This chapter excerpt is from Citizen Engineer: A Handbook for
Socially Responsible Engineering by David Douglas and Greg
Papadopoulos, with John Boutelle, published by Prentice Hall
Professional, ISBN 0137143923, Copyright 2010 David Douglas and Greg
Papadopoulos. For more info, please visit the publisher page:
www.informit.com/title/0137143923
I’m a big fan of the Nagios network monitoring system and rely on it to tell me if something goes wrong with the systems for which I am responsible. I have made a large investment in time configuring Nagios to monitor exactly what I am interested in, and this effort would be wasted if Nagios detected a problem, but failed to communicate that problem to me.
Introducing Linux Journal's penguin gallery contest. That's right -- penguins. Real, virtual, 2D, 3D, with fish, without fish, etc., etc. Submit your penguin photo or artwork and be entered to win some pretty cool LJ goodies.
I'm always on the lookout for original projects, and this particular application really took me by surprise. According to its Web site, “Flinks is a text-mode flashing word Web browser. It is intended for speed reading and/or skimming Web pages and text.”
When grep and sed aren't enough, gawk may provide
the extra horsepower that you need.
The following tip contains a sampling of some of the
things one might do with gawk.
Some time back I wrote about creating a number of
konsoles automatically using dcop.
Although we were at the time well into the KDE4 era I had
not yet upgraded since there were still things
that weren't quite working with KDE4, most of these have now
been fixed so I've upgraded some of my systems to KDE4,
which means it's time to update the original code to
now use dbus.
I don't usually write book reviews, but this one is special. My friend and colleague Daniel James has written an introduction to the world of media production with Linux, or as the subtitle describes it, "A manual for creative media on a modest budget". I'll put the spoiler right up front: This book is wonderful and is an essential read for all artistically-inclined Linux users. Read on to find out why I think so.
Audio processing and synthesis plugins are always a lively topic for musicians. Many contemporary music-makers rely completely upon their plugin collection for all their sound sources and processing routines, and it is not at all uncommon to discover that some of these composers have never learned to play a traditional instrument. However you feel about audio plugins they are a fact of life in modern music production.
One of my favorite new apps is a little system tray app called
caffeine
(and here).
It's simple, yet very practical, its purpose is to inhibit a screen saver
or sleep mode, which is great while watching flash videos on sites like hulu.
Back in 2007, I wrote an article on
free games for Linux and thought it was time to write a bit more on the subject. Actually, I had a lot of fun doing the research for this article and telling my sons that I really was "working." I don't really play that many games, so when I do, there are a few things that I look for.
