Author: Bobby Rockers

Wisdom

Quotes for the day:

In seeking wisdom thou art wise; in imagining that thou hast attained it – thou art a fool.
— The Talmud

Wisdom is ofttimes nearer when we stoop than when we soar.
— William Wordsworth

Matrix Theory

Warning to all… this link could easily be one of the biggest movie spoilers in history.  Its a current working theory of how the Matrix trilogy works out in the end.  Read the entire thing (if you decide you want to…) there are some additional comments made by contributers that really fill out the whole theory.

The article is devastatingly interesting, and entirely possible.  Just how dramatic are the Wachowski brothers? We shale have to wait and see.

Justice and Censorship

Couple quotes for the day:

No man is above the law and no man is below it: nor do we ask any man’s permission when we ask him to obey it.
— Theodore Roosevelt
I am mortified to be told that, in the United States of America, the sale of a book can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry too.
— Thomas Jefferson

I am spending more time looking at the words of our founding fathers lately. 

More on HL2

My brother sent me this link.  It goes into greater detail about the theft of Half Life 2 from Valve.  Sounds like it was a well executed attack.  Its fairly simple to secure yourself against virus and worm attacks… its a whole other issue when you have to protect your systems from a intentional, highly focus, methodical, intelligent attacks.  Has anyone actually gotten their hands on a working copy of the code yet?

Thanks for the heads up Adam.

kdialog –msgbox “Check this out.”

So KDE is easily the best GUI for *nix type OSes… but how useful is it really for command line application usage?  Funny you should ask.  This developer.kde.org tutorial covers kdialog; a command-line driven script-able window generation tool for KDE. Good tutorial with some great examples.  Just perfect for the new programmer or the system admin.

Get KDE to COMDEX

COMDEX is the largest technology conference in the world.  Its held each year in Los Vegas as an opportunity to show off the latest and greatest in the technology world.  O’Reilly’s (the book publisher) has made a agreement with COMDEX to sponsor 6 open source project, with display space, on the exhibit floor (where no Open Source project  has been  before.)

Go to Oreillynet.com to vote.  You can vote once a day so make it part of your daily routine.  And be sure to check KDE as one of your three projects.

Planet Linux

Wired is running a 6 page article on Linus Torvalds; the creator of the Linux operating system.  Its nice to see such a level headed person running the helm of Linux development (instead of a  greedy, self-indulged, fanatic.)

In an interesting side note Larry McVoy (the founder of BitKeeper, the version control and configuration management system used in the Linux kernel development) posted a rundown of Linux kernel activity.  The quick rundown is that the Linux kernel developers have averaged 179 changesets per day; 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  Thats about 65,337 changesets this year alone!  That number does not even include the sizable group of developers who choose not to use BitKeeper (for ideological reasons; i.e. see fanatics above.)  That rate of development may qualify the Linux kernel as the most actively developed software project on the face of the earth, commercial or otherwise.

Recipe BasKet?

Couple of interesting KDE applications that I plan on making RPMs for.  Krecipes is a recipe application that includes database look-up based on diets, calories, vitamins etc.. and does things like print shopping lists, calculate daily caloric intake, and give daily food suggestions based on diet type.

BasKet is akin to a tabular scratch pad that lets you drag and drop links, text, images, sounds, etc.. and do things like sort, arrange, and group them.  My first request for BasKet will be a search function.