I have long been a loyal customer of Norton Internet Security product -- and I can vouch for its comprehensive, effective protection. However, when my most recent subscription expired, due to my Grad-student budget I decided to try other alternatives that I had access to via other subscriptions, or free software.
My ISP, Charter Inc. provides its users a security solution titled 'Charter Security Suite' which in turn is an offering from F-Secure. While I have been skeptic of anything other than Symantec/Mc Afee/Zone Alarm, I decided to give it a try. After all, F-Secure is a for-profit organization and I must be paying for it indirectly (by paying my ISP).
It turns out to be quite noisy. I have grown used to Norton silently making decisions for me based on its Symantec WINE. But being an early adopter, I occasionally did manually choose my trust levels with Norton. The Charter Security Suite on the other hand, asked me if I trusted Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger and nearly every other prevalent software out there.
And, curiously, this antivirus was not the first program to startup. It usually started after quite a few software that connect to the Internet were up and running -- bad, right?
And then there was that fiasco with one software update -- Charter's suite asked me if I trusted the exact same binary about 30 times! That was the limit.
I had the free Microsoft Security Essentials running on my parent's PCs and they never mentioned it nor was there any incident of virus on their systems - a good thing. So I decided to try it. Install was a breeze and the quick scan completed in under 15 minutes without affecting my system performance. Nice!
But I was not comfortable with no firewall on my Windows PC -- enter Zone Alarm. I had used it a master's student and remember being very satisfied with it. The download size (~150MB) was a bit of a brow-riser, but the install and setup was fantastic. Funnily, I kept waiting for ZoneAlarm to pop-up and ask me to set up something -- but good thing I was disappointed there. I then dug into the settings to find all in good shape -- software that I trusted was already trusted; no pesky pop-ups.
So that is my current setup - Microsoft Security Essentials and ZoneAlarm Firewall - both free & so far so good.
I tend to have this belief that one spends a fair amount of your time reading on the internet. If that is true now or in foreseeable future, you may want to read on.
There has been a fair amount of work on making the world a more readable place. Of these, three tools are on my radar: http://readability.com, http://instapaper.com and Safari's Reader mode.
Readability.com specializes in making your reading experience a good one: it removes clutter, ads and all that and shows you just text. And renders it beautifully at that. They have a paid app and also a free bookmarklet that lets you do this.
http://Instapaper.com is basically a reading list (read later option) that you can access from any browser with a native iPad/iPhone/iPod paid app. However, my interest in this is mostly the bookmarlket that cleans up the text.
On the heels of Instapaper and Readability, Apple released a browser in-built 'Reader' mode. Simply click on the reader button in the far end of the address bar for web-pages that are 'readable' and you are presented with a fantastic clean view of the content. So far, my favorite has been readability.com's bookmarklet, but now I find myself doing all my reading in Safari browser (available even for PC). See this for what I mean: http://www.apple.com/safari/whats-new.html#gallery-read-reader
Very easy on the eyes and zero distraction. Highly Recommended.
A reminder to self (this should work for all BSD-like systems, including Fedora & RHEL) —
Edit /etc/inittab as root. The number after the first colon after id is the default runlevel.
id:3:initdefault:
BTW, I prefer runlevel 3 (no GUI).
Reference: http://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/Installation_Guide-en-US/s1-boot-init-shutdown-sysv.html
After the upgrade today, firing up a tmux session via PuTTy with my usual "Session Settings > Translation > Remote Character Set" pointing to "ISO-8859-6:1999 (Latin/Arabic)", I found that line drawings were all messed up: the lines were drawn with the 'a' like characters, instead of lines. It occured to me that the newly updated Ubuntu ncursesw libraries and/or tmux may have fixed something. Promptly switching to 'UTF-8' as the remote character set brought back the good looking line-drawings.
Bonus: Simultaneously scroll left and right files with overflow.
Dependencies: jQuery
Usage: Simply include jQuery in gitweb/gitweb.cgi (within the head tag).
Future work: Going by this thread on kerneltrap.org, 'side-by-side' diff appears to have been on the team's TODO list and never gotton around to being implemented. So, except for the simultaneous scrolling, I intend to port this to Perl and hope to get it integrated into Gitweb core. Simultaneous scrolling needs to be done in Javascript and the fact that external dependencies are frowned upon,
Note that we frown upon introducing extra dependencies for gitweb, unless they are optional, and best detected automatically.
scrolling needs to be handled separately in gitweb.js (the currently implementation depends on jQuery).
Screenshot: 