Category: Technology

Two quick links.  The first is an article from newtolinux.org.uk that looks like the beginnings of a “useful features for KDE that you didn’t know about” kind of faq.  They only have three articles up so far but it looks like the beginning of something wonderful.  The Second link was passed along by my old roommate/good friend/Counter Strike buddy Jason.  A nice addition to the the new anti-drug campaign.

tlc.com has a great article  titled “The Hakers Hall of Fame.”  And just an FYI, Woz is just a god to Maclots, not to the majority of the Hacker community.  They forgot a few very important people in my humble opinion:  John Carmack, Ronald Rivest, and Jon Johansen come to mind.

Check out some of the not-so-great moments in tech for 2003.  Some some classics you might remember of the Microsoft toilet, the swastika font, and RIAA shift key debacle.  Overall it was a good year for fools.  I am surprised that SCO did not make the list.

FedoraNEWS.ORG has a great intro to getting KDE 3.2 (released on Fed 2) installed on your current Fedora Core 1 machine. I am installing it as we speak on my laptop; just to try it out.

The SWIPE Toolkit is a list of web based tools to allow people to search their publicily available personal data. Things like the bar code on your credit card.

The Independent Qt Tutorial is a Linux QT tutorial maintained by e8johan. The strength of the KDE environment is based in large part to the power and flexibility of the QT toolkit. If you are a MFC, gtk+, or Cocoa developer you will be totally blown away by QT. Check out the tutorial for a good intro to QT for people who already have some C++ experience.

Found a freggin sweat how-to, via 2600, about warspying.  Evidently X10 video receivers (commonly used for security cameras and such) use the 802.11b protocal over 2.4ghz spectrum.  This shows you how to build your own receiver to see what those camera’s are seeing.

My boss passed along this link to me today.  Its a bash script that helps configure your iptables firewall for you.  In addition the side has some really nice blacklist add-on options for the firewall configuration tool that help against spy-ware, ad-wares, and a blacklist add-on called PeerProtect.  The spy-ware add-ons allow you to block internal network spy-ware from reaching the outside.  The PeerProtect add-on allows you to ignore RIAA and MPAA generated content on your peer-to-peer network (hopefully keeping them from suing you for downloading MP3’s.)  Thanks Tom.

Quick link, my buddy Jason pointed this link on his blog.  Its a random dungeon generator that is simply too cool to not post.  Has a couple of options and prints out a nice HTML table of the dungeon.  Reminds me of the Nethack dungeon generator… hmmmmm Nethack…..

Found this great op-ed piece about human travel to the Mars.  I must say that I totally agree with his conclusions (I have for a long time believed that we should consider one way space travel.)  The problem is that there are so many soft-hearted people in this country who have very little desired to do anything that might involves loss of human life (i.e. Iraq war) even it is obviously in the best interest of our country/world.

People willing to sacrifice progress, knowledge, and freedom in the name of safety or security are doomed to loose all of them.  Such people would let the last great space achievement of the U.S. be the trip to the moon; and watch while other countries leave us behind.