My own personal rules for effective computing:
1. Don’t buy anything with ‘Norton’ written on it, unless the next word is ‘Ghost’.
2. Don’t buy any program without consulting osliving.com. Open source is often faster, more effective, and doesn’t provide features you don’t need.
3. Half the computer companies are brands of another. Check who belongs to whom, then use Google Shopping to find the cheapest supplier. The product and warranty will be the same, just the price will be cheaper.
4. A 2GHz AMD processor is as fast as a 3GHz Intel, but costs less than a 2GHz Intel.
5. Memory is the cheapest, easiest, and most effective upgrade you’ll ever buy.
6. Most users don’t use anything most Linux distributions won’t give you for free.
7. Free antivirus is better than no antivirus at all, but the best antivirus money can buy is no substitute for common sense.

Just a quick one – if you haven’t seen this yet, Swati Bansal over at ITSpice has an excellent article – 19 Most Effective Open Source Tools For Developers. Great roundup if you haven’t seen it already…

There’s an open-source spinoff from Chrome already: it’s called Iron (the website is in German, but Incomplete News translated it). (more…)

Let’s imagine a scenario. You’re on the road (or perhaps the train, use your own imagination here), working on your laptop. Your nice Linux based laptop. Or maybe it’s a Mac. Maybe it runs OS/2 or eComStation… Or maybe it runs Windows, but you don’t have Microsoft Project. It is quite expensive, after all.

And then – wouldn’t you know it – someone sends you an MS project file. You need to respond to it – and respond right now. Otherwise your conservatory doesn’t get built… or something. (You know, this whole scenario thing might not have been such a clever idea after all…)

Anyhow, Gantt Project to the rescue! It can import and export MS Project files, its own .gan files, and even export as HTML and PDF. Which is really quite nifty.

I’ve been using this quite a bit lately – it really does do almost everything you need to manage a project. And unlike some other open source project management tools, it works fine on Vista. In fact, it should work on any platform that supports Java. Result!

And before I forget, have a screenshot:

Oh, one last note – if you download version with the Windows installer, you will need to select “open Microsoft Project files” when you install, as it’s not selected by default.