Now running Fedora 8

Today is a brand new day !!

A few weeks ago - my hard drive had an "Incident". For some reason my FC6 kernal updated, and corupted my file system. Of course I had no real backup - and could not recover properly. So now I have a brand new 250 GB hard drive, installed with Fedora 8 !!

Right now - not very different - I installed from the Live CD, and it went pretty smooth.

Right now, I'm using Blog posting software. I have tried this before - and not realy like it, but I forget why so I'm giving it a chance.

Links:

Fedora 8 Project

A Picture/Video Message!

Nice concept car - dissapearing door!!

Ok, this is cool !! The door of the car slides underneath the car. Look at the video near the bottom of the page.
RonSusser.com // Vehicle Inventory

Configure TCP/IP from the Command Prompt

Found this while trying to setup a server who's mouse did not work.

This is geeky - but hey pretty cool !! Using a command called netsh, you can reconfigure your IP from the command line. Not as nice as Unix tools, but it allows for some automation. The cool one is to dump and reload your config from a file. Anyway - check it out at Configure TCP/IP from the Command Prompt

Online Finanacial management

So a few years ago (quite a few), I had started using MS Money to manage my finances. I used it around 6 months and than the overhead of it got to me. Entering, downloading, classifiying - and the damn little bug that messed up credits and debits on my line of credit!! Now there is also my wife and myself, do I use my computer or hers? how do we deal with travel.

One of the hardest things was organizing - once I had a system, I forgot it, and needed to recall it - kind of recreated it.

I have just found two online applications - both are online finance management, Wesabe and mint, with a scocial networking twist. So you can tag expenses and the system will eventualy find similarities between you and others, and get you in touch with each other. This sounds cool, but will it realy help me? How is this different than what credit companies, customer cards and banks do ? Should I trust such a company ?

One of the arguments is will people trust uploading all their private financial information to the web site. My original thought was "hell no", but after thinking about it, don't I do that with my bank? my brokerage account? My retirement fund? What makes this different?

For me, I think, the largest difference is that this is a "new net-only guy" - it's like handing over finances to an accountant. I have "non-net" relationships with evryone else - or I possibly can. As well they none of them have full access to ALL my financial data. My bank and credit company possibly have the most - what I buy, when I buy, how much I make my payment history etc. It will boil down to two items - will it be worth it, and can I trust them.

Bill tracking

Hey - here is a cool application - Where's Willy? will allow you to enter a paper bill's serial number and track where it ends up. There is also a US version called where is george (Willi is for Wilfred Laurier). There is also a link for a google map to track the bill.

Presence Systems Number One On Federal Wish List

This is a pretty interesting read Presence Systems Number One On Federal Wish List. I had once read presence - the status part of instant messaging, for example - as DNS for people. Of course there are many other ways to tell presence - from IP address and account login, to cell phone registration when you turn it on. Very cool and scary at the same time.

Test from e-mail blogging

First post for E-Mail blogging.

Finaly - somthing for the hole in the desk

This is pretty cool ...

http://www.engadget.com/2007/03/30/belkins-usb-ipod-hubs-neatly-plug-excess-desk-holes/

Rotating video with mencoder

This is something that has been bugging me ever since I got a digital camera that could do video - how do you rotate a "portrait" video back to "landscape". Recently a friend asked me to do this for something important - a video she took for "The children's wish foundation" so I looked a little more. I finaly found how to do it with mencoder at Scott Hanselman's site.

He even goes into describing the flags for the tool - which is always good. As well, to make things cleaner, how to get the aspect ratio back to 4:3. I now have a few videos to rotate.

Taking single shot panorama

During my trip to Italy, I took a bunch of cool photos. As has happened before, I felt it did not quite the feeling of being there. So I have been looking at ways to may 360 degree pictures with a single shot. I found Panoramic Photography with Fisheye Lenses which tells you how to take a 180 fisheye picture and turn it into a cilidrical panorama. I have also tried doing the same using The Gimp and a metalic sphere, the bigest problem being taking a picture without the camera taking over the entire view - that and I need to polish it.

I'll post photo's once I figure it out.

Making RPMs

I got the January issue of linux Format - I was a fan of the Amiga Format ages ago - and they have a timely piece on creating RPMS. Now the article is the kickstart I needed to get things going. Of course I tried and failed - since I did not try and create the same package as they did.

I'm trying to get the tcptrace utility in an RPM for fedora. I picked this because I use it, it is a simple package - the old clasic : configure , make, make install. It creates a single binary with no config files that gets copied into the /usr/bin directory. So I figured this would be simple !! no dice yet.

For one - I get compile warnings - this is not bad in itself (the author redefines memcpy for some reason) - jsut not clean, and I have noticed that the example they use places things in the proper directories ( bin ) as it builds. So the automated items work - for me they don't. So I have got to dig a little more.

Photos: Polymer Vision's Readius with rollable display - Crave at CNET.co.uk

Oh yeah ... rollable displays !!
Photos: Polymer Vision's Readius with rollable display - Crave at CNET.co.uk

Online Banking

So I'm trying to use GnuCash for financial stuff. In some respects it seems to deal with things better than Money or Quicken. Of course the wizards and stuff are not as nice. One aspect that is probably going to be a tipping factor is the online import. This requries connecting to the banks, if Quicken and money can do it - GnuCash should be able to. The largest item is where aer te connection points. The Online Banking page - linked off of the GnuCash Docs - provides scripts to download the latest datafiles from microsoft for Money. These are reusable in GnuCash. I just want to see if they aslo have canadian data.

Awsomely small printer - with no ink !!

In the CNET article, they show a compact portable photo printer. Put Bluetooth or PictBridge on this and you have a great companion to a picture phone. Here is the link Getting printers down to iPod size

It is archived in my del.icio.us tags.

Procrastination, Adult ADD and INTP

I was reading a slashdot article on procrstination research at the University of Calgary and I found this web site on Procrastination and Adult ADD . Now This also seems to match much of what is said of the Myers-Briggs INTP personality type. Ahhh ...