With everything that we’ve learned over the years about its never-ending list of serious security vulnerabilities, I find it really hard to believe that anyone would choose to run Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Web browser any more.

Personally, I switched to Mozilla’s much-more-secure, free and open-source Firefox browser — first in Windows, and then in Linux — on the [more...]

I love Italian food. I’ve always said that if you cut me, I bleed tomato sauce.

I love Italian food is because I love melted cheese. Specifically, melted mozzarella (or scamorza, if you have some). Whether it’s pizza, lasagna, cannelloni, mannecoti or baked ziti, Italian food usually contains plenty of melted mozzarella.

Low-fat mozzarella, for [more...]

It used to be that having bugs in your computing system meant that there were mistakes in its programming — things that didn’t work correctly.

Years later, the computing vocabulary expanded to include worms, which use up networking [more...]

By now, most people know that Mozilla recently released Firefox 3.5, the latest version of their free and open source web browser. The new Firefox has many new features, and is reportedly noticeably faster than even the 3.0.x version that I have been using, as well as many times faster than earlier versions of that browser. [more...]

Regular readers of this Journal know that I work as a full-time volunteer at a domestic violence center and shelter, and that one of the many things that I do there is setup and configure old, donated PCs for domestic violence survivors to use in their homes.

I’ve also described how I [more...]

Ever since last July, I’ve been using a WordPress search plugin called wpsearch to power this Journal’s search box.

Unfortunately, ever since the beginning, wpsearch has had a few bugs that have caused continuing [more...]

Anyone who’s familiar with the normal procedures involved with software development expects any new software to go through several alpha, beta and release candidate testing stages.

Each of those stages plays a specific role in helping identify bugs as well as necessary features, and gives the developers and coders [more...]

Despite a short-but-sorry shilling attempt by comedian Jerry Seinfeld several months ago, Windows Vista continues to be a huge flop, due to its well-known incompatibilities and bugs, as well as its highly restrictive DRM and other security policies.

Those computer users who were unfortunate enough to have bought [more...]

It’s old news that even though Windows Vista has been on the market for almost 2 years, its many problems have caused many corporations and individuals to keep using Windows XP instead of “upgrading” to Vista. In fact, that situation forced Microsoft to allow PC manufacturers to keep selling brand new PCs with XP installed on them instead of Vista.

It’s also old news that although they usually solve one or more [more...]

In the nearly 2 years since Windows Vista was released, its incompatibilities, bugs, DRM, security issues, user interface issues and more have caused many people to say many negative things about it.

Two of my favorites referred to it as “VistaME” and “DRM masquerading as an operating system.”

But I think that Windows, Mac and Linux users alike can all agree that there’s at least [more...]