Author Archives: Donncha

While out searching for a joke Bob sent me, I found Gimboland that looks like rather a good blog!

Linux For the Office – The GIMP, more tips but I prefered the procedure described below for removing red-eye.

Go Ira! – The real story behind the first man to Mars

Scientific American: How to Build a Time Machine – Some great reading and head spinning ideas here.

I use xwrits at work to force myself to take breaks every 40 minutes. Unfortunately I learned that by typing “quit” when the screen locked I could unlock it again. Not now, I supply xwrits with a “random” password like so:
xwrits typetime=40 +beep +breakclock +top -after=.3 +lock -password=`date| md5sum |awk '{print $1}'`
That’ll generate a long 32 character password which is impossible to remember if you’re human (brain boxes go elsewhere!) and too long winded to write down. I’m happy, I’m forced out of my own machine every once in a while for a rest!

Experiences at a Firm Hostile to Free Software – glad I don’t work at a place like this! I’d go mad!

Microsoft Puts On the Tux – an interview with one of the guys on the MS stand. I can’t imagine the amount of abuse they’ll get from a certain part of the crowd.

Even though this weblog doesn’t use tables it still appears exactly the same in Netscape 4.7, hmm. Must investigate later.

A discussion on the ILUG about showing “Revolution OS”, the film about Linux, sparked an interesting post from Rick Moen who forwarded an email from the producer of the film, J.T.S Moore. Alan replied that they should help J.T.S recoup his costs. Rick responded with some interesting facts about the homebrew club, Bill Gates, The Altair and Basic, ending with the nugget, “I still think that, if more
Homebrewers and others in the hacking community had more consistently adopted my viewpoint and said “The hell with Altair BASIC and the horse it rode in on”, we’d have had an open source explosion a decade sooner than we did, and the 1980s would have been a lot more fun.”