Charl van Niekerk » Blog: December 2005

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7-Zip

I was the classic Winzip user that switched to WinRAR later and still wasn't happy. Then I found 7-Zip.

7-Zip is open source and extremely fast. It's a native Windows application (Linux users have more than enough good options available to them already) and integrates well with Windows Explorer. What's more, it's available in many languages (including Afrikaans) and supports all of the formats I need and also many I don't. This thing is a little crazy - apparently it can even unpack RPMs.

But from my side, it definitely gets the thumbs-up!

Does this look familiar?

Resized. Original by clarkk. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License applies.

Freedom Toaster in George

We finally got a Freedom Toaster hosted in my city!

By "my city" I'm of course referring to George, South Africa. Attention all Dutchpeople: This is not the same as Georgetown, which is located in America. (Sorry, I just had to make this clear; most Dutch people I speak to think it's Georgetown for some odd reason.) :D

Anyway, relating to the toaster, it's located upstairs at 110 York Street. This is the building just to the right of Spar.

For those that are unfamiliar with the Freedom Toaster project, it's managed by The Shuttleworth Foundation, which is naturally Mark Shuttleworth's organisation. Yes, the same man that started Canonical, the company that created the Ubuntu Linux project.

A quote from the Freedom Toaster homepage:

What is the Freedom Toaster
The Freedom Toaster is a conveniently located, self-contained ‘Bring 'n Burn' facility, where users bring their own blank discs and make copies of the open source software they require.

But why do we need this?
The Freedom Toaster project began as a means of overcoming the difficulty in obtaining Linux and Open Source software due to the restrictive telecommunications environment in South Africa, where the easy downloading of large pieces of software is just not possible.

Yes, this project has been slashdotted too. :)

More photos available on Flickr.

WebDrive

WebDrive is a brilliant piece of software. It feels like “live editing” on the server. What they do is mapping a drive named W: to the server you are connected with through FTP (or other protocol) and upload the files to the server every time you save the file.

- WebDrive - Anne’s Weblog about Markup & Style

It's always funny to me to see the things we *nix users take for granted. Personally I wouldn't be able to live with a system that doesn't at least have this basic functionality built-in.

Well, to be more specific, KDE doesn't have you map the FTP share as a drive, but lets you access files on FTP just like you access files on your local system. In other words, just use any native KDE application (such as Konqueror, KWrite, etc) and open whatever FTP file/directory (normal ftp://ftp.example.com/pub/whatever IRI) as you would a local file. When you save, it automatically saves back to the place you opened it from (like the FTP server). Simple.

Yeah, the *nix community is just so far ahead... ;)

Email

Just a quick note to all those people that might have e-mailed me the last couple of months.

When I got my GMail account, I decided to freely publish my e-mail address in plain form. I assumed that it would get out somewhere sometime anyway to all those nasty spammers, so why make it difficult... Just publish it freely and keep things simple. After all, I've got 1 GB (at that time, now it's much, much more) space anyway and fairly good spam filtering.

That's true, the spam filtering is fairly good. However, some legit messages are being thrown into the spam folder at times and some spam messages do occasionally get through into my inbox.

The only thing I did not anticipate was the volumes of spam I would be receiving. I often get more than 100 spam messages within 24 hours. I always scan through my spam messages for legit ones, but since I'm usually offline over weekends (I spend enough time in front of a computer during the week - sheesh) I often get back on Monday to have a few hundred messages in my spam folder.

This forces me to scan through these messages fairly quickly (I've got lots of work to do, for those that didn't know) and sometimes I miss some legit messages.

The last while I got a few cases where people complain that they mail me stuff and that I don't reply; in the meantime I didn't even know about their mail. I want to ask everybody kindly to resend their important mail to me if I don't reply in a couple of workdays (I typically reply very fast). I'm very, very sorry about this because I know this is extra hassle which nobody wants but blame the spammers. :)

At least that's another nice thing about GMail - you can see fairly quickly who replied to your mails thanks to the threading features.

AFLUG

Yesterday the AFLUG has officially been launched. This is an open source / Linux user group aimed specifically at Afrikaans-speaking individuals.

Anybody, anywhere in the world is welcome to join; this user group is not regional (like most) but for a specific language group. In other words, you don't currently need to be in Southern Africa or even from Southern Africa to join. The more people that join, the better, never mind where you are.

So, if you would like to learn more in Afrikaans about Linux and other great open source packages, you have no more excuse not to. ;)