BrianJarrett.com

Recently I’ve started making real use of portable applications running from my thumbdrive. There are a lot of portable apps available but I’ve also had to search for some of them. I thought I’d use this page to showcase the portable apps I use in hopes that it’ll make your search easier by organizing them all in one place.

Many of the portable apps I use on my thumbdrive come from PortableApps.com. They also have a really nice start menu that, once installed on your thumbdrive, will allow easy access to your portable apps. What’s also nice is that it’ll work with any .exe so it’s not restricted solely to apps from PortableApps.com. I have several apps I’ve downloaded from elsewhere but have easy access to via the PortableApps start menu.

These are the same apps I use on my home computer so I’m getting the same …read more »

As a rule I don’t use Internet Explorer; I use Firefox instead. The reasons for this are outside the scope of this article. I do, however, use IE for work-related stuff (it’s our company standard) when necessary and I use it when testing my website. One of the most annoying things about Internet Explorer is a nagging feature which reminds you that Microsoft feels your security setting are too lax. One of the main issues I have with this is that it appears to be all or nothing. If I let Microsoft choose my security settings then every damn time I try to open an image or zip file from a shared drive on my internal network I get a nag message forcing me to say “OK” before I open it. This is unacceptable since my internal network should be a trusted zone.

To get rid of the nag message every time I open a file from my network I …read more »

When Internet Explorer 7 came out a while back I first noticed that they’d finally gotten up to speed with many of the features Firefox had already introduced years ago. I still think IE sucks but that’s a personal opinion that I’ll save for another time. At least they finally decided to do a little work on this dog and try to keep it relevant.

It seems that Microsoft had now succeeded in keeping up with the Joneses …read more »

Well, well, well. It looks as if Microsoft has decided to finally move into the year 2001 and offer tabbed browsing, something Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, and others have been doing …read more »

Now that I’ve been trying to code CSS for both Internet Explorer and Firefox I now understand fully why Firefox is so much better than IE. IE is a piece of shit that Microsoft has no intention of fixing because 90% of the population uses it. Another example of monopolistic software quality decline. I finally decided after spending hours trying to work around bugs in the way Explorer handles CSS that it wasn’t worth …read more »