How do you cloud?

“Cloud Computing” is one of those buzzword terms that’s been driving everybody nuts for a while now, at least from what I’ve seen. But what does it really mean to people? Often when a term gets thrown around enough to become a “buzzword”, it starts losing its meaning because people grow numb to it. Once that happens, you get pushback from people, even people to whom the buzzword applies.

Computing in “the Cloud” is one of those terms. Like the term or not, Cloud Computing is here, and has been here for a while now, and if you’re like most people on the Internet, it applies to you in at least some way, whether you admit it or not.

Here’s how it applies to you, and how it applies to me.

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Linux Mint 9 LXDE: A Quick Glance

Breaking with past tradition, the Linux Mint folks have done away with “Community Editions”, instead bringing the non-Gnome flavors of Mint fully under the Mint umbrella. Linux Mint 9 LXDE is now in general release. Here are my thoughts.

Midori 0.2.6: Simple, lightweight, but still needs work

In my ongoing search for something with which to tinker, I’ve occasionally run across the Midori browser, a fully GTK+2 integrated, WebKit-based browser with a focus on being lightweight and simple.

It had been a while since I gave Midori a try, so I thought that since they had released a few updated versions since my last look, I’d install it and give it a new look, because it seemed to have some promise the last time.

I did most of my testing on my 64-bit Mint 9 laptop, and I installed Midori 0.2.6, which was the version in the repositories. I used it for a week as my primary browser, only resorting to Firefox when I had to do something that I couldn’t get to work in Midori, which is my usual approach to evaluating browsers.

Clementine 0.4: Amarok 1.4 reborn!

I’ve lamented since last year that KDE’s radical change in direction left me — and a lot of others — going on an app-hunt. I’m really not a fan of the new Amarok, and I’ve been as yet unsuccessful in finding something to replace my beloved Amarok 1.4, even resorting to procedures like this one to install the old version.

Such procedures make a good stopgap for the time being, but sooner or later, that old thing will simply not work anymore. Once a program falls out of development, the clock is ticking on it remaining useful, and at that point, you have to face reality and find something with which to replace it.

Fortunately, I’m not the only Amarok 1.4 lover out there. It’s been forked, and the new version is called Clementine.

Opera 10.60 for Linux: A rant

I’ve made no secret of the fact that despite my open source advocacy, I’m still a longtime user of the Opera browser.

However, the past year has been pretty rocky in that respect; Opera 10.10 for Linux was plagued with a lot of bugs, crashes, and performance issues, rendering it practically unusable, even for an Opera fan such as myself, and despite 10.50 being released for other platforms in March, the Linux world was stuck with the problematic 10.10 (and eventually 10.11) release until this week.

Finally, after such a long wait, Opera 10.60 was finally released for all platforms on July 1st, so I was finally able to ditch Firefox and Chrome and go back to my browser of choice.

Or was I?