Linux

OK, today I tried to open the final version of the manuscript for Cell & Tissue Research. My boss sent it to me as an e-mail attachment some 2 weeks ago. I use Mozilla Mail and saved the attachment. Open Office didn't manage to open it. Obviously my boss uses still Macintosh binhex encoding to attach files to his e-mail instead of MIME to make himself as incompatible to the rest of the world as possible. There is luckily the command line utility hexbin in Linux, which converts the binhexed file into some readable stuff:

hexbin -3 Lymphangio_review_CTR.doc

There are only a few Mac or Windows programs that don't have a good equivalent on Linux. One of these few is the Gene Construction Kit (GCK) from Textco. GCK is available for both Windows and Mac. So it should be possible to run it on an i86-Linux machine using wine (a sort of emulator). I tried that and failed (I didn't try really hard). However, probably any Windows program can be run under Linux using VMware. Unfortunately VMware is commerical and expensive (but there is a fully functional time-limited demo).

I read that Windows XP has a "new" feature that lets users hot-swap their desktops. Instead of logging out, a user can put his session into the background and another user can log in. This is of course very useful if you are downloading large files or running services and you don't want to interrupt the process. If figured out that Linux is able to do the same already for years: