Category: Uncategorized

This is possibly the most random group of links I have ever posted. Hopefully I will get back to posting real articles in a couple days.

• The Ubuntu Guide. Useful information for other Linux distributions as well. Like getting buttons 4 & 5 working on a mouse.
• IE 4 Linux — A drop and install version of IE for Linux. Uses a pre-configured, pre-built version of wine to work. Requires no outside wine configuration to get working. Perfect for web developers who need to test IE support for their websites on Linux.
• Upstart— A dependency-based system replacement for init on Unix systems. Works to solve dependancy startup issues by “pausing” a service until it’s needed resources become available. In this way it’s more intelligent than the more common init replacement, Initng.
• Advice to students— By Peter Norvig to the 2006 graduating class of UC Berkley CompSci department.
• Industry vs. Education— YES!!! One I kinda remember something about. This is a brain dump from a guy who has experience working for a univerity (doing research) and then working for a business (also doing research.) Covers the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches to knowledge gathering.
• No Sympathy for Students— A college professor lists the top ten things he ignores on end of semester course questionnaires. GREAT comment on what is wrong with entitlement students and how they view education.
• The Dutch Wind Carpet— The Dutch Wind Carpet is the largest off-shore wind farm in the entire world. It has a max capacity of some 2,500 MW of power. This article has some really interesting information on the coast/benefit breakdown of the carpet along with its overall weaknesses (not the least of which is an average 20% output from full capacity.)
• HowTo Build KDE4— The first developers build of KDE was released a couple weeks ago. This describes how to get it built on your Linux system.
• Kerberos & LDAP— Using these two technologies for centralized management of an enterprise system.
• Reason and Logic— Gödel and the limits of logic.  Rundown of his life and the problems he discovered with number theory.
• Two Dogmas of Empiricism — Willard Van Orman Quine’s famous attack on logical positivism.

Public school education, these days, strongly favors girls over boys.  The evidence for this is a little overwhelming.  SAT scores, graduation rates, college attendance, and grades have all become the primary domain of women.  In that light, here is an article from City Journal by Gerry Garibaldi.  In it he discusses some of the reasons for this sudden (1970’ish) sea change in education.

Test Smarter, Not Harder is an article by Scott Sehlhorst that covers software testing (the information can actually be applied to all forms of unit testing) and how to reduce the cost of application testing.  The fundamental idea is that if testing costs are greater than not testing then you are better off NOT doing the testing.   Therefor emphasis should be spent in reducing the cost of testing so it become practical to test more often.  Topics covered include automated testing, random sampling, pairwise testing, and N-wise testing.

Just when I was looking for it; here is a quick tutorial on tuning an Apache server for optimal performance.  Linux, Apache, MySQL, and P* may make a solid application platform but if your system is badly configured, not even they can save you.