Themes.org Well, themes.org has lay fallow for ages now. Sites like kde-look and sunshineinabag have moved in and attempted to take up the slack. However, browsing to freshmeat I saw a note saying that the old themes.org themes had been rolled into themes.freshmeat.net. I don't know how well things will work, but I wish them all the best!

Resume XML Library Found this today, while waiting for some information from some people (which, BTW, I still haven't gotten)... it's a very cool looking library that allows you to define elements of your resume in XML, and then use uses the FOP to render the resume as text, html, and PDF. It's customizable, and allows you to use your own CSS stylesheets to make sure it's "you" :)

So check out XMLResume. You'll also have to grab the FOP distro and install the files from it according to a very good howto.

The Help Desk Anthem The below was passed on to me from my good friend Fred over at TDIClub, and is a must read for anyone in tech support.

Read on...

 (sung to the tune of "Help!", with apologies to Lennon/McCartney) 
 
 "HELP!
 My system's frozen!"
 
 "HELP!
 All my apps are closin'!"
 
 "HELP!
 You know my screen is blue!"
 
 "HEELLLLLP!"
 
 When I was younger and quite desperate for pay,
 I worked the help desk for eight hours every day.
 End users called me up to tell me what was wrong,
 And now I find, it fried my mind, I worked "the desk" too long.
 
 "Help me if you can, my system's down!
 And a reboot didn't bring it back 'round!
 Should it make that awful grinding sound?
 Help desk pleeeeeease, please help me!"
 
 And now my work has changed in oh so many ways,
 I wrangle data; I'm an MCDBA.
 But now and then the help desk sneaks into my dreams,
 I'm taking calls, I'm up the walls, I wake up with a scream.
 
 "Help me if you can my system's down!
 I read virus-laden e-mails by the pound!
 All my data's one big steaming mound!
 Help desk PLEEEEASE, PLEASE HELP ME!"
 
 When I was younger and quite desperate for pay,
 I worked the help desk for eight hours every day.
 But now I wish that I could travel back in time,
 I wouldn't cry, if only I could leave that desk behind.
 
 "Help me if you can my system's down!
 Spilled my coffee, now my hard drive's full of grounds!
 HELP DESK PLEEEEEEASE, PLEASE HELP ME!
 HELP ME!
 HELP ME! Oooooooo...."
 
 (sitar music starts up)
 
 "If you'd like to speak with a help desk representative, using your touch
tone phone, please press number nine..."
 
 "Number nine..."
 "Number nine..."
 "Number nine..."
 "Number nine..."
 "Number nine..."

Viking Name Converter <Go to this website commands "Arcterex Hairy-Cheek">

Sign up to be a Goon I've always wanted to be a henchman, so signing up to be a goon was an easy decision. Via a text ad on k5.

Foz has an excellent post on his site called Charles Schultz Philosophy... good read, even better point.

Laser Surgery? Just a quick question for everyone out there. I've been toying with the idea of getting corrective laser eye surgery from the Valley Laser Eye Center for a while. Anyway, I wanted to get any input from other people that I could. How it was and how are the results basically. The lovely Webdiva has already given me her experiences, now I'm looking for a wider range of people. If anyone has had this, and wants to share, please let me know by email or by commenting below.

Things I'm also wondering about are age, how bad were your eyes, how is night vision, halos around things, and playing quake (yes, seriously... I can play just fine with my glasses on but with contacts I can't "focus" (or something) on the screen sometimes.... just for 3d fps though), and have you needed touch ups since.

Thanks for any info anyone can give me!

264 MPG Wow, and I thought that the Honda Insight (which I took for a test drive last week... just for fun (I love my prelude too much to let it go)) was good! Well, this little beauty from VW will do 264 MPG, and weighs under 700 pounds. It's even a two seater! Tres cool, can't wait until we start seeing more of these out on the streets :)

Virtues Via nyetwork comes a good link to an article entitled Nine Virtues, Three Professions.

Stupid Customer Questions This site, to an ex-tech support worker, is like a mirror back into time. Or something like that. It's funny dammit, just go look!

Some E2 Lovin' Why nothing like Star Trek would ever happen was a C!ed node I noticed today...... nice good belly laugh and a nod of "yup, that's exactly right" :)

KDE 3.0 Experimental Debs Just saw on kde-look that there are instructions for debian users on how to get kde3 on their machines via deb.

SoF 2 Impressions A decent article with impressions of the new Soldier of Fortune 2 Multiplayer that was just released that rings pretty true to what I thought about it. It "felt" very close to the Navy Seals mod for quake3, but was better somehow. The models, weapons and sounds were all nice, and it had a good mix of realism/fun, and as it was done using the quake3 team arena engine as a base, it looked niiiiiiiiiiiiiice. Try it out yourselves and let me know what you think!

Some GNOME Backgrounds In the quest for good default GNOME2 backgrounds, this URL, containing some nice backgrounds was posted. Nice stuff in there!

WebMail b0rked Just FYI, the webmail email sending may be b0rked. Looking into it now....

GNOME Releases Couple of things I thought I'd point out.

• Gnome Media Project - not for the files themselves, or any actual content, but for the funniest release notes I've ever seen!
• ABIword 1.0 - nifty stuff like gnome2 support and tables! Good job guys!

Galeon-AA HOWTO (xft version) Ok folks, this was supposed to be soon after it was nuked originally, but that didn't happen :( Anyway, if you're interested in getting Galeon going with anti-aliased fonts and not using the (inferior IMHO) freetype method, read on!

Update: After talking a bit with tko on IRC (#galeon, irc.gnome.org), he threw me a sources.list line, which is at the top of the HOWTO now. Update 2
The tko xft debs were updated last night so that the second part of the instructions are no longer valid. No more messing with fonts.conf, just install the debs!

Update 1
First, huge thanks to tko for making these available. Please note that they are a) i686 optimized, and b) built for him, by him, so if they're busted, don't bitch :)

Add the following to your /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://tko.wox.org/debian ./
They are mozilla .9.9-6 debs, so right up to date with the current ones. Second step is to download http://tko.wox.org/debian/fonts.conf and put it in /etc/mozilla

Restart, and all will be well! If you're still interested in building your own, read on boys and girls.

First of all, I'm sorry, I don't have the original HOWTO still available, so this is from scratch. Just so you know, the reason why I did this originally was because while the (now standard I think) method of getting antialiased text in galeon/mozilla was with libFreeType2, the XFT hack seems to work and look much much nicer, and requires only an environment variable or two to be set instead of having the user mess around with their prefs.js file.

First thing to do is grab mozilla with the XFT hack in it. This was originally here, but the RPMs were removed, and now there are just tarballs (which work just fine). However, if you want the rest, with the -devel, -psm, etc files, you can grab them from the local mirror.

Ok, so you've got the files, now install them. If you're an RPM user, use alien to convert the .debs to .rpm, or .tgz, or really, whatever you want. A cool way of doing this is:
# for i in mozilla*.deb ; do alien -r $i ; done

(That'll convert all the .debs to .rpms in one command.... $DEITY bless bash!).

Step 2: grab the latest galeon:
# cvs -z3 -d :pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.gnome.org:/cvs/gnome co -r galeon-1-2 galeon

(that will grab the galeon 1.2 branch from the gnome cvs tree).

Step 3, compile.
# cd galeon
# ./autogen.sh && make && make install


If you've installed mozilla in a non-standard place, you'll have to pass that information to galeon via the ./autogen.sh script. When compiling is done, set the following environment variables in the method that is appropriate to your shell (modify paths if needed).
# export FONTCONFIG_PATH=/usr/lib/mozilla/res/Xft/
# export MOZILLA_XFT=1

Then run, and admire the great look: example 1 and example 2.

That's about it... now, the last time I did this was a while, back so I don't know if it'll work anymore. I've emailed the maintainer of the XFT hack, and asked if there's any more development on it, so who knows.

Please let me know of any errors in here so that I can fix them. I've just finished building it using mostly exactly what I used here, but who knows right? :)

The OE-ONE Distro I have to give a hat tip to Foz and Engel for sending me over to the OE-ONE website. They have what Microsoft was fearing a while back, a browser based desktop (calender pics, better to check out the flash demo available on the main page). They have basically taken mozilla and used it like it should be used, an application via the XUL interface. It looks really slick, and the sort of thing that my mother could deal with. A review on Newsforge is here.

Anyone had any experience with this software? I'd normally be more than happy to lay down the $40CND for the software distro, but at this moment I'd like to know that it's as cool as it looks before laying ca$h on the table. I don't suppose any OE-ONE guys out there want to send me an eval version do they? :)

"In the Beginning, Was the Command Line" I just finished this book a couple of days ago, and loved it! I didn't realize that the full text was available online! It's a fantastic book by Neil Stephenson, the author of Cryptonomicon.

My favorite thing about the book is his use of simple analogies to explain things and make everything make sense. His explanation of the 4 car companies representing MS, Apple, Be and Linux, and his use of a story about drills to explain why unix people are the way they are (search for "hawg" in the link to find that section).

UI Schtuff A couple of things that ya'll might be interested in.

• First is an email to the nautilus list (referenced later by the usability list) with a proposal (or at least the discussion of) improved handling of email, and how it could/should be email that becomes the killer app, not the web. Read the full email here. If that's down (it is now) I have a local copy or you can grab the google cache.
• The next is an interesting article on ask tog about Apple and how they could do something great, but aren't.

Perl Poetry Hit http://perlmonks.org for the first time in a while, and found this awsome example of poetry there.... Metallica's Enter Sandman written (and compiling in) perl!

Holocaust on Endor Saw this over at GN.n.... someone has gone to extreme technical detail on the resulting holocaust that would result from detonating a huge spherical battlestation over an inhabited planet moon named Endor. Wow... cool stuff.

Big Ass Shoes So how big are your feet? Think they're big? Try these on for size!

Episode III In a random travel I came across this site which is a place for Episode III info. Episode III is of course, at least 3 years away, but they have some good hints at what it will have in it, based on episode 4-6.

Shack Selling Hardware Looks like sCary has entered a new market and has started selling hardware. The SHACKSTORE is where you'd get your high end hardware for gaming. This is definately a place where you would get hardware that you know doesn't suck, cause hey, it's a store run by gamers! Good luck guys!

National Workplace Napping Day Khensu threw me this fine, fine link, finally justifying those long hours I've spent at work with my head on the keyboard, dreaming and drooling. Hit the National Workplace Napping Day site for more details. It's today though, so warm up those pillows, and prepare to nap!

LOTR in Lego Yup, someone's constructing scenes from the story here. Looks good. Link via ars.

Some software Updates Couple of quick links from OSNews.

• There is a security update for OS X that is available from Apple. The following packages are updated: OpenSSH v3.1p1, rsync v2.5.2, groff v1.17.2, PHP v4.1.2, sudo v1.6.5p2, mod_ssl v2.8.7, mail_cmds
• Sounds like there is a first service pack for Windows XP in the works.

Tripping the Rift Animated Series Looks like there'll be a animated series based on the CGI short of of the same name. The short will start in the first quarter of 2003 on the SCI FI channel, and, if it's the slightest bit true to the original, will be hilarious. I really look forward to this (when it comes out on a channel that I can actually get that is). Thanks fark.

Happy Birthday Fozbaca This took me by surprise, but apparently my good friend and perl-programming-weenie fozbaca is having a birthday today. I won't spoil it and tell ya'll how ancient he is, but let you go and discover for yourselves. "Young for a mountain, old for a grapefruit, just right for a fozbaca"

Happy birthday dude!

New GNOME Themes Site Well, since themes.org has lapsed lately, there is a new site out of the UK that is becoming a theme center. http://www.sunshineinabag.co.uk has gtk, gtk2, sawfish, meta themes, as well as nautilus themes and emblems. A very good site, still being filled up with new themes and in need of some minor UI features (new themes at the top of the page for example :) but a great resource nonetheless.