The Barrel

First hurricane of season forms in Atlantic (Reuters)

 
Reuters - The first hurricane of the 2008 Atlantic storm season formed on Monday, hundreds of miles (km) away from the United States, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.

Hang on to your hats folks, we have one more chance for Bush to show us "correct" hurricane rescue tips
First hurricane of season forms in Atlantic [...]

Posted in General

Want XP on your new Dell? $50, please

You read correctly. Dell will start charging customers up to $50 for factory-installed Windows XP on some of their PCs, Computerworld reports today.
Consumers interested in the bargain-basement Vostro line of desktops and notebooks will pay $20 to $50 more for Windows XP Professional installed as a “downgrade” from Windows Vista Business or Vista Ultimate than [...]

Posted in General

XP Home availability extended [News]

 
Microsoft is due to announce some time this week the extended availability of their Windows XP operating system, and it’s all thanks to devices like the Asus Eee PC.
Good news for those of you who refuse to go over the Vista and have not tried Linux as of yet, Baldy

XP Home availability extended [News]

Posted in General

It’s time to learn Scheme

 
Have you ever peeked into one of those bazillion .el files in your Emacs installation’s lisp folder and wondered what it meant? Or have you ever looked at a GIMP script .scm file and scratched your head over all the parentheses? Lisp is one of the oldest programming languages still in common use, and Scheme [...]

Posted in General

Is Firefox 3 ready for prime time?

 
Review — Firefox 3 may still be a beta, Beta 4 to be exact, but in a recent Reuters news story, Mozilla Vice President of Engineering Mike Schroepfer said of the browser, "In many ways it is much more stable than anything else out there."

Is Firefox 3 ready for prime time?

Posted in General

Greenpeace: Devices greener but have long way to go

Consumer electronics are becoming greener, but manufacturers still have a long way to go to eliminate hazardous substances from devices and make them more energy efficient, Greenpeace said.

Hmm…. How shocking!
Guess who didn’t want to play??
Yep, good ol’ Microsoft
Source: ZDNet News

Posted in General

How to disappear online

You can delete your old Friendster account and those embarrassing blog entries. But can you erase your online identity altogether?

Source: Globe & Mail

Posted in General

D&D creator dies, aged 69 [News]

 
Gary Gygax, co-creator behind the Dungeons and Dragons concept and game, has died aged 69 after a long illness.
Okay I am sure that here is a man that had no idea on how his little game would influence people for years to follow. Follow the link for a complete write up.
 

D&D creator dies, aged [...]

Posted in General

Archive files in both Windows and Linux using PeaZip

 
If you need an archiving program that can run under both Windows and Linux, sport a graphical interface, and be licensed as open source software, only a single program will do: PeaZip. It acts as a graphical front end for several tools that provide archiving, compression, encryption, and similar functions.
Take a look at the rest [...]

Posted in General

Firefox 3 Beta: Good Enough Now and Getting Better

 
Don’t look now, but the third volley in the second browser war is about to be fired, and it’s packing an impressive payload. Mozilla, the folks developing the Firefox Web browser, last week released a new test version. It’s the third beta of Firefox 3.0, and it’s solid enough that it could become your [...]

Posted in General