I'm still up at 1:30 AM because there is a water-main break right across the street from my house.  The street opened up, and water is shooting 30-40 feet straight up into the air.  It sounds like I'm living next to white water rapids..  Water is rumbling like crazy.  I went out and grabbed some pictures.  I tried to grab a video, but it didn't show up in the darkness.  I brightened the photo a bit.  This photo doesn't do it justice - it's an amazing sight in person, especially when it's 30 yards out your front door.

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Sophos recently recommended computer users switch to Macintosh.  They recommended it because Windows users are being hit with malware more and more each year, and only one case of malware is known on Macintosh. Read more

Okay, this is driving me nuts.  Many podcasters don't use consistent tags.  Their various episodes all have different tags for Artist, Album, and Genre.  If I find a pocast I like and download the past year's worth of podcasts, they are all scattered throughout my MP3 player and I have a terrible time finding them all buried among my 5000 tracks of music.Read more

I've tested XGL in the past, and thought it was really cool.  But it didn't include Xinerama (proper dual monitor) support, so I couldn't use it as my primary desktop.  I've since found a way to change that. Read more

Anyone who runs in computer-technology circles has seen the "my favorite app" zealots.  They preach of how you must use their favorite application.  They claim that you must be stupid if you use the competing application.  There are Gnome/KDE/*box/Enlightenment/etc. zealots, Linux/BSD/Mac OS zealots, XMMS/BMP/Amarok/etc. zealots, Java/.NET/PHP/Python zealots, and perhaps the oldest of them all, vi and emacs zealots. Read more

In a previous entry, I proposed a fairly simple way to moderate comments.  But it was really just a way to get at a checkbox interface to delete comments.  I didn't like that spam comments were live until I deleted them.  I've come up with a better way where comments aren't shown until I approve them.  Here's how.Read more

I didn't like that CoreBlog2 Categories were in chronological order by default.  If you viewed a category, the first thing you saw was an entry that was years old.  Here's how to change the CoreBlog2 Category view to reverse chronological:

Go into the ZMI.  Navigate to portal_skins > CoreBlog2 > cbcategory_view.  Click the "customize" button.  In your custom view, find this:
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Update - May 2, 2006:  I would skip this advice and refer to my later entry that shows how to set up fully moderated comments for COREBlog.

Because of the proliferation of comment spam on weblogs, having the ability to easily remove comments is critical.  Coreblog2, the Plone product I use for my Weblog, doesn't offer a good way to handle comment spam.  Here's how I solved the problem for myself.Read more

To set up Plone, I wanted to make sure that I could continue to use other web applications, such as PHP and Java applications.  This can be accomplished using Apache with mod_proxy and mod_rewrite.  I'll cover this from an Ubuntu perspective, but setting this up on other distributions or operating systems should be similar.  While Ubuntu spreads the configuration to many different files, on many other systems you can put all the configuration lines I mention below directly into http.conf.

Install Apache

Start by installing Apache 2.
On Ubuntu:Read more

Last night, I tried out XGL on Ubuntu for the first time by upgrading to Ubuntu Dapper and following the instructions on the Ubuntu wiki.  Wow, what an experience.  It looks to me like a fundamental evolution in Unix and Linux display technology.Read more