At work, we often look for the best tools that will help us deal with the information we have to analyze. Sometimes we have brainstorming meetings that make things either confusing or clearer. Either way we get tons of information that we have to process and sometimes we need concept maps and mindmaps to make it better.

Enter, Xmind, a collaboration tool and mind mapping software. It has different templates that will help you analyze and/or present information better. The interesting thing about this tool is that there is Xmind for Eclipse users so the software developers I work with can easily view it on their favorite IDE.

Xmind. Image Credit: Clair Ching, 2009.

Xmind lets you create a topic and its subtopics. You usually start with a new page with a new topic and then when you right click it, you will find the various options available for you like adding subtopics and other topics. You could even add new notes to the items you’ve written already.

Xmind’s workspace is reminiscent of Eclipse. It has panels that help you with defining its properties, as well as view the outline you’ve created. For the properties, you could define the background color for the entire map. You could also define the colors of the rounded rectangle. You could change the font face you are using too.

Another nifty thing about Xmind is that there are a lot of markers that help you point out which are pending tasks, done, or should be flagged. You could even add smileys to the items on your mindmap. This would make it more graphical and help you remember better or would help you communicate your topics better to your colleagues and/or friends.

There are free downloads which are available as a plugin for Eclipse, installer on Ubuntu or portable version that does not require you to install it.

Thanks to Tech Source From Bohol, I learned more Twitter Desktop Clients for Linux. I don’t use Twitter as often as I used to but it’s nifty to have a Linux desktop client when you’re always following people. The clients I learned about today:

• Tweetdeck
  
  Interestingly enough this seems to have a lot of nifty features. One of them is creating groups of people to follow, manage conversations with @ replies and direct messages, manage multiple Twitter accounts, view photo thumbnails from Tweetdeck, avoiding Twitter spam via the Spam button.
• Twhirl
  
  This runs on Adobe Air. You could find it easier to use this to connect to your Twitter, laconi.ca, Friendfeed and Seesmic accounts plus cross-post your updates via ping.fm to boot. This also allows searching of tweets via Twitter Search and Tweet Scan.
• Choqok
  
  Choqok is the KDE microblogging client and it currently supports laconi.ca and twitter. It supports multiple accounts too. One nice thing for those who prefer keyboard shortcuts to launch this: Ctrl + Meta + T does the trick.

I’m more of a GNOME user so I might have not been posting much KDE apps here but I am glad that this blog entry pointed out one KDE app for Twitter. I wouldn’t know about it if not for this. It seems that Choqok is still relatively new so it looks like interesting to follow if you’re a KDE user.
May you find a good Twitter client for you to use!

If you like learning the Japanese language then dictionary applications are essential for you. There is another application I just recently knew about: gWaei. You could choose the dictionaries to use for it. Basically you could have several dictionaries that are being used by this application. You have to add your preferred dictionaries first.

Available dictionaries:
English - Japanese dictionary
Kanji dictionary
Names dictionary
Radicals

All of these are from Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC. By default, you could install them if you want. Otherwise you might need to tell gWaei where else to get the dictionaries.

Searching for words is easy because below the toolbar is the search box. If you’re looking for words, you could type it in romaji or kanji. If you want to search for kanji, you must use the kanji pad. It lets you draw the kanji and the closest matches will be on the right side of the kanji pad. Just select the matching character then it will search for the various instances of that character in kanji. Even its presence as a radical will be shown to you too.

If you are looking for a word and you type it in english or romaji you could see the meaning of the Japanese word and what kind of verb it is. Other uses will also show up in the results so if you’re wondering about it then at least you get a better idea. So if you only know a part of the word such as “tabe” there will be a lot of relevant results, trying to match it with your query.

This application looks nifty. I might recommend it to some of my friends who read manga a lot.

Ever tried using Blam! - the RSS reader? For some reason, it can’t seem to fetch some of the feeds I’ve added. How could I use this as a feed reader, right? It is essential that I get the feeds I’ve added. Oh well, could it be the internet connection? The server of the blogs I wanted to read? So much investigation needs to be done for later!

But for the feeds that it was able to fetch, Blam! was ok. I see the news immediately and it was readable. The layout was neat too. You just see the titles on the upper part of the main pane first and when you click that, the news will appear on the lower part of the main pane. If the feed of the blog you’re following is only showing summaries then you could click the “Show in browser” link at the bottom of the news. It will show you the complete blog entry on your browser. You could also start commenting on the blog entry, if you’d like to interact with the blogger.

To add a new feed, it’s as simple as going to the “Channel” menu and click “Add new channel” and you will see a dialog box prompting you to add the URL and the username and password — which are, more often than not, unnecessary. The keyboard shortcut for this is “Ctrl-N”. Blam! also supports importing and exporting of OPML files.

This is a straightforward feed reader. If you want your graphics and stuff right away, this might be a good option for you if you don’t have fancy shmancy needs.

I’ve been having some difficulty using Pidgin these past how many days so I was looking for another messenger client to check out. Incidentally I stumbled upon a blog entry about CenterIM, a messenger client for the command line/terminal. Knowing that it’s available in the repositories made me get it right away.

Centerim

Pros:

• CenterIM consumes barely 1% of my memory. I am running it on an Acer Aspire One 150Bb with 1GB of RAM.
• Several IM protocols are supported: Jabber, Yahoo, MSN, AIM, LiveJournal. It also has an RSS Reader.
• You can have several conversations at the same time.
• The screen shows the keyboard shortcuts that help you navigate through the application.
• By default, the sound is on so you could hear the ‘ping’ sound when you receive a message.

Cons:

It’s interesting actually. So if you’re looking for a way to chat while you’re on the command line and you don’t want to use an IRC client connecting to a Bitlbee server, then CenterIM is more of a good fit for your needs.

To learn more about CenterIM, here’s the CenterIM website.

It’s not easy trying to remember the different time differences you have with other people you need to interact with. Thank goodness for tools that make life easier for us.

1. GNOME Panel clock applet
For GNOME desktop users, the panel has a date applet and if you click it, you will view the calendar and a world map. If you edit the locations available for your viewing you can set as many as you need and you will see the time on their part of the world along the name of their city/locale.

2. gworldclock
This is something you could install to have a simple list of the timezones you need to track. It’s not built into a panel applet. It is an application which will be launched on your desktop. There are no fancy maps and colors, just a straightforward list.

There are other applets you might want to try, depending on which desktop environment or window manager you are using. I think that you could use these anyway but if you want something that blends with the overall look and feel of your desktop, try looking around first.
For now, at least I can make sure that I am going to be on time for the voice chat I am anticipating today.

Fedora 9 has the following features:

• FreeIPA - for managing identities and authentication
• support for resizing ext2, ext3 and NTFS partitions during install
• support for creating and installing to encrypted file systems
• unified installer of packages via PackageKit

Desktop environments such as GNOME 2.22 and KDE4 are available so you could choose either.

I guess that for people who are dual-booting or have other types of file systems on other partitions the best thing in the release is the ability to resize partitions. I’ve encountered people who have had difficulties resizing the partitions on their hard drives and so they have to boot into the other OS in order to do some resizing.

Admins will have even better ways of managing users with FreeIPA — single sign-on for many services is said to be a feature and I’d probably mention that to our sys ads. Single sign-on would be beneficial for users. It’s such a pain sometimes to keep logging on the various services which we are using.

Get your copy of Fedora 9 so you could start fiddling around with it and let us know how it goes! (I am sorry but I am loyal to Debian and Ubuntu… but still! I can’t help but be curious about other Linuxen.)

Looking for a way to surf the ‘net on the terminal? Use w3m!

I’ve used w3m time and again because it’s quaint that way. I usually use it as an Emacs macro/extension. It’s nice! I could read webpages while in Emacs, aside from the terminal.

You could look it in Synaptic if you’re using Ubuntu. You could also check it in apt. Or your package manager.

There are really nifty commands from the w3m manual:
w3m [options] [filename|URL] -s — this one is for displaying pages in shift JIS so if you’re viewing a Japanese page, chances are you’d find this good as an option
w3m -T text/plain [filename|URL] — if you want to get the source HTML.

Who says you can’t do anything from the command line when there are so many tools you could use?

Have you been finding it a hassle to open docx files from your co-workers and/or clients? Ubuntu Geek helps us with this: Use the ODF Converter!

There’s a .deb package which you could download and install on your Debian-powered machines. Also, there’s an RPM file for SUSE.

Though the Novell RPM file is said to only work with the latest Novell version of OpenOffice.org, you might as well give it a try. The blog post on Ubuntu Tip also gave a way for Slackware users to convert from rpm to a Slackware tgz file:

Use alien to convert it to a Slackware tgz file:

fakeroot alien -ct odf-converter-1.0.0-5.i586.rpm

Unpack the slackware tgz file:

tar xzf odf-converter-1.0.0.tgz

Copy three files into your OpenOffice.org directories — note that the usr that you’re copying from is a directory that was inside the tgz file.

sudo cp usr/lib/ooo-2.0/program/OdfConverter /usr/lib/openoffice/program/

sudo cp usr/lib/ooo-2.0/share/registry/modules/org/openoffice/TypeDetection/Filter/MOOXFilter_cpp.xcu /usr/lib/openoffice/share/registry/modules/org/openoffice/TypeDetection/Filter/

sudo cp usr/lib/ooo-2.0/share/registry/modules/org/openoffice/TypeDetection/Types/MOOXTypeDetection.xcu /usr/lib/openoffice/share/registry/modules/org/openoffice/TypeDetection/Types/

Restart OpenOffice.org and start opening those shared docx files
Thanks to Productive Linux for the link to Ubuntu Geek!

The GIMP is usually installed as the graphics editing tool in Linux distributions. You might be looking for ways to use it and you might have tried it already and thought it felt really weird. It’s because it’s different from the default graphics app in Windows which is Paint. It has more features than Paint.

• gimp-tutorials.com - A website which compiles various tutorials (shown in a frame within the page) which could help you create borders around your images or create a header image for your blog.
• Gimpology - The site is like Gimp-tutorials but it doesn’t show the tutorial on the page itself but it gives the link to the original site. You could submit your tutorials and you just need to sign up in order for you to do that. Two tutorials I skimmed and found interesting are: on GIMP hotkeys and how to add radiance to photos of people.
• Gimp Talk - The forum has a section for tutorials. Check it out.
• Gimp User Group - Another forum with tutorials. There are even thumbnails on the index so that you know what kind of effects you could add to images.
• gimp-tutorials.net - If you’re more interested in brushes and filters, you might want to check this out. Another lovely thing about this site is the downloads section if you want more scripts and gradients.

Other essential references:

• Gimp tutorials on tigert.com
• Grokking the GIMP
• Touring the GIMP

Itching to try out the tutorials? Run GIMP and have fun!