Keeping track of Passwords

I finally gotten to the point where I have more online accounts than I can remember. So I’ve decided to use gpg to encrypt a list of usernames/passwords, unless this is really insecure. I set the key to expire in a month to force me into changing my passwords withen that time. I may go to a key pair that never expires, but I think a month is a good length of time for a trial run. Now all I need to do is name the file something inconspicuous like “tax_info.txt” or “mypasswds” 😉

LaTeX update

So far learning LaTeX (I hope I’m formating that right) has been fun. The syntax isn’t that difficult, but it’s going to take some time before I can use formatted text without a refrence in front of me. I was suprised that this tutorial seemed to encourage the use of a GUI LaTeX editor. (or emacs) It’s a very good tutorial. It’s long (hopefully that means it’s thorough), but it’s easy to work through. If you want to learn LaTeX I highly recommend it as your first stop.

Book Publishers

Around yesterday I decided to email all the some of the publishers of my computer books to see what I could do to get an electronic copy of them. So far, the only thing I’ve gotten back was a vacation auto response, but it’s only been a day or two. Normally I like having a book, but sometimes it’s hard to hold a book in one hand and type with the other. Or if I go on vacation or somewhere else it would be nice to be able to take some books with me without having all the extra weight to carry around.

Have you had any experiences asking this from a book publisher before? I’d love to hear what kind of response you got back.

I love Wikipedia!

If I’m looking for something spicific on the web usually the first place I look is Wikipedia. Usually I can find exactly what I’m looking for, along with links to sites dealing with the topic. Google’s great, but when I’m looking for spicifics Wikipedia is definantly the way to go.

Learning LaTeX

I’ve decided that I want to learn some sort of Linux text processing language. I’m really excited! I’ve decided to learn Tex. I couldn’t really find a comparison of TeX markups, but I’ve settled on LaTeX. I’ve read it’s much easier than plain TeX, but I’m still open to recomendations. What version’s of TeX do you recommend?

Has anyone else tried to learn TeX or other typesetting languages?

Left Panel not as usable

In GNOME I created a second panel to act as a quick launch bar for my frequently used apps. The main bar’s located at the top of the screen and I didn’t want to use the bottom, so only the left and right sides of the screen were left to put the new panel. Most of the time I see extra widgets like my quick launch bar placed on the right side of the screen, so I placed it there first. Then I decided to be different and use the left side of the screen. I noticed I had started to use it less and less, and when it was used it felt very akward. So now it’s back on the right side.

After reading through Designing Interfaces I wonder if the usabillity of the panel is related to english being read from left to right?

Finally, I have a reason to reinstall Windows!

… and this time I’m happy about it 😉

I managed to finally wipe XP from my hard drive after finding a tool to use my MTP/Play for Sure mp3 player in Linux, only to find out that I’m going to need it back again. I came across this really cool site that had tons of hacks, tweaks and mods for windows. I was especially interested in changing the shell windows uses to something like blackbox, or one of the other shells that exists.

I’m just not looking foward to the 39ish minute install and repairing my boot loader. I guess now is the time to finally read one of those “install windows after Linux” articles on LQ

… and I just found this site

Looks like it’s going to be a busy week 😉

Making Progress with a 2.6 Kernel

I’ve been doing some research on kernel. I found two site that helped a great deal with about half of the kernel options. Most of them I had no idea what to select, but the two sites did a good job of explaining what an option does, and why you would or would not want to include it. The major sections I’m still missing are drivers, and networking.

I didn’t know whether pentium M processors had smp/hyperthreading the Ubuntu forum helped not only give me the answer, but it described what would happen if I did include it. The pentium M article was also helpful with this. but YAST’s hardware tool made the most impact. In the list of hardware there a section called “Has SMP” and sure enough it had the value “no”

Hopefully by the time Slackware 11 is officially released I’ll be ready to build my kernel and start Slacking again 😀

Of course there is the problem of the many GNOME dependancies my a lot of my favorite apps have… Maybe I’ll try Freerock or GWare. Anything but Dropline *shivers* Dropline replaces too many system packages for me to be comfortable.

http://www.linuxchix.org/content/courses/kernel_hacking/lesson2
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=149348&page=2&highlight=cpu+686
http://www.techenclave.com/forums/compiling-the-linux-kernel-version-2-a-5099.html

PenguinTV

Version 2.0 of my favorite RSS reader has just been released. It’s was created with podcasts and video blogs as its main focus when it was developed, so it makes a great podcatcher. I like the interface better than most RSS readers because of its simple and easy to use interface. I also like that it parses the entire feed and displays full articles instead of a snippet like a lot of others I’ve tried.

The thing I’m most glad about this release is that the develper can finally start working on 3.0. It almost seems like a waste looking foward to the next .0 release after one has just been anounced, but I’m really looking foward to when the develper “Recode[s the] download architecture and redo Active Download interface” I’ve always thought that the downloading process was akward to use, but it’s getting better with each release.

check it out at http://penguintv.sourceforge.net

Learning PHP

I spent today going through the php tutorial on <a href=”http://www.php.net”>php.net</a&gt; One of the most annoying things about learning PHP is that you have to have a web server running, and you have to program in the document root. This makes it somewhat harder to start learning than javascript (I may be comparing apples to oranges here, but from my stand point they’re both just scripts embeded in html) Once the server’s going it’s not any harder to code and test, but it takes more effort to set up.

All things considered, I think I’m going to like PHP.