I’ve used gentoo on and off for around 3 years now, since I got my last box, it’s been powering my main production machine at home. I’m a fan of it’s structures and concepts. Sure it’s not really a typical-user distro, but I’m not really a typical user. PClinuxOS is perfect for typical users (and I run it on my laptop where I develop software for them), Ubuntu and many other systems also target that market. If anything there is a major shortage in hacker oriented distro’s today.

"GNU Smalltalk 3.0.1 can now be downloaded at the following URLs..."

Setting up a web server with Apache on a Linux distribution is a very quick process, however to make it a secure setup takes some work. This article will show you how to make your Apache web server more secure from an attack by effectively using Access control and authentication strategies.

"I ordered PAIP today. Good computer books are so expensive. It hurts me to spend $80 on a book. But there are many worse ways to spend $80 than on something which contains so much knowledge, I guess. I got a $25 gift card for a book store for Christmas, so may as well put it to good use. I've read good reviews of PAIP, so I hope it lives up to them. I had only one AI course in college, and it was taught in C (ugh) by a grad student, and I learned little to nothing from it. It'll be nice to revisit the subject. (And learn more Common Lisp, of course.) [...] Every request to Hunchentoot is apparently handled in a Lisp thread, so concurrency issues are generally all taken care of for you, no worries.

I love planning but I hate planning software. It's an interesting problem. When I am working on something alone I tend to outline the project, estimate each piece and be done with it. My estimates tend to be accurate and the project gets done.

"I am pleased to announce the release of Emacs Muse 3.12. Emacs Muse is an authoring and publishing environment for Emacs. It simplifies the process of writing documents and publishing them to various output formats. One of the principal aims in the development of Muse is to make it very easy to produce good-looking, standards-compliant documents..."

File backups are a key element for every user and on every computer. Whether it be an office setting or a home desktop machine, backups are essential - your hard drive will fail at some point; you will need a backup, and you'll be kicking yourself if you learn this lesson the hard way.

What would life be without music? Given the proper codecs, in Linux you can play almost any digital audio format. Linux has many graphical applications that can do the job, such as Amarok, Rhythmbox, Audacious, and XMMS, all of which provide an intuitive user interface, playlist sorting, and various other options. But what if you want low resource usage so you can play tunes on aging hardware? Here are some alternative players for the Linux command line.