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Showing posts from February, 2009

Use the Bcc Field To Send To Many

Often when sending email to many, we just type out the email addresses of our friends in the to field. Each of our friends will see the email addresses of all our contacts listed in the to field. We should protect our friends' privacy and we should add this simple act of courteousness in our basic email etiquette. When sending email to many, put your own email address (alternate) in the to field, then use the Bcc field to enumerate your friends' email address. This way you protect your friends from spam and other more serious internet crimes. In addition you make the web more secure and therefore more usable for everyday communications. Thank you.

Use the Live CD

One of the insistent issues among new adopters to linux is hardware compatibilitiy. The show stopper for most enthusiasts is the lack of internet connectivity at the outset. As long as they can connect to the internet and ask questions in the linux forum, they are hangin' in there. Use the live cd of your distribution. Most linux distro have a live cd version to test the hardware issues including your printers and scanners. Don't forget to test your usb drives too. For the live cd, the common options are Knopix live cd, Ubuntu and Puppy linux. Most live cd versions can do anything the full installed versions can do except save your data in the hard drive. The live cd version is also slower.

Free Software and Intellectual Property

The open source community stands in clear ground when they speak of free software. That software should be freely used by everyone, free to be modified and distributed with very few limits. One limitation is you can't profit (as in money) from code you took free from the community. This limitation has been successfully defended in court, so there is legal basis here. Successful commercial entities based on this model are thriving. In fact, in this bleak economic times their business model is the most tailor-fit to survive, even dominate. Selling code is becoming untenable in the light of this movement. For now, microsoft is the giant defending this realm from all sides. Microsoft products make up 90 percent of operating systems being used by personal computers globally. Due to this overwhelming presence and to its marketing powers open source battles a way of computing that will remain in its seat of influence for many years to come.

Tag-araw, Tag-ulan (lyrics)

tag-araw, sa may dagat namasyal at pagdilim sa may baybay humimlay at nagyakap sabay sa pagsabog ng alon sabay sa paghuni ng ibon saksi ay liwanag ng buwan di ba't sabi mo pa na wala pang iba na ako ang una sa pagmamahal mo sinta at ang buhay nating dalawa ay nagbunga ng makulay na pag-ibig na dakila ngunit bakit ngayong umuugong ang hangin at ulan sinlamig ng gabi ang mga halik mo ni wala nang apoy ang titig mo sa akin naglaho ba ang pagmamahal mo sinta? at sa habang-buhay tayo'y magsasama nakamtan ko ang pagmamahal mo sinta ngunit bakit sa tag-ulan ay naglaho

Like The Plane That Landed in The Hudson

The economy is like that plane that landed in the Hudson river. It's going to get worse, progressively worse, even President Obama is saying it out loud and clear. I believe that he has a firm grasp of what's coming to this economy in the following months. The economy is going down fast and he is trying to cushion the effect on the most vulnerable. The economy has not found its bottom. President Obama's heroic act might just be landing this thing in the water, preferably where every body will feel safe to start again.

Downloading New Software In Linux

Installing new software in linux is easy and straightforward. Nearly all distributions of linux has a package manager which handles software downloads for you. Usually, opening a GUI of the package manager and letting it download the new application from the repository(internet) is the easiest option for users who are new to linux. Interaction with user and GUI and the degree of "hand-holding" you get from your package manager depends on your choice of distribution. I use Ubuntu and its package manager is Synaptic. Synaptic gives you a list of applications available in Ubuntu repositories. Just tick the one you want to download to your hard drive and it will handle the download including all dependencies.