GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) is an alternative for Photoshop for Linux as well as for Windows operational systems. I was not fair to skip this image editor in my reviews on this site because most of this site itself was made in GIMP and not in Photoshop. The latest versions of GIMP are getting nicer and nicer featurewise and it is easier to use it from day to day. For those of you who used to work with Photoshop a lot, GIMP may appear a little unconfortable to work with but after  a few weeks of working with it you can see that you can do most of the things that you do in Photoshop but without any payment, because GIMP is free as in FREEdom. So, why not to try it?

Their site is GIMP.org

Probably this news is not "new", but I just recently met person who didnt know a thing about Google Earth or ANY similar software. Surprise surprise, there are still people who dont know that they can look at their place from the bird fly height, as well as to make virtual flight to the places in the world, or simply around the world. In recent versions of Google Earth user can also travel in space, and see closeups of different stars that are not even visible from our planet without special equipment. Now Google also made closeups of the bottom of the sea, but unfortunately not too deep. Also there are 3d pictures of the streets of major cities, so you can view how the city look like from car.

Well, I dont get money from Google for advertizing their product, but I really like it. Check yourself at http://earth.google.com

Oh, on on the picture there is Restenas. But the pic is too small for really see it in good quality. So, download the program, find Restenas, Sweden and enjoy the view.

If you have your own site and have contact form on it you probably get a lot of spam messages from that web form, what to do to fight it? install CAPTCHA(Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) in your form. What is captcha? according to wikipedia it is "A distorted image of letters and numbers used to prevent automated use of websites. Anything that a human must do to prove that they are not a computer." So, how to install this thing? There are plenty of php classes and functions on the web helping you to do exactly it. Just search for captcha and you will find one. I use captcha tool from http://puremango.co.uk and it works nicely, the generated words are human mind relative, so, easy read by human being and very complecated for robot. It works the same way as all captchas do - when the form is loaded, the captcha is generated and the content of it is saved in $_SESSION variable and on submition of the form the content of session variable is compated to inserted text and form is processed according to this comparison result. Very smart and easy. Try to install captcha on your site form and you will see effectiveness of it.

 If you are PHP developer you must know that PHP can be used for writing desktop applications. If you have Linux box you can write scripts on PHP and run them without starting browser. That makes this simple programming language even more valuable. Ok, lets imagine that you have created a PHP script with MySQL support and 20-50 classes and include files in different folders. Now, you want to send your script somewhere, sharing it with the world. I hope you dont expect your end users be so advanced that they would have to go into your code to edit your configurations like names of files with data, name of the database used, username and password for MySQL access. You would probably want some more simplicity in installation process of your script. And here it comes a little script that will generate installation script for your PHP software. Check this up: http://mkinstaller.nisu.org/

A few times in my lifeI was trying to fight against monopoly of microsoft on my computer, a couple years ago I finally won. Now I have Ubuntu Linux on my home and office PCs. As you might know there is no Internet Explorer in Linux, most of the distributions of Linux have Firefox installen for browsing the Web. So, both of my computers have FireFox preinstallen. But this browser is a little heavy on resources and sometimes behaves not well under slow oldish hardware, and here I remembered Opera. Opera is Norwegian web browser which was designed with speed in mind,After close comparison between browsers that I have used before Opera definately wins by speed of opening pages. However, Google's Chrome is stepping on tail and eats even less resources than Opera. But there is no Chrome for Linux yet, I dont even think that Google will daire to release Chrome for Linux in near future. That means I will use Opera on my old pentium 2 with IceBuntu Linux on it. I didnt do benchmark tests myself, there are plenty of people who did it and proved that Opera is fast. I just want to recommend you - if you are using old slow computer, and want to surf Internet without slow-downs, Opera is the choise for you. I use this browser on my telephone too. Opera mobile is also the fastest according to my experience.

You can find more information and downloads on the product site: http://www.opera.com

If you are Christian, who has windows mobile based Pocket Pc or smartphone, I'm sure you would like to have the Bible in your device. There are quite a few different software products available on the market to satisfy your need, I'll list only freeware and only those that have Russian Bible in them:

Recently, when I've got the phone from my wife, I wanted to connect it to Linux box for synchronization, but it was not an easy task. Well, I did it and the connection I have right now is even better then Windows ActiveSync. So, if you have a Windos Mobile phone or Pocket PC and have Linux box, you can connect them.
I decided to make a little tutorial on this topic. There are already some tutorials on the web, so, this will be one of them.

Some time ago I was looking for an alternatiive to heavy and slow Eclipse and NetBeans, for Java development, and I found a few Java IDEs (written on Java) but most of them where a little slow. But after a few hours (or days..., I dont remember already) I found one excellent aplication called tIDE. It is writtem on Java, but fast enough to compete with such monsters as netBeans. It has most of the features that commersial IDEs have. It is open source, and it weights only 2Mb. If you are Java developer - you should check this  IDE. Here is what the author say about his programme:

"tIDE is a full featured opensource Java integrated development environment (IDE), distributed under the GNU General Public Licence (GPL).

More precisely: tIDE is a small, powerful, quick, efficient, easy and open framework to create 100% Java applications.

Try tide, you'll be astonished by its simplicity and rapidity. No installation is required. A single click on the JNLP and the IDE is on your screen ! An import tool let you import the main settings of any existing Eclipse, NetBeans or Schmortopf project."

Check this tool here: http://tide.olympe-network.com/

Just recently I wanted to write a little script that would work on Windows XP on Linux and on Windows MobileI thought about PHP but it was a bit complecated for the windows mobil, then I looked at Python, and I was really impressed with the opportunities of programming with this language! To say briefly: Python is very simple programming language, object oriented programming is available, a lot of build in modules allowing to work with almost every area of the host operating system,and there are lot of other things to say about this language. I'll just copy and paste first paragraph from http://python.org website:

Python is a dynamic object-oriented programming language that can be used for many kinds of software development. It offers strong support for integration with other languages and tools, comes with extensive standard libraries, and can be learned in a few days. Many Python programmers report substantial productivity gains and feel the language encourages the development of higher quality, more maintainable code.

See more information on their official website http://python.org

Today I start to describe my favorit software for my favorit operational system - Linux. The first one is programming text editor. My choice is open source editor Geany. It is based on Scintilla engine so it has all the things that Scintilla has - code highlight for several different languages, light weight of executable file, small mount of memory and CPU resources consumption, which makes this programm to run quickly on the oldish computers (I have pentium 2 for testing/development) Check their site for more screenshots, information and downloads.The link is below.