Miscellaneous Ramblings....

For the KDE community, KDE 3.5.2 has been released (release notes are here). It looks like this is primarily a maintenance release to fix some bugs.

For all of those who struggle to come up with a new breakfast restaurant, there is now the TwinCitiesBreakfast.Com website.

Via a fellow Pentax photographer, I found what looks like a very cool tool for creating panoramas called AutoStitch. Needless to say, I have this software downloaded already and have started playing with it.

(Also, for those who miss the split-screen focusing, there is Katz-Eye Optics which makes split screens for some digital SLR models)

It looks like I'll finally get to see the US Woman's National Team live. They will be playing an exhibition match against Sweden on July 15th at 5:00 pm CDT at the Blaine National Sports Center (it will also be broadcast live on ESPN2). (Also, Canada will be playing against Sweden on July 18th at 7:30 pm CDT). These exhibition matches will be occurring as part of the annual Schwan's USA Youth Soccer Tournament. You can go here to order tickets directly from the National Sports Center (this bypasses the Ticketmaster per ticket surcharge).

WhatIsThatFile.com is a handy website for Windows users for checking what a particular Windows process or Windows file is actually for. It also identifies if a file is a known Trojan or virus.

For those who want tools to give them a quick overview of their computer (BIOS, Memory, CPU, etc), there seems to be several tools available:

Via a tip from a co-worker, I came across this cool (network) map of the internet on the Telecom Stock Blog site. Pretty cool looking PDF I must say.
Also, this article explains how this network map was created.

In what has been rumoured for weeks, Dell finally completed it's acqusition of Alienware.

For all those users of the (Windows) PuTTY application (of which I am one), there is now portaPuTTY. This is a version of PuTTY that has been hacked to store PuTTY's settings in files, rather than in the registry, allowing for you to store your settings anywhere (like on a USB stick for example).

Firefox Bon Echo Alpha 1 2.0 has been released. However, it is noted on the page (in bold type) that this release is for testers only. So use at your own risk....

As if Google didn't have enough tools already. Now there is Google Financial. Besides all of the usual stock ticker info that you would expect (symbol lookup, company news items, etc), where Google Financial differentiates itself from the pack is the enhanced stock ticker graph. By default, the stock ticker graph gives a three day view of the stock performance. You can also mouse over various positions on the graph allowing which shows the stock value on a minute by minute basis. The feature that I like is that the graph also allows you to go back in time (usually to about the year 2002) and view the performance of the stock at that point in time. The news items associated with the company stock will also change to that moment in time. Nice!! Note: I also happened to come across the nice tool Map of the Market (from SmartMoney), which is a cool GUI interface that displays a dynamic color-coded current state of the Stock market.

For those who want to be able to carry their Wiki with them at all times, there is now the Wiki on a Stick (thanks Tim). The software enables you to run a Wiki off a a USB drive (which includes the packages: PHP, MySQL, Apache as well as ActivePerl). It seems to be pretty easy to install and get running and doesn't seem to take up much space either (my afore-mentioned co-worker had it running on a 128MB USB drive).

Ever have the burning curiosity to know that the official flag for a particular country was? Well, the World Flag Database site was made just for you.
It has a nice index, plus you can search by the country's two letter abbreviation as well.

Thanks to the persistence and creativity of my nephew's wife (and the entire family spending both Saturday and Sunday over at my nephew's house ), we now at last have our family cruise booked!!
We are going to the Carribbean on the Royal Carribbean Explorer of the Seas ship.
Yes!!

RadiantVista, another cool photography link I heard about from my co-worker (who will be probably be an expert once he returns from the two-day photography class ). One of the things that I really like about this site is the Podcasts and video tutorials on this site where the author, Mark Johnson, will take a photograph and walk through the process that he uses to improve/change the photograph. There are also daily critiques of photographs as well.