Battle of the Browsers Part 3: Maxthon In conclusion to this three part series, I decided to include a lesser known browser for comparison against the bigger name brands.  Maxthon is an IE-based web browser that has the expandability of Firefox, the features of Opera, and the security of both, built in.  Maxthon can be [...]

In the second week of Battle of the Browsers in this column, I move to the Open Source browser of popular choice: Firefox.  It has many advantages and very few disadvantages over similar browsers.  This is one of the reasons that Firefox could be considered the most popular browser for people who are looking for [...]

PC Technicians everywhere know the overwhelming feeling of friends constantly bugging them about problems with their computers.  Sure, I love doing that kind of stuff – I am in my “element” when working on computers, it’s who I am.  How much is too much, though?  How much does it take before you are pulling your [...]

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Its been pretty well established recently that IE isn’t a great choice for browsing the internet.  It has security flaws, non-standard HTML decoders, various hacks, and ActiveX.  Here is one of my favorite quotes to sum this up, and its from our very own GLC: “glc says ‘Internet Exploder 4, 5, and 6 is a [...]

With my first weekly in Kudos and Calamities, I thought I would start with a little explanation on how we came up with the name of this column.  It was actually quite an interesting journey, and in the end, it came down to something of chance.  Force gave his introduction – and a brief description [...]

Tyler reviews HTML-kit: a text editor with some enhanced support for web-based programming languages. Web developers will love this neat tool!

For many webmasters out there, it is handy to have a personal web server set up on their local machine. Many webmasters do not want to mess with the hassle and potential problems of installing Apache, PHP, MySQL, PHPmyAdmin, or other such server technologies. AppServ is an Open Source package that installs all of the above packages easily for you.

With the use of RSS rising in usability and popularity, it is handy to have a good program that will read RSS newsfeeds. RSSOwl is a great Open Source program that will let you do some cool extra stuff besides read the RSS. Be sure to check it out!

While Tyler was repairing a customer’s hard drive earlier this week, he needed a quick resource that would allow him to perform several diagnostics from a bootable media. He was running out of floppies to store all the diagnostic tools on, when GLC pointed him to the Ultimate Boot CD. It is a simple bootable CD that contains tons of handy tools to help you out. PC Technicians everywhere need to check out this neat program, as it will probably save them from excessive trouble somewhere down the road.

In this week’s Open Source Spotlight, Tyler reviews Snare, a program that monitors and audits security events on a computer. It is very likely to be helpful for Systems Administrators and others who wish to monitor the access and changes made to a computer, either local or remote.

Everyone seems to have heard of the more popular messaging protocols like AIM, Yahoo, and MSN, but one of the protocols that seems to lurk in the shadows is IRC. This week, Tyler reviews Bersirc, a very simple and user friendly IRC client. Be sure to look it over!

In this week’s Open Source Spotlight, Tyler reviews Eclipse, an open source Java Development Environment. Eclipse can prove to be very useful for Java developers, and has many cool features. Check it out!

To celebrate the release of the last Star Wars film this week, Tyler reviews OpenEXR, an image format pioneered by ILM, a Lucas-owned special effects company, and released to the general public as Open Source. It has been used on many recent movies, so check it out!

This week, we will check out Skype – a messenger client with a few unusual twists. Not only can you chat, like most clients, but you can call people – both users of Skype and regular phone numbers. That’s right – you can call a friend from your computer without using VoIP. You can call friends, have a conference call, and transfer files. It works with Windows, Apple, Linux, and PocketPC based Operating Systems. Be sure to check it out!