News and Views

Between helping people repair their computers and spending time every day browsing and searching, I’ve come up with some good programs that people might be interested in. Most of these are open source; all of them are free.

1) Firefox Web Browser
Much better for web browsing than Internet Explorer, and much less likely to provide a pathway for spyware to enter your computer. Tabbed browsing and easy-to-add extensions such as AdBlock make browsing easier, less irritating and safer.

2) Open Office Office Suite
A very good full-featured replacement for the Microsoft Office Suite. Although it is very similar to MS Office and most people will pick it up with no problem, there may be a short learning curve for some of the more complex operations.

3) AVG Anti-Virus Software
Background scanning of all file operations, daily updates and daily full system scans. AVG has served me well for the last two or three years.

4) Thunderbird Email Client
An excellent replacement for Outlook Express. It has built-in “Bayesian” spam filtering which is the best spam filtering I’ve seen or used. Unfortunately it’s on the client, so the spam still gets downloaded, but 99% of it gets moved to the spam folder before I even see it. Thunderbird also has some security advantages over Outlook Express, such as not displaying images from unknown sources unless you OK them. It’s not a complete replacement for Outlook, since it doesn’t have a calendar or task manager, and won’t sync with a handheld.

5) ZoneAlarm Firewall
Perhaps the best Firewall on the market, and it’s free. No broadband connection should be without a firewall of some sort. Most broadband routers have hardware firewalls built in, which do a pretty good job of protecting you from the outside, but ZoneAlarm also prevents malicious programs that have snuck onto your system from connecting out.

6) Spybot and AdAware
These two programs do a pretty good job of removing spyware and adware. Currently I think Spybot (version 1.4) is a little better, though next month AdAware may leapfrog it again. For the harder jobs I sometimes have to resort to Spy Sweeper, a commercial program. You can download a two-week trial and clean out your system, but if you want to keep it you have to pay.

7) Gaim Instant Messaging
This program is compatible with ICQ, AIM, MSN-IM and several others. No ads, just simple instant-messaging. It seems to lose it’s connection once in a while and doesn’t always reconnect automatically, but it’s easy to reconnect manually. All in all I like it better than the alternatives.

8) GimpShop Image Editing
This is a very full featured image editing program. This version is a “skin” for the original “The Gimp” to make it more of a PhotoShop clone. I’m more used to Paint Shop Pro, and both PhotoShop and GimpShop handle some things differently, so I’m not completely at home using this. I can’t really personally comment on it’s stability or effectiveness, but I’ve read a lot of enthusiastic reviews. I’m trying to learn it now.

9) Filezilla FTP Client
A very nice full-featured FTP program

10) MyACDSee Image Browser and Viewer
If you already have the “real” ACDSee, there’s no reason to switch, but this is a pretty good free clone.

11) LogMeIn Remote Control
Not really a program, but a free service. The best remote control software I’ve seen, and all you need on the controlling end is a web browser. You can view the screen and control the mouse and keyboard of the host machine. Very fast screen updates, very responsive.

12) FoxIt PDF Reader
I like this much better than Adobe Acrobat. It loads much faster, and doesn’t have to install lots of pieces all through the registry. So far I’ve found it completely compatible and just lots nicer to use.

13) 7-Zip File Archiver and Compression Manager
A good replacement for WinZip. Seems fully compatible, and with more compression modes.

I could list more, such as CWShredder (for removing the Cool Web Search family of hijackers) or HijackThis (for viewing and removing IE add-ins, including malicious ones). Azureus is a good bit-torrent client, and Free Agent is a pretty good News Reader. Angry IPScanner is good for viewing all the connections on your network. If you know what “Grep” means, you might want to try Agent Ransack.

These are some of the main free-ware programs I use.

Anybody else have any favorites?

Tomorrow (Friday) Gisele and I are driving to California to pick up Devon (and Keri) to bring them home for a 1-month long winter break. Over and back on the same day. It makes for a long day, but it’s easier than getting a hotel.

There is always a lot of discussion this time of year about restoring the “true meaning of Christmas”. This usually means treating it as a Christian holiday, celebrating the birth of Christ.

But of course, the true original meaning of the holiday is the celebration of the winter solstice. Almost all the year-end holidays have their roots in this important day, in particular Christmas and New Year’s Day. As primitive calendars slowly shifted, the dates moved off a little from the solstice, but there is little doubt of the source. The early Christians co-opted the holiday so that recent and potential converts could continue to have a celebration at the time of the winter solstice, but call it a Christian holiday. For example, putting an “evergreen” tree in the house was originally to symbolize that green life and summer will return. Some Christians try to change the symbolism, with a reference to Christ not dying, but the attempt is clumsy and rarely invoked.

In fact, Christmas is only nominally a religious holiday anymore, and only to some people. Consider Christmas trees, Santa Claus, gifts, tinsel, and lights. You see many more Rudolphs than mangers, more Santa Clauses than Marys.

“But” you may say, “the very name of the holiday includes the name of Christ”. OK, so for a similar example “goodbye” contains a distortion of the word “God” (as in “God be with you”), but not many people actually clamor to restore the original meaning of the word. It’s just a thing to say when we separate, and has evolved away from any original meaning. If you believe that words have magical powers then you might consider this still significant, but I think it is clear that the words don’t make the thing.

The main thing about Christmas is tradition and family, a time when we get together to reminisce, to shower gifts on our children and have a feast in celebration of another year successfully lived through. If you want to dedicate the holiday to your god, by all means do so. But don’t force your interpretation on others, including the atheist who can enjoy the holiday as a purely secular event without being a hypocrite.