August 16, 2006
GIMP for Windows [ Software ]
Since it takes a few clicks from the main gimp.org site to get to the current Windows downloads, here's the links to grab the latest stable version of GIMP for Windows:
GTK+-2.8.18 for Windows (needed for a new Win2K/WinXP install)
GIMP 2 Help Files (not required, but helpful to have around)
Safe search + icon editors [ Software ]
So I wanted to find a decent freeware icon editor for Windows, one that wouldn't come bundled with spyware. I had seen some links to Scandoo before, so I thought I'd try that out. Works pretty well! It acts as a front-end to Google search, flagging potentially harmful destination links with a red X and "safe" links with a green checkmark. See the results below:
It's similar to McAfee's SiteAdvisor in that regard.
You can customize what sorts of content to flag (gambling, sports, illegal activities) including unclassified content, which can be helpful for new, as-yet-uncategorized sites. Plus they've got various search and toolbar plugins for Firefox and IE, as well as the Google Toolbar.
More information:
Search with Gridwell, Scandoo, and Zeedex - from solutionwatch.com
Google Sounds Silent Alarm - from about.com
Google's Infrastructure [ Software ]
Older article (published July 6) on How Google Works from BaseLine Magazine. Interesting bits:
* Google often doesn't deploy standard business applications on standard hardware. Instead, it may use the same text parsing technology that drives its search engine to extract application input from an e-mail, rather than a conventional user interface based on data entry forms.
* "Sorry, we don't talk about our infrastructure."
Makes you wonder whether large organizations would be better served by going with the grid-model for computing and deploying their business apps on the grid, rather than the traditional spec-out-a-server-and-toss-COTS-packages-on-it approach.
Original content copyright ©1995-2006 Eric Dobbs, except where otherwise noted.
