software

Led by Obi Bok's Linux Tune-Up Guide "Slipstreaming Windows CD under Linux" I was able to get an XP Install going on the Dell Vostro 1500. My lady bought this system (1.4 GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, 160 GB disk, DVD burner) on sale for $600 (with intel wifi and dell bluetooth) and it's pretty sweet, and well-designed for the modern age, it even has slots which can accept a storage cache card for vista (not that we got any of those.) Vista, unfortunately, is a dog, so the goal was to install Windows XP.

If you want to use the mapping functionality of ntop to give you [typically incorrect but better than nothing] geolocation maps on host-information pages (for IP hosts) then you need to install the mapper.pl script on a webhost someplace. Each lookup seems to take around 30-40kB but that's just a guess. I suppose I could use ntop to find out... Regardless, this is how I got mapper.pl to work.

This is a fairly niche application, but at my place of employment I have an Epson Perfection 3170 Photo Scanner. I'm not even using the photo (negative/slide) scanning capabilities, I'm just using it as an ordinary scanner. It is however very fast and unprecedentedly quiet. I wanted to use this scanner under Linux (Epson provides Windows 95+ drivers and MacOS 9+ drivers, but no Linux drivers) sometimes, and on the Mac sometimes.

When we want to send files over the internet, we typically want to compress these files so that they take up as little space as possible. We generally also need to bundle files together. Today, the default format for doing this on personal computers is the PKZIP format, while on Unix systems we use tar to group files together, and a separate program to compress them - these days that's generally gzip or bzip2, and in olden times it was the compress program. A lot of PC users are also using the rar archiver, because for a long time it has provided the best compression.

Today, that is no longer true; the crown is worn by 7-Zip. 7-Zip is a newer archive manager which, in addition to being able to handle older archive formats at various levels (for example, it can decompress but not create rar archives, but it can both make and break zip archives) it implements the new 7z compression algorithm. This is not actually the most efficient algorithm available today, but it is the best one that has a decent application wrapped around it.