Check out this piece over on betanews.com talking about how instant messenger use is on par with email use these days. This isn’t surprising to me. It is a source of minor frustration in that I have had at best mixed success trying to convince educators that they should begin using IM as a way to communicate with their students. I’ve also had mixed success convincing institutions they should be providing IM services to their campuses – at Bowdoin I came within a hair’s breadth of solving this before I left, but I guess after my departure it fell apart. Skidmore’s willing to talk about it but that’s about as far as it goes. I’m blogging about this mainly for myself, so I have this link around later to point to the next time I have one of my ‘would you consider adopting IM as part of your communications toolkit’ conversations at work.

Check out this handy web service that builds a pdf file you can print and fold to make a cd case. The next time you grab a great concert off of archive.org’s live music archive you can make yourself a beautiful case to wrap it up with.

[via downloadsquad.com]

Microsoft is under price pressure in a variety of product categories from the open source movement and others. Most folks are probably unaware that the true core of this is not Office and Windows, despite how important they are to MS’s revenues. A developer friendly culture and strong development tools are a big piece of what’s contributed to MS’s ongoing success – these lead to a healthy software base for their operating systems and indirectly to the broader use of their products. If folks are writing all the books in your language, it’s the language most folks are likely to use is a way to think of this if you’re a non-technical person. It’s actually a good bit more complex than this, but it’s a really important contributing factor to Microsoft’s dominance.

Meanwhile if you take a look around higher education these days, what you’ll discover is that more and more computer science programs are teaching Java and very few are teaching .Net or C#, Microsoft’s preferred languages. If a school’s not teaching Java it’s teaching C. (or really, more accurately, they’re teaching both, but almost none of them are teaching .Net or C#). There are a variety of reasons for this but a huge one is the free availability of great development tools for Java, especially Eclipse. Additionaly even Apple is releasing its dev tools for free these days, as are Sun and IBM, and there are a variety of free alternatives available for linux.

All of this represents a medium term risk for Microsoft as newer generations of software engineers come up using non-MS development tools. Microsoft is of course not stupid, so what’s a struggling monopolist to do? We should all know by now simply by looking to the past. Release the developer tools for free, which they’ve just announced.

Normally I wouldn’t link to stuff like this since it’s really over the head of basically all of my audience, but here’s the thing: having a windows compatible IDE and compiler available is pretty handy at times, and this deal, at least for now, is only promised for the next year or so. So take a moment and go here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/support/install/

And download your tools. Just tuck the CD images away on your hard drive somewhere until the day you need them, in total it’s less than 2 gigs of data. These are unrestricted licenses and the link is to a download location that doesn’t require registration or product keys. These are not full versions of the products, but they’re more than sufficient for any hobbyist’s need or the casual geek who just wants to compile something they’ve grabbed off of sourceforge.

Check out these tiny little thumb drives from US Modular. Nice looking enclosure and a decent price, $99 for a disc-based 2GB thumb drive is not bad at all. This is a worthy holiday gift for the right geek. Me, for example.

Check out this post to the snapstream company blog. Beyond TV is moving to version 4 and adding support for direct DivX encoding, radio recording, and HDTV support amongst a host of other features. I’ve been waiting for this for quite a while. If you’re not familiar with it, BeyondTV is Tivo for the build it yourself crowd. It’s the primary way I interact with video content and an application I use daily. It blows away what you can do with a Tivo. Upgrades are only $30, or for around $100 you can get the software and an HDTV encoding card. I will definitely upgrading the moment this comes out – native DivX encoding alone makes this worthwhile.

If you use del.icio.us to store your bookmarks, check out the del.icio.us direc.tor, an ajax-powered take on making a superior interface for del.icio.us’s bookmarking service. The author calls this a prototype but really this is ready for primetime in the sense that it’s well designed and immediately useful. One caveat for the mac folk – due to a safari issue you can’t use that browser. Visit with Firefox if you’d like to tinker with this.

Jedit is my primary text editor these days and has been for over a year. What it loses in responsiveness due to being java-based (and truly it’s not that bad speed-wise) it more than makes up for in configurability and extensibility. Today I found the ruby editor plugin. There are easy to follow instructions on the site for getting it installed and configured, which you’ll need since unfortunately it doesn’t follow the normal jedit convention of simply using the jedit plugin manager for install. Still it’s more than worth the effort – ruby code completion, a great code structure browser, and integration with all your other fave jedit plugins.

Check out the ajax-ified Turbodbadmin, an ajax-powered riff on phpmyadmin. It’s got a ways to go to reach feature parity with phpmyadmin but it’s already worth checking out, and it has a sure chance of displacing it once it’s ready for primetime. If you’re not familiar with it, phpmyadmin is a web-based management tool for MySQL databases, and turbodbadmin is basically the same thing with a much nicer and more responsive interface.

I’ve written a couple of times about voodoopad, the excellent little desktop wiki from Flying Meat Software. I noticed an alternative this weekend, wikinotes. It’s the product of a student project, but don’t let that scare you off – it’s been stable and useful in several hours of testing. It’s also free, so if you’ve tinkered with voodoopad but haven’t liked the concept well enough to consider paying for it, check out wikinotes and see if free is the right price for your desktop wiki needs.

Paint.net has been around for a while now, in fact I might have mentioned it before, but if you’re on windows and need a light-duty image editor it’s hard to find something superior to paint.net, and it’s free. While it’s not going to replace Photoshop any time soon, it can serve very capably for most user’s image editing needs – red eye removal, contrast, tone and color adjustment and so on. If you’re an amateur digital photographer on the PC and need something to work with images, and you’ve run into the limits of picassa, check out paint.net.

It’s also an interesting app in that it emerged out of student work at Washington State University, and successive classes of students have been adding features and squashing bugs. The only downside, depending on your outlook, is that it requires Microsoft’s .Net libraries. Chances are fairly good that you already have them; if not they’re free from Microsoft and easy to install.