I already switched from MS Office to OpenOffice for some time. But most of my friends and colleagues still use MS Office. At my workplace, most of the people are using MS Office. Some of them use MS Office 2007. I introduced OpenOffice to friends, but switching from one environment to another needs some time for adaption. So, normally they reject.

Why I want to use OpenOffice? Firstly, it is free. You can get it without paying any money, and do not have any license issue Secondly, it is open source. If you are developer, you can study and contribute. Thirdly, it is cross-platform. If you are not working with Windows, but Linux or FreeBSD, then how do you use MS Office? May be you will say that, “Why Linux? Why FreeBSD? We have Windows already.” Very good, you are very loyal, then go ahead. For me, learning more than one skill is always better. Fourthly, OpenOffice can satisfy my works: documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.

We always search the information from Internet with the search engine. The search engine crawls from web to web through hyperlinks. Then the search engine will index the keywords of the websites. Then we search the information based on the keywords.

When we face some problems, and there is no website provides sufficient solution, then we can go to a forum and post our questions. Wait for several days, someone might respond to the questions. The forum is normally a website. Thus, when we search through the search engine, we will also get the results from the forum. Currently, there are services like Yahoo! Answer and WikiAnswers help a lot to solve our problem.

Written by using C and C++, depends on GTK+ and Expat. I spent about 3 days to study GTK+ and Expat since never used them before. I wrote this application because sometimes, I want to say a prayer, especially Angelus. But I need the prayer to read and also a reminder. So, I decided to wrote this program, at the same time I can also learn about GTK+ and Expat. And I decided to open source it as a contribution to Catholics.

Previously on booting PC-BSD through USB flash drive, I mentioned that I used Linux to perform “dd” operation towards the pendrive.

Yesterday, I just found that, my 8G pendrive now only 2G. There are 6G storage missing. I used Windows’ Disk Management Utility to check, then I found that there were two partitions in USB pendrive. And we know that, we cannot perform partitioning in Windows platform. Try to search from Internet about some information for partitioning USB pendrive, but none of them works.

I am a software developer. I like cross-platform development. And I prefer lower level programming language like C. My OS is Windows. Thus, I normally use Visual Studio Express Edition to compile the source code. But using Microsoft Visual C++ compiler is not a good idea for cross-platform development, because it highly depending on the Microsoft platform. Besides that, it doesn’t have C99 standard.

So, the best cross-platform C and C++ compiler is GCC (GNU Compiler Collection). However, it is used in Unix-like OS. Yet, there are two projects porting GCC to Windows: MinGW and Cygwin. These two projects provide us GCC to compile cross-platform source code such as libjpeg, libpng, zlib, etc. This indicates that, we can also write our own cross-platform source code and compiled by using GCC in Windows and other Unix-like OSes.

Hahaha. When I wrote my previous post, I found that I possibly made a mistake when copying the IMG image to USB pendrive. Yes, I used “dd” incorrectly because I didn’t know how to use it exactly.

This was how I used “dd” in Linux:

dd if=PC-BSD-7.1.1-x86.img of=/dev/sdb1 bs=1024

Now, the problem was the “/dev/sdb1”. We should use “/dev/sdb” instead of “/dev/sdb1”. This is because “sdb1” indicates the partition, yet “sdb” indicates the drive. And I should copy (dd) the whole file system and data of IMG to the drive, not to the partition. That was why, after I used the statement above, I still found that my pendrive was in FAT32 format.

I like Unix philosophy. I like open source. I want to install PC-BSD to my netbook, but finally I realised that I failed to do so. I have tried several ways, then I give up now.

Actually, I preferred to install FreeBSD. But FreeBSD is targeted for server, so I choose PC-BSD. And PC-BSD has GUI installation, which makes everything easier (I tried it on VMware). So, I downloaded DVD ISO image. Then, I tried to use UNetbootin, since the site mentioned that it supports to create LiveUSB for FreeBSD 6.3 and 7.0. I assumed that it can also support for PC-BSD which is based on FreeBSD. However, I failed.

I just found that there are some differences for the regular expression in search and replace for both jEdit and Notepad++. Both of them are great text editors. jEdit requires Java Runtime Environment. Notepad++ is based on Scintilla, so Notepad++ regular expression is based on Scintilla.

So, what are the differences I found? Notepad++ regular expression for search and replace, we can use \1, \2, \3 to \9 syntax. For jEdit regular expression, it uses $1, $2, $3 to $9 syntax.

The world is evolving. Internet already becomes a need for everyone just like electricity and mobile phone service. There are a lot of freeware, open source applications, online services, even free OSes. Internet connects everyone of us with our friends despise the geographical differences.

So, what online accounts we should sign up? Popularity is the most essential factor. And also based on your area. Because some services are popular in one country but not the others. The list below is only based on my opinion:

The story continues from my previous post.

I used Parted Magic to perform the partition tasks. However, I found that Kingston DataTraveler 2.0 USB Device cannot boot as LiveUSB. It cannot find pmagic-4.5.sqfs. And even Parted Magic 4.8, there is something like dev_list cannot be found. But, there is no problem for Kingston DT 101 II USB Device. Weird!

Okay, after I delete E: F: and resize D: to occupy the space. But in Windows, I found that the D: properties show that the space is still the same. But in Disk Management utility, the space is already used for D:. I tried CHKDSK, the problem still there. Then I remember a phrase from a movie: