Tag Archives: Holy Shmoly

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.”

Using the GIMP to Create Images for the Web – lots of great tips here, removing red-eye, getting rid of smudges, logos, etc.

Oh a side note, “convert” from the Image Magik package is invaluable. I have high-quality png files at work which I wanted to edit here at home but they’re too big to download in a reasonable time over a modem link. Simple solution: “convert picture1.png picture1.jpg” and then mail the uuencoded pic home with “uuencode picture1.jpg picture1.jpg | mail donnchaSPAM@linux.ie” (remove SPAM for correct address). woohoo!

Skynews has news on the floods in Prague.

The Time Travel Fund[tm] – travel to the future, sort of! oh, and be filthy wealthy when you get there!

Floods wreak havoc in Prague – Sounds really bad there, we were supposed to go to Prague at the end of August, but we had to cancel. We’re going to Kilkenny, Galway and cruising around the west of Ireland instead!

REVOLUTION OS – the film! I wonder if it’ll show in Ireland?