Month: July 2005

Everybody Loves Eric Raymond is a funny, geeky comic strip sitcom about
a group apartment in which, inexplicably, Richard Stallman, Linus
Torvalds and Eric Raymond are all roommates. The jokes are ALL
free/open source software in-jokes, but they’re often very funny, and
the idea gets tons of bonus points for being so stupendously weird and
well-executed. Check it out via the IT Chuckles section here.

Michael Palin

If like me you followed the intrepid Michael Palin in his numerous adventures on TV, you might be pleasantly surprised to learn that you can read all his memoirs from the trips online.  Alas, these are not ebooks which you can download, but this is still a really cool thing. Check them out via the eBooks Links here.

PHPNuke has been getting harder and harder to upgrade
recently.   although it’s OpenSource, a premium is required
to get the biggest, bestest, faster version.  Non payers have to
wait for a couple of months after release before they can download it.

While this works really well, and the ‘nuke authors certainly deserve
reward for their efforts, the need for cash is causing security patches
to be very hard to get for those without a subscription. 

I’ve decided therefore to kiss goodbye to phpNuke and move to something
else.  A quick trawl of the OpenSource CMS sites will show
literally hundreds of products now all of which perform a similar
function to PHPNuke.

In the end, I’ve gone for a CMS that I’ve not even used before called Joomla. 
One of the most powerful selling points has been that I’ve managed to
migrate the article and user data without massive effort.

Please let me know what you think of the new site.  Expect the layout to change over the next few days!

TurboTas July 2005

In honor of the first manned Moon landing, which took place on July 20,
1969, Google have added some NASA imagery to the Google Maps interface
to help you pay your own visit to our celestial neighbor. Happy lunar
surfing.  Don’t expect the API to work though: I already tried to add the Russian spacecraft and failed! more