I've just been watching Survivors on iPlayer whilst rebuilding an unfortunate old PC that died of deathstaritis. It made me think about surviving the worst case scenarios, what tech would I want to survive a zombie apocalypse? What software should I keep several copies of? Is gentoo the answer? And then I found a worst of all worst case scenarios: What software is essential to survive the windows experience?

rdiff-backup is awesome. It's a POSIX backup tool providing a (possibly remote) mirror and an incremental difference history (should that be decremental history?) of the mirror.

BackupNinja (website currently down) is even better. It's a curses (ie text based) wizard for setting up a number of backup tools including rdiff-backup and mysqldump. It does all the fiddly bits like handling ssh keys and setting up cron jobs.

And so I Just booted into XP for the first time in about 2 months in order to take a better look at Office 2007. As soon as I've logged in, the Sun Java updater alerts me that a new version of Java is available and asks me whether I'd like to claim my free copy of Open Office.

EDIT:Moved screenshots beneath text so the interesting text isn't below the break

And I'm going to have to stop because the text insertion point is blinking like a strobe light and is making me feel ill.
Text highlighting is completely screwed and I can't even put it in the dreaded 'Emulate IE7' mopde without having to restart the bastard.

Brave for a beta tag methinks.
Of course there are a lot of translations of brave.

...is so retarded it feels like a step back from Vista. I can't remember the last time something went bloop or ding in KDE or Gnome and I couldn't work out waht it was. And I've had about 10 instances of that today. And randome things stealing focus when I'm typing. Grrrrr.

I guess it's one of those things that you either get used to, or abandon.

Several years ago I took it upon myself to bring my mother at least into the 90s. And now it's coming back to bite me. The current challenge is to find a laptop. A laptop for the sole purpose of Powerpoint. And we wander into the idiocy of consumer hardware and the complete failure of countless software engineers to adapt.

So my Gentoo install is driving me nuts. I suppose a stable system with all the software I need on it is too much to ask? I'm fed-up of the workarounds for a bug being 'get the latests version', which just happens to require a whole bunch of stuff keyworded as unstable. Worse still is the suggestion 'have you tried emerge -e world'. I'll just leave my computer recompiling itself for the next 2 weeks on the off chance it fixes an obscure KDE bug. It's not like I actually wanted to use my computer for anything else...

Ok, so maybe I've been using linux for far too long. It's so easy to get the software I want. I'm sorting out an Ubuntu box for a frined at the moment, and this page shows how easy it is to find all the multimedia codecs he could ever want.