Geek Style

Now that I am using OpenOffice.org 2 more seriously for a while (on FreeBSD you could guess), I am badly missing Microsoft Office. And to me, its not about the functionality. Its about pre-installed templates.

This shows up when you want to create pretty presentations or professional looking text documents. Now it seems like that OpenOffice people has figured out this problem and included some new templates in their recent release.

I wish they would also make it less memory hungry. Opening a very simple spreadsheet on my workstation takes up to 130MB of memory.

There is many compression software and algorithms available today. Many people are still using zip (the oldie but goodie) while many others are cult of RAR. In UNIX, the gzip is the classic and widely used compression program, but bzip2 seems to have many fans either. Mac users are still using StuffIt since I guess they have no more choice! (Correct me if I am wrong please)

You are also using your favorite compression program with your very own custom settings perhaps, which fit the best for your needs.
Everything that we know about our favorite compression program is that it “feels” faster or “probably” makes smaller archives. But have you ever tested different programs yourself to compare them? I did.

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Mozilla 1.7 beta has really impressed me by its features and performance.

Though its a beta, but its very stable and I haven’t discovered any bug yet. I like the new icon set and finally the “Smooth Scrolling” feature. It also feels much faster in terms of launching and also rendering web pages.

If you are interested, there is a long changelog available.

If you are still using IE, I strongly recommend you using Mozilla or FireFox. The reason is that IE is getting too old and Microsoft is not interested in updating its browser to support cutting edge technologies. My weblog, for example, looks much cleaner in non-IE browsers, despite I am using standard XHTML and CSS2 features. Its time to switch.