UPDATE: also, before you try this, make sure you have some good fonts installed, after a fresh install of Lenny at work, I needed to run this first: apt-get install ttf-mscorefonts-installer msttcorefonts
After a…slight slip up, I finally had the chance to install Linux from scratch on my laptop (Dell Vostro 1500) the way I’ve always [...]

If anything, that should be the message to all Internet surfers out there.  This graphic shows the danger, the percentage of users who have their browsers at their most secure, in regards to patches/updates being applied. Clearly people running IE aren’t going through the trouble of updating, while Firefox has updates built in that [...]

Wow, it sounds like this wasn’t thought through too well, apparently Apple requires you to activate your new iPhone at the store you buy it from. On a normal day this should work out alright, but not on today, with the rash of people snapping up the new model. “Problems with the iTunes [...]

It looks like the ultra conservative news site, OneNewsNow, brought to you by our friends over at the American Family Ass (remember them?), aren’t very hip with those new web technologies.  Oh sure, they block plenty of news that doesn’t meet their views so they can present the user with a tainted view of the [...]

Half the fun of the Internet (capital ‘I’ please) is discovering new things, but it’s rare that you see something new that really changes your perception of things. For me that happened when I came across the online bookstore Zoomii.com, which sells books via Amazon; think of it as a new front-end to the [...]

If you run a Linux desktop you need to be using conky.  It compiles all those shiny gadget you see on other desktops eating system RAM, down to what you need; information on what your system is doing.  So try it out, install conky, and then drop this into your home directory as .conkyrc - [...]

I’ve gotten my pictures online from my San Francisco trip.  The city was everything I always hoped it would be, and I really loved it there.  I had the opportunity to meet with diverse people that all intersect with various aspects of my job (now being refered to as my career).  From The Moore Foundation [...]

If you’re like me, you’ve messed up your xorg.conf before and wanted to start over with the default that you know dpkg-reconfigure can set it to.  Because of this I’m posting here because I’ve needed it multiple times in the past and have tired of looking it up!  To automatically reconfigure Xorg in Debian or [...]

This is a big deal for me, I played with Skype back in the day, but never really used it much since it required a second client, and I have always used Gaim (which is now Pidgin) to consolidate all of my accounts into one client and didn’t want to break out of that mold, [...]

UPDATE: I’m reworking my config blending in the security ideas found on camomel.org they’re really thought things through on this, this should make for a very secure environment.
I’m always trying new software, and with the webserver I’ve moved from Apache 1.3 to 2.0 to 2.2, and then later I moved everything over to Lighttpd, which [...]

With the barriers lowering, and other market factors creeping in, Macs are slowly making a move into the enterprise.  While this may/may not solely be Apple driven, the fact is that people like choices, and the Macs are now far more compatible with other systems than they once were, so finally folks have options.  In [...]

Last week I traveled to Woods Hole, MA to attend Nomina 2.  Woods Hole is the home of the Marine Biology Lab, and it’s where Encylopedia of Life is based.  EoL played the host, and did a wonderful job at making us confortable in a very quaint, peaceful town.  The meeting was organized by TDWG [...]

Image via Wikipedia

Heading out today for Woods Hole, MA - it’s supposed to be beautiful (expect pictures on my grossly underused flickr account). I’m representing the Biodiversity Heritage Library in a meeting with the Encyclopedia of Life folks as we discuss standardizing data streams for upcoming sharing of data. It may not sound [...]

Our DSL went out last Friday, and didn’t come back up until yesterday…frak.  I’ve hosted all of my websites on homebuilt servers for over 7 years now, and I love doing it, but when the temps change or some phone repair guy plugs something in wrong, we’re down.  It’s never the internal wiring, it’s never [...]