Linux Journal is offering a free one year digital subscription during the week of March 09-13. You just have to watch the daily Tech Tip during that week. The shows hosts announce secret letters during each video.
At the end of the week, unscramble the secret words. Everyone who responds with the correct answer by midnight Friday the 13th, 2009 wins the subscription.
See the first video here
”It’s true that most blogs don’t make money directly. It’s also true, however, that a large number of bloggers make a lot of money as a result of their blogs.” according to Josh Catone from his blog post on the sitepoint.com website.
While this blog has small ads from Google, it hasn’t made any money from these ads since the ads were included Jan 27 2009. Has it made any money otherwise? To this point, the answer is no, but it’s still in its infancy.
More of Josh’s interesting post is available at his post on the sitepoint blog
Jason, one of our business analysts and senior programmers, moved back to Melbourne Australia in 2000 after spending 4 years with us. I was on an Instant Messenger chat with him today and we talked about the wild bush fires in his state of Victoria. The fires started a few days ago when the temperature in Melbourne reached 47.6C (116F). He said, “It was so hot and dry, everything just exploded.”
I asked him if they effected him and his family and he said that the “closest were about an hour ago [away] – we were booked to go to a weekend away in a place call Marysville in May, but the reports say that town has been wiped out. All but 2 buildings left I hear, so not so good for the owners of that B&B.” Also one of his mates had one of the fires come as close as the mailbox. His mate’s father was in the thick of the fires and has not been heard from for a couple of days. Hopefully the father escaped and will be in touch as soon as he has a means of communication.
I was checking out Twitter and there was a tweet from Robert Scoble on how Google maps help the emergency services and the residents know the locate of the fires. The fire map (Feb 08 09 22:00 EST) looks like this:
Google maps Australian bushfires
More on the Google Victoria fire maps story is at Google Australian bushfire maps.
One of the Twitter people – @mrhomegadgets, I’m following pointed to a site that shows you where an IP address is located. The site has a Google map on the world and a text box called ip:2:loc where you type in any IP address on the internet. It immediately pops up a red push pin on the geographical location of the IP address. I typed in my IP address and it produced the map below. It also correctly listed my ISP and the physical location of the ISP.
You can try for yourself at http://ip2loc.jerodsanto.net/
Firefox has many add-ons, but one of the best ones I’ve come across is ScribeFire Blog Editor. The current version is 3.1.6. Once you add it to Firefox, press F8 on any page within Firefox and the ScribeFire editor pops up in the lower half of the screen. It’s a simple and straight forward editor. You can add HTML code in line as well as add images and YouTube videos. Once you’ve setup the link to your blog site, it pickups your current list of categories and allows you to add tags to the post. More out of habit, I publish the post as a draft to my blog and finalize it within WordPress before publishing it to the blog.
You can include Technorati tags as well as as sharing the page on many of the social networking sites such as Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, Newsvine and others. I’m experimenting with this post and sharing this page on Facebook.
Did I mention that you can make money with the ScribeFire Editor? You can sign up for ads for your blog in a fashion similar to Google’s AdSense. When people click on these ads, you get paid a small amount. You get paid on the 7th of the month following for your previous month’s earnings. ScribeFire pays on a minimumof $5. AdSense waits until you’ve accumulated $100 before it pays out.
When creating reports in Visual FoxPro, it’s important to watch when the printer environment is saved on reports. If you create or modify reports in the client’s office, saving the printer environment should produce the desired outcome on the printed report. Generally VFP programmers don’t always have the same printer that their client do. We go about creating and modifying reports without a concern for the printer environment. We test the printed report on our printers and they produce what the client asked for. Then the report gets updated to the client’s version of the program and it doesn’t work. This happened to me last week.
I modified a report and tested it on my computer and it produced the result. Uploaded it to the client site and a part was missing. I tried it again with the same data and the report printed as requested. After further digging, Mike, our senior programmer, found the problem. In the report properties of the particular report, the Printer Environment had been checked. Mike made a rule for our development efforts – make sure that the Printer Environemt on any report is not checked. Inadvertently or accidentally, I broke the rule. So I unchecked the box, recompiled and it worked correctly on the client site. Another happy client.
Our client asked for a change to an order entry screen in one of our Visual FoxPro applications. Our senior programmer Mike, accidentally left off the table prefix for one of the fields in a SQL SELECT statement. The net result was that the work tickets printed from the final SQL cursor, sometimes printed customer information and some times didn’t. After some digging, I found that 2 of the tables in the SQL SELECT statement had the same field name. The SQL SELECT got confused and sometimes returned the customer information and sometimes didn’t on the printed work ticket. I added the table name prefix to the field and did some testing.
Sure enough, the work tickets that didn’t print the customer information now had the relevant information printed in the proper spot. Our client was happy with the result.
The other day my main workstation was slow to respond. So I used AusLogics Disk Defrag (a free defragging tool) to defrag and speed up my hard drive. It completed the task in a few minutes. The workstation was still slow, so I decided to reboot the computer. The login came up and I entered the user name and password and sat back for the desktop to come up. At this point I was called away and left the workstation to continue its loading.
I didn’t get back to the computer till the next morning and the screen was blue (not a Blue Screen Of Death) with no desktop icons. I though this strange, so I rebooted, logged in and after waiting about 10 minutes, there were still no icons on the desk top. I pressed Alt-Ctrl-Del to get the Task Manager and ran some of my programs. They worked as normal, but still no icons on the desktop. On the processes tab, I noticed that explorer.exe was near the top of the list in terms of activity, but it wasn’t doing its job. So I deleted the explorer.exe process and voila the desktop icons all returned. Another problem solved.
While blogging may be considered a way of boosting one’s ego, research published in the Journal of Research in Personality suggests that writing blog entries can be beneficial to your health. The full article with links is here
Vietnam’s government will require its ministries and state agencies to install and become proficient in open source software. There are various stages to the adoption of open source software products like OpenOffice, Mozilla ThunderBird, Mozilla FireFox web browser and the Vietnamese typing software Unikey. By June 30, 2009 all clients of the IT divisions of the agencies are mandated to be using open source software.
The ministries themselves must have and be using 70 percent of open source software by December 31, 2009. Finally by Dec 31, 2010, all staff in these agencies must be able to use open source software in their jobs. By then most information and documents will be exchanged using only open source software. The government is also encouraging computer traders to install open source software on computers rather then “cracked software”. More information is available here