Free .biz domains (seriously!)

I’m totally serious.

I got an e-mail not too long ago from 1&1 telling me of their free .biz domains offer.

Although I’m not sure whether this offer is also valid for new users, I’m extremely pleased with 1&1’s services, and have great confidence that they are absolutely honest and non-deceptive in this offer. I’ve registered “freddyware.biz” among others, all of which I plan on developing — there’s a requirement that you can only register .biz domains if you are going to use it for business/commercial purposes (which do not include selling or trading domains).

Anyhow, check it out. This is an offer webmasters cannot miss out on.

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Top 15 Open Source Items (For Windows)

I decided to let you know what my top 15 open source items are for Windows computers. All of the items below are free, both in the monetary sense and the intellectual property sense.

Only programs that I use or have used are in this list. I’m sure there are plenty of great programs not in this list, but I believe this list will suit the various needs of most Windows users. (I have excluded PuTTY, as it is a program intended for use by a small group of users — those with Linux/Unix servers.)

15. Handbrake

This is an excellent program for backing up (a.k.a. “ripping”) DVD’s, converting them to formats like H.264 MPEG4 for playback on computers. Leo Laporte has recommended this program to many callers on The Lab With Leo Laporte, but it may not be legal much longer if the proposed copyright reform in Canada is passed. From what I can tell, it is a powerful program.

This program is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux.

14. PDFCreator

I used to use this for converting any printable document to PDF, but now I have Office 2007 which has built-in PDF capabilities. I no longer have a need for this open source solution. Mac users, of course, can convert to PDF in a simple fashion when printing. With PDFCreator, it leverages other GPL/LGPL things like ghostscript in order to convert whatever you’re printing to PDF. There are commercial and non-open source solutions, but this is by far the best of them — aside from Adobe Acrobat.

13. Pidgin

This is a good instant messenger that consolidates multiple IM accounts from Windows Live Messenger, Google Talk, AIM, Yahoo! and more. It doesn’t look as intuitive as a free (but closed source) product like Windows Live Messenger or Google Talk, but it is a powerful application. I used to use this before I found out how to install Windows Live Messenger on Windows XP Professional x64 Edition.

Other notable IM clients for Windows include Miranda IM.

12. DVD Flick

DVD Flick is a really good program that creates DVD’s that can be played in most modern DVD players. It doesn’t match up to iDVD on the Mac — it only converts the video/audio to the DVD standard format and creates titles & chapters — but it is an easy-to-use solution for average Windows users that don’t need a menu. There is another open source solution for menu authoring, though.

11. Notepad++

Notepad++ is an interesting program that is so much more than a Notepad replacement. It can even replace some coding programs, given the plugins available for it and code highlighting, even though I think Dreamweaver still beats it in terms of usability and user-friendliness for Web designers and developers.

I would appreciate the authors of Notepad++ more if they didn’t have a large, ugly, and ineffective banner at the top of their site advocating the boycott of the Beijing Games. Guess what? Not a single country decided to boycott the Games! But that’s a matter for another time and another blog…

10 more programs after the jump, including (in no particular order here) Firefox, 7-zip, VLC Media Player, Audacity, MediaCoder, and more!

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(1 votes, average: 3 out of 5)

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Getting a new computer

Well, we (my family and I) are getting a new computer. Not a new PC in the sense of Dell or HP (which are now the better PC brands), but rather in the sense of a self-assembly kit.

The kit includes:

• A corporate steel ATX Mid-Tower case with 7 expansion slots and 600 watt power supply
• A powerful motherboard with:

NVIDIA nForce and NVIDIA GeForce chipset

A 1333 MHz front side bus

4 SATA ports (3.0 Gbps) and on-board RAID

Gigabit LAN interface

HDMI — great for my 24″ widescreen monitor which supports 1920×1200

8-channel high definition audio

PCIExpress

• An amazing Intel Core 2 Quad (Q6600) processor

Each core: 2.4 GHz

A 1066 MHz front side bus

An 8 MB cache

Support for EM64T (x64)

Support for Intel Virtualization (perfect for running virtual machines)

Stuff like Smart Memory Access, Advanced Smart Cache, Advanced Digital Media Boost, etc.

• 2 GB of DDR2 memory  at 667 MHz — not amazing or great, but good for our needs; besides, DDR2 is insanely cheap to add.

No monitor, hard drive, optical drive, or operating system. That’s okay, because we have all of the above. It also doesn’t come with a fan/heatsink, so we had to buy one with the kit.

This computer is going to be an excellent improvement over the current Intel Pentium D (2.66 GHz) that I use everyday. Do you know how hard it is to do all of the things I do on 512 MB of shared memory (DDR1, no less — expensive to upgrade) and bad integrated graphics that won’t let me make full use of the 1920×1200 monitor? Memory is the most crippling limitation of my current computer; I can’t multitask very well, and running Firefox and Word side-by-side is sluggish.

Yes, I know. At some point in the past, people lived on 286’s and 4 MB of RAM.

With this new machine, the video compression that I do will be blazing fast — on 4 cores. And I do believe that setting up virtual machines on the computer (perhaps a Linux server and a virtual 32-bit XP installation) will be the best way to suit all of our needs — my father’s compute-intensive scientific research, my own Web development and multimedia work, as well as for running all of the miscellaneous items that won’t run well on 64-bit Windows. (Yes, I’m going to be installing Windows XP Professional x64 Edition; I’m not quite ready for Vista yet.)

As of right now, the barebones kit isn’t yet sold out, so take a look. It’s only $299.99 after instant rebate and mail-in rebates.

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IE8 FAILS Acid Tests

I was very skeptical back in December 2007 when Microsoft released a PNG image indicating that an internal build of IE8 passed the Acid2 test (Acid Tests are complex pieces of coding which test the standards compliance of any browser). And I said:

Everyone’s just so optimistic for IE to be standards-compliant that they’ve disregarded Microsoft’s capacity and history of lying.

Guess what? Now that there’s a beta of Internet Explorer to be downloaded, which Microsoft claims features “improved interoperability and compatibility”, I can entirely disprove the previous claim that IE8 passed the Acid2 test. (Note: it doesn’t take much to pass Acid2; current versions of Firefox, Safari, Opera, and other browsers pass it easily.)

This is what Acid2 looks like on IE8 (top) and the reference rendering (bottom):

It’s plainly obvious that Internet Explorer is incompetent at displaying even the relatively basic Acid2 test.

Let’s examine what happens with Internet Explorer 8 and Acid3. Once again, IE8’s screenshot is on the top and the reference rendering is on the bottom.

Big difference, eh?

There. I’ve completely and utterly debunked the false claims that IE8 passes the Acid2 test. Once again, it’s the people creating the product who spread misleading information specifically to promote their product.

For all the web developers and designers out there: DON’T take advantage of IE8’s new proprietary features; urge Microsoft to support web standards, which they have embarrassingly FAILED to do for more than the past decade.

(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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ICANN allows new domain extensions

Bad or good news?

How about seeing sites on the World Wide Web with domain names like “search.goog” or “live.msft”? ICANN voted unanimously to allow new domain extensions, each of which would cost a company hundreds of thousands of dollars to set up and maintain.

The high cost will also mean that you won’t be likely to see “frederick.ding” or “yourfirstname.somethingelse” on the Web anytime soon; however, if some reputable agency registers the “.ding” top-level domain, then ordinary people may be able to purchase a second-level domain from the company, as it becomes the registrar for that extension.

I wonder how long it’s going to take before the Internet crashes.

(2 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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SJA Mobile & FBI Launch SMS Tipline

SJA Mobile today jointly announced with the FBI’s Washington D.C Field Office and Metropolitan Police an initiative which will enable D.C-area citizens to anonymously report crime tips via a novel new medium -– SMS. SMS, or “text messaging,” has up until now never been used before as a medium for crime tips.

Citizens in the D.C area can report a crime or homeland security tip by sending a text message with the tip to the number 50411. The 5-digit number to text to is called a “Short Code.” Currently the service is available on all major wireless carriers, along with several Tier 2 carriers.

SJA Mobile is in talks expand the service to several other major cities.

–

It’s good to see that law enforcement agencies are finally embracing technology. I have several things to say about this:

• Danger on the road?
• What’s faster?
• What took them so long?

Danger on the road?

Research shows that text messaging while driving is more dangerous than talking on the cell phone while driving, since one needs to use one’s fingers and attention to send a text message. Though not everyone sending in a tip is going to be doing it on the road, I believe that encouraging SMS could lead to (at least) a few incidents on the streets.

What’s faster?

Do you text message faster, or do you talk faster? In another comparison, do you type (on a computer keyboard) faster than you can speak? I believe that one’s voice can contribute a greater amount of information in a shorter amount of time.

However, if the FBI or Homeland Security isn’t equipped to handle a large volume of calls at the same time — for instance, not enough operators — then SMS allows them to receive a large volume and go through that pile in sequence as it piles up.

Unfortunately, that also increases the likelihood that important tips are queued. I hope they use some smart filtering/searching technology (Google, perhaps?) that will allow them to see urgent tips more quickly.

What took them so long?

Why did it take so many years for law enforcement to finally embrace this sort of technology? It’s fortunate that SJA Mobile finally made it happen.

This post is brought to you by our friends at SJA Mobile.

(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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