More and more of what people do on computers is moving online, which eases the transition to Linux. Two programs that are still nice to have on the desktop are Rhapsody and Quicken. Unfortunately, these programs aren’t available in Linux.

I think Rhapsody has an online player that’s so-so.

GnuCash is the best accounting software I’ve found for Linux. It’s more accounting software than help-joe-with-his-money software. I’m pretty sure it’s available on Windows as well if you want to demo it. You can import Quicken data.

I’m a big fan of what works. Every time I use Windows, I want to defenestrate the computer within 5 minutes. It works for a lot of people though, which is great. So I don’t go around recommending Linux to everyone.

If someone is a power user in Windows, I don’t recommend Linux. They can get everything done that they need to and I think it’s really important to have people around who can help the non-power users with their computer. If they really want to use Linux, that’s great too.

If someone is interested in Linux, I’m comfortable recommending it to them as their full time operating system as long as they have someone around to help occasionally. That’s usually me.

I definitely recommend Linux for computers that are old and getting bogged down. Windows just does that over time. So if you have an old Windows computer, have lost the recovery disk, don’t want to spend any money, and can get by without all of the Windows only software, Linux is a really great option. I use Ubuntu Linux and it has some really fantastic features. I should make or find a screencast of some of the things I like about it. (You mean, in Windows you actually have to put a CD into your computer and go through a 10 minute install program just to be able to edit documents? How old-fashioned.)

Jon and Claire have Ubuntu installed on their laptops. Justin uses Fedora Linux.

Today my brother Ben and I made a tower out of these blocks–18 levels high, 16 blocks per level.

We took the tower down one block at a time, taking a picture of it each time. I reversed the list of images and then turned it into a video. It looks like the tower is going up, but we “filmed” it, stop motion style, in reverse. More pictures on Flickr.

Someone asked what I read online, so I figured I’d just write it up here. The full list can be found on del.icio.us (tagged blogroll).

1. Jon Udell

Jon has a lot of interesting things to say about technology and the internet in general. Here are a couple highlights.

Hosted Lifebits Scenaris
The Blurred Line Between Personal Information Management and Publishing
Social Networks Then and Now

2. Jeff Atwood

Jeff is a recent addition to my reading list. He writes about stuff that I’m interested in as a programmer. It’s generally pretty accessible though.

Computer Workstation Ergonomics
Classic Computer Science Puzzles
You’re Probably Storing Passwords Incorrectly

3. Rashmi Sinha

Rashmi talks about cognition on the web.

A Cognitive Analysis of Tagging

Looking through her posts, that’s the only thing I can find to recommend to a broad audience. Look through and see if you find anything interesting.

4. A List Apart

A List Apart just has a lot of good stuff to say about web design.

Reviving Anorexic Writing
Never User a Warning
Better Writing through design

5. Brian Oberkirch

Another recent addition. He writes about the social web. I like what he writes as I continue to think about the future of the People of Praise on the web.

Designing Portable Social Networks
Designing for Hackability

Slashdot is worth looking at at least once.

These two guys are worth reading and are excellent writers.
Joel Spolsky
Paul Graham

The #1 Paul Graham essay I recommend people read: Beating the Averages

Holding a Program in One’s Head
Stuff
A Plan for Spam

Sunday:
High Performance Webpages, Steve Souders and Tenni Theurer
Scalable Web Architectures: Common Patterns and Approaches, Cal Henderson

Monday:
The New Hybrid Designer
Power to the People Via User-centric Identity
Vulnerabilities 2.0 in Web 2.0: Next Generation Web Apps from a Hacker’s Perspective
The Arrival of Web 2.0: The State of the Union on Browser Technology

Tuesday:
The Future of e-Commerce
Panel: Comparing Web Application Frameworks
Syndication

Wednesday:
Business Mashups for Fun and Profit
Panel: Examining AJAX Frameworks
From Pages to People: Behavioral Targeting
Bringing applications from the Web Browser to the Desktop

Update: Looks like we also so a Lamborghini Gallardo as well. And I got a couple pictures.

Oh wait, I just committed myself to update…

Doug recommends O’Reilly’s Javascript: The Definitive Guide with the praise, “I can say without fear that it is the least bad of a very large class of very, very bad books.” I’ll keep that in mind if I’m ever shopping for a JavaScript book.

The equals (==) and not-equals (!=) operators don’t behave as I expect them to. They do type coercion. So, 42 == 42 is true, as I expect, but "42" == 42 is also true, because JavaScript makes them the same type first. I think I’m going to start using === and !== instead, which behave as I expect ("42" === 42 is false, while 42 === 42 is true).

If you’ve ever user a language with C style syntax, you’ve probably used logical-and (&&) and logical-or (||). You can still do that in JavaScript, but the way it’s done is interesting. For A && B, if both A and B evaluate to true, then A && B evaluates to true. Here’s how JavaScript does that: If A is true, A && B evaluates to B. If A is false, A && B evaluates to A. It’s short circuit logic. If A is false, B isn’t even evaluated. You can think of && as the guard operator. A && B is then read: A guards B. With the guard operator,

if (A) {
  result = B;
} else {
  result = A;
}

can be written as, result = A && B.

The logical-or operator (||) is similar. As usual, A || B evaluates to true if either A or B is true, or if both of them are true. The way it’s calculated in JavaScript, A || B evaluates to A if A evaluates to true and B if A evaluates to false. So || can be thought of as the default operator. It defaults to A, but falls back to B if A is false. So,

if (A) {
  result = A
} else {
  result = B
}

can be written as: result = A || B.

And this is just funny: the typeof() function will give me the type of an object (i.e. typeof(42) is “number”). Using typeof(), we can see what type NaN (Not a Number) is. typeof(NaN) –> “number”. Not a number…is a number.

As a side note, Python treats and and or this way as well.

And moving into the very arcane, you can use this to simulate the C-style ternary operator in Python. In C/C++/Java/JavaScript: result = test?A:B. In Python: result = test and A or B.

Simon Willison has a very nice screencast about OpenID.

Now I just need to find a place to use my fancy new OpenID…

Another thing I’ve been thinking about doing is starting a linklog. Like I said, I’ve been using del.icio.us a lot more in recent weeks. A lot of of the stuff I tag is is for personal or work use, but sometimes I just run in cool stuff. The plan is to tag all of that cool stuff linklog.