Monthly Archives: January 2003

John points at the 10 Google Myths..

Via Phpeverywhere:
Software, Jim, but not as we know it
PHP Look Back

Life in the trenches: a sysadmin speaks – haven’t read it yet, will read tonight.

Linux Today’s Hall of Fame: Top 10 Stories of 2002 – should be some good reading here!

WorldNetDaily: If you believe that people are basically good .. and those evil people who blow up innocents are evil to their own children aren’t they? They eat their babies don’t they? Good and Evil, Black and White.. grey, fuzzy, not simple.

Desktop Linux for the Home: How and Why? – some good stuff here!

Incessant Ramblings: jetsam on Windows and Linux media playing.
I don’t like Windows Media Player. On occasion I’ve used it, and it’s big, it’s slow, it’s clunky. I agree that skinning the application serves no purpose. If it’s playing MP3s, it’s more than likely going to be behind some other application anyway so why waste the clock cycles drawing fancy graphics?
A bigger issue is codec installation. Yes, it does download the codecs for common formats from some Microsoft website. Yes, it’s easy. Yes, a new user could an Indeo 5 avi file playing easily.
No, a new user couldn’t get a divx video playing as easily. I’ve tried, God knows I’ve tried! It’s now come to the stage where it’s easier to play movies in Linux than it is in Windows! In Windows XP I’ve never managed to get WMP8 to play Divx files. In Win2K I can view older Divx files, but newer ones fail, and AFAIR the required codecs don’t seem to install for some reason.
My freshly installed Red Hat 8.0 desktop can play all sorts of movies. How did I do it? “apt-get install mplayer” and copy the codecs from their homepage into a directory. It’s not as if mplayer is hard to find or anything, and the download page clearly points out the Win32 codecs available.
These are my experiences using these bits of software, they’re not the experiences of a newbie (who wouldn’t know a tarball from an rpm) but mine, and I’ll bloody well raise my hand and claim my right to be counted as a “computer user” no matter what! *bah*

I won in the Lotto!! woo! Alright, I only won a scratch card, but I won 25 Euro on that. I’m taking my money and running while I’m on a winning streak 🙂

Will Filters Kill Spam? – Nope, but they’ll help a lot. Over the holidays I received over 400 spam emails. I had one false positive, that was from someone using a mail server that had been blacklisted. I had 3 spams in my inbox. That’s not bad. That’s Spam Assassin.
(Thanks Keith, and to set your mind at ease, Spam Assassin handles base64 encoded emails just fine. Catches them just as effectively!)