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The manual for Mental Blocks (see previous message) claims that, for both C64 and IBM, you put the diskette in label-side up.

The diskette that blew Trixter’s mind « Oldskooler Ramblings

I seem to remember having a lot of fun back in the day fiddling with the capacity of hard drives, first on the C64 and later on the PC when hard disk space actually cost something.  This is a great article and, as you might imagine, the comments are just chocked full of nuggets of old disk info.

Tags: C64

In March, Mr. Payne created downforeveryoneorjustme.com, as in, “Down for everyone, or just me?” It lets visitors type in a Web address and see whether a site is generally inaccessible or whether the problem is with their own connection.

As Web Traffic Grows, Crashes Take Bigger Toll - NYTimes.com

A most interesting tool.  So, if your having trouble getting to a site just jump there and enter the URL and it will tell you whether or not it is visible elsewhere.  I’m going to recommend this to our friends, since we occasionally get complaints about CALi being unaccessible.

The Sun Wiki Publisher enables you to create Wiki articles on MediaWiki servers without having to know the syntax of the MediaWiki markup language. Publish your new and existing documents transparently with the Writer to a wiki page.All important text attributes such as headings, hyperlinks, lists and simple tables are supported. Even images are supported as long as they have already been uploaded to the wiki site. An automatic upload of images is currently not supported.It is the perfect extension for all users who want to make existing documentations and specifications available on MediaWiki servers. Just load the document and call the Extension with ‘Send – MediaWiki Server’. A dialog will guide you to publish your document.Requires StarOffice 8 (Update 10 or higher) or OpenOffice.org (2.4 or higher)

Sun Wiki Publisher | OpenOffice.org repository for Extensions

Tags: openoffice, mediawiki

Produced by Primary Research Group, The International Survey of Institutional Digital Repositories (ISBN: 1-57440-090-8; $89.50) describes norms and benchmarks for budgets, software use, manpower needs and deployment, financing, usage, marketing and other facets of the managment of international digital repositories based on data from higher education libraries and other institutions involved in institutional digital repository development.

Law Librarian Blog: International Survey of Institutional Digital Repositories

Tags: repository, library, institutional

The following package of extensions will incorporate a social profile, user board, and basic profile information into MediaWiki, specifically Avatars, Friending, Foeing, User Board, Board Blast, and basic Profile Information.

Extension:SocialProfile - MediaWiki

Some cool extensions to MediaWiki.  I find it amusing that not only lets you make friends , but also foes.  That’s good because I needto keep my enemies off my wiki:)

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Tags: socialnetwork, mediawiki

The following fifty proprietary programs are listed in no particular order within broad categories along with their open source alternatives. In some cases you could probably write your own book on frustrations with the proprietary programs shown here. In other cases, you’ll discover that the open source alternative isn’t quite up to snuff yet. And, in other cases still, you’ll learn that some proprietary programs are real gems, but that the open source advocate can replace those gems with equally shiny objects from the open source repertoire.

The Top 50 Proprietary Programs that Drive You Crazy — and Their Open Source Alternatives | WHDb

This is a great list that includes a head to head comparison of 50 closed source, commercial apps and their open source, no cost alternatives.  Yes, some only run in Linux, but for the most part, any MSFT app you can think of has an open source alternative that runs nicely in Windows.  Perhaps a litle experiment loading all of these Windows apps is in order, just to see what happens.

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