Online Backup with Dropbox
Dropbox offers a simple solution to backup some files outside of your computer. It even offers the possibility to synchronize between different computers and the Dropbox server. The tool is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Your documents are saved encrypted. Documents in the public folder can also be made available to others by sending them the public URL. Additionally you can share documents within your account with other dropbox users. Dropbox offers you 2GB of free space. Additionally there are different payed packages to increase your space. When you register via my Dropbox link you get an additional 250 MB for your account (and so do I).
Windows unter Linux, oder Adios, Dualboot
Virtualbox is a nice little program. It allows you to use from within your main operating system (for me this would be Ubuntu) other operating systems (like Windows, Mac OS, etc.).
My notebook Fujitus-Siemens Amilo si1520 came with a Windows Vista Home Premium licence. I hardly use it. Most programs I need run under Ubuntu (or I could a decent equivalent). So I hardly boot Windows, but it is still occupying 20 Gigabyte of my hard disk. I have hardly anything installed so I am wondering why it needs 20 Gigabyte, but this is an other story, I guess.
However, I had installed Virtualbox installed quite a while ago, but I did not really get how to install Windows (I tried to use my dualboot windows, which did not work).
No I thought I'd give it another try. So I took my Vista recovery DVD and installed it within Virtualbox. The process was quite straight forward. I had to create a virtual hard disk first, then could install Vista and it runs. With the older version from the Ubuntu repositories I had some trouble with the network. I found the blog of Jan Beier, who had similar problems with using the network in Virtualbox. He gave me the tip to install the newest version from the Virtualbox website. And now it works smoothly. However, the network seems pretty slow to me. I will see if I will find a fix for that too.
I might soon be able to format the partition on my hard disk where Windows Vista is installed and free some 20GB of space. Nice!
Wordpress Plugin: Automatic Upgrade
I like Wordpress. It is free, simple and has loads of usefull plugins and nice themes.
What was always quite annoying was the upgrade process. An annoying upgrade process leads to the problem that one might not immediately upgrade to a new version, which can make the installations insecure.
Then Wordpress added a feature to easily upgrade plug-ins, which was an important step ahead. But upgrading the blogging software itself was still annoying.