Technology

As I posted previously, I got a new laptop and am in the process of setting it with Linux. Installing Linux is easy – to make it take full advantage of the existing hardware is tricky. My current challenge is to have the Graphics subsystem use the full 1400×1050 resolution of the screen. I will update this post as I go along to document my progress.

I am in the process of migrating to LFS 6.0. In the process, I changed my MTA from Postfix to Courier. I am using Courier with Virtual Mailboxes, and getting this to use with procmail (for spam filtering) was a little tricky.

After playing around with various distributions and desktop environments, I finally made my decision on my preferred environment: KDE it is. Here is my reasoning, and some advice on how to run GDK (Gnome) applications peacefully under KDE.

Mark your calendar (and sign up): Mozparty on Friday, November 19th at Fergie’s in downtown Philly!

Casual computer users only have to fight spam, spyware and torjans – but if you host a site where users can leave feedback (like this one), you have to deal with users writing spam comments!

I finally figured out why I couldn’t update my Tripwire Policy. Tripwire is an amazing tool that checks the integrity of your computer’s filesystem, thereby detecting intrusions. But there are some pitfalls…

A friend of mine got me a Gmail account. Now they gave me 6 invitations that I can forward. Any takers…?

Update: All invitations are gone! Sorry!

I recently had to setup a computer from scratch. The machine had been sitting around for the longest time unused, and I finally got around buying a new hard drive for it. What OS to install? I use a hand-build Linux From Scratch system as my main system, but I don’t need that pain for every machine. Another one is running Gentoo Linux, but I wanted something even more userfriendly. As I worked with RedHat in the past (and didn’t like it too much), I thought I’ll give the latest raising star a try: SuSE Linux (a German company recently acquired by Novel).

Did you ever wonder who’s writing computer viruses? Here is a detailed and extensive article by the New York Times.

Remeber the August 14 East Coast power outage? Renesys has a cool animated map of the propagation of the outage.