Somewhere out there!

As this guy says, Debian Stable is really starting to drag. It is so far behind the times it is becoming a joke, and so much for testing as an attempt to speed up the release process. Most of the time its just a slow-security-release root-kit-target-waiting-to-happen. In order to use even some of the current simple applications for a server, you basically have to be running Sid.

There doesn’t seem to be any slow up to the rate of packages being updated in Sid and I wonder if anyone is placing odds on Sarge being released next year. I’d say they aren’t that long. Just go ahead and freeze Sid, get the damn thing out already! Personally also think its becoming a real job for the Security Team to keep back porting patches into centuries old applications.

I’m started wondering if its better to look at something like Ubuntu as a server, their wiki has a short blurb about how to set this up with their current release: Ubuntu – Custom or Server Installation.

I’ve played around with a test install of Ubuntu, on a spare desktop. Seemed very nice. I much prefer KDE over Gnome, so its unlikely I’ll move my desktop to Ubuntu any time soon. However, it might be interest to try an experiment between Sarge/KDE and Ubuntu/Gnome desktops when I finally get around to building my NX server at work. Especially if I can get the two running on Xen or UML and get some of my users doing week long trials with either install.

A Terse first look review by NewsForge about Base the OpenOffice.org database application. Note its worth also considering Kexi which seems like it is maturing rapidly.

FireHOL is a Linux iptables packet filtering firewall builder for humans.

Has a nice looking rule set, looks almost as good a pf. Has a straight-forward tutorial for a home network situation.

I never really had much luck with Dans Guardian and its Clamav module, performance was really crappy. I probably should go back and have a look at it again. However, I saw this link in the openbsd-misc mailing list today: SquidClamAV Redirector. Looks interesting.

Sharp Zaurus SL-C3000 review.

Planning to learn a new language. I don’t have anything at the moment, so a good pair of headphones is probably worth investing in. These guys seem to like the Sony MDR-V6 (“Best Headphones Ever: (by Jeremy Zawodny)”). Also some comments here about this HeadPhone.

When I was witting my dissertation I used to use M-q all the time. I’d forgotten about it until I saw this page: AUC TeX – Advanced Editing Features.

I need to move back to working on laptops as I’ll be doing a bit of travel. Been thinking about switching to a Powerbook, this seems like a good place to start: The Tao of Mac – HOWTO/Switch To The Mac.

Lack of an OSX Openoffice port, it probably the main thing that is holding me back. We use OO in our business, so it would be a pain to be without it. Especially the upcoming 2.0 release. I could of course run Debian/PPC, but that somewhat defeats the purpose. Then there is the NX option from my colo box. I’m not sure if there is a native NX client for OSX. Something to explore.

Nice straight forward development walk-thru for a recipe webapp with Ruby on Rails. It would be further interesting if the author continued with in a similar comparison walk-thru to the web-application at PyWebBlog.

Firefox is just getting more and more clever stuff: ScrapBook.

ScrapBook is a Mozilla / Firefox extension, which helps you to save Web pages and easily manage collections. Key features are lightness, speed, accuracy and multi-language support. Major features are: