Technology Bytes
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-- Craig Johnson

The Holiday season is approaching, and with the end of the year come finals and final projects, as well as the hectic details of family and work life. My workplace, like many others, institutes an ‘end-of-the-year code freeze,' so the next two weeks are going to filled with long hours and hard deadlines. The good news is that with all the overtime I'll be able to afford that pony my daughter's been asking about for Christmas...

More Freeware for Students

Terry Bebertz, a recent alumnus, sent an e-mail regarding my October Article, ‘Open Source Alternatives to save you a few bucks.’ He passed along a number of additional sources for freeware programs that many students could find useful, among them:

• http://sourceforge.net/ - a wealth of free software, beta products and utilities

• http://www.undelete-plus.com/ - a nifty little utility that can recover a lost or deleted file

• http://www.oldversion.com/ - previous versions of existing programs, often free (especially useful if you're still running Windows ‘98 or ME)

• http://cutepdf.com/Products/CutePDF/writer.asp - a free program which allows you to create PDFs from most word processing documents

• http://www.getpaint.net/ - another alternative to Photoshop, stripped down for photograph retouching and manipulation

• http://www.coffeecup.com/freestuff/ - Free HTML and Web development utilities

He also mentioned that Mozilla, maker of everyone’s favorite browser Firefox, also offers a great companion e-mail client – Thunderbird – as well as a companion calendaring and scheduling application – Sunbird. You can download Sunbird at http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/sunbird/, and I’d also encourage you to take a look around http://www.mozilla.org/projects/ as well, for a wealth of other free applications.

I later received a follow up e-mail from Terry with some interesting news: Adobe had been offering its' FlexBuilder program to university students and faculty for free during the month of November. A valid student ID (a scan will do) or a copy of your registration on University letterhead is all that's needed to obtain this $700 program for free.

While I'm not sure if they'll continue offering this free to students after November, it's definitely worth checking out. If you're interested in dynamic Web development, Flex is definitely something you'll want to get your hands into. My employer recently informed us that we'll be doing a majority of next year's “small-scale” development in Flex, and the developer networks are abuzz that this is the ‘next big thing' in Internet programming, so I've already downloaded my copy. Visit http://www.flexregistration.com/ for more information.

Speaking of Windows

With the infiltration of the Vista OS into just about every corner of the hardware world, and the collective "...meh" from the general public, a number of retailers are continuing to offer Windows XP as an operating system option on new laptops and desktops. I’m not going to bash Vista – in this month’s column, anyway (I don’t get enough column space to recount everything I dislike about it) – but the few people that I know that have upgraded have had nothing but issues with the new OS.

Specifically, many of their expensive software programs (such as Dreamweaver and Photoshop, among others) will not work properly on the new platform, and manufacturers have been slow to release compatibility updates.

If you're planning on picking up a new laptop in the holiday sales frenzy of deep discounts, you might also want to spend an extra $100 to do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of Windows XP Professional. You can install XP Pro over the Vista operating system, or create a partition on your drive to run both operating systems on your new machine. It's a few extra dollars for the ability to continue to run all your programs without hassle.

If you're feeling extremely adventurous, you can overwrite Vista completely: while you return to the relative 'stability' of XP without the confusion of separate boot sectors, multiple operating systems, etc. – your brand new system may not function properly: many of the hardware drivers are now embedded within Vista, and overwriting the OS may result in your system failing to recognize components...such as your keyboard, your monitor, etc.

Many manufacturers – in anticipation of the Vista backlash – are offering updated Windows XP drivers for new model machines built for Vista. A simple ‘Google' search or a visit to your computer's manufacturer's Web site should point you in the right direction.

Topic, please? Or ‘...and your point?'

If there are any topics you’d like to see covered, subjects you’d like additional information about, or general questions and comments about the method and madness of Technology Bytes, please feel free to e-mail me at metropolitan_webguy[at]comcast.net.