Kiddie Koruption

A few great pages if you are like me and would like to lead your kids down the programming path. I haven't tried any of them yet, but watching the passively play lame Webkinz games is driving me crazy. I have to get them creating things, instead of watching things. I'll let you know of any progress I make.

How To: Teach a child to program - Lifehacker
Teach a Kid to Program / Wired How To's
O'Reilly Radar > Why Johnny Can't Program

Leaving Linux Kernels

Interesting interview with Con Kolivas, prolific kernel contributor. He talks about the whys and wherefores when it comes to kernel developing, and dealing with Linux people.

Why I quit: kernel developer Con Kolivas | APC Magazine

The One True Alt-Tab

Here I described how to get Alt-Tab to work like it is supposed to work - including all the windows on all the screens by setting a new option SeparateScreenFocus to true. Well, it turns out that there was a bug in the option and, in fact, you are supposed to set the option to be false in order to get the One True Behaviour. So after my latest KDE upgrade, Alt-Tab stopped working the way it was supposed to work and went back to the braindead way of just showing windows on the current screen. But after reading the bug report, I went back and set the option to false and once again, I'm in Alt-Tab heaven. I'll update that page too.

Now Now, be a good mailing list

An interesting paper on mailing lists, and how to both effectively use them and be a good mailing list citizen. I'm a huge mailing list fan, as I find them so much easier to read than every forum I have ever found on the web.  This is especially true when you read them via Gmane, which lets me use the even more effective newsreader ui from Thunderbird. I have yet to find a forum that lets me read and contribute information nearly as well as a threaded newsreader.

How to Help Mailing Lists Help Readers (Results of Recent Data Analysis)

Yet Another Linux Page

Here's Yet Another Linux page. Linux Links pulls together links, news, software descriptions and the like, but is organized very cleanly. It calls itself "The Linux Portal", so I guess that explains it all...

Linux Links - The Linux Portal

Twittery

Okay, so I started using Twitter and, of course, whenever I start to use something like this, I start trying to use it as efficiently as possible. Unfortunately, the Emacs Twitter tool on the Emacs wiki doesn't seem to work for me very well. I'm using v21, which gives me some kind of error return from the URL fetch. And I would like something easy to use from the command line too, so I worked up this little bash function, which uses curl (obviously):

function twit() {
curl -s -u twituser:twitpass -d "status=$*" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml >/dev/null
}

Now I can just type in twit This is an update and the update goes right to twitter. Oh, goodie goodie!

Twitter Fan Wiki / API Docs

Google Linux Repositories

Cool page showing how to configure various Linux distros for including updates to Google Linux apps (which at this point is only Google Desktop and Google Picasa). The step by step GUI configuration lists Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty), Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 and openSUES 10.2, while the command line list includes APT, YUM, urpmi, YaST2, and RPM.

Google Linux Software Repositories