Klingon Programming An oldie but a goodie, it's the one about the Klingon Programmer.

How to write in your Blog An oldy but a goody from eveyone's hero, Jakob Nielsen... guidlines for Microcontent: Headlines and Subject Lines.

Webmail Problems and Fixes As some have noticed, the webmail service here is a bit strange, somewhere along the way IMP decided not to show any messages in your inbox. A bit annoying to say the least. Until that is fixed, or until enough people complain that it's not as good as IMP, I have installed squirrelmail as the webmail client for users.

It works for me^(tm), so it should work for you to. Please email me any issues, or a fix for IMP if you know what is going on. Squirrelmail is also available at http://mail.ufies.org for your convenience :)

Procmail Quickstart Here is a good page with prett much all you need to know for a procmail quickstart. It's not the best laid out (IMHO), but has lots of info, and lots of education for those who have scratched the surface of using procmail, and aren't quite sure how to go beyond the two or three recipes that you keep on cutting and pasting (like I do). Give the page a visit.

More State of the Onion Hilarity First up, Lying Media Bastards has a great analysis of the State of the Union speech. An excerpt:

This entry is really, really long. For those of you with short attention spans, here is a summary:

Bush sucks and is a liar.

Thank you.

Whitehouse.org has their own version of the SOTU speech.

You see, the war goes on, and we are winning. Sure, there's no evidence of that. You just need to take my word on this one, because to give up even a shred of information would jeopardize the secrecy of our global spy satellite system which nobody outside America knows exists. (Applause.)

Both are long but hilarious reads.

State of the Union Drinking Game It's over now, but a link for The State of the Union Address Drinking Game was posted to Fark. Apparently some folks decided to play (scroll to first post after 9pm). Kudos to Lying Media Bastards for the link(s).

Best quote from the fark comments is: "god our president is a jackass"

How Not to Hire a Programmer I found this employment ad reviewed via inluminent.com. All I can say is "wow", and "I certainly wouldn't want to work there. I figured my job-hunting or recently job-hunting friends would get a kick out of this one :)

KDE 3.1 Released I'm sure everyone knows that KDE 3.1 has been released. From the announcement:

The KDE Project today announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.1, a major feature upgrade to the third generation of the most advanced and powerful free desktop for Linux and other UNIXes.

Let the compiling/downloading begin!

And I just got 3.1rc5 compiled! :(

Dynamic Perl Modules with Gentoo While I have been using Gentoo linux for a while now, I recently found out that it has the ability to dynamically create ebuilds (the gentoo package format) for perl modules. No more worrying about "polluting" your system with non-ebuild files, or trying to make your own! Just run:

host# g-cpan.pl Perl::ModuleName

And watch as it is created and installed for you, with any dependancies, automagically! You can then remove it and manage it with Portage just like all your other ebuild packages.

... and the Hulk! Apparently the superbowl hulk trailer is online as well.

Superbowl Matrix Trailer Online [aintitcoolnews] All I can say is "wow", as this is the coolest Matrix Reloaded trailer from the superbowl I have ever seen. All new footage, no huge plot spoilers that I could see, but great hints of what is to come. Here is a direct link to the high quality version.

Joke of the Day Read below for a great joke sent to me by Fun_Pad... Are you my Son
An old man was sitting on a bench at the mall. A young man walked up to the bench and sat down. He had spiked hair in all different colors: green, red, orange, blue and yellow. The old man just stared. Every time the young man looked, the old man was staring. The young man finally said sarcastically, "What's the matter old timer, never done anything wild in your life? "Without batting an eye, the old man replied, "Got drunk once and had sex with a parrot. I was just wondering if you were my son."

2001 Explained A great find by Tig is a flash site Kubrick 's 2001. Very cool.

Remote Monitoring with gkrellm Remote Gkrellm Over SSH Mini-HOWTO.

Good stuff, will have to try that out myself.

Update: Here is a better way to do it using gkrellmd.

You Thought You Had it Bad Well, back in my day....

Very funny, thanks to my buddy Shawn, fellow inmate at UCFV...

Fonts for Free Ten fonts will be released for use under a special open license agreement, giving advanced font capabilities to all free and open source software developers and users. Nifty. Read the press release here.

HTML Email Evilness [via vsbabu] Good article on on the pros and cons of HTML email. Personally I hate it, I really do. I do 99% of my email in mutt, and the HTML email that I get that is not spam has a text component. Basically for what I do I have 0 need for html email, but those who are in other lines of work (marketting, C?Os, etc) probably "need" (or think they need it) for getting a more impactful message across, or at least grabbing someone's attention. For me, my attention is grabbed by the message because it is 5x as big as it should be, isn't readable, or is piped into links automatically.

Anyone else have any good arguments/comments for or against HTML email?

Optimizing KDE Interesting article linked from dot.kde.org about optimizing KDE performance. Some obvious tips, but some other things that you might not think of. Speaking as someone 19 hours into compiling KDE 3.1rc6, this is a good find :)

Debian System Recovery This isn't me for once.... but the Debian Weekly News has a link to an interesting article on the lessons learned when you a) don't make backups and b) lose your /var partition. A good read.

Kevin Back Online Apparently Kevin is back online on the 22^nd, like on "The Screensavers" on Tech TV. This cartoon is probably a pretty funny representation of what will happen. Don't forget that you can ask Kevin questions on ask slashdot.

Easy as Cake Well, as you can see we're back online, with no problems at all! The easiest hardware transfer I think this system has ever seen :) Hopefully nothing will show up tonight, or tomorrow, or for the next year or more (touch wood *tok*tok*). The only issue encoutered was a kernel panic encountered when the kernel was recompiled (I love the 2 minute compile time btw) with high memory support. Oh well, will figure that out sometime later, for now I'm just going to cross my fingers and hope things stay up and well over night :)

As always huge kudos to Fred and Ken for their help.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled random links and funny stuff.

Dog Laws Hilarious stuff.... Dog Laws, found by Firefly. My favorite has to be from under the "LIFE LESSONS LEARNED FROM A DOG" section:

8. If it's not wet and sloppy, it's not a real kiss.

Ain't that the truth!

Ufies.org Downtime Monday Jan 20 As some people aren't on the UFies announce mailing list, I'll throw it up here as well...

On Monday, Jan 20^th UFies.org will go down from around 10am to sometime slightly later than that. I'm hoping it'll only take an hour or so. Anyway, we'll be putting the nice fast motherboard/cpu(s) back, along with a more powerful power supply.

If all goes well, there should be no more problems, ever :) However, if things crash again I will go back in Tuesday (the 21^st) and put the old (current) motherboard back in, and we'll be back up. But that won't happen, knock on wood (*tock*tock*).

Analysis of a Compromised Honeypot Fascinating article entitled Analysis of a Compromised Honeypot, which gives an interesting look into how script kiddies and crackers think and operate. Via the honeypots mailing list.

GTK2 Evolution Looks like the gtk2 port of Evolution is progressing nicely. I'm not sure exactly why it matters that much (there are still lots of bugs in the 1.2.x version), but it'll be nice to not have to theme both gtk1 and gtk2 to get a consistant looking desktop.

Jabber Survey The Jabber guys have a End-User Survey, wander over and fill it out.

This survey is for current end users of Jabber clients. Future surveys will focus on server administrators and developers.

Sodipodi Tutorial Found a good tutorial on using Sodipodi, the gnome vector drawing package.

UFies in the SunRun Time again for the annual 10k/6.25mi walk/run through downtown Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada - followed by geek mischief with your teammates. early bird registration is $32CAD by Feb 7, or $37CAD by March 6th. all the details are at http://sunrun.ufies.org

-- captain mapleleaf

F1 For Sale And I'm not talking about keyboards again. This is a fine looking car, a McLaren F1 (0-60 in 3.2s, 240mph) with $250,000 in upgrades and extras.

Anyone want to loan me a bit of cash? Not that I could afford the insurance, or gas, or stress of trying to drive it at 50km/h through town....

Git-R-Done! There is someone up above and watching over us all, Larry the Cable guy has his own website! Larry is, for those who don't know, a comedian that was on the Blue Collar Comedy Tour (with Jeff Foxworthy, Bill Engvall and Ron White.

A sample for your perusal:

GIT-R-DONE!!!! We just got back from premiering the movie in all three test markets and I got some great pictures so let's get busy!! (What am I Arsenio all of a sudden?) After a quick trip to the Wal-Mart to get some Copenhagen Black and a bag of BBQ pork rinds for my Atkins diet (which has me backed up like Mexican toilet on taco Tuesday), I headed to Tampa to meet Jeff Foxworthy for our free showing premier of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour The Movie.

His commentaries are also online in realplayer format.

Daredevil Trailer Another good one to spooge on until the flick is released on Feb 14^th... watch it here. Kudos to Silv for noticing.

Spammer Victims [fark] I really only have one word for these people.... Dumbasses!

PNG? What Ping? Tig had a pointer to an article at a List Apart all about PNG, transparency, and why we should all be using them by now.

Sadly, flaky browser support has made PNG impractical for almost everything �but now, with a few simple workarounds, we can finally put one of its most compelling features to use.

Word Today's Ozy and Millie does seem to have particular comment on the youth (yuts?) of the modern age. Thanks to TradBrad for throwing this over to me.

Jabber Configs and Binaries The Razor's Edge has released the binaries and config files for their jabber server. Very good if you're looking at setting up a jabber server. All of the files that run the jabber server at jabber.razorsedge.org have been made available for download.

RIAA Hacked (again) A kind soul on ARS this morning noted that the RIAA site had been hacked yet again.

hehehehehe

Virtual Mailhosting Howto Ken has written up a very nice Virtual Mailhosting howto. It is based on gentoo, but should be easily adapted to other distributions. It covers postfix, apache, cyrus, courier, imap, sasl.... the works! Very nice work.

New and Nastier than Ever Yup, that's right, a new issue of Nasty has hit the shelves! Head and read, always full of good stuff from those bratty smart people.

New Character in Lord of the Rings A friend from college passed on this note that fans were outraged at a new character in The Return of the King.

Wellington, New Zealand - A recently leaked trailer for The Return of the King has Tolkien fans outraged over the apparent addition of a new character - Jar-Jaromir. The scene depicted in the trailer shows Jar-Jaromir shouting, "Gondora gonna fallsa"

A toilet to be proud of. It may be old (or not), but the iToilet still got my funny bone. Thanks dragon.

Gentoo Weekly News The first issue of the Gentoo Weekly News is out. Read it here.

How to Write Like a Wanker Cuv pointed me to a page entitled How to Write Like a Wanker, which is most amusing. I quote:

No matter what Flash-blinded web monkeys would have us believe, the Internet is a text-based medium: especially its major discussion forums (IRC and Usenet) where people from all over the world can interact and share information. A popular misconception about text messages on the Internet is that, to be an effective communicator and earn the respect and admiration of your peers, you must be able to write lucid prose; that your messages, articles, posts and pages must be easy to understand and pleasant to read.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Read it all at the page...

MRTG on Steroids My buddy Cfreeze pointed me towards zabbix the other day, it's like MRTG and big brother combined and on some great steroids. SNMP monitoring, email alarms, graphing, service downtime reporting, network mapping, and much much more. See the screenshots for more details.

There is also a review for your reading pleasure.

Web Based Jukebox in Java This is pretty cool. A web based way (via a java applet) to stream mp3/ogg files from a central location. Very nifty, my bud cfreeze (maintainer of the XFMail project) showed me this. We sure could have used this at my last job if our massive mp3 collection had ever come into being!