404 Tech Support

I was looking for a tool that would allow me to diff two directories last week, so I could try to see what a patch was changing. The top result and a quality product was WinMerge, an open-source application that can find differences between directories and then merge them together if you want.

WinMerge is hosted by SourceForge and has its own webpage at WinMerge.org where you can learn more about the program. To find the differences, you just launch the program and start a new comparison. Select one directory for the “left” and a different directory for the “right”. You can also choose compressed files to compare against and filter things by file name or file extension. When you’re all set hit Ok.

There are many-a people who would like to see Internet Explorer 6 bludgeoned and beaten quit gruesomely to its death, but there is another group (less than 10.2% of web users) that would like to see IE6 continue lumbering on. Instead, IE6 will be quietly put to rest in a somber funeral service on March 4th, 2010. The funeral will be held in Denver, CO and you can RSVP  and leave memory notes through the site IE6Funeral.com. From that site:

If you have more than one person using a computer, things can get a little bit frustrating when preferences, bookmarks, and software might be different between people and accounts. The standard way of dealing with this is to use Windows accounts to log in under your own account or ’switch users’. I’m not a big fan of this approach because it can potentially leave a lot of stuff running in the background and the time to log out of one account and into another can be annoying. With that in mind, I came up with a few other tricks to let somebody have their own preferences without logging out.

I hate it when I download something and it tries to install more stuff than what I asked for. Thus I composed this Directory of Bloatware comprised of software that I’ve encountered recently that try to install more than what was listed.

I know a lot of companies use these additional installations as their revenue stream in order to provide free software, but the ‘bloat’ label is still accurate. It unnecessarily increases the size of the installer I’m downloading and the amount of software installed on my computer if I just go through the default install. A bigger installed software footprint means there are more applications that need to be kept up-to-date or could potentially have system-compromising vulnerabilities. I would like to see an industry standard where tag-along software must be listed along with the download link.

Adobe is in rapid-fire for releasing updates lately and with the bugs, crashes, and exploits that keep being discovered, they need to be. A few days over a month after version 9.3 patches were released for Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat, 9.3.1 is released to address further concerns

From the related Adobe Security Bulletin:

A critical vulnerability has been identified in Adobe Reader 9.3 for Windows, Macintosh and UNIX, Adobe Acrobat 9.3 for Windows and Macintosh, and Adobe Reader 8.2 and Acrobat 8.2 for Windows and Macintosh. As described in Security Bulletin APSB10-06, this vulnerability (CVE-2010-0186) could subvert the domain sandbox and make unauthorized cross-domain requests. In addition, a critical vulnerability (CVE-2010-0188) has been identified that could cause the application to crash and could potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system.

With today’s high processor clock speeds and multiple cores, almost every home user has a few processor cycles to spare. The question is, what do we do with them and how do we make use of them for good? Distributed volunteer computing uses software and hundreds to thousands of computers around the world to create a super computer via the Internet. Distributed computing or grid computing is certainly nothing new with some of these projects having been around for quite a while, but both computers and the software have advanced quite a bit since you might have last thought about joining the grid to help further science. There also might be some projects listed here you didn’t know about that interest you and if you know a grid computing project that I didn’t list, certainly share that information in the forum.

I’m in no way a die-hard Twittard, but I do use it to promote new articles and spout off random comments (140 characters or less) every once in a while. That being said, I did find the free application Seesmic Look to be very helpful in understanding and organizing all the information in Twitter to be a bit more functional and informative. I have a guest article over at Freewaregenius that highlights this application and its highs and lows. Check out the full article at Freewaregenius: Seesmic Look – A Polished, Functional Twitter Client.

Do you have a genuine version of Firefox installed? Did it install a bunch of malware alongside your browser? Is Microsoft allowing this to sabotage your first impression of Firefox? The browser wars are getting ugly. Why isn’t Mozilla doing anything to stop this phishing attempt that is ruining their good name and adding more machines to the botnet?