The rise of credible Open Source alternatives to entrenched commercial software continues. Today I uninstalled Winzip that I paid for a couple of years ago in favour of 7-zip. For me 7-zips ability to handle files with Russian and Kazakh language names was the deciding factor. Sorry Winzip. Go team 7-zip.

The promise of infocard and digital identity is still a long way ahead of us. Until digital identity provision becomes a ‘no-brainer’ commodity technology we will still need to keep track of a multitude of usernames and passwords. My best estimate is that I have about 150 separate password and username pairs from different websites and services! Any Password is the tool of choice for me.

Working with fonts for Kazakh language is getting easier all the time.  Unicode is really having and impact and the old codepage soup is slowly disappearing.  Occasionally however, I still need to view a rogue Kazakh (or yesterday Kirghiz) font to find out where the characters are hiding.  The Arjan Mels freeware font viewer is an oldy but a goody!

Desktop search has changed the way that I look at my computer. I spend a lot less time filing — and I can now find my old notes and emails much more reliably. I am currently using Copernic Desktop Search having dumped Google Desktop. Google Desktop kept crashing Outlook. No such problems with Copernic.

I have looked for years for software that allows me to brainstorm. My friend Francis introduced me to Freemind which is now part of my working set of programs that I use daily. Freemind runs under the Java VM and is now at version .80 . Definately worth a look.