Adventures in Nerdville

How I got a Windows Vista refund from HP | equiliberate

This is beautiful. Now you can get yourself a nice linux laptop without paying the microsoft tax.

Running Debian Etch on my server seems at times like a gigantic step backward from the ubuntu server I used to run. But alas, it has been quite a learning experience. I just set up my server to run the No-IP dynamic update client (which is available as a package for ubuntu hardy), but it didn’t work with the included init script. Searching online I found very little help.

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Dustin, whose family just joined our church told me about this guy. Ergun Caner is now the Dean of Liberty Baptist Seminary. His testimony is very inspiring and enlightening - a must see. One of the very profound things he pointed out at ~4:10 is that ‘you don’t have the option of respecting Jesus, you can either revere him as God or reject him as a fraud, but you don’t have the option of just respecting Him’.

For those of you living in a cave, there have been some pretty serious vulnerabilities found in ruby. See this link for the announcement.

In my trademark paranoia and goodwill, I have built myself a .deb package for the patched ruby. It is just a basic checkinstall generated package, but for those of you who have too much trouble running ./configure && make && checkinstall I have posted the package I generated. As always, I guarantee nothing, if you really care about your system, you will build the package yourself rather than downloading it from a nobody site such as mine. (more…)

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.

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Update: I have started a project called Fox SIS that will be based off of a once-prominent open source student information system. Please see the blog post and use the comment form on that post to let me know if you would be interested in participating.

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Focus SIS is an open source student information system hosted at source forge that I was involved with back when I worked at a small school district. I at one time had the download available here, but have been asked by the folks at focus-sis.org to remove it. I will instead, provide instructions on how to download the project named focus-sis from source forge.

Let me disclaim quickly: This is not the software that is available as a service from focus-sis.org although the commercial version spawned from this project. The software available at focus-sis.org is most assuredly more stable, polished and feature-rich than the older, legacy version hosted on source forge.

These are instructions on how to download the GPL project known as focus-sis on source forge.

Windows:

Download TortiseSVN from http://tortoisesvn.net/downloads and follow installation instructions

Make a new folder and name it something like SIS.

Right click on that folder and select SVN Checkout.

Enter this url for the repository: https://focus-sis.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/focus-sis/branches/2.3/

Click OK

Linux

Run (assuming ubuntu or debian - if you are using something else, you can figure it out)

# sudo apt-get install subversion

# svn co https://focus-sis.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/focus-sis/branches/2.3/ sis

This will create a new folder called sis in the current directory with the source code in it.

Ever since my father explained to me what a tesla coil is, I have been fascinated with the concept of resonance (and with Tesla in general). This video is a fantastic demonstration of a sound wave resonating with salt poured on a steel plate. As the frequency is turned up, distinct and complicated shapes and patterns form. A must see.