main content on your pages. Right now, there are only a few site elements, but I would imagine that they would add more as popularity grows. It may become something like the “widgets” for iGoogle (which by the way, I love).

The real meat of the Appearance section is “Colors and Fonts.” This is where you can upload your own background images and change colors for your theme create your own custom theme. I tried fairly successfully to recreate the look and feel of this site. One thing Google Sites does a lot better than a lot of other sites I’ve seen is the style manager. What one would usually use CSS styling for is in a nice GUI. For instance, adding a background image in the top left that doesn’t repeat involves just uploading the image, selecting vertical, horizontal, and repeat settings from drop downs, and hitting save. It’s done. That will probably make a lot of users that don’t know CSS quite happy.

“Other Stuff” is where you change things like your title, categories, and description. Oh, and you can delete the whole site here too.

My Thoughts

I’m quite underwhelmed by Google Sites. Products like WordPress seem to be much better. Although I’ve never used it, Blogger seems like a much better alternative if you’re looking for a Google product. That being said, this is an extremely new offering, and I’m sure it will get dialed in a lot better. Maybe the should have tagged it with “beta” for a couple years, like Gmail. This is also free. I find it hard to give something free a bad review, because your ROI is divided by zero. Im interested to see where this goes in the future.

I also felt like there should be more. That feeling just kind of confused me the whole way through. I think it may have just been so simple it was hard. Maybe I’m just dumb. :-)

What do you think about it?