Google has announced their latest take on social networking – Google Buzz. It is social networking functionality integrated directly into your Gmail inbox.
Archive for the ‘Software’ Category
Google Buzz
Thursday, February 11th, 2010Installing hMailServer on a 64-bit Operating System
Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009hMailServer is my prefered email server. It is really good – very user friendly and its configuration is quite detailed and versatile. And of course it is free. :)
I recently installed it on a clean installation of a 64-bit operating system. On startup, the installer told me that the .NET framework version 2 is required and will now be downloaded. So I let it download and (I thought) install .NET. However, when it got to the step of configuring the database, the application would not start. All I got was the relatively non descriptive error “failed to initialize properly”. And the same error occurred when trying to start up the tools from the start menu.
I was just about ready to give up, having found no helpful hints online. However, when I got to the “Add or Remove Programs” dialog, I realised that the .NET framework is in fact still not installed. Curious but solvable. So I downloaded the .NET framework manually, and tried to install it. As it turns out, I accidentally downloaded the 32-bit version – which cannot be installed on a 64-bit operating system. The 64-bit version is about 10MB larger than the 32-bit, which made me realise that the hMailServer installer downloaded the wrong version for my operating system. I had to uninstall and reinstall hMailServer after this whole process, but now it is running perfectly.
Moral of the story – when installing hMailServer on a 64-bit OS, make sure that you have the .NET framework version 2 installed first!. :)
NetBeans Platform Refcard
Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009DZone has a number of refcardz – cheat sheets for developers. They are free and can be viewed on the website, but you have to be signed in (registration is also free) to download them. Useful refcardz include: Core Java, Design Patterns and NetBeans IDE. And now there is also a brand new refcard for the NetBeans Platform!
Tabs – more than you think
Friday, December 18th, 2009While trawling through the depths of the Net I came across this fantastic article that details the close tab behaviour in Google Chrome. It’s a very in depth analysis on an often overlooked component of software, the UI.
Software Tools
Monday, December 14th, 2009Our Software Tools page is growing slowly but surely. Are there any tools you feel should be listed there? Post a comment here!
Google Chrome Extensions
Monday, December 14th, 2009Extensions for the Google Chrome browser went live for everybody (as opposed to just developers) on 8 December, the same day as the first official release of a Mac version of the browser. It was released with 300 extensions, and by the next day there were already 500!
Chrome extensions (for the beta channel only) are available at https://chrome.google.com/extensions/ and http://www.chromeextensions.org/.
Twitter… now in Klingon!
Tuesday, December 8th, 2009It is now possible to tweet in Klingon. When posting a tweet through http://tweetinklingon.com/, it is (really!) translated to the Klingon language!