If you've ever needed to stick several PDFs together into one document (maybe your scanner software makes one-page PDFs when you scan to that format), my old friend and one-time coauthor Brian has an answer for you: PDF Append 2003.

I guess he wrote it in 2003 but wrote about it yesterday?

I thought this was a joke at first, but it appears that Adobe really is buying competitor Macromedia.

Veritas is trying mightily to unseat Microsoft as my least-favorite software company. I do believe Backup Exec to be the worst piece of software of any kind on the market. In fact, babysitting Backup Exec is the reason I haven't been around much.

I'm looking to version 10 for some relief (and the much-needed 1.0 quality that Microsoft usually delivers around version 3--when Veritas will deliver it probably is an interesting Calculus problem).

I find myself having to make fill patterns in Gimp every so often and always having to look up the trick.

Here's how to use Gimp to make tileable fill patterns, which you can either use inside Gimp, inside other programs, or as web backgrounds.

Paint.NET got Slashdotted today (here's a list of mirrors ) and instantly it was hailed as the killer of Gimp, Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, and probably every other graphics program ever made.

Of course I had to try it out immediately.

Even if you aren't really a Linux person, the live CD Linux distribution Knoppix is incredibly useful. If nothing else, you can use it to replace Ghost, Partition Magic, and Nero or EZ CD Creator. That's $100 worth of utilities for the cost of a download, or, if you don't have broadband, for $5-$10 from a Linux distributor.

The disk defragmenter that Microsoft includes with Windows 2000 and XP really stinks up the place.

I've been playing with an alternative.

My girlfriend was asking me about graphics software today. She'd been trying to use Paint Shop Pro as an inexpensive alternative to Adobe Illustrator and, predictably, was disappointed.

The GPL alternatives to Illustrator still lack at least one crucial feature (bitmap pattern fills) but I remembered reading about Serif DrawPlus.

Big surprise, huh? Seeing as I've been running it since the very first version, back when it was called Firebird, and the version number was probably 0.1.

And I really liked 1.0PR, so it was a given that I'd like 1.0. So there's no big difference, right?

I'm not so sure about that.

So I wait. Now I know what it was like to stand in line waiting to buy Windows 95. Wait. No I don't. I'm actually standing in line waiting to get something good.