Category: VAULT Links

I am starting to put together a little rant on my current opinion on the US presidential election. One of the best resources I have had (a resource I found during the last presidential election) is Opensecrets.org. What Open Secrets does it track money during elections. They have local (yes local), state, and national information; and I have found the data to be very accurate and fairly represented.

Being thats its almost impossible to get any unbiased information from public media outlets (be it the New York Times, the BBC, or Fox News) Open Secrets is an exceptional tool. If any readers have a good source for unbiased political data please let me know by leaving a comment.

Sorry for the long delay in posts. I have been out of town on Linux training the last couple of weeks. I don’t know if I got my RHCE yet, as Red Hat has not emailed me with my test results. A co-worker pointed me to this link today. Its the website of the Cleveland County Assessor of Oklahoma. The interesting this is that you can actually do lookups on Cleveland county property. Find out things like the previous owner, current owner, how much they paid for the property, etc.. Pretty interesting but I was under the impression that some of this information was illegal for distribution without consent of the owner.

This time of year I am planting the seedlings for my herb garden. A little over a year ago my mother-in-law introduced me to home grown herbs. I then became addicted to fresh Rosemary (like I didn’t have enough problems already.) The other herbs I have planted are to give me some fresh spices for my hot-sauce recipes. Its probably a natural extension of my wilderness survival days at Boy Scout Camp, but thats getting a little too Freudian for me. This year I am planting Lemon Balm, Rosemary, Sage, Thyme, Basil, Parsley (Simon and Garfunkel would be proud) and Cilantro.

Some of my online help has come from Herbs for Beginning Gardeners, The Spice & Herb dictionary, The lingle’s Herbs Growing Guide, and Gardening Herbs.

short introduction is a Russian woman’s on-line journal of her trips through Chernobyl. Her English is broken but the content generally speaks for itself.

Found this link… I forgot how much fun connect 4 could be. But then I was always a sucker for internet games.

We are beginning the process of converting some of our workstations of to Linux.  Our current infrastructure seems to be ok, but we were having a little bit of trouble authenticating to Novell’s eDirectory.   For anyone who is having this same problem here is a straight forward tutorial Mike found on getting it working, written by Novell itself. 

Just thought I would pass another KDE link along.  this link talks about kconf_update.  Its a KDE script designed to auto-magically update KDE configurations for all users on a given machine the next time that user logs in (the first time after kconf_update has been installed.)  Need to do a system wide change to all your KDE users personal settings 6 months after an install?  Here ya go.

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.

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.

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.