jpdugan's blog

Going to try and work on a few projects that have been collecting dust for several months now. First on my list is to get my G15 display linked to the output of several programs, notably Pidgin and Skype. Also want to tweak the XChat plugin so that it displays some of the messages differently. If I have time, I may even write a azureus plugin for my G15.

Other projects include working on some Battletech Miniatures and fixing a memory leak in some monitoring code for two of my servers.

Gotta get back into the habit of writing in my blog in addition to my old fashioned paper journal. Long ago I decided to inflict my personal opinions and musings on the internet at large, but for some reason, call it karma, I never get around to writing simple updates and adding content to my website.

This must stop, so I will attempt to write at least one entry or add something to the site every day for the rest of the year.

JPD

Yesterday President Obama spoke some words that I feel really mean something to all of us who work in our shops, labs, and garages re purposing old devices and inventing new ones.

I quote: “…think about new and creative ways to engage young people in science and engineering, like science festivals, robotics competitions, and fairs that encourage young people to create, build, and invent — to be makers of things, not just consumers of things.”

Read more on his speech to the National Academy of Science here: http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=20090427

How does one join split files with extensions like ".001 .002 .003 .004…" back together into one file again?

Split files like these are likely made by Windows users using the QuickPar program, and as such linux users can rejoin them into the original file using command line options of the pararchive package. Using the following command par will see the split files as additional blocks and it will check, repair and concatenate (aka joining) the files into the single original file or files.

par2 r myfile.par2 myfile.*

Well, today is the last day that Comcast offered Usenet service. Has Eternal September finally come to an end? While I came along after the AOL added Usenet, I was first exposed to newsgroups (and Linux) in my first semester at PennState. I guess I have always regarded Usenet to be superior to forums due to the higher quality of responses. Simply put between IRC and Usenet, I have always been able to find the answer to my question, or at least be put on the correct path to said answer. Fortunately, I subscribe to an independent Usenet provider, , so my Usenet will not disappear.

Saw an interesting article by Brian Proffitt, a Managing Editor at Linux Today. In his article titled. Maybe We Should Charge For Linux, he raises the issue of price and quality in the minds of many consumers.

A fellow Linux User in my hometown lug, Jonathon Mager aka Yonkletron, has organized a tech blog aggregator PlanetPlug. Why not head on over and see what others in the Phildelphia area Linux User Group have to say.

Just uploaded and installed a new CMS system, Drupal. This CMS was chosen to replace my wordpress version. I had lots of problems getting wordpress to configure and mesh with my chosen site design and in the end decided to discard it and try something else.

I also changed my hosting account from GoDaddy to Dreamhost at the same time, as to make a clean start overall.

More later,

jpd