I was at the LugradioLive 2007 conference this last weekend which was fab, see here for my take on it.

I am famous, well no, but at the end of the JakAttack podcast 55 [ogg | mp3], they read out my email, rock on!

This post is another of my occasional series on what has floated up my RSS reader since last time. I normally surf the web with Javascript and Ads turned off, so as always, if there is tacky ads all over them then, erm ... get yourself set up like me!

Who made you Captain Kirk?

LKH writes a post about how 'enterprise' Linux distros manage their kernels, and how their kernels are so old and broken and not getting any better, especially for manufacturers who want to get their kit supported in a hurry. I am not having a go at LKH, he puts 'enterprise' in double quotes. This is good, because I cannot see any use of the term 'enterprise Linux' other than to spread confusion and FUD. Unless you are talking about an operating system for a galaxy class starship.

I believe in 'Community' distros such as Gentoo and Debian. I think it is a better model all round. Ubuntu and Fedora are semi-community. Leaving the rpm-infested rest as 'enterprise' with their five year old binaries and shrink-wrapped boxes.

The use of the term 'enterprise' is loaded, it implies that Redhat and Novell must be automatically better for companies to use, which of course is complete rubbish - the real standard of whether you should use it is whether it crashes or not, i.e. is it any good? Is your hardware supported? Do security updates come through fast?

I personally think meritocratic communities are, in many cases, a better place for companies to engage in, why swap one Microsoft for another? Why depend on anyone? Control your own technological destiny, don't let your technology dictate you. Apologies if that last sentence was too marketing- like; I heard a really good Chris DiBona talk at LugRadioLive about how important it is for companies like Google to have freedom over the software they use, that is why Google is one of the biggest open source software users (and contributors of patches and cash).

Meritocratic communities are what open-source is all about, after all. Unlike Redhat or Novell, Debian cannot go bust. If you purchase third party support for Gentoo or Debian and your support company goes bust, just employ another support company then go for lunch; your computers will still be running Gentoo or Debian. No interruption required.

Null and Void

Ryan Hill writes an impressive post about how he is going to fix WXwidgets in Gentoo, then he screams and goes back to the drawing board. You can't win them all.

I like to use /dev/null when I am really angry at something. It's like the naughty corner in that TV programme about the nanny with the awful cockney accent who goes into dysfunctional families and sorts them out. Brock argues that redirecting to /dev/null/ is ugly and there is a better way.

Give me cool stuff

A guy called Isam has a really cool idea for his blog. It is about wget and cURL and how to use them to automate downloads of your favourite things, (there are also other subjects covered as the passion takes him).

There is a useful post by an Andrew about how to output your system profile to a text file on Mac OS X.

A guy called Jeff has really got into Microsoft Powershell and is writing a blog about it, check it out for all your next-generation Windows command line needs.

Cd-MaN has some nice stuff. Firstly how to look up the IP Address of Windows PC's on your network from Linux when you only know the computer name. Secondly how to use Truecrypt on Ubuntu. Truecrypt is a cross-platform encryption program, so the idea seems to be that you can use the encrypted disk on both Linux and Windows.

An anonymous blogger has written a nice little bash script to email himself each day's access logs. Bet that is fun reading! Whatever floats your boat, I suppose. I personally use awstats that parses the logs and produces a one page summary with graphs.

My SysAd Blog has lots of interesting system admin tips, examples seem to be from Solaris which makes a nice change.

Linux by Examples attempts to explain every GNU/Linux command by examples. Which is what I originally started this blog for, until I ran out of useful Bash commands and got bored of it, that and I got a laptop capable of running GNOME so it was possible to sometimes talk about graphical stuff.

**More Commandos **

Us Warriors here are no longer alone, there is now also a Command line Samurai and a Command Line Ninja!

The first has amusing rants, half of which I cannot make out what the context is. The other tends to talk about what music he likes, a man after my own heart.

On the music front, Darren lists his top six songs for geeks.

Slightly more insecure is the "command line idiot" . A new blog about starting with Linux, despite the title it has some interesting posts.

command line interface seems to be currently a holiday diary, but otherwise has lots of relevant stuff.

Why the * does your CSS look * in IE?

Programming is an art form as much as painting or acting, source code is a literary work of its creators, some source code is more like novels and some are more like shopping lists, but you get the idea.

Putting your own point of view in source code comments and variable names has a history as long as computers, it is a matter of free speech.

This is one of the reasons that longtime proprietary products often take so long to open source. Some poor guy has to spend weeks going through the program, censoring perhaps a decade of swear words, sexist comments, sci-fi references, names of glamour models, potentially libellous statements and so on that were never intended to be publicly shown or made search-able via Google.

On this topic, spugbrap has a classic post about ideological statements in id and class names in HTML. IE often breaks the W3 standards, which can often lead to last minute fixing of unexpected bugs, so people get cheesed off.

Excel bugs and elections

In the last post I was talking about MS Office, namely if MS Office is the solution then you have not understood the problem. Office software is the answer when people are asking the wrong question.

Gervase had a post about the Scottish elections called Excel Nearly Elects Wrong Government, almost enough said! I would just like to repeat my view that Elections should not involve using any software where the source code is not fully open and available for public peer-review. This principle is called democracy.

Making things better

Mike offers 10 ideas to improve GNOME, one of my favourite topics.

Bug reports that his spam comments dropped off after introducing a basic maths question. My quantity of spam has also reduced quite a bit after asking for your email address several times and checking if they are the same.

Bug also mentions that many web hosts still do not support PHP version 5, still offering 4 only, they are partying like it's 1999. There is no excuse not to offer both in my opinion, most decent operating systems can slot them.

Anyway, a group of prominent PHPers have decided to declare that February 5th, 2008 is the day that PHP4 dies:

> The PHP developer community has decided that it is indeed now time to move forward, together. Therefore, the listed software projects have all agreed that effective February 5th, 2008, any new feature releases will have a minimum version requirement of at least PHP 5.2.0. Furthermore, the listed web hosts have agreed that effective February 5th, 2008, they will include PHP 5.2 (or a more recent version) in their service offer.

That's your lot for now. What have you read this month? Please do let me know using the comments function below, share the love!