Adventures in Nerdville

Due to the overwhelming response to another post, I have taken it upon myself to start up an Open Source Student Information System project. Fox-SIS will be a fork of a once-popular open source student information system. 

I will need other people to help. In particular, I need a Graphic Designer (you don’t have to be very good, we just need a replacement logo), PHP coders of any skill level and people who could help with the documentation. Please use the comment form to express interest in participation. I will not display any comments such as these on the page, but will respond to them personally. Other comments will be displayed as normal.

The new website is www.fox-sis.com but it doesn’t have much content on it as of now. If you express interest in participating, please use the register link on fox-sis.com to create an account. I will give you permissions when I hear from you using a comment on here.

The main goal of fox-sis is to continue the old project with the old spirit of openness and community involvement without stepping on anybody’s toes. That’s why it will be especially important to respect the trademarks of others and the terms of the GPL. There have been a lot of forks of this system out there (and the system it is forked from), but my aim with this is not to make a profit, but rather just to help everyone out there who just wants things back to the way they used to be.

In case you have been living in a cave for the last 3 days, Google has come out with a new web browser called Chrome. Right now it is only in beta, but so far it I am very impressed. After only a day of playing around, here are my favorite features. (more…)

Accepting Ignorance: True Monetary Price of Government

A nice article I just happened upon showing some of the hidden ways in which we are taxed. This was written by a Canadian, but it looks pretty close to how America is working today.

Apparently you can get rid of a mosquito bite by putting scotch tape on it. Who wouldda thunk it?

This is a great blog post that I just read about how to keep your windows XP installation running smooth, since those of you who are reading this will most likely be using XP (55% of my visitors). Only 10% of you are using vista (hopefully you will learn). Luckily, linux weighs in at 12% and beats out vista (I am so proud of my viewers). As long as I am talking stats, I am also proud of you because Firefox beats out IE 45%-37%.

Anyways, this post details almost verbatim the advice I give to people trying to keep their computers up to date, with a few caveats. I don’t recommend backing up to an external hard drive, mozy home backup is far better when you have a broadband connection since it backs up automatically and off site. Mozy is the only thing that keeps windows running in my house (otherwise I have no reason not to be all linux).  I also have a password set on my computer, but that is because I want to be able to get in remotely. Either way, the post has some good advice in it.

I wonder why a company with a speech recognition phone system, online tracking and all these fancy tech features haven’t figured out something as fundamentally important as routing protocols. Case in point. Two weeks ago, Toledo, OH got flooded. I ordered some vitamins a week ago and they were shipped from Nevada this past Monday. For two days, my package has been stuck in the UPS center outside of Toledo, where they sent it to from Nevada. (more…)

Over in Dubai, they are building a skyscraper where each floor rotates on it’s own. They use the spinning motion to power the building (and they even have some energy left over!). Even though it takes between 1 and 3 hours for an apartment to make a complete rotation, I think I would still get motion sick. I guess what would make me sicker is that they are charging $3.7m to $36m for a 1,378 sq ft apartment!.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7472722.stm

http://newteevee.com/2008/03/18/comcast-cameras-to-start-watching-you/

One of the hardest things I have to tell people when I try to win them to linux is “you are going to need to do some things on the command line”. That about instantly shuts them off. I, personally, love the command line. My home server doesn’t even have a screen, I manage everything through ssh (a remote command line terminal session ). Now for those of you who want to try out linux, once you have installed ubuntu (the best linux to learn on), you will inevitably read online about typing in some kind of command in the shell. When you actually go to the shell, you will be greeted with:

jkorz@lappy486:~$

That’s enough to make most people confused.

(more…)

http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/

If you don’t have firefox already, tuesday would be a perfect time to get it (provided that their servers haven’t yet exploded).