Letters

I was pleased to see the LINUX license plate in your February 2003 issue [Letters], particularly as I have the same five letters on my car! I too was surprised to find that LINUX had not been chosen in my home state (Northern Territory, Australia). Having a LINUX license plate is certainly a talking point around town. I'd like all the owners of LINUX license plates from around the world to send a picture to LJ, along with a few words about their particular part of the world.

—Adrian Casey

A few years ago, when I first subscribed to LJ, someone made a mistake and sent two copies of each issue. One was sent to me, and the other was addressed to Eric W. Sattler, which was strange because there was nobody by that name that I'd ever heard of. I laughed at it, and that was that. In 2001, when our son was born, my wife and I were having trouble coming up with a name, and we remembered Eric from Linux Journal. It sounded better than anything we had thought of on our own, so Eric it was. He'll be two years old this June, and I wanted to send this mail to thank you for helping us name our son.

—Tom Sattler

BBS Renaissance

In the March 2003 issue, the From the Editor column talks about community and the fear of spam people have when posting on Usenet or web forums. But there is something old that has become new. Cheap hardware and cable modems have caused a renaissance in the BBS scene, and one of the major factors in this is a GNU operating system named Linux. Why choose to eat spam when you can telnet into a friendly BBS?

—Anonymous

Although Bolivian users held an installfest at 11,000 feet, astronomers at Mauna Kea regularly install Linux at 14,000 feet. At that height we need extra cooling, usually by placing big fans (ten inches at least) near the monitor, which seems to produce the most heat. The lower efficiency of cooling is a big problem at these altitudes; yet, Linux runs well up there too.

—Peter Teuben

I find a T-shirt on the Linux Journal web site to be very offensive. The shirt has a typical Christian fish with the words “Linux Saves” inside. I'm surprised the person(s) involved with designing this T-shirt, its advertising and sale aren't offended.

—Norman Clerc

I remember you used to sprinkle little tech tips, command one-liners and other useful everyday kinds of knowledge throughout your magazine. What happened to those? I found them very helpful. I wrote a script called rpmff (RPM File Finder) to search RPMs looking for a specific file and find it useful.

—Doug Wright

Look for rpmff elsewhere in this issue.

—Editor

I bought two products that recently have been featured on the Linux Journal web site: a Hawking PN7127P print server [www.linuxjournal.com/article/6509] and a copy of Eric Meyer on CSS: Mastering the Language of Web Design [www.linuxjournal.com/article/6618]. Both are great. I appreciate having the articles, the reviews and even the ads. You folks have found the right balance.

—Mike Tarrant

I just read the article on weblogging by Doc Searls and Dave Sifry [LJ, March 2003]. Nice work. And, just to add another option for Linux, there is the Python Desktop Server (pyds.muensterland.org). It is similar in spirit to Radio Userland but runs on systems where Radio isn't available. In combination with the Python Community Server Software (pycs.net), you can get your own community server up with people participating quite fast.

—Georg