Sean’s Mental Walkabout

NBC Edits SNL Bailout Skit Following Legal Concerns Over “People Who Should Be Shot” Chyron
Interesting. This is one of the reasons you should be watching SNL live, because the archives have this editted out. Revisionist history wins the day.

Dynamic Periodic Table
Just because it’s awesome.

Dutchess Wine Trail - Discover the Premium Wineries of the Hudson Valley
Our local wine trail

Storm King Art Center
Giant Art on 1000 acres of beautiful land

Viscount Wines & Liquor
Wine tastings every saturday. It’s like an amusement park for adults.

Dutchess County Tourism
dutchess county tourism page

Stanford CS Ed Library
If you or a friend are trying to cut or re-cut your teeth on basic C stuff, I found this site years ago that’s actually quite good. Especially as they don’t seem to teach pointers in college any more.

Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool: Table of Contents
For whatever reason the GNU.org docs here suck, and this has always been my reference page for this.

Quick Reference Cards
A bunch of great quick reference cards for various technical tasks.

Advanced Search—The Tree Guide at Arborday.org
In case you are looking to plant a tree, and want to find the right one for your area

Giles Bowkett: Lightbulb Joke: Bad Ruby Programmers
If you follow things in the community, it’s pretty funny. It doesn’t change that I love ruby and ruby on rails, but it’s still funny.

Popularity: unranked [?]

I was working on the MHVLUG wiki, and needed to find a good color of orange.  Typically I just launch gimp, and use the color wheel in there.  But I stopped this time, and did this instead:

apt-cache search color picker

which returned 3 results, including gcolor2.

First off, this is exactly the application I needed.  It launches fast, and just gives me a color wheel to pick colors.  But, it turns out it has something else that’s great.

You see that little eye dropper?  You can click it and then click any pixel on your computer, and it will give you the RGB color of that pixel.  It doesn’t need to be anything special, as it’s pulling directly from the xbuffer.  So handy.  I can’t believe I didn’t know this existed until now.

Popularity: 7% [?]

tecosystems » Define “Contributions”
“If Novell and Red Hat are then the better plumber, to beat the housing analogy to death, Canonical, to me, is the better designer/architect. And much like I don’t want a house without running water, I’d prefer one that’s designed to be livable. It takes all kinds, as they say. “

openmeetings - Google Code
This looks seriously interesting. I’m going to have to see what it takes to get something like this set up.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Java Tips - How to make phone vibrate in J2ME
how to make a phone vibrate with j2me

Neuros OSD 2.0 HD Developer Kits on Sale | OdNT - open.neurostechnology.com
Interesting tv platform

Popularity: 1% [?]

isnoop.net universal package tracking
This is pretty slick, and gives me some of my own ideas on package tracking stuff

RTTNews - Quick facts Articles, Positive EPS Surprises, News Analysis, Earnings, Audio News….
Red Hat buys Qumranet, the tech company behind kvm. I think with this xen officially gets pushed way off to the side.

Popularity: 1% [?]

ByteME - Home
Good stuff on this site, like qavimator .deb files and wireshark filters for SL

Popularity: 1% [?]

Popularity: 39% [?]

I found that Liferea (my rss reader) was starting to get really slow. Hitting space bar to go to the next article was getting somewhat painful levels of delay.

The Fix

Liferea uses sqlite to store it’s information. Over time, when you delete from sqlite, the db gets pretty unoptimized (lots of tombstones). This can be fixed with the following command (make sure Liferea is NOT running before doing this):

sqlite3 ~/.liferea_1.4/liferea.db vacuum

(adjust the directory if running a different version of liferea.) It both made my liferea.db 1/2 as big, and now everything is snappy again.

Popularity: 19% [?]

5 reasons to avoid iPhone 3G - Free Software Foundation
Good things to highlight. I’ve never been an apple fan because of their really strong DRM push.

An introduction to git-svn for Subversion/SVK users and deserters
Really extensive write up on git-svn usage patterns

Git - SVN Crash Course
git for svn users

David Silverman - About Typo
Sent to me by a friend of a friend. I need to check out some of the excerpts this weekend.

Scramblings
doing C# bindings on Linux

KODAK Theatre HD Player Features and Benefits
This could be cool, except if they fully did away with an IR remote. I don’t care out innovative your remote is, if I can’t use my logitech harmony your device is useless to me.

BBC hires IBM guru for its foray into virtual worlds | Technology | guardian.co.uk
Roo has been a great pleasure to work with, the BBC is very luck to have snagged him from us.

Slashdot | RHN Bind Update Brings Down RHEL Named
Ah, it’s going to be a funny day on the internet

Popularity: 1% [?]

If you are in the San Francisco area in early August, I’ll be giving a presentation on OpenSim at the Linux World Conference. Our local linux users group got a preview of that talk this past week. For the talk I started up an OpenSim instance on my laptop and let everyone with wireless and a capable video card connect to it, with much hilarity ensuing. It worked so well, that I’m definitely going to include that portion in my talk at Linux World.

If you are going to be around there, let me know. I’d also love to meet up with OpenSim folks in the SF area during my trip out.

Popularity: 22% [?]