Found this article on using autofs to mount windows samba shares on demand. It is particularly nice because it requires no effort to use and automatically unmounts the share when not in use.
Category: VAULT Links
10 JavaScript Tips
Here is a lists of useful tips for novice JavaScript programmers. With AJAX becoming a way of life on the internet, the importance of solid software engineering practices has become more important. All too often neither JavaScript developers, nor “hard language” programmers think of JavaScript as real programming. Most people’s web experience would improve significantly if more people did.
From What Dreams May Come
Harpers online has a well written, and thought provoking, article entitled “The Ecstasy of Influence.” It is about plagiarism and the role of influence on creative work. Besides, rare is the author that can reference both The Simpsons and Heidegger in the same article.
Cleaning Up the Bookmarks Folder
Just a couple links for the day:
- Linux Security Tools — is a list of some of the best security tools for Linux. The article also includes information on how to use the tools.
- NRA-ILA FBI Study Results — breakdown of gun deaths, gun ownership, and the results of concealed weapons laws by the FBI for 2005. Reference material for gun control discussions.
- 10 Steps to Security — article that breaks down how to perform your own security audit.
- Subversion Manual — Red Been has the definitive guide to using, configuring, and managing Subversion, the VCS replacement for CVS.
- Suse Server Configuration — A step by step tutorial on getting a functioning Suse Linux server running. When completed you should have MySQL, Apache, POP/IMAP, DNS, an FTP server, Webalizer, and more. In fact the system should be able to install a web-hosting control panel interface (i.e. cpanel or ISPConfig.)
- SLES SDK Images — One of the HUGE complaints I have had about Suse Enterprise Linux is the lack of developers tools. Well, evidently Novell provides additional development tools via an “extra” DVD. It includes some other minor software packages like subversion, mod_Perl, and MySQL 5. Why this wasn’t shipped with the box (or for that matter even mentioned in the software documentation) will never be known, but it has proven useful.
More Than Meets the Eye
Ben Mayers (aka icefox of KDE fame) has just finally put up his opus magnum. Toybin is a list of all Gen 1 transformers. It show pictures of all the original toys, manuals, accessories, and even has a search function that understands things like “green truck.” I don’t know about you, but I cried when Optimus Prime died.
MISC. LINUX COMMANDS #3
MISC. LINUX COMMANDS #2
- who – Show who is logged into the system currently.
- last – Show a listing of the last logged in users. Searches through the /var/log/wtmp log file.
- lastlog – Formats and prints the contents of the /var/log/lastlog login file.
- faillog – Formats and prints the contents of the /var/log/faillog log file. This file lists all failed login attempts.
Clean Jeep
Surface rust is a common problem with owners of old Jeeps. Now, if you are looking for good tutorials on restoring your Jeep; the best place to look is at hot rod’ers and their websites. Which gets me to this link. Its a simple and effective tutorial on removing surface rust with some hard work and a product called “Navel Jelly.” NJ come highly recommended to me; so this tutorial covers the bases for me on its effective use .
Three Little Links
Ok, I have had these links waiting to be posted for a couple days now hoping I would find something to “match” them with. Unfortunately it seems like it will not be. So without further excitement. Here are three totally unrelated links:
- Database Normalization – A great introduction into relational database normalization and the normal forms. It is fairly common that I tell people about our database structure and I am amazed at how often they don’t understand normalization. This is here to help explain it.
- 71 CSS/ AJAX Tools – Who wants to re-invent the wheel. Here are 71 commonly used CSS and Ajax interface elements for web development. Think you need Flash to do anything useful in web design, check this out. It uses NO Flash and is entirely XHTML compliant. It is 100% text indexable. It requires no plugins and it even will degrade gracefully on text only browsers (it shows up as a list of links to the photos.)
- RPG Inspirational Posters – I think Jason will love this one. It is a gallery of motivation posters (think Successories) for roll playing games. This one and this one are probably my favorites.
Quick Links: RSS & Mailman
I need a place to store these links. We are using mailman at work to do anouncement mail-lists and wanted to extend it to auto-generate RSS feeds for those same announcements. These are a couple of examples of that functionality that other people have already done:
- mailman RSS feeds – Usage and description. Quick and dirty Perl script.
- mailman RSS feeds – the script.
- RSS export – Live patch to update mailman to issue RSS feeds on archive.
- RSS export – original source of previous post.
- Generate RSS summary – Sourceforge project to include RSS in future mailman version.