About a month ago, I installed Ubuntu on my laptop as a second OS. Vista Home Premium was the original and workhorse of the two OS’s.  I have fell in love with Ubuntu so I decided to clean my laptop of Vista and install Ubuntu 8.04 as my only OS. During each install of Ubuntu, I noticed that setting up wireless can be a pain. I will share a few quick and easy steps to get your wireless and Ubuntu working.

My wireless lan controller is from Broadcom so these steps are specifically for this controller.

First, open and terminal and type the following code:

sudo aptitude update

This will update your system with all the available packages.

Second, go to System –> Administration –> Synaptic Package Manager. Search for b43-fwcutter and install it. This will install the firmware for your wireless card.

Finally, go to Connect to Wireless Network and enter the necessary information.

That should do it. These are the steps I have followed each time I needed to setup wireless for Ubuntu. Please let me know if this does or does not work for you. Good luck!

Since I have been a Microsoft developer for the last 12 years, I haven’t paid much attention to Linux or the open-source community. I have been unhappy with Vista for a little while and I wanted to expand my technology knowledge so I installed Ubuntu on my Vista laptop, which makes it a dual-boot laptop now.

I have been very impressed with Ubuntu. It has been very fast in comparison to Vista or XP. Ubuntu starts up or re-boots in a minute compared to a 5 minute start-up for Vista on my laptop. I love I can start my laptop and I don’t have to go get a cup of coffee while I wait for it to start.

I love the Synaptic Package Manager that contains a ton of applications to install. I have installed a number of applications this way, which makes it quick and easy. I have everything installed that I need with the exception of Visual Studio. I even have a Linux version of Internet Explorer installed, which I need for a web application that I use for my business and it only runs in IE.

One minor flaw that I see with Ubuntu (or the open source community in general) is the installation process is sometimes not very easy. I think this is one major reason non-technical people are not willing to give Linux a try.

Ubuntu has a great community forum and my experience in the forum has been very positive thus far. I would encourage all new Ubuntu users to use this forum to get their questions answered quickly and accurately.

In my support of Ubuntu, I will soon be ordering a Dell laptop with Ubuntu. The price of my laptop is much cheaper than if I got the same laptop with Windows. This allows me to spend more money on upgrades such as memory and more hard-drive space.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post on a web time tracker tool called, Paymo. I have used this tool on a daily basis since I signed up to use this service and I love it. It has made my time tracking much easier both on a daily and monthly basis. It is very important to me to have a reliable and accurate service such as Paymo since I am an independent consultant that bills clients on an hourly basis.

The support has been second to none. I notified Paymo of an issue and it was resolved by the next day.

I highly recommend using Paymo for your time tracking needs.

I have been using Paymo time tracker for about two weeks to do all of my project time tracking. I absolutely love it!

There are two parts to this web application:

1. Paymo Time Tracker
2. Paymo WebClient

The Paymo time tracker is a free tool for the first 1-3 users. It allows you to enter your time via projects and their associated tasks. Of course, you can add as many tasks as you need to a particular project. This tool also provides time reporting based on the dates entered or canned reports such as current week and previous week. Unfortunately, it does not have a weekly report that has a view by the day.

The Paymo webclient is an unique tool that allows you to start a clock when you begin a particular task. After you complete your task and stop the clock, the time is added automatically for you. I haven’t used this feature much since I usually have a number of people stopping by my cube to check up on a project’s status.

The support from Paymo has been wonderful. There was a bug that recorded the time being 0:59 minutes when I actually entered 1:00 hour. I submitted this bug to Paymo one night and it was fixed by the next day.

There is also a commercial version of this tool that will be released in the future. The commercial version is available for 3 or more users.

I have been looking at and using a couple of different photo/image editing programs. I started looking at these programs because I am interested in improving my skills in creating graphic images so I can service my customers better when building their websites.

First, I am a software developer. I have very little graphic design experience other than the occasional graphic for a button to use on some website. So my preference is to find tools that are free and relatively easy to use.

The tools I am currently using are Paint.NET and GIMP.

First, let’s take a look at Paint.NET. They have a nice user community that provides tutorials to show how a certain task is performed. I found this tool pretty easy to use when doing Photo editing and simple graphic images. However, I found it a little difficult to use when creating more advanced graphic images such as a Web 2.0 looking button.

The GIMP program has been great for both Photo editing and graphic images. I found this tool very easy to use even for more advanced graphic images. I was able to create a Web 2.0 looking button through this tutorial . Here it is:

This isn’t too bad considering it was my first attempt and took me all of 15 minutes to complete. I will have to work on my technique to make it look better but I am sure that will come with more experience.

I think both of these tools are good candidates to use when editing your photos or images. I need to spend more time with both of these tools to unleash their real potential. Either one one of these tools should meet your graphic editing needs.

Recently I have been kind of down on some of the products being produced by Microsoft. This has been kind of tough for me to handle since I make my living developing software using Microsoft products. I still like the majority of products by Microsoft. However, it seems Microsoft wants to have them use all of their products.

For example, a couple of weeks ago I tried to use Windows Live Mail as my mail client for one of my email accounts. I could not use Live Mail because this account was not an msn or hotmail account. I thought at first I was not setting up Live Mail correctly. After I Googled for a resolution, I discovered a lot of people having the same issue using various email accounts like gmail. So, what did I do?

I installed Mozilla’s Thunderbird mail client. I was up and running in less than 5 minutes. Now, why would Microsoft only allow people using msn or hotmail accounts the ability to use Windows Live Mail? I don’t know, either.

IE (internet explorer) is another product I have been disappointed with. I have been going between browsers the last 4 or 5 years. I usually use Mozilla’s Firefox or Opera. I try to go back to use IE but I just can’t do it. I have found that Firefox and Opera perform better than IE. IE 7 has been frustrating to use. It usually throws the famous error where it asks if I would like send the information to Microsoft.

On a positive note, I have been pleasantly surprised with Windows Vista. I have the Home Premium Edition. It has been very stable and reliable for me. However, it took me awhile to get this version of Vista working with Visual Studio .NET 2005. Also, I cannot debug ASP.NET unless I manually connect to the aspnet worker process (aspnet.exe).

Overall, Microsoft does a great job developing products for people to use at work or home. I just hope they realize some of their products could be improved and available to more people.