firefoxgurl

Originally uploaded by x4d41.

Firefox girl! Another good reason to use Firefox…

I am now the proud owner of a FeedDemon 2 license! I’ve been trying to decide on a feed reader recently and with so many cool online readers available I thought I didn’t need an offline version. But at the end of the day, nothing beats a full, desktop application for speed and functionality. And the great thing about FeedDemon is that it synchronises with NewsGator Online which means I can always stay up to date even if I don’t have FeedDemon installed. I’ve also been experimenting with some of the interesting FeedDemon features, like the keyword searches that use one of several blog search tools to present you with a feed based on what keyword you enter. I’ve set up three for microsoft, apple, and google for the time being and I’ll see how that goes before playing with it more.

I also picked FeedDemon because the parent company, NewsGator, seems to integrate nicely with other software too. They recently demoed their online service synching with IE7, but the coolest thing is that I can add any feed to my account by using the Google toolbar in Firefox. A subscribe button on the toolbar is highlighted every time I visit a site which has a feed available, and all it takes is a click on the toolbar and I’m redirected to the NewsGator site where I can choose what folder I want to keep the feed in – very handy indeed!

Some of my favourite technologies at the moment are RSS/Atom/ICal – I’m really enjoying how I can synchronise data across all sorts of platforms and applications. The only thing that would make it perfect is if I could subscribe to my Plaxo calendar through ICal – I’ve raised this as a request on their forums.

I use Netvibes as my home page, and I highly recommend you check it out. I’ve been using it for the last six months and it has grown from strength to strength. I have also tested out all of the other home page services available and none of them compare to Netvibes. I use it to aggregate all of my data in one easy to use view. I can access my Gmail, my Icals (not Plaxo yet), my del.icio.us bookmarks, as well as a handful of my favourite feeds, such as Digg, Engadget, and TechCrunch. If this is what Web 2.0 is all about, I love it!

We went to see the Rolling Stones in Wellington yesterday, and what a concert it was!!! They are definitely still the greatest rock band ever – the concert rocked from Jumping Jack Flash opening track, right through to the encore of Satisfaction.

I first saw them in 1995 on their Voodoo Lounge tour and I was very impressed that the same supporting band had stuck together too. Not sure if I’ll get to see them again so I’m glad that this concert was such a banging one.

I won’t write too much about this as there is so much being blogged already, but Apple have just released a product called Bootcamp which gives users of the newly updated Mac operating system a graphical utility to repartition your disk and prepare it for the installation of Windows XP.

No more needing to hack the bios or anything else like that, and although Apple isn’t supporting Windows XP on new Intel Macs, they are providing the tools to do it for free. More reading here…

• On Memeorandum
• Boot Camp Beta Installation & Setup Guide (PDF)
• Apple’s official announcement

This was widely accepted to happen sooner or later, but Microsoft have today announced that Virtual Server 2005 R2 will now be available as a free download. As both the Enterprise and Standard editions will now be free, the Standard edition is becoming redundant as there is no reason why you would run Standard instead of Enterprise. So only the Enterprise Edition is being made available as a free download.

This definitely makes the virtualisation game a lot more interesting now. VMware recently discontinued the GSX line of their software, instead releasing a free version called VMware Server. This version only runs on server operating systems and provides a similar feature set to Virtual Server. VMware though, are still selling VMware Workstation and the top-of-the-line ESX server – Workstation is designed for use with desktop computers, whereas ESX Server is designed to run on large, enterprise-level servers. Microsoft doesn’t yet have a competitor for ESX – ESX includes a Linux kernel that it boots off so there is no need to run ESX on a server operating system.

In my own tests, VMware has always outperformed Virtual Server or Virtual PC, so I don’t think that VMware is any trouble at the moment. But the recently introduced support of Linux operating systems under Virtual Server, definitely makes the Microsoft package more attractive to those Microsoft-shops out there.

I just noticed this on the Microsoft Connect site – Virtual Machine Additions for Linux. Previously these additions have only ever been available for Windows guest operating systems, so this is a big deal that Microsoft is now working on the Linux versions.

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