“How is something with three the same vowels to compete with Vista? That name almost is as stupid as Google! Those hackers really can't think of names, they sound as if it were the first and last sound a newly born baby made when he choked on an apple his evil babysitter gave him.”

~ Bill Gates on Ubuntu forks

I’ve screwed up the computer center at my department by installing OpenOffice.org and removing MS Word. Its true that OOo has better formatting features, equation editor and things, but it does not provide full support for MS Word Documents.

When MS Word Documents are opened in OOo, there are several formatting errors. The content looks totally out of place! Especially when there are images or equations in the document. Files saved using OOo in MS Doc format are not displayed properly when opened in MS Word. I’ve been trying to find out ways to get this to work properly, but i’ve not found a solution as yet.

I guess I’l have to remove it and get MS Office back again. Lets hope the formatting problems are corrected atleast in the next release of OOo.

Most of the times I go through the web for finding tweaks for Firefox. I found these articles are very interesting and tweaks contained in these articles help me to improve the performance of Firefox.

1. About:config Entries – This is a reference to about:config entries which you can get basic understanding about those entries.
2. Ten Mysteries of about:config – about:config tweaks from Linux Journal.
3. Top Firefox 2 config tweaks – Written by Gina Trapani from lifehacker.com.
4. Firefox about:config Hacks and assorted tips – Some greate performance hacks for Firefox from Tech Yantra.
5. Make Firefox much faster about:config tutorial – Video tutorial from youtube.com and you can find more from related video list.
6. The secrets of about:config – Firefox Hacks from computerworld.
7. Firefox Tweak Guide – 12 page Firefox tweak guide from tweakguides.com.
8. Firefox Tweaks – Firefox tweaks for network connections and plugins.
9. Firefox performance tweaks – Another Firefox performance hacks.
10. Firefox memory tweaks – High usage of memory is some time a problem for Firefox users. This guide will help you to tweak the memory settings.

These guides some times contain same tweaks but I prefer you to read these and choose the best things.

This is a screenshot of me playing Age of Empires II using VirtualBox on my computer running Linux.

Ever since I shifted completely to Linux, I’ve been missing Winamp and its DSP plugins. Enhancer is a really nice DSP plugin available for Winamp, and so far, I haven’t found a XMMS plugin that could perform half as well. I tried to use Wine to simulate Winamp, but that didn’t work well.

So I was searching for a virtualization software and found VirtualBox. VirtualBox is a cross-platform virtualizer that supports a large number of platforms. Check the screenshots at the VirtualBox website.

This is a picture of me running Winamp with Enhancer on my virtual Windows XP. Click it for a high-res preview.

Matlab was one of the reasons why i had not scrapped windows from my harddrive completely. I was searching for free equivalents and found GNU Octave. Octave is a cross-platform Open Source alternative for Matlab.

Octave uses the same commands as Matlab and has almost all commands as Matlab. It uses GNUPlot, which has to be installed separately, to draw graphs and the graphs plotted appear to be better than Matlab.

Though Octave does not have a GUI, and OctaveWorkshop doesn’t look as good as Matlab, it still is extremely friendly, and can serve as an excellent alternative for Matlab.