I don’t often write RC scripts these days, most things are in ports and works out of the box, but now and then I need to write something and don’t feel like pouring over the tons of man pages for something I do once or twice a year.
Today a few sites mentioned an excellent article titled ‘Practical guide to BSD rc.d scripting‘ which seems exactly like the thing I need, shows detail examples with explanations of each knob in the typical file, great read.
I’ve been looking for book catalog system for a while now, I’ve tried a few but all desktop based ones. The problem with these are that they’re not platform independent, hard to share with other people, just more things to backup etc etc.
I have been considering writing my own for a while now, today again I figured I should start on this, then I read about Library Thing on Blogspotting.
Library Thing is fairly typical for todays online tools, you add the books by ISBN or title, author etc, it searches Amazon in many countries or the Library of Congress in order to find all the information about the book, including images. You can tag your photos, it shows tag clouds, author clouds etc and will help you find other people who share your taste in books.
Crucially it has a export function that lets you save your data locally, import into Excel or whatever. Great site, I put my 170 books into it in about a hour.
You can see my catalog of books, hopefully soon there will be a API that lets you build on-top of it. So far I am within the free account limit, but I cannot see why I wont upgrade to a paid account soon.
It seems my wishes has come true and Google has finally launched a Blogsearch service.
It does not have all the bells and whistles of other blog search tools, you cannot restrict searches to OPML feeds etc, but I’ve never used those features in the competition. I just do a simple text search and want results.
The search supports all the usual google search modifiers like link: but also has some blog specific stuff: inblogtitle:, inposttitle:, inpostauthor:, blogurl:, more at the FAQ.
UPDATE: Scoble is doing some comparisons between google and others, check his blog for new entries but so far see these: 1, 2, 3.
The sample data provided with my 1.0 release of GMaps PHP had a mistake in the config file which rendered the sample useless.
I’ve fixed this and also added a <comment> tag to the XML data file that will be shown at the locations. A full valid point in the XML file now looks like this:
<point> <lat>-34.01715</lat> <long>23.07238</long> <type>visit</type> <title>Knysna</title> <country>South Africa</country> <comment>Holiday during school years</comment> </point>
The new version can be found here, full documentation including these changes can be found here.
Thanks to BJE for pointing this out.
I came across an excellent guide to IPSec called An Illustrated Guide to IPSec it’s very thorough and well worth checking it out if you are interested in the inner workings of IPSec.
