My very best friend on the internet, Google, is 7 years old!

They have been, in my opinion, the hands down best ever search engine out there. I use it daily and can’t imagine life without it!

So… to Google: Happy birthday, and thank you for being there!!

It’s monday, and I don’t have to work again (yay, me!).

I took the week off to see if I couldn’t get some more paint applied to my house. So far, mother nature isn’t exactly cooperating with me.

We’ve got rain today. They’re saying it should be good again starting tomorrow and then rain again on friday. Guess I’ll have to get busy durring those days.

Other news:
I’ve been having issues with the server over-heating and locking up durring the last few weeks. I ordered a spiffy new case yesterday , the Thermaltake Tsunami VA3000SWA Silver All aluminum Modern Dream Tower.

I also ordered a 480watt Thermaltake power supply. That should pretty much do the trick. The parts should be here by the end of the week, so expect some server downtime on friday/saturday.

Once again, I’ve been going through my refer spam, trying to makes my stats readable.

There seems to be a trend where sites are hitting your page in the hopes that you publish your stats (which I don’t), so that their link will appear high in the list of referring pages, and they’ll either get a better google rank or some idiot will click on them.

I will not drive business you way, spammer tard.

So… if you run a php based site (ie, a blog, forum, etc), you can end this nonsense by using the No Refer Spam script.
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I’ve mentioned before how spiffy Ubuntu linux is. I’ve now found a great use for the live CD (the CD you can boot from to try the OS without installing it): recovering data from a toasty NTFS hard drive.

My friend, Brian, has a HP laptop and his hard drive gave up the ghost. I could view the drive using NTFS Reader, but it would blow up when I attempted to copy the files to another drive. I tried a number of data recovery software packages but got no love.

The data was there, but the partition was toast. You couldn’t even fdisk the damn thing because the sectors where the partition info lives were hosed. I tried to repair the partition using some MS tools, but that didn’t work either.

Finally, I put his drive in an external USB enclosure, added another external USB drive formatted with FAT32, and booted up my laptop using the Ubuntu Live CD. Ubuntu saw both the damaged drive and the FAT32 drive, and I was able to copy the files from the GUI (Gnome) by simply doing drag and drop (I needed a FAT drive to write to… linux can read NTFS, but not write to it).

After recoving my friends 7.5GB of digital photos and a few media files, I burned them off to DVD and then attempted to fix the partition, but that was a big ol’ no-go. My friend is very damn happy, and I learned something new.

Life is once again sweet.

I’ve been playing around with my computers at home (and yes… that’s plural… I have a number of them because I’m all OMG!! RED HOT SEXY and somewhat geeky that way). I’ve been looking for an OS alternative to Windows that meets the following criteria:
– Easy to install
– Easy to use
– Supports the applications I need it to

I’ve looked around and think I’ve found a linux based implementation that will satisfy those three needs.

Ubuntu and Kubuntu are pretty much the bomb. Both are based on Debian Linux, but come with slightly different specs.

Ubuntu comes packaged with the following:
– Gnome – A GUI like Windows XP <screenshots>
– OpenOffice.org – The complete Office Suite (similar to Word, Excel, etc)
– Firefox – A web browser which seriously kicks much butt
– Thunderbird – An email client (like outlook)
– Gaim – Instant Messaging software that connects to all major IM networks (MSN, AIM, etc.)
– Gimp – A very spiffy graphics program (like photoshop)
– Audacity – An audio file mixer, editor

Kubunto uses the Ubuntu base files but comes with a few differences:
– KDE – the ultimate GUI for linux (it’s just that sexy!!) <screenshots>
– Konqueror – the KDE browser (for the web, your pc, everything!)

Both are easy to install, easy to use, and easy to get… they’re both free.

You can also try it before you make a commitment. Just download the “Live” version of Ubuntu or Kubuntu, burn the iso to CD, put it in your computer, and reboot. It will boot from the CD and bring your computer up with Linux (you’ll have to answer a few questions on boot like what language, keyboard, and video resolutions you want). It does run slow from the CD (for obvious reasons), so don’t let that discourage you.

If you choose to install, the process is very easy… just read the screens and answer the questions.

So… go there, download the Live CD iso file and play with it. If you like it, you might think about downloading the Install iso and freeing yourself, and your computer, from the bloatware you’re running right now.