First, a disclaimer: I am not a Mac zealot. In fact, I am not even a Mac owner. The entire extent of my Mac experience stems from the early-days of the Apple][ eighties and a few months of OSX use during some web development subjects at university. Linux is my flavour of choice, and I like it that way, but I am going to jump on the (very over-crowded) bandwagon anyway and bring up the topic of Apple making the switch to Intel processors.

I realise this story has already been flogged harder than a Windows user at Steve Jobs’ latest keynote, so I will keep this as concise as possible. (read: point-form)

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So, the MPAA has seen fit to accuse the BitTorrent protocol of eating away at the launch-day earnings of Star Wars Episode III.

I am sure George Lucas is collecting all of his food stamps and lining up at the local welfare office following such a blatent robbery of his small-time earner. The movie only made ~$50 million or so… IN ONE FREAKING DAY! Surely BitTorrent is to blame for such poor earnings.

The consipracy theories abound, but I think one Slashdotter put it best:

I believe it was BitTorrent on the Grassy Knoll. BitTorrent also touched those boys at Michael Jackson’s pad.
This is like blaming Boeing for destroying the World Trade Center.

BitTorrent be damned.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pr0n surfed, weak and weary,
Over many a strange and spurious site of ‘Hot XXX Galore’.

While I clicked my fav’rite bookmark, suddenly there came a warning,
And my heart was filled with mourning, mourning for my dear amour.
“‘Tis not possible!”, I muttered, “Give me back my free hardcore!”

Quoth the server, 404.

Sure, this site’s doctype might say XHTML 1.0 Strict and validate as such, but as the more astute of you already know, that means SFA as far as your browser is concerned as long as the document is delivered as text/html. Make no mistake about it. Your browser will effectively render any page delivered as text/html as tag soup; that is to say, the same way it would render HTML 3.2.

Admittedly, it will be the most semantic HTML 3.2 known to man, but unless your browser is delivered a Content-Type of application/xhtml+xml, it will not render the page any differently.

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Sometime yesterday I noticed my Gmail account’s available storage was ever slowly going up! First 1500MB, then 1700MB, and this morning I wake up to see the following:

I wonder if that is where it will stop. One would assume so, but with Google you never know. (And the fact that it is 2051MB and not 2048 - a true 2 gigabytes - is also a little odd).

Update: Well it looks like Google are going to scale Gmail storage quotas almost indefinately and in real time. My quota is now 2057MB at 6:56pm AEST 4/4/2005.

I would hazard a guess that 95% of Linux users know what their /tmp directory is for. For those that don’t, your chosen Linux distribution probably already uses tmpwatch in order to achieve the following.

As an avid Slackware user, I needed a quick way of checking the contents of my /tmp and /var/tmp and pruning files which haven’t been used in a given period of time. The following few lines of bash code achieve just that:

#!/bin/bash
find /tmp -type f -atime +5 -exec rm {} \\;
find /var/tmp -type f -atime +30 -exec rm {} \\;

The second line will clear all files located in /tmp that haven’t been accessed in five days or more, while the third line clears any files in /var/tmp that haven’t been accessed in thirty days or more.

Just throw this in /etc/cron.daily and you will have yourself a clean and up-to-date /tmp directory.

More like a Google-firecracker than a Google-bomb.

So it turns out that currently, 38.6% of all of my Google-searcher traffic is looking for the phrase “firefox settings”. Also, all of that traffic seems to be going directly to my short article about, wouldn’t you know it, Remote Firefox Settings. How could this be?

Well as it turns out, that dodgy little article is number one in Google for a search of "firefox settings".

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After a few months of beta testing, Adobe Reader 7.0 for Linux is finally available for download.

AdbeRdr70_linux_enu.tar.gz (39165K)
AdobeReader_enu-7.0.0-1.i386.rpm (38933K)

In my opinion, it is the first stable not-so-bloated release since version 4. It also works flawlessly within Firefox 1.0, and any other gecko-based browser. I have also tested it in Opera and Konqueror and I can report that it works perfectly in both browsers as well.

Here is a screenshot of Acrobat Reader 7.0 operating within Firefox 1.0.2 on Slackware 10.1:

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Today (Fri, 18 Mar 2005) at 01:58:31 GMT unix time turns 1111111111.

“Tonight we’re gonna party like its 1111111110“

German company Ahead Software have released a Linux version of their award-winning Nero Burning ROM.

Nero has long been the industry standard for CD and DVD compilation on the Windows platform, and the announcement of its availability for the Linux operating system could be a major boon for Linux users and developers alike.

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