This topic came to mind suddenly after more than a few days of pondering what I should write an article about. I think it had something do with wine's inability to fluently render animations in Macromedia Flash, and my fear of Bill Gates.

There have recently been a number of articles over on digg.com, about how Macs are switching over to Intel's architecture. Most of these articles were debating whether it would be possible or not to duel boot Windows XP on Mac. To be honest with you I couldn't really care less. I mean, what kind of crazy bastard in their right mind would want to install Windows on their Mac?

Then, it came to me this afternoon during a few beers at work, what if you could have OS X running on a IBM PC? Once I got home I fired up firefox and ran a quick google on the subject. It took me a few searches to find what I wanted, however after about 5 minutes I found that this could, and actually has been done with hacked versions of OS X.

I am currently downloading the hacked ISO of OS X 10.4.5, it's around 4.3 gigs worth so it's going to take some time. It is my mission to have OS X duel booting with deblian on my AMD machine, hopefully, I will avoid running into any spiked walls along the way.

I will keep you updated with my progress.

In the seven years I have been designing web pages, I have experimented with several different HTML editors. I started out with notepad in 1999, back then I found it to be the best tool to design your creations, reason being it was the only program that gave you complete control over the presentation of your web pages. Between 1999 and 2002, I had tried and trialled many HTML editors ranging, from the full blown Dreamweaver to the insignificant and extremely crappy FrontPage. However, always found myself going back to notepad.

It was only when I started programming in other web languages in 2002, when notepad started to lose its appeal. I set out searching the internet for a bigger better text editor and found a lightweight program called EditPlus.

The two most loved of the many features listed below, include syntax highlighting for several different languages, and a very useful built in FTP client for editing your scripts on the fly.

• Extensible syntax high-lighting
  People write new syntax files all the time, and you just drop them in the program directory. I was looking the other day, and there's about 200 different syntax files out there.
• Localized FTP
  You can connect to an FTP site as if it was a local folder. Whenever you hit "Save," the file is seamlessly FTP'ed out.
• Cliptext options
  Write a certain text structure a lot? You can save that structure, and insert it with a click of a button with the text insertion cursor at exactly the right spot.
• Extensible templates
  You can save "shells" of file types you work on a lot (a blank HTML page, an empty Java class, etc.) and start a new one from "File > New…"
• Backup options
  You can tell EditPlus that, whenever you save, save an extra copy of that file to a certain folder. You never see it happen, never even think about it, but on more than one occasion, this little treasure trove of old files has saved my ass.
• Command line integration
  You can configure a button to run a command line program with the file you're working as the first argument.

Further more, its very lightweight and it works well under Wine, and has great support for regular expressions and macros.

This text editor does a lot. Software this useful and easy to use is a rarity. It is free to try and $29 USD to register. I guarantee it's worth every cent.

My only reasons to endure running a Microsoft Operating System have just been eliminated. I have just Installed Macromedia Flash MX and Internet Explorer on my Linux partition through the use of a well known and free Windows emulator, wine. The only dilemma I had was with the installation of Internet Explorer, after a few Google searches I quickly found a solution.

Wine has saved me just under 5gb of precious disk space after I took great pleasure in removing my now obsolete NTFS partition.

That said, games don't work very at all well under wine at all, but thats why Microsoft invented the Xbox. Thanks Bill for creating an alternative gaming platform, now I don't have to use your crappy “Operating System” at all.

I now have to sleep as I have to wake up in a few hours. Good night.

Thank god for firefox. I decided to make a few changes to my style sheet today when I inadvertently uploaded an older version of my CSS file over top of my only good version.

I was saved when I got home by firefox as I had my web browser open on my blog. "Edit CSS". HAHA! Success.

There are many other reasons as to why firefox is so much better than it's nemesis, Internet Explorer, however I'm only going to touch on the top 5 reasons:

1. Extensions
   If you can think of something you would like to have supported in your most used application, its more than likely been developed and ready for you to install on top of your browser.
2. Tab Browsing
   Ever had 20 different windows open while viewing several different web pages at once? In firefox, tabs replace these windows with a user friendly tool bar just waiting for you to click over to another page.
3. Security
   This is a debatable one as firefox has only just reached the 20% mark of the browser market share. Firefox security patches are released quicker than IE security patches that sometimes been known to take up to six months to be released, and then don't patch anything anyway.
4. Size and Speed
   Firefox is less than 10MB, IE is over 100. I wonder what unnecessarily crap Microsoft has bundled into their shitty featureless browser. Nuff said.
5. Standalone HTTP Client
   This is a big one, firebox doesn't need to use Windows APIs to function, which means when it crashes (and it does) it doesn't take your operating system with it. This is good for security as well, why would you want to use an application that could have access to your operating system?

If your not a caveman or a complete idiot, download firefox now you fuck!