An article written by Richard Koman from newsfactor.com talks about the performance increases that everyone will see once SP3 for Windows XP is released. The company Devil Mountain Software, has recently done tests on Windows Vista in regards to the up-coming release of SP1. The testing concluded:

"The hoped-for performance fixes that Microsoft has been hinting at never materialized," the testers reported. "Vista + SP1 is no faster" than out-of-the-box Vista, they said.

Theres a feature on Lifehacker about a free piece of software called DriveImage XML, that provides backups and images of your Windows Based Hard Drive. The software has four different functions that you can use to backup/image your hard drive:

I was setting up a bunch of monitoring at work as we hadn't have that much implemented. I ran into this application in a random fashion. Sys Junction is an application that graphs out syslog data from Cisco PIX firewalls.

I stumbled upon a little application called "evtsys" that was created by some Computer Engineering folks at Purdue University. The program runs on Microsft Windows 2000/2003/Vista 32-bit or 64-bit version and sends eventlog messages to a networked syslog server. You can then have syslog either print out the alert or write to a file.

If you don't know about Thunderbird, then you've been living under a rock. Its a small, lightweight, Email application provided free by the Mozilla foundation. I was looking around for Thunderbird add-ons this evening and found a couple that I found to be a "Must Have" for anyone that uses Thunderbird as their primary email client. I'll list them off in no particular order:

Enigmail - OpenPGP message encryption and authentication for Thunderbird and Seamonkey.

I was looking for a solution to backup three of my linux machines that I have running this site and many others. After searching for some time, I didn't actually need to go with a company. I found a friend that provided me some space. During this time I did find out some useful information.

PC World reviews the newest release of Apple's Max OSX version 10.5 codenamed "Leopard". In this review "Edward Mendelson" states one big remark.

"First: despite minor problems, it's by far the best operating system ever written for the vast majority of consumers, with dozens of new features that have real practical value—like truly automated backups, preview images in folders, and notes and to-do lists integrated into the mail program".

I have only played with Leopard in the last few days and seen it in action on a co-workers laptop, and I'm starting to thing more and more about purchasing a Macbook Pro!

Have you ever wanted an easy way to view all of your folders sizes, without have to Right Click and select Properties on each one. This application integrates with Explorer in Windows and provides a column that shows the folders size on disk. This is very useful if you're trying to find where a big file or if you're trying to free up disk space. An excellent download and a must need for System Administrators/Power users.

If you have ever created a blog, node, page within Drupal that is far too long to be on one page. Or if you'd rather have an article split into two pages, then the Drupal Paging module is what you need.

I had the chance to try Splunk out about 3 months ago. The software was rather easy to install, however one thing that did seem to a little hard to use was the interface and the general working with inputs for the software. The search function was really neat, and easy to find errors that were occurring. The free version is limited but still usable, in a larger environment this product would probably be a life saver. Single server deployments, not so much.

A rather in-depth screenshot tour of the new KDE 4 beta 3 booted from a LiveCD.

Stephan Binner has released a new version of his KDE Four Live CD. This version uses a recent SVN snapshot and works quite well.

While I had some trouble testing the newest KDE 4 Beta release on my test machine, the KDE Four LiveCD works surprisingly well. According to Stephan the version used on this LiveCD is KDE 4 Beta 3 plus a set of recent patches.

See the full Screenshot tour

I'm sure a lot of people are familiar with the FireFox extension called GreaseMonkey. The extension allows you to manipulate the JavaScript present on any website you visit. For instance, if you want to displaying text is a specific way, you can. You can also change the colour or look of site with your own custom JavaScript.

9. Flickr Follow Comments - This useful script helps you to view images that you have commented on - but only those that interest you. If you are writing lots of comments every day you know how hard it is not to get distracted by the overload of images when you click “Comments You’ve made”. With this userscript you have 4 different options to see only certain types of comments.

The following article from howtoforge.com shows how to setup the perfect Linux Desktop using Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon. If you've always wanted to use Ubuntu as your desktop OS, then give this article a read and follow along using a Virtual Machine or VMWare Player.

Haven't found an application that will automatically jailbreak the iPhone v1.1.1 firmware? Check out iFuntastic, which will jailbreak your v1.1.1 firmware automatically for free!

InstantBird is a mutli-protocol Instant Messenger that uses parts of Pidgin and Firefox, it is open source and is available to Windows, Linux and MacOSX.

Instantbird is a multi-protocol Instant Messaging client. Using it, you can connect to all your different IM accounts. It uses the Mozilla rendering engine to display IMs, and the Pidgin libpurple to connect to the different networks. Instantbird is a free and open source software. So you are free to use, distribute and modify it. The project is just on its first release, many features are not implemented yet. We hope you will like it and look forward to get your feedback!

Visit the official InstantBird Site

Sandboxie will isolate the outcome of any website you visit, including any software or script installations, which can then be undone.

LifeHacker has a review up on their site about a little application called 'mRemote'. This is quite a piece of software and you can tell that the developers have spent some time on it. I have always been an advocate of being more organized and efficient. With mRemote everything that you need is in one screen, and everything that was left out with Microsoft's Remote Desktop Connection Client is in mRemote. Tabbed windows, supports RDP, VNC, SSH2 and telnet protocols. There is also a connection manager, so you can setup all your connections and then point and click to connect.

This is a really neat application, however I was not able to get it to run on Debian Testing. I was getting a strange error message after installing "python-ctypes" "libnetfilter-conntrack1" through apt-get:


Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/pyctd", line 27, in ?
import pyctd
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/pyctd/__init__.py", line 2, in ?
from pyctd.conntracking import DataCollector
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/pyctd/conntracking.py", line 31, in ?
import pynetfilter_conntrack as nfct
File "build/bdist.linux-i686/egg/pynetfilter_conntrack/__init__.py", line 4, in ?
File "build/bdist.linux-i686/egg/pynetfilter_conntrack/func.py", line 32, in ?
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/ctypes-1.0.2-py2.4-linux-i686.egg/ctypes/__init__.py", line 353, in __getattr__
func = self.__getitem__(name)

LifeHacker Has a walk through of how to customize Microsoft Windows XP with Tweak UI, with included screen shots.

Customize Windows XP with TweakUI - One of the best tools for fine-tuning Windows XP is the free TweakUI PowerToy utility from Microsoft. TweakUI digs deep into Windows' settings and can customize its behavior dozens of ways, from how many icons appear on the Alt-Tab dialog to Explorer context menu choices to what your program shortcuts look like. TweakUI's been around forever and we've mentioned it here and there throughout the years at Lifehacker, but it's high time we gave it the full walk-through it deserves. After the jump, take a gander at 15 useful adjustments you can make to your XP system with TweakUI.

A small review of Movable Type 4 and WordPress, its mostly talking about why the person switched from WordPress to Movable Type 4 and how Movable Type 4 worked for this person.

Why I Don't Use WordPress - You may be surprised to hear that this blog does not run on WordPress- like much of the blogosphere- but rather, Movable Type 4. I've given WordPress plenty of chances to be my CMS of choice, but for my own blog, it just doesn't cut it for me. [Digg Main]

Unfortunately there is no swiftweasel for debian etch/testing:

I had to browse to the SourceForge project page, and download the appropriate version for my machine, which is a athlon64/32bit.

I just untar'd the file, and ran ./firefox from within the directory and it picked up all my settings and everything. Next I had to set it up so that I just had to type firefox within a console. So I created a symlink in my 'bin' folder with all my other custom perl scripts and other command line programs/scripts:

I also had to setup my fluxbox keybinding like so:

I originally was using "iceweasel" which is the Debian fork of Firefox, you can read why Debian had to fork Firefox on WikiPedia

I do notice a difference, pages load pretty fast and the FasterFox Plugin helps. However they packaged an extension called "AdBlocks" which I've never used and I don't really like. But for now I have just removed it.

Swiftweasel 2.0.0.4.1 (Default branch) - Swiftweasel is an optimized build of the Mozilla
Firefox Web browser for Linux. It offers builds
for both AMD and Intel processors. Swiftweasel is
100% compatible with all Firefox themes, plugins,
and extensions.
License: Mozilla Public License (MPL)
Changes:
The update notifications feature that made its
first appearance in 2.0.0.5pre is installed. When
a new version is available, you will be notified
so you can get it. Further font rendering
improvements were done. Automatic detection of
plugins is done in common directories in the file
system. A few more build tweaks were made. The
"Release Notes" option in the Help section brings
up the release notes.
[FreshMeat]

samhain 2.3.5 (Default branch) - samhain is a daemon that can check file integrity, search the file tree for SUID files, and detect kernel module rootkits (Linux only). It can be used either standalone or as a client/server system for centralized monitoring, with strong (192-bit AES) encryption for client/server connections and the option to store databases and configuration files on the server. For tamper resistance, it supports signed database/configuration files and signed reports/audit logs. It has been tested on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, and Unixware.

License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

Changes:
This release fixes some minor bugs. The portcheck module tears down connections for some common protocols more gracefully.

[FreshMeat]