Maybe you have already tried Appcelerator’s Titanium. If not, you should have. It’s a very easy to use RAD framework for creating cross-platform desktop and mobile applications based on HTML, Javascript, PHP, Python and Ruby. However, I was having a grave issue lately with their desktop builds. No matter what, I could not build the Windows installation package of my applications. Appcelerator’s documentation on manually packaging applications is sketchy and outdated. So I did what any self-respecting hacker (in the good sense, i.e. geeky developer with a strong aspiration to solving complex problems) would. I figured out a solution myself and documented everything in the process.

Sometimes, despite how advanced desktop GNU/Linux has become, it's desirable to have your computer able to boot into Windows without the use of an emulator. If you had Windows pre-installed on the computer at the time you installed GNU/Linux, this dual-booting ability is added automatically on all modern distributions. However, if you want to install Windows after Linux, this seems like a complete headache. Not really! The process is easy.

This article is written while installing Windows 7 Beta on a PC with Mandriva Linux 2009 already installed. Of course, the same procedure – with some minor adjustments – applies with any Linux distribution and any Windows version!

More than a year after their initial launch, Windows Vista - despite Microsoft's efforts to convince us otherwise - are yet another failure OS. Such a claim might sound propostruous, but let's talk some numbers here, shall we? I use Google Analytics on three sites of my sites. JoomlaPack.net (targetting techies and web developers) shows that 85% of the visitors use Windows, with the XP to Vista ratio being 3:1. The Association for Adult Education (with a wide target group, mostly on the lower end of tech-savviness) shows a whopping 96% of visitors using Windows, with the XP to Vista ratio being 4:1! Finally, this site displays the same ratios as JoomlaPack.net.

With a vastly different blend of target groups (and a very big sample of thousands upon thousands of visitors), it is quite clear that the XP installations outnumber the Vista installations by a disproportionate amount. But, then again, why is that?