On a mailing list I’m on, someone asked an interesting question about the du command: “I want to figure out how much disk space I’m using in different directories, but I don’t know how to exclude certain directories from the output. Anyone have a suggestion?”
A reader writes to me: “I work with HumaniNet, an organization that assists humanitarian field teams with their communications needs, mostly over satellite. Bandwidth is typically very expensive, in the dollars per minute range. Am I correct to assume that Lynx doesn’t even request images or other forms of ‘rich content’ like Flash, and would therefore save dramatically on bandwidth costs? In other words, Lynx doesn’t download anything beyond (x)html, right?”
A reader writes in to me, asking whether I think that the Lynx web browser, a command-line screen-oriented alternative to the big, splashy graphical web browsers like Firefox, Mozilla, Safari and Internet Explorer, has any relevance in the modern world of technology and broadband. It’s a fair question, and in fact I just published an article in SysAdmin Magazine on this subject.
Dave, Help! My weblog is drowning in these seemingly nonsensical postings from people that have nothing to do with my discussion, yet don’t actually point to any sort of existing Web site or even a valid email address. On the assumption that they’re not doing it just to annoy me, why would they bother to spam my weblog with this kind of stuff?
My sister and I have been engaged in a dialog about the merits of weblogs versus traditional Web sites and it’s evolved into a quite interesting discussion. She asks: “I still don’t see how a blog would be better for me
than a web site. I don’t see why a person would want to come to my site
often to see what I’m up to.”
A pal of mine who is a prolific writer but not so much of a techie asked me the following question: “I’ve just heard that feedster added a feature where I can automatically ping them when I have new entries for my Weblog. I use Movable Type daily, but I’m darned if I know how to add a new ping host to my blog configuration. Help!”
A technical wizard pal of mine asks: “I have all sorts of challenge/response barriers to comment spam on my Movable Type weblog, but occasionally someone goes through the work of identifying themselves and still leaves some silly spam comment. I want to delete it, but right now I get the email notification of the new comment, then have to log in to the administrative interface, find the comment, and delete it by hand. Quite a hassle. Isn’t there a better solution to this?”
If you’ve been reading my entries, you already know that I’ve been working on installing different Linuxes on my Mac OS X PowerBook system, with success. All works well until you actually have more than one Linux installed on the system, creating a tri-boot, rather than dual-boot Apple computer. The problem is that, by default, each Linux installs its own version of yaboot which only knows about Mac OS X or itself. So I needed to figure out how to significantly modify the yaboot configuration file to support both Ubuntu and Yellow Dog Linux simultaneously.
