Software

Besides P2P, the rise of sites like Rapidshare, Megaupload and the like have provided another avenue for pirates (and other legitimate users of course ...) to peddle their wares. Unlike P2P, there is no upload and related politics involved and matters are attended to with straightforward HTTP downloads (which are usually quite speedy). Most of these sites have a premium option as well as a hamstrung free option.

Upgrading KTorrent from 3.1.2 to 3.2 RC1 on Kubuntu 8.10 Intrepid with KDE 4.2:

1. Install cmake and related tools:
   sudo apt-get install cmake automoc build-essential gettext
2. Install other required libraries:
   sudo apt-get install kdelibs5-dev libqca2-dev libgmp3-dev kdebase-workspace-dev kdepimlibs5-dev libkrosspython0 libkrossruby0
3. Remove the existing ktorrent installation as a precaution: sudo apt-get remove ktorrent. This should not affect your configuration files.

For those of you out there who have been hankering for a decent free, open-source file renaming utility, I highly recommend that you give Métamorphose a shot. I've been using the v2 beta in XP and it's been excellent. It's written in Python and is also available for Linux, BSD and Macs.

There are a few minor UI bugs though, but I'm sure that they'll be sorted out in due course.

Hooray for FOSS!

An excellent story on How to make money with free software has been doing the rounds today, and deservedly so. While I won't spoil the surprise for you here, I must say that I like the back better than the front :)

The Eclipse 3.3.1.1 update manager has to be the most annoying updater ever fucking written. What a pile of refuse :/

I'm sure that the Eclipse developer community has their own private updater as I am certain no sane man can stand working with it.

Issues:

• If I want the update to run in the background, I should also be able to run it in the foreground.
• If I cancel the update, it should be cancelled immediately. It should not be "cancelling" for the rest of eternity and require a restart of Eclipse to get done.

I usually have something along the lines of Adobe's PDF Writer or Flash Paper and such, to print stuff directly to a file. However, earlier today, I found myself needing similar functionality, but not having the afore mentioned software. Therefore, I had to resort to using the "print to file" check-box on the Windows print form that allowed me to save a document to a file on the hard disk.