Popular Windows freeware site Sysinternals has apparently been taken over by Microsoft. The guys at Sysinternals do some really cool freeware for Windows, including the awesome Rootkit Revealer amongst many other useful tools.

Unfortunately, this acquisition by Microsoft could spell trouble for the freeware tools, as we now don’t know what Microsoft might choose to do with them. They could take them offline; or worse, they could force Windows Genuine Advantage validation on them. Don’t get me started on WGA – it’s a terrible idea and as far as I’m concerned it’s spyware (this is coming from someone with genuine Windows, by the way).

So I’d recommend downloading them all now – we don’t know what Microsoft might choose to do with the code. I can’t help thinking the anti-rootkit technology might make it into the new builds of Windows Defender.

Find this tutorial useful?

In my second tutorial about Linux, I’m going to look at files and folders and how they work on Linux – because it’s very different compared to the Windows way of C:, D:, and E: etc.

Basically, in Linux (and other Unix-based systems, but I’ll keep it simple for now), there aren’t different drives. In Linux, everything you can access stems from the top folder in the stack. It’s called the root folder and it can be accessed using a single forward slash – /.

» Read the rest of this post…

Yes, that’s right! Me and Huw (Gizbuzz) interviewed Raju Vegesna of Zoho, who are behind a lot of cool Web 2.0 office applications, including Zoho Writer, Sheet and Show for the first ever Gizbuzz Podcast.

We talk about Zoho, issues of trust with online office suites, I ask a few questions about the technical side (cross-browser implementation and stuff) and we also discuss the future of rich web applications (will they go mobile any time soon?), Google and more!

• See the original post at Gizbuzz
• Download the podcast now
• Subscribe to the Gizbuzz Podcast

This is actually a really interesting insight into what Zoho are doing and where rich web applications might be going soon.

Apparently, anyway. Slashdot seem to have the story that the Linux NTFS project have released a beta version of their NTFS driver for Linux that should prove very useful for those (like me) running Windows + Linux dual-boots.

At the moment, using Fedora’s kmod-ntfs (available in the Livna repository), I can read my Windows NTFS partitions in Linux, but not write to them. The Linux NTFS project claim to have read/write support.

Now I would test this out, but it being a beta and my data being important, I won’t try it out until I’ve got a backup of everything done (I don’t know that it might not do something terrible to my data).

Anyway, good work and thanks to the Linux NTFS team.

Well, I’ve been blogging a lot about Zooomr recently. I think they’re actually very interesting. Like Flickr were originally (before Flickr got gobbled up by Yahoo), they are a small independent start-up (to the best of my knowledge).

Zooomr are similar to Flickr in the fact that they are both photo sites, but Zooomr does quite a few things better:

• They don’t have ridiculous restrictions on what is and isn’t a photo – put what you want on there (within reason, of course)
• Geotagging is awesome (when I have some real photos to test I’ll get a better look)
• Trackbacks on photos (Flickr are almost as slow as Blogger are on getting trackbacks on blogs, come on Blogger!)
• Flickr has RSS feed support – but Zooomr really pushes it and I think RSS is available to syndicate a lot more things than Flickr can
• Tagging – Zooomr’s implementation is just slick and appears absolutely everywhere
• Uploading is great – I love the fact that multiple uploads are handled so intuitively
• Integration with Google Maps API is everywhere, I love it

However, they could work on:

• Speed – at times Zooomr is painfully slow, when Flickr is fine. Yes, this must be difficult to afford the server & bandwidth capacity when you haven’t got Yahoo behind you, but still it will drive people away
• The interface of Zooomr personally I don’t think looks as nice as Flickr’s – Flickr looks and feels friendlier to the new user
• I can’t see anything along the lines of a set creator or something like Flickr’s Organisr. This functionality would be nice
• Something like (or better than) the cool Flash animations and little HTML snippets that show your recent photos – I’d put one on the sidebar here!
• Publicity – Zooomr’s great, but hardly anyone knows about it. I suppose the free Pro accounts (and people like me blogging about Zooomr) will help them, but without product awareness, they’ll never beat Flickr
• Innovation – not to say they haven’t innovated already, they have, but they need to work on some really awesome features that leave Flickr’s in the dust (feature wars anyone?)

Anyway, I hope this helps the Zooomr team try and increase their popularity – I think it’s nice to see the small players win sometimes. Zooomr – I think you won me over with the free Pro account. One question – how would you have upgraded to Pro if you didn’t get upgraded for free? I couldn’t see the option anywhere.

Finally managed to get a bit more web development (as opposed to getting pre-developed stuff online), as I’m continuing work on Hybrid Accounts. And my recent meddling with integrating phpBB into web designs, (so the forum looks an integral part of the site not just a different site) credit to the Extreme Styles Mod, has brought me to start thinking about Hybrid’s own forum solution.

Voist (as it’s codenamed, I know it sounds like a VoIP app) will be available probably under the GPL as well as a non-Free licence and its main features will be:

• Easy and simple forum solution written in PHP and using MySQL as DB
• Nice and friendly URLs (so site.com/topic/4 rather than site.com/viewtopic.php?t=4) which will rely on Apache’s mod_rewrite
• Clean design with a fairly easy skinning ability
• [This bit will be in a non-GPL version] Connection with Hybrid Accounts

As I’ve mentioned, Voist will hopefully integrate with Hybrid Accounts in the proprietary version (that will likely be the only difference between it and the GPL version, however). That means I can’t start Voist yet, because Hybrid Accounts isn’t finished.

So that’s what I’ve been working on for a bit of today, Hybrid Accounts. There’s also something very special coming up, but they’ll be more about that later.

I wasn’t very fair about Zooomr when I said they were “a bit similar to Flickr”. Hey, they are a bit similar to Flickr, but they’ve actually got a few more features.

The GeoTag system is really cool. If you upload a photo and then ‘tag’ where that image was taken, Zooomr analyses and finds other photos tagged with a nearby area. I haven’t had a chance to use this extensively yet, but it looks interesting.

That’s just one of the things Zooomr has that Flickr doesn’t. There are a few more, so give Zooomr a try if you haven’t done so. And blog about it for a free Pro account (thanks Zoomr).

I love the free VMware Server. It’s a great product, and thank you VMware for it. But the compulsory upgrading is irritating. Now I haven’t been using VMware lately, so I’ve been forced to upgrade twice, once for Linux and again for Windows. As you can see, nothing on the interface has changed:

VMware on WindowsHosted on Zooomr

OK there’s probably bugfixes, but it’s not like it was particularly buggy before!

By the way, I hosted this image on Zoomr, because they’re offering free Pro accounts to any bloggers who host on Zoomr, check it out. They look a bit similar to Flickr, but officially they allow non-photo uploading (perfect for my screenshots!).

First things first, this is another post in the Explainer series. So, if you know what Linux and free/open source software are and/or don’t need refreshing, then you can just skip straight over this post.If you don’t know what Linux is, or have only vaguely heard of it, this post is designed to give you a brief introduction into what Linux is, what the ideas behind it are, and how to give it a try (without wiping over anything on your computer).

Read the article…

Yes, you read that correctly. According to BBC News, MS are going to release free downloadable tools that allow Microsoft Office programs to save in the freely available and open OpenDocument format.

OpenDocument is already used as the primary format for OpenOffice.org, KOffice and some of the Gnome office tools like Abiword (actually I think Abiword is desktop neutral, someone correct me here) and Gnumeric.

Only thing I would like, is I’d like to see this functionality built into Office 2007, not just available as a download.

Still, this is great progress. Keep it up MS.