Vault

Passing along another couple links.  First I have made a small change to the site.  I have added a web tools sidebar filled with some useful web knowledge tools. They include two mailing list links; one too The mail Archive and the other too Geocrawler. All the links are wonderfully useful and commonly used by myself.

One of the most useful site I have found on the web is the wayback machine at archive.org. It is a search engine for websites that have been archived by archive.org.  If knowledge is power than archived knowledge must be battaries.

Holy crap!  I have found what has to be just dang near one of the most useful websites in history.  rpmpan combines two of the most used aspects of my development world.  RPM and Perl CPAN.  The dang thing is even apt aware!  God must freggin love me.

In additional news another great apt source that I found is jpackage. Jpackage is an apt repository for rpm based distro’s that works to keep copies of the mostly commonly sought after Java apts in one location.  Very very nice.  When they are up.

I am looking to take the RHCT in late September and as such have been keeping my eyes open for tutorials to study. 

One of the best links I found was RHCE 2 B an RHCE prep site with several useful tutorials. It looks like the best RHCE prep book available currently is this one, and although they are not RHCE tutorials; IBM has been running a series of tests for the LPI certification that seems to cover much of the same material.  I have copied the articles (in pdf form) locally:

• Linux fundamentals (77k pdf)
• Basic administration (126k pdf)
• Intermediate administration (128k pdf)
• Advanced administration (201k pdf)
• Compiling souces and managing packages (119k pdf)

This should keep me busy over the weekend.

Thursday afternoon humor.  Boy some of these are really funny.

Display technology is something that has become important to me as of late.  Here are some of the vendors selling LED and Diode based display options.

• http://www.polycomp.co.uk/home.htm
• http://www.timeomatic.com/
• http://www.electronicdisplays.com/
• http://www.gamma-tech.com/
• http://www.trans-lux.com/home.asp
• http://www.pace-setter.com/index.htm

Just posting the links here for future reference.

If you are not a programmer but still want to help out with KDE development there are lots of things you can do.  This tutorial is the first in a new series to do just that.  It teaches non-programmers how to add “What’s this” support where its lacking.  Just think about… submitting patches and updating applications just like a full blown programmer.  Its a great (and needed) way of becomming a KDE developer.

Ever wonder exactly what air brushing does to photos of models?  How does the before image compare the the after image?  How pretty do you really need to be to make it as a fashion model in an “air brush” world.  Check out this little eye opener and see.

MichNews.com is a conservative news and commentary website I found today.  I am generally socially liberal and economically conservative (with the exception of a few important issues.)  Found the site interesting enough to want to go back and read more articles.  With all of the liberal bias in the media it was nice to read some news articles that were slanted the other way.

This article does a good job of showing the current and future prospects for the desktop Linux market.  Wonder what PC’s will look like in 15 years?

…and SCO’s solution to it. For those of you who are not familiar with BBspot I strongly suggest you check it out.  If only that article were so far fetched.

Application developers on Linux have been looking with great interest at the upcoming Reiser4 file system developed by Hans Reiser.  Although there is a great number of currently supported file systems on Linux (some better than others, some better at other things than some…) Reiser goes along way in fixing one of the most persistent bugs in file system theory; that of handling small file efficiently.

A great article discussing some of the possibilities that become possible with the Reiser4 can be found  here.  The longer I work with computers the more I am convinced of the accuracy of *nix style OS development.  Microsoft seems to agree also; with recent moves to extend the command line, create a command line only server OS, change the way the system looks at data (that of all file/folders/devices/drivers being objects), etc.. etc.. etc..  Heck, given enough time and money Microsoft will invent…. Unix!

I love JEEPS!  Not those mambee-pambee YJ/TJ valley girl (“I use my 4wd to go over the really big speed bumps.”) Jeeps… no, no, no… I love CJ/MJ Jeeps.  I am currently in the market for a pre 1986 CJ7 in fairly good condition. Great place I found is Sport Utility Performance Center . Lots of good Jeeps! Real Jeeps.

For those who follow KDE development there is a GREAT page for analysis of the current KDE project here. Includes information concerning code, modules, commiters and does both statistic and graphic evaluation.

Working to get OO.org Database configuration working with MySQL using ODBC gave me a little bit of a headache.  I have decided to pass along the info I found and used. 

First is a two part article at LinuxWorld ( Part 1 & Part 2 ) which helped a whole bunch in getting ODBC and MySQL setup.  A HUGE help was the how-to by Mr. McCreesh referred to in both part1 and part 2; of which I have linked locally (pdf 1.5m) for everyones convenience.  Finally I last little bit-o-trouble was given to me by MyODBC and I found the solution on a groups.google.com post.

All of this was to do OpenOffice.org work with databases on forms in a post I made earlier.

Natively compiled Eclipse is a GTK compiled version of Eclipse that is much faster than the standard version. It also does a much better job of integrating itself into the system as a whole. The link above is for Redhat native RPMS of GTK Eclipse package.

linmagau.org has a great article on creating Open Office databases, forms, and reports. Its a common complaint that Linux does not have an MS Access equivalent… an argument that is entirely untrue.

US Newspapers – US Newspaper List is a great web resource that lists all(?) newspapers in the country by city and state. I have found it really useful to find the online version of other city’s classifieds.

Other useful information that is listed are Radio Stations, College News Papers, local TV stations, local Magazines, and Senators/Representatives (state and federal).