I usually try to avoid talking about politics here really because I don’t want this to be a political blog. I am going to make an exception right now to talk about a concept. I’m going to try to stay out of the party/candidate discussion, but just want to make a question on this idea. I’ve been bothered though the last few weeks about some things I’ve heard said that no one, NO one I’m hearing on EITHER side disputing. It bothers me because I think it runs contrary to just WHAT we should be voting for and what elections are about. Now, I’m trying to make this discussion not about one candidate or the other, but to the concept behind this argument.
Month: October 2008
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Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex released today | ubuntu not yet profitable
The newest release in the Ubuntu Linux series has escaped into the wild today. If you recall the last Ubuntu release was a long term support release and this one is intended to be a bit more “edgy” or in this case “intrepid”. Download from Ubuntu, or read a review from linux format. It has, of course, the newest releases of the major desktop packages as well as improved networking support. They are trying to focus on making mobile connectivity even better in this release. There is new artwork as well. There is a new mobile USB install option which is a download image that can be written to a USB drive for installing on the netbook class of machines. Judging from Linux Format’s review it’s looking like a solid release.
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Free Codeweavers Wine today Only
This is for Mac or Linux. Their servers are VERY busy right now as you might imagine. But, if you’ve always wondered about crossover wine, see if you can get a copy today at Codeweavers main site. I was redirected to their DOWN page which is a lean page with the download links and a place to sign up for a license key. The license key you can register by the end of the month. Right now their server is crying since they’ve been dugg and slashdot’ted at the same time, but I’m sure it will be possible to slip in sometime today for a free copy of their polished product.
On a side note, I’ve been a paying crossover license owner for some time although on my current main laptop I’ve been using stock wine with VERY good results. If you look “up the food chain” though. Many of the good results we get in the free stock wine is thanks to the work at codeweavers. So…. in spite of todays free offer, they deserve the communities support if you believe that a working Windows compatibility layer is important to the future of operating systems such as Linux.
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Strange Outage
We’re back up after a very strange outage. The 500 internal server error was because our .htaccess file was sideways.
What I mean by sideways is that part of a line had been truncated which led to an incorrect htaccess rule and all sorts of error pages thrown up.
Interestingly the only thing happening prior to the first errors was a page edit here in WordPress. I updated my dd-wrt page last night right before the errors started getting tossed up. Is it possible that wordpress 2.6.3 stomped on my htaccess??? Don’t know, but we’re back up now.
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Hack a day
I’ve just discovered hackaday.com. For those of you interested in electronics, computers, engineering/etc….. you’ll probably find something interesting to read over there. Each day they will publish a hack from around the web, once a week though they present a video how to. Their most recent video how to at the time of this writing was a webserver the size of a business card.
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Firefox Plugins that are sure to Make Webmasters Hate You
I’ve run across this a few places, where a webmaster actually BEGS users NOT to use a firefox plugin or addon when visiting their site. So, I thought it might be interesting to compile a list of those plugins that will have webmasters really disliking you, hating you, banning your ip because of abuse and otherwise marking you off their Christmas Card list.
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Out of Cycle Windows Update – Patch Today
Yesterday news broke of an out of cycle security patch for Windows. The bulletin is available from Microsoft. Apparently the vulnerability was in the Windows Server service (XP, 2003, 2000, 2008, Vista ALL affected though regardless of server/workstation/client/desktop/etc…). The RPC handling (remote procedure call) is the achilles heel this time around. It sounds as though as many as 100 instances of this flaw being exploited had been seen in the wild, but use was increasing which prompted the out of cycle release. This is the kind of vulnerability that could be exploited by a worm that could give rise to a worm reminiscent of the Blaster Worm. (Worms are self-replicating viruses that spread over networks without user intervention.)
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Filtering out Ads with a Proxy using SafeSquid Proxy Server
I just ran across this good how-to on replacing ads using a proxy server (in this case safesquid). A proxy server is a piece of software that requests web pages for other machines and then passes the pages along to the other computers. When the server requests a page it’s possible to make alterations and this is exactly what the how to details. In this case they construct a rule to identify ad blocks in the page (by the text that they use to call the ad from the adserver). After the block is identified it’s replaced with a custom bit of html.
Good how-to and I wanted to make note of it for future reference.
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Is 10:04PM the most creative time of day?
The telegraph brings us this survey which claims that 10:04 PM is the most creative time of day. To contrast that 4:33PM is the least creative time. It’s not clear HOW exactly the survey was conducted, but apparently I would be among the 25% of people that burn the midnight oil working on their ideas… What I find more interesting is that most people lose their creative ideas by failing to write them down!!! (Carry a small notebook with you, you’ll be glad to have it.)
Interestingly I’m writing this as we’re approaching 10:04PM local time!! So, what do you think – what is the most creative time of day? (Comments are Open
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Jungledisk – online backup solution
How many online backup solutions ARE there now? Anyway I’ve seen another cross platform solution in JungleDisk. It’s available for Windows/Mac and Linux and uses Amazon.com’s storage as a backend. The software itself is free you just pay for the storage you make use of. (15 cents per GB using Amazon’s S3 service.)