Category: VAULT Information

Congratulations to Arch and Meerie on the birth of their first child, Maximilian.  I tell you, everyone seems to be having babies.

Sorry for the lack of updates this last couple of weeks. Work has been oppressively busy lately and this week my wife left town on a school trip. I have taken the week off to spend with my daughter. Emily has done a superb job of keeping me exceedingly busy; in fact this is only the second time I have been on the computer this week. Something approaching a sacrilege for me.

For anyone who has tried to post a comment; I got spammed by about 250 junk comments (œcome try our blackjack/Viagra/porn/black exploitation movies at etc.. etc.. etc..) over the course of the last 3 days. I changed my settings to require non-anonymous logins to stop the flood until I found a better solution. Although some people may not consider login required comments to be a serious inconvenience; I myself do (as can be verified by seeing that I don’t actually login to make my own comments on my own blog) and have, as such, worked to find a suitable solution. That solution has been found. And so by the time I finish this post anonymous comments should be enabled again.

Putting the word out for the up-coming O’Reilly’s release of “Knoppix Hacks.” LKF Knoppix hacker at large Kyle Rankin (aka greenfly) has written the book. I have known greenfly for a while from the Linux IRC chatrooms and in spite (or maybe because of) all the times he has given me the “voice of shame”; I am really excited to see such a good guy do so well. O’Reilly’s is arguably the best technical book publisher on the face of the earth. You can pre-order the book here. Feel free to visit him (or me for that matter) in the #Linux room of irc.arstechnica.com.

Found this old but very good article on using kickstart and RPMs. Some of the most interesting information includes “Munging your own RPMs into the distribution” and “Modifying the Red Hat installer”. Useful for anyone wanting to make or improve a Red Hat Linux distribution of their own.

I am testing out a new Blog entry management system called BlogGTK. This is my first entry using it. Pretty nice application. I always like Moz Blog but no work has gone into it recently and it seems to have a bug in Fedora (I submitted the unanswered bug report.)

Got a twofer today on the technology business and how those businesses can complete. The first article is called Why MySQL grew so fast and talks about the massive adoption of MySQL and its place as a disruptive technology. The second article is Shake Your Groove Thing by PBS columnest I, Cringely. It talks about how companies (like Google and Adobe) can and do complete with Microsoft.

One of the strongest points the article makes is that Microsoft in no longer an actual technology company. For example, it has more lawyers working for it than it does programmers. If you want to compete in the world of technology, these articles are a good place to start.

This story from “The Australian” newspaper talks about a Brithish documentary that was seen on TV a couple days ago. The name of the documentary is My Feotus, and it shows footage of actual abortions in the 4th, 10th, 11th, and 21rst weeks. A couple quotes from the story are:

When I interviewed a doctor about the unpleasantness of performing late abortions it was difficult to listen and not believe it was morally wrong….

I swallowed. I didn’t want to say it, but the word ‘murder’ came to my lips…

Both quotes are from pro-choice advocates. My question is, if you conscience is telling you that something is morally wrong then why arn’t you listening to it. Especially if the action in “question” is the possible murder of another human being. I have a hard time not seeing abortion as the slavery issue of the 21st century. That thing we all know is wrong, but, darn it, it sure makes our lives easier.

Found a link on the kde developers website on most common mistakes when developing in KDE. Great article for anyone interested in Linux/QT/KDE development.

Well its official. Peter Jackson is planning on doing “The Hobbit”, the prequel to the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. Check out the story here. Yes my friends, God is good!

Several articles
I have posted have covered the utility and functionality of the KDE Run
Command. I have begun using one more… this one is based (slightly
modified by myself) on information presented in a KDE tutorial by Antonio Larrosa Jiménez. Check this out.

Go
into your KDE Control Center and browse to the “Web Shortcuts” section
in “Web Browsing.” There will be a list of web shortcuts that can be
used from within Konqueror and the KDE Run Command. Click the “add”
button and put the following information in the text boxes:

Search Provider Name: Qt Documentation
Search URI: /usr/share/doc/qt-devel-3.1.1/html/\{@}.html (works for Redhat 9; qt-devel-x.x.x will need to be modified for your specific Qt distribution)
URI Shortcut: qt,QT,Qt

When you click the ok and then apply you will be able to access the qt documentation via run command simply by typing qt:qstring (qstring being name of object function or tool instant entire c its like developer heaven>

Another great example of the functionality and flexibility of KDE and QT.