Category: VAULT Treasures

The Modern Library keeps a post of their 100 Best Novels. There are actually two lists, the board’s 100 best list and the reader’s 100 best list. I find it interesting to note that 3 names (that appear NO WHERE in the board’s list) make up 8 of the top 10 ten titles on the readers list. Those names are Ayn Rand, L. Ron Hubbard, and J.R.R. Tolkien. Other names that fail to meet the board’s list but make notable appearances on the readers list are: Steven King, Tom Clancy, and Frank Herbert . And they say that literary elitism died with Amazon.

Looking at the lists I have only read a couple dozen; therefore I just extended my to-do reading list. For anyone who is looking for a couple good reading lists, these are a good start.

Liz is one of my closes college friends, an outstanding writer, and a left wing nut. Some of you may remember here from a previous post that referenced her. Here is her new blog.

I am totally screwed!  Seriously!  My co-worker just sent me THIS link.  Its an on-line Nintendo Emulator via a java applet.  My social life just crawled over to the corner and shot itself.  It also looks like there is a Arcade Emulator available to play on too. Well… it was nice knowing all of you.

This is the most random thing I have ever posted but hey… its my blog.  Found a site with some instructions on how to do your own book binding. Just in case anyone wants to print their favorite online tech manual.

If you are interested in doing other “home” projects (only more tech related) be sure to check out Gideon Tech. Everything from case mod’ing to creating a digital card reader to power on your computer… its all there.  I like the tutorial showing you how to make it look like your case is full of water.

I have finished a couple new rpms that are now available in the apt repository.  In what is surely the most “fun” group of packages I have made; I now have a complete a group of Seti@Home rpms for KDE!

• setiathome-3.08 -Is the setiathome executable.
• ksetiwatch-2.6.1 -Is a taskbar applet/application that allows you monitor your seti client from inside KDE
• ksetisaver-0.3.2 -Is a KDE screensaver with star charts and and LCARS look & feel.

The setiathome client is a command-line application, but here are some pics of ksetiwatch and ksetisaver.  Thanks to Charles R. Anderson for his work on the original ksetisaver RPM.  Because setiathome is kinda funny (it puts its configuration files in the same directory as where the binary is called from), here is my recommendation for installing them:

Install the setiathome rpm.  Then as your main user do:

mkdir ~/.setiathome
echo ‘#!/bin/sh’ > ~/.setiathome/setiathome
echo ‘/usr/bin/setiathome’ >> ~/.setiathome/setiathome
chmod 755 ~/.setiathome/setiathome

After that just make sure you point ksetisaver and ksetiwatch to user “~/.setiathome/setiathome” instead of the executable directly. You can also use kcron  to set up a cron job (crontab -e does the same thing) every four hours or so.  If setiathome is running the cron job will have no effect but if its not running it will restart it.

What a great way to start the holiday weekend.

So KDE is easily the best GUI for *nix type OSes… but how useful is it really for command line application usage?  Funny you should ask.  This developer.kde.org tutorial covers kdialog; a command-line driven script-able window generation tool for KDE. Good tutorial with some great examples.  Just perfect for the new programmer or the system admin.

For those who follow KDE development there is a GREAT page for analysis of the current KDE project here. Includes information concerning code, modules, commiters and does both statistic and graphic evaluation.

I have a fairly extensive list of quotes that I have collected over the years. I may try to setup a way to post them other than simply putting out another post, but till that time happens let me share one:

“…peace is the highest aspiration of the American People. We will negotiate for it, sacrifice for it, we will never surrender for it, now or ever.”
-Ronald Reagan

Hope you enjoy.

For weekend fun try doing a Google (be sure to click the I’m Feeling Lucky button) search on “French military victories” (without the quotes.) This is the resulting page. Even the best search engine in the world cannot help you out THAT search.