Linuxphile.org

Christmas has come and gone. It is now time for me to post the Christmas photos taken to the website where all the family members will view them. There is always one trouble maker in the group being photographed. My sister is that trouble maker. Her pictures invariably have  her with demon eyes. This is not a testament to her personality, really ;)

The pictures I had of her were quite nice other than the red eye. I remembered seeing a tutorial somewhere with the topic of red eye removal in Gimp. I am graphically challeneged but decided to give it a shot. I was amazed at how easy it was.

I'm working on an application for one of my employers. This application reads thousands of rows of data and renders it to the browser. Unfortunately with thousands of rows of data page load times are huge, the server can run out of memory, and other irritating problems.

So I began investigating page numbering for this problem. It was quite easier than I imagined. It is as easy as you using LIMIT in your SQL statement, with the FROM parameter, ex:

select * from some_table limit 1, 30

In the above the sql will only return 30 results/rows, starting with the first. I then created a template function that takes three parameters: current page, total pages, and the link to be used as the base for the navigation:

By day I am a configuration manager at Computing Options Company. My duties include maintaining our source repository, building and deploying the software, and building installers for our end users. We use InstallAnywhere to deliver the software to the end users. Prior to luntbuild I had an ant script that would prepare the software for InstallAnywhere and then I would manually launch InstallAnywhere and create the installer.

Then I discovered InstallAnywhere's ant task to produce the installer. I modified the Ant script to include the new taskdef and now all I had to do was manually launch the ant script. That was nice and even fairly efficient.

I'm not necessarily a big fan of law suits, but something has to be done to keep the big record companies and film groups from controlling the media we consume. Apparently Texas is as upset by DRM as I am: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20051121/tc_nm/sony_texas_dc

DRM is crap

I'm writing a paper for a philosophy class on the morality of DRM. I am appalled at just how much consumers are being limited in they way can use media they've purchased. It spans all electronic media, CD's, DVD's, MP3's, eBooks, software.

I know it's old news but it still rankles: Dimitri Sklyarov was arrested for his work on cracking the Adobe eBook format. Yeah, re-read that. From that statement it might seem like what he did should be illegal, however, the intended use for the software was to allow a consumer to take their legally purchased eBook with them wherever they were and also to allow the book to be read by the computer for the blind. Doesn't seem so wrong any more, eh?

<rant>Argh!
I am a huge open source fan. All open source in fact. I am also supportive of the companies I patronize making money. I support local businesses. I buy from smaller shops when the cost is just a little bit more and I'll pay for open source software when it makes sense. Why would anyone want a company to NOT make money or NOT do something that could benefit the company monetarily while allowing them to stick with their beliefs?
This is all about Novell's layoffs and decision to switch to Gnome instead of KDE as their default desktop environment. After Linux Today posted an article by a disgruntled employee of Novell, Novell themselves responded to the hub-bub generated by the article. According to Novell they did layoff employees but those directly involved with their Linux initiative were "left largely intact." It seems clear now that the employee who wrot e the Linux Today article, one who worked directly with KDE, felt that Novell was turning away from KDE.  But going with Gnome does make sense as the usability has met government requirements for usability. Also KDE isn't going away! Novell is still providing this as an option and is still contributing resources. Please excuse them while the regroup to better provide US with a superior OS. </rant>