I think Google Maps was one of the first killer web apps. It was probably the first AJAX application I ran into. I spent countless hours just looking at the world from a new perspective. Google then released Google Earth, which gave me more ways to view and interact with the satellite imagery. Google has also released an API for Google Maps, which allowed others to use their imaginations to create new and useful derivatives. Here are just a few of the cool ones…
Author Archive for n01getsout
Recently, a friend of mine asked me to look at his karate instructor’s computer. I went over there and the computer was continuously rebooting. It was running Windows 2000 and MSN as their internet provider. He, like most other computer users, did not have a backup of his software or data. He runs his business off of this computer, which has irreplaceable information from the past 10 years and has a program that manages all of his students, training, schedules, and billing. He said he does not have the CD that the program came on anymore as the last person that worked on his computer destroyed it. Microsoft in their infinite wisdom decided to set the computer up to automatically reboot when it encounters a blue screen of death, rather than show the error message and just let the user reboot on their own. I guess even Microsoft hopes that problems will just fix themselves. “No problem,” I thought, “I will just reboot into safe mode, set it to not reboot on errors, fix the problem, and I will be done.” Yeah right…
Continue reading ‘Would You Trust Microsoft With Your Business?’
Is it possible for Linux to win in the fight for desktop users against Microsoft Windows? Is it possible for Microsoft to stay competitive against another operating system that is available for free when it has spent over $6 billion dollars to make Vista?
I recently read yet another article posing the question of what would happen if Microsoft makes Windows available for free (as in price, not open source). I personally think this is a ridiculous question to ask because users already pay for Windows. Price is not the issue. Users also pay for Mac OS X, which is built upon the BSD like Darwin. Linux can be much like OS X using nothing but free, open source software. So why do people pay for an operating system?
I finally got tired of trying to get my ATI Radeon 9000 Pro to work properly with Linux. I had to jump through hoops to get Google Earth to work, I had to turn of stars in Celestia with gconf-editor to prevent it from crashing, Neverwinter Nights would crash at random, and I had problems with certain color-depth / resolution combinations. I kept hearing that NVIDIA’s proprietary drivers work much better than ATI’s, and with the fact that ATI will no longer produce drivers for the Radeon 9000 Pro, I decided to purchase a NVIDIA graphics card.
Ever since I upgraded to my desktop to Debian Linux I have not been able to run Google Earth. It would freeze on the splash screen and never open the main interface. I used Google Earth on Debian before, so I knew it was just a problem with my machine. As it turns out, it was the new ATI fglrx drivers that were preventing it from running properly.
The real question that is being asked here is how much can someone change Firefox and still be able to call it Firefox. But before anyone takes this article the wrong way, let me clear up a few things. I love Firefox. I respect the fact that they wish to have quality control over the product that bears the Firefox brand. I will continue to recommend Firefox to Microsoft Windows users without any reservations. However, I trust Debian far more than the Firefox crew to package and configure Firefox/Iceweasel in a way that meets the standards of my Debian system. And yes, there is much more at play here than trademarked icons!
Continue reading ‘Why Iceweasel Instead of Firefox on Debian?’
My D-Link router died and I bought a Linksys WRT54g thinking I could put Linux on it. Unfortunately, I should have checked a little more before I bought it because I got a v5, which has half of the RAM and flash memory and is not compatible with most 3rd party firmwares. I also found out that I could not forward packets to the broadcast address, which is exactly what I needed to do to get Wake-on-LAN working.
Continue reading ‘Wake-on-LAN on Linux with a Linksys WRT54g’
I have seen many, many discussions about how Linux is faster than MS Windows, or how Gentoo is faster than Arch is faster than Debian is faster than SUSE. Faster? Will I really notice a few milliseconds? Will my hardware have the same speed boosts as these other people are claiming? Will some things be faster while other things get slower?
The answer is yes/no/maybe. I can definitely say that Debian IS faster than Windows 2000 on the same hardware. I can also extrapolate that since Windows XP is just 2000 with some added features (bloat), that Debian is also faster than Windows XP.
One of Debian’s greatest strengths is the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG). Among other things, it says that software must be free to redistribute in both binary and source code forms, and that people can freely make and distribute derivative programs from it. While this is one of the principal ideas of both Debian and the open source community, it does not help you if you want to watch a DVD on you computer. This is why Christian Marillat created the unofficial Debian Multimedia repository.
I have always had problems installing sound cards in Linux, whether it was on-board or a Sound Blaster. I have tried several SimplyMepis LiveCDs and they always seem to get some sort of sound out of my cards so I figured it was something in my configuration. I recently installed Debian on my main computer, and this time was typical with my Sound Blaster only halfway working.
My hard drive crashed and I was again left with the proposition of re-installing Windows. I have used Linux in the past and have dabbled with Debian in virtual machines. I read a great book about Debian called The Debian System written by Martin Krafft which convinced me that Debian was the right Linux distribution for me (where is Ubuntu’s Social Contract?). I highly recommend this book for anyone who is even slightly interested in Debian. After looking at what software I had that was Windows only, I finally decided that I don’t play Half-Life 2 that much and I could live without Dreamweaver. I made the switch.
Here are the directions for how to shutdown or restart in Xfce4 without a password. It will also enable the shutdown and restart buttons.
Open a terminal use visudo and add the following:
username ALL = NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/xfsm-shutdown-helper
This could need to be /usr/libexec/xfsm-shutdown-helper on non-Debian based systems.
