Rather than splashing out on MS Office, spending on other software packages and website memberships, what are the free alternatives? It might surprise you how much you can get for free (legally!).

This is a free alternative to Microsoft Office available on PC and Mac. It includes alternatives to Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint. It is absolutely free, developed by a community of developers offering their time without charge. It’s compatible with MS Office, so if somebody sends you a document you won’t have a problem opening it.

Go to the OpenOffice website

Rather than make calls over the phone, Skype allows you to place calls to other Skype users for free, or to landlines and mobiles for a small charge.
Go to the Skype website

As well as being free, the beauty of Google Docs is that your documents are stored online, so they’re available wherever you can access the internet from.
Go to the Google Docs website

This is a collection of free textbooks that anyone can edit. It’s a wiki so expect similarities to Includes the World History Project.
Click here to go to WikiBooks

Includes literary analysis of many classic novels. The site is a bit confusing to navigate, but does have excellent content.
Go to Novelguide.com

Not a content provider in itself, but a useful starting point for searching with Google, Wikipedia, a dictionary as well as unit conversion tools and translation facilities.
Go to the Schoolr website

Useful website for finding the online degrees available in your country.
Go to the Study2U website

This is a great tool designed to help students organise their studies and take notes during school. It’s designed to make note-taking during lectures as easy as possible.
Go to the Notely website

Price comparison website for books. Bookfinder searches both new, used and rare. Boasts the capability to search 150 million books.
Go to bookfinder.com

No list on educational resources would be complete without this fantastic (yet contraversial) encyclopaedia.
Go to Wikipedia

A great idea for a site. Live Mocha is a social networking site where you can help others speak your native tongue, whilst at the same time learn another language from other users.
Go to the Live Mocha website

Algorithm

Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī

We know that algorithm was originally a mathematical and linguistics term. It dates back to the 9th century AD and a mistake in interpreting Hindu to Latin – Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī wrote a piece on calculations with Hindu numerals in 825 AD, and when it was translated to Latin in the twelfth century, the translator used “Algoritmi” as the authors name, so the title was (approximate English translation) “Algoritmi on the numbers of the Indians”. So essentially the title was misunderstood, and “algoritmi” eventually “algorithm”. Here’s Muhammad on the right. He was a very serious looking fella with the bags under his eyes

ASP

The MS language started off at Aspect Software Engineering. They’d completed dbWeb, which was a commercial failure. Although Microsoft stepped in and bought ASE as they were creating i-Basic (dbWeb’s successor). MS then renamed it to ASP.

Boot

Baron Münchhausen

Short for bootstrap, it literally comes from the term ‘to pull one up by one’s bootstraps’. That particular term has been traced back to The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen by Rudolf Erich Raspe, who lived in Germany during the 18th century. He was a librarian, but considered a rogue by his biographer, so supposedly a librarian you could sit next to at a dinner party. The reference to bootstraps stems from a story where the Baron escapes a swamp by pulling himself up by his bootstraps. The Baron was a real person, known for telling tall tales about his adventures (other feats include riding a cannonball and visiting the moon). The psychological disease Munchausen Syndrome is named after him, in which sufferers are driven to pretend to have an illness when they really don’t.

Bug/Debug

Thomas Edison first used the word ‘bug’ in a letter to Theodore Puskas in 1878.

“It has been just so in all my inventions. The first step is an intuition–and comes with a burst, then difficulties arise. This thing gives out and then that–”Bugs”–as such little faults and difficulties are called–show themselves”.

The word ‘debug’ was first used in the Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society in 1945, and wasn’t used in computing until the mid-1950s.

C

C is so-named because its design was influenced by B, a language that died out in the ’90s. A relatively new language called D was influenced by C (as well as C++ and C#).

C++

Originally called ‘C with Classes’ (it was first developed as an extension for C). When it became a commercial language (in about 1983) it was renamed to C++, as “the name signifies the evolutionary nature of the changes from C”. The ++ is a tongue-in-cheek reference to C’s ‘++’ used to increment the value of a variable.

C#

Originally called Project Cool (C like Object Orientated Language), Microsoft wanted to keep the name, but changed their mind to name it C#. The ‘#’ is musically inspired, ‘C sharp’ being a semi-tone above C.

ColdFusion

Initially called Cold Fusion before becoming ColdFusion (one word instead of two), possibly for trademark reasons. The first version was created by JJ Allaire of Allaire Corp. and couldn’t do much more than access a database. Allaire Corporation were bought by Macromedia in 2001 who were in turn bought by Adobe a few years later.

CSS

Originally called CHSS (Cascading HTML Style Sheets), the ‘H’ was soon dropped as stylesheets could be used by other markup languages other than HTML.

EMACS

Based on the simple WYSIWYG editor called ‘E’ used in the Stanford AI lab in the early ’70s, EMACS stands for E with MACroS.

Erlang

Agner Krarup Erlang

Developed by Ericsson, You might think that Erlang is short for ‘Ericsson Language’, although it’s actually a reference to A. K. Erlang, a Danish engineer, mathematician and all-round bright guy. Although the guys at Ericsson admit that the double-meaning wasn’t a coincidence.

Flash

Originally called FutureSplash, it was created by a small company called FutureWave, a four-man company in San Diego who wanted to compete with Macromedia’s bloated ShockWave plugin. Having none of that nonsense Macromedia bought out FutureWave and went on to develop it into Flash.

Hypertext (as in HTTP and HTML)

Ted Nelson

Hyper is a greek word that means to overcome the traditional constraints of written text. Ted Nelson came up with the word, as well as hypermedia. He got a bit pissed when people started saying ‘interactive multimedia’ instead of hypermedia, not able to understand why anyone would want to use so many more syllables.

Java

Originally called Oak (Java’s creator, James Gosling had an oak tree outside his office window and didn’t really have much imagination). It was renamed to Green (guess he was still staring at the tree) before finally being renamed to Java from a list of random words.

JavaScript

Originally called Mocha, then renamed to LiveScript before settling on the current name of JavaScript. As you’ll probably know it has nothing to do with Java. Some believe its name was a marketing ploy by Netscape to ride the coattails of Sun’s Java, which was gaining some serious popularity at the time (around 1995).

JPEG

Developed by and named after the Joint Photographic Experts Group.

MPEG

Stands for Moving Picture Expert Group, who are an ISO Working Group. You can check out the official MPEG website here, although I have to warn you – it’s not pretty.

Perl

Originally it was called Pearl, after the Parable of the Pearl in the Gospel of Matthew. Although it was renamed when its creator, Larry Wall, realised a language called PEARL already existed.

PhotoShop

Thomas Knoll's 'Display'

Originally named ‘Display’ when it was a small project for the Macintosh Plus back at the University of Michigan in ‘87. A PhD student called Thomas Knoll was the developer behind the project. When his brother saw the potential in Display, they put six months aside to create ‘ImagePro’. They then changed their minds on the name again and renamed it PhotoShop when it was packaged along with a slide scanner.

PHP

Stood for ‘Personal Homepage’ in its inception in 1993, until version 3 in 1997 when it became known as a recursive initialism, PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.

PuTTy

There’s no actual reason for the name, although TTy is the common Unix abbreviation for a terminal.

Python

Nothing to do with the snake, it’s actually named after Monty Python’s Flying Circus. There aren’t any similarities between Python and the BBC comedy, it just so happens that Guido van Rossum was reading the scripts from Monty Python when he was creating this language.

Ruby

In Ruby’s case the name was chosen before any code was written. In a choice between the names Ruby and Coral, Yukihiro Matsumoto opted for Ruby because it was the birthstone of one of his colleagues.

Spam

Another Monty Python reference. Some suggest it’s an acronym for ‘Shit Posing As Mail’ or ‘Stupid Pointless Annoying Messages’, although the accepted version is that the name is based on a Monty Python sketch about SPAM being the main ingredient in every dish offered in a cafe. Here’s that clip:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anwy2MPT5RE

The luncheon meat called SPAM is always spelt in uppercase. The makers of SPAM have never complained about the potential infringement on their trademark, as long as unsolicited emails are refered to as ’spam’ in lowercase only.

Wiki

A popular misconception is that wiki is an acronym for ‘What I Know Is’. Although I’ve since learnt that’s a backronym. It’s actually based on the Hawaiian word for ‘fast’.

XML

The eXtensible Markup Language could have been named MAGMA (Minimal Architecture for Generalized Markup Applications), MGML (Minimal Generalized Markup Language) or SLIM (Structured Language for Internet Markup). XML was designed by a W3C Working Group of eleven members who never actually met face-to-face.

I use a budget web hosting company for a website that collects data that’s important to me. I don’t want to rely on the hosting company to maintain this by themselves, as I’ve been burnt this way before. I also don’t want to pay for a further hosting solution to look after my backups either.

The code below will get a sql dump of a MySQL database and email it to any address. The SQL will be the body of the email – we’re not going to try and attach it as a separate file or anything too clever.

mysqldump -h DB-SERVER -u DB-USERNAME –password=”DB-PASSWORD” DB-NAME | mail -s mysqlExport EMAIL-ADDRESS

I’ve installed this on two machines – one uses Plesk so installation was simply pasting in the command as a new automated (or scheduled) task. The other allowed me to create my own Crontabs, so I puttied into the web server and typed ‘crontab -e’ and added the new task to run every day.

In Gmail, after I was happy everything was working I set up a filter to delete the email from the server the minute it arrived. This way my database didn’t eat away at my mailbox size. Since mail is kept in my trash folder for 30 days, that’s 30 days of backups I can access whenever I need to.

Update 04/11/08
Thanks sxeraverx for pointing out that this is only suitable for smaller databases. I forgot to mention that – please only use this method on databases small enough so that creating the SQL dump file won’t be too big for your email application to accept.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oX5OVu4OP8Q

Google has a monopoly that has not shifted in spite of the money Microsoft and others have pumped into creating their own rival search engines. Cuil came from nowhere. It has some innovative ideas such as being black and displaying results in a number of columns across the page. It also implements suggestive text (something that Google offers as Google Suggest, but this is not a default feature on it’s main search page).

For a moment ignoring the accuracy of Cuil’s results, the features that make it different haven’t exactly been heralded as ground-breaking. There was a ‘black’ Google around some time last year, which was an environmentally-aware site that argued in displaying a while screen, your monitor used more electricity: so a black screen uses less power, thus saving the planet’s resources given the number of people who would usually display the white Google pages. People soon realised this was a false argument, and ended up forgetting about the whole thing.

I really don’t like the results in columns.  It’s not how I look at information. I can see that by doing this, Cuil can display more results on the screen without the user having to scroll, but when I read listings, whether it be in a search engine results page or the classified ads in a newspaper I will read top-down. Cuil wants me to read along the page and then down. This makes information harder to see and is more work for the eyes.

Cuil is also missing the nice features Google has. If I search for ‘Time now in London’ on Google it will tell me immediately. The same as if I were to type ‘Weather in Sydney’ or any one of an array of searches Google regognises and answers without me having to leave the results page.

Although the most important part of the search engine is the accuracy of the results. Cuil seems to provide pretty accurate results on some occasions but has some spectacular failures. Most notably Cnet’s Buzz Out Loud Exec. Editor, Molly Wood searched for herself on Cuil to find that the photo attached to her biography in the results is of a completely unrelated woman who is a good thirty years her senior.

If I were to stop using Google today and force myself to use an alternative, Cuil would not be that alternative.

Today we have the same relationships with our brands, but some of the products they represent are intangible technology. Google is undoubtedly the prime example of this relationship. Much as you might ask for a Kleenex rather than a tissue, you will Google rather than search.

I’ve begun to question the reasons for my relationship with products like Google. Do I use Google for search, email, website tracking, RSS and my calendar because I believe the technology is the best or because  I want to conform?

I’ve been in meetings with other web-savvy types in the company I work for (in advertising) and when we talk of group calendars, SEO techniques,  IM solutions and such; Google is the solution. I have to admit it’s frustrating when people stick to what they think they know because the technology lives under a familiar brand. There’s lots of fantastic technology out there made by a vast community of talented and creative people. We should be trying to discover what we don’t know rather than stick to the beaten path.

To me, branded technology indicates an expected standard, not cutting edge innovation.

Personally I like SBS news, but sometimes it’s just nicer to spend an evening in front of Channel 9 News. Depends on my mood I guess.

I found this price breakdown for AP quotes on Techdirt’s article about the issue:

• 5-25 words: $ 12.50
• 26-50 words: $ 17.50
• 51-100 words: $ 25.00
• 101-250 words: $ 50.00
• 251 words and up: $ 100.00

So essentially I can quote four words from an AP article for free. I found an AP article about the issue that said, “The Associated Press, following…”

In all seriousness,  when it comes to copyright on the Internet the big players historically haven’t come off so well. Although at the same time I can see AP’s point. Their entire business model is syndicating their content to publishers, when publishers (in this case bloggers) use that content without paying the AP lose revenue.

Although a distinction should be made from fairly quoting and referencing content from plagiarism. I can’t see any harm in quoting, referencing and linking to an excellent resource that is relevant to a blog post I’m writing if it supports an argument I’m making. If, when bloggers look to quote an they then need to ensure that the copy was not written by an AP journalist, then I think the AP lose out more than anybody else.

Although some have put a positive spin on the issue. The AP are clearly considering their options. It would appear as if they’re thinking out loud (very loud) as to what the best policy is with regard to blogging. Essentially the way they intend to move forward with their relationship with bloggers seems undecided, yet the last few days could easily be seen as a bit of a rocky patch.

This article from CNET gives a good summary of what’s happening.

mysqldump -h DB-SERVER -u DB-USERNAME –password=”DB-PASSWORD” DB-NAME | mail -s mysqlExport EMAIL-ADDRESS

To use, replace the fields (in caps) with your database info and run in a crontab.