Friday's Linkdump

Dave Gorman's Googlewhack adventure
Googlewhack.com

The conspiracy against our inboxes
Anti-spam measures will only help the spammers...
Linux Documentation Project is 10 years old
Congrats to the LDP team and contributors!
Gates - "You don't need perfect code for good security"
No , but it helps
Microsoft's new CLI
About 30 years after Unix....oh dear....
American Express adopts Linux
Linux further encroaching into Sun.com

  
The Worlds Best Bars
Bars from cities around the world - what makes this site interesting are the customer comments from travellers who have actually been to these places.

Sendmail,procmail,spamassassin and fetchmail
Fetchmail, Mozilla & Spamassassin How To
SpamAssassin & Kmail integration

Poor Google results
Source: The Register
"Plagued by link farms and blog noise, Google's engineers have resorted to brute force suppression of the search results, in the process, throwing out the baby with the bathwater. "

More Reg stuff on Google here, here and here

Generating a ssh-keygen public/private key
Step by step guide to creating rsa key pairs - very useful for non-interactive ftp'ing to a box (or boxen) during overnight cron jobs.

Tuesday's Linkdump
SGI hopes NASA's Linux spend will boost results
"SGI's latest results edged closer to profitability, as it announced NASA had bought a Linux machine with 256 Itanium 2 processors and was planning to buy more"
Monty Python Spam sketch
This is where the term "spam" in regards to email originated from.
1 Million iTunes For Windows downloads in 3 and a half days
14 million songs sold by iTunes since it started in April.
Linux Cost Savings Add Up

Crontab @reboot

From the "they didn't have that in BSD 4.2 so I didn't know about it" department, a handy feature in Vixie cron: the @reboot option. It means run once at restart, an alternative to /etc/init.d for ordinary users. Vixie cron has other useful features:
@reboot Run once, at startup.
@yearly Run once a year, "0 0 1 1 *".
@monthly Run once a month, "0 0 1 * *".
@weekly Run once a week, "0 0 * * 0".
@daily Run once a day, "0 0 * * *".
@hourly Run once an hour, "0 * * * *".

This has been available since 1994 but it doesn't show up in RedHat or Mandrake man pages. It does show up in Debian.

Jeremy Zawodny mentions this as well.

The Art Of Unix Programming
Why Unix is so..... Unix-ey.. An interesting online book on the philosophy and culture of Unix.

Happy Birthday KDE!

A tutorial on KDE dialog
Shell scripting with KDE dialogs

"There are some misconceptions that KDE is only a graphical environment. While it is true that KDE is an outstanding desktop environment, the Unix heritage of command line and scripting is also well supported by KDE. In particular, KDE applications can be controlled from the command line, and shell scripts can make use of some of the KDE widget set."

Sendmail
To find out the current version number do
/usr/sbin/sendmail -d0.1


MySQL Breaks Into the Data Center

Friday's Linkdump
Introduction To Thunderbird
A viable , free alternative to Outlook Express, with built-in spam filtering technology.

New Mozilla Beta site
New kernel set to speed Linux adoption

Yet Another Critical Windows Flaw
MySQL Clustering coming soon

Hello Craig - yes , this really is my blog. :-)

Wired has a lengthy interview with Linus Torvalds

Mandrake 9.2 is out

Slashdot has a linkdump on the release of Mandrake 9.2 .

Although the ISOs will be available for free, you can pre-order full Mandrake 9.2 boxed packs (including manuals) from MandrakeStore. Do your bit for OpenSource, and buy it , even if it's the ONLY Mandrake that you'll ever buy.


Key features of the 9.2 release available here

Killing Apache zombie processes

Somehow, issueing an "apachectl stop" killed off the parent and left about 50 errant child processes on my box. Issueing "apachectl stop" again only threw back an errror about a missing httpd pid (because the parent is now dead)

Here's how you can kill all those child httpd processes in one swoop:

ps -ax | grep httpd | grep -v grep | awk '{print $1}' | xargs kill -KILL

Obie Trice has some free mp3s of his infectious , funky, hip hop. With all the news of RIAA sueing downloaders, I find Obie's site refreshing. You can view videos of his tunes here too.

Friday's Linkdump

Hubble has captured a stunning image of the Sombero galaxy.
Mars Global Surveyor :The first public requested image.
Mars Global Surveyor : The 134,000 image online gallery

Apple's Missed Opportunity??
Google bug blocks thousands of sites
What will be in Linux 2.7?
New Element 110 - Darmstadtium

Is the universe a dodecahedron?
If you consider that the ancient Greek philosopher , Pythagoras, thought that
the dodecahedron was a divine shape, symbolising the cosmos the above story is quite remarkable.

The Man In Seat 61
Came across this excellent site today , with caters for travelling by train & sea throughout Europe and beyond.

The Degree confluence project
A fascinating and compelling site.
"The goal of the project is to visit each of the latitude and longitude integer degree intersections in the world, and to take pictures at each location."

Northern Germany


While reading the Lonely Planet book on Germany, I came across a great accomodation idea - "Heu Hotels". Literally "Hay Hotels" - in other words, farmyard barns.

Saxony (north Germany, around Hamburg, Hanover and Bremen) has a network of these, and you can get more info about it on this website.

There's an extensive listing of kid-friendly places to stay, which will be useful , as I intend to bring my little sprog along.

Links:
Hanover Region - Accomodation Booking
Stadt Celle
Photo of Gottingen
Gottingen
HeuHotelferien
Deutschland Panorama
Serengeti Park

Longhorn - two years away

Interesting quote from this :
"In other words, the point is to knock down the walls that separate data in a Windows environment. For instance, Outlook Calendar data would no longer be restricted to Outlook, but could be utilized by other applications, so long as they are designed to work with WinFS. "

Oh dear...
KDE already has this, and it's nothing to do with the file system - it's DCOP messaging.
More sledgehammers to crack a smallish nut from Micro$oft.

Crap Towns.com
Run by the folks who publish The Idler, this lists Britain's crappiest towns. There's a new section for the USA as well. After reading that, I don't think I'll be holidaying in Gary, Indiana.

The BBC news website is covering this story as well

Miniscule Of Sound
The world's smallest nightclub - with probably the smallest website in the world as well.

Today's Linkdump


AntiBloggies
The "Like the World Really Needed Another Blog" Awards.
A9 - Amazon search startup
"Seattle-based Amazon has dubbed its search startup "A9" and set up offices in Palo Alto, not far from Google's Mountain View headquarters. A9 hopes to launch in October with 30 employees and grow much larger as it develops a search engine that will be licensed to other Web sites, said spokeswoman Alison Diboll."
Response to MS's PHP -> ASP.NET migration document
Electronic Paper
Poll: New KDE logo