The Ballad of ‘Oklahomo’ Rep. Sally Kern

In an earlier post, I put up Sally Kern's secret speech in which she bashed homosexuality high and low, describing it as a spreading disease, a death knell to her country. Related to this, the "Ballad of Sally Kern", a poem, and a rather striking one at that (+transcript). Sally Kern also replies.

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Finally a Fast PDF Reader: Foxit

Sunday, May 25th, 2008

PDF (Portable Document Format) is the omni-present file format for all important documents that need to travel from one place to an other. They work on every platform, so long as a reader is installed, and they aren’t editable. The key is that every PDF document comes across exactly the way the author intended it, save the infamous inconsistencies proprietary software like Microsoft Word often impose. PDF, in itself, is also proprietary, though. It’s not open. It’s just been around long enough to seem that way.

Adobe Reader (formerly known as Acrobat Reader) is the official reader software that accompanies PDF. Throughout the years, Adobe Reader has put on weight and has become increasingly bulky, and.. slow. Panning through a document containing more than a few dozen pages usually bogs down your system, peaking CPU performance along with it.

Foxit Reader You aren’t necessarily tied to Adobe’s own reader, though. There are dozens of other, faster applications that handle PDF fine and even provide a [roughly] comparable set of features.  I’m talking about Foxit Reader 2.3, in particular: A free application that incorporates nearly all of Adobe Reader’s features with gracious speed.

Foxit Reader

Foxit supports all the usual: bookmarking, commenting, magnifying, tabbed browsing, etc. And, best of all, no more panning through documents in slow motion.

Foxit Reader is available for free on Windows and Linux.

Rating: ★★★★½

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Free File: Active@ ISO Burner

Monday, March 31st, 2008

Active@ ISO Burner is a freeware application that does exactly one thing: burn ISO-images to disc. This app is great for people who don’t often use their burner and don’t feel like purchasing a whole Nero-suite or something similar. It will burn images to CDs and DVDs alike.

image

Additionally, command line is supported in order to enable automation.

If you insert a used re-writeable disc, it will automatically be erased (Quick Erase). Secure erasing is also possible using the free Active@ CD/DVD Eraser. ‘Secure’ in the sense that every sector on the surface will be overwritten with a neutral pattern, whereas ‘Quick Erase’ only modifies to file table to make whole disc seem empty (the actual data remains).

Rating: ★★★★★

Get both freeware applications at NTFS.com.

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Free File: 7-Zip

Thursday, March 27th, 2008

7Zip is an open-source compression/decompression utility that supports most of the popular compression formats. In addition, it also introduces its own high-performing format called LZMA. According to the 7Zip, LZMA supports:

  • a high compression ratio
  • compression speed of 1MB/s and higher (based on a 2GHz CPU)
  • decompression speed of 10 to 20 MB/s (ditto)
  • low system requirements
  • multi-threading and hyper-threading

Not only does it support regular ZIP, its compression ratio for ZIP is 2 to 10% higher than the its commercial counterpart, WinZip. In true open-source fashion, 7Zip is available in more than 60 languages and can be used on older computers without too much trouble. Furthermore, it comes with a custom file manager that allows advanced functionality like:

  • splitting files
  • combining files
  • calculating checksums of files

If you’re not (or can’t be) tied to a single computer and you prefer to carry your applications around on a USB-stick, there’s a portable version available at PortableApps.com, too. Sure, it doesn’t support every single possible format like WinRAR does, but it does a heck of a good job. And hey, it’s free!

image

7-Zip is available for Windows, Linux, Mac and most other Operating Systems out there on their official download page.

Get the portable version of 7-Zip here (Windows Only).

Supported Formats

Compression and decompression:

  • 7z
  • ZIP
  • GZIP
  • BZIP2
  • TAR

Decompression only:

  • RAR
  • CAB
  • ARJ
  • Z
  • RPM, DEB
  • ISO
  • And others…