Computers

Coincidence

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Sometimes coincidence can be frightening : yesterday, I noticed that my computer screen refused to deactivate DPMS. Rebooting the computer revealed that the screen had died on me. At the same time, my laptop battery went dead. Plugging in the power cord didn't resume the laptop, and even after rebooting, the laptops screen remained black... WTF ? Only after a second reboot, the laptop showed a screen again. Spooky, isn't it ? Luckily I still had an old screen lying around, but working at 800x600 isn't much fun.

Zen Garden

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I'm quite excited by this : there is a project called CSS ZenGarden. It's a collection of different stylesheets which modify the same content according to contributor's tastes and design abilities. There are few dozens of examples, and amongst them there is a Slashdot interface, albeit not a perfect copy as shows in the article.
You can view all the available CSS designs here [mezzoblue.com]. Same content, different stylesheet. Just shows off all the wonderful things that's possible with CSS standards-based page creation.

Just in time now I'm in the process of hacking some PHP scripts of a collegue which are responsible for the creation and maintenance of a collaborative website, something in the middle of a Wiki and a small CMS. I wanted to give the new website a different look than the original one, and was wondering how I would attack this problem. I was already thinkering with style sheets, but now I have a clearer view how to divide content from layout.

Homedir in CVS

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Joey Hess, Debian developer, keeps his homedir files in CVS. An idea that seems strange at first sight, but it has some inexpected advantages. The first thing I usually do after logging in on a new box, is scp'ing my dotfiles so I get my comfortable environment again. However, keeping everything in CVS seems a great distributed backup medium that gets synced quite quickly.

At work, I use SCCS - an old Solaris CVS clone - to keep track of my servers configuration files. Every modified bit gets reported instantaneously.

Barcodes

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After reading a post about making your own Albert Heyn bonus cards, I search a bit around, and quickly discovered barcode (duh), a Unix command line program, which makes barcodes of an excellent quality (in PostScript).

Most barcodes on items here in Europe, are in EAN-13 code, which you find explained here. The first 2 or 3 characters are used for country codes. For example, Belgian manufactured goods are labelled with a barcode beginning with 54.