Do you happen to view your bank statements on-line? Long process, is it not? It can be automated with this huge library of Perl scripts for many different banks around the world. A click or two can reveal your balance, transactions, etc.

The BBC takes a glimpse at Sony’s new portable MP3 players, which somehow imitate the iPod shuffle.

Unlike hard disk-based players, (Sony’s) flash devices hold fewer songs, using solid state memory rather than a disk.

The Sony line-up includes MP3 players which hold a similar number of songs to the iPod shuffle – about 250 – but the players have much longer battery life.

The home of the Walkman finally realised the importance of this entertainment niche.

Regardless of your operating system, good practice is to put recently added/changed files in a container (let us call it transfer). Files should be accumulated in transfer until the next backup cycle. Once a backup of that container is obtained, files can finally be moved appropriately to their destined directory. The notes that follow deal with a method of automatically backing up transfer using a server or another hard-drive. It also places emphasis on back-up of Web sites — a task which can become closely-related.

Note: instructions are Linux/Mac-specific, but can be adapted to Windows

Until recently, I used to get gunzipped tar archives of all my sites from CPanel. I did this every morning. Some weeks ago I automated part of the process by getting more crucial (and frequently-changing) pages and storing them remotely. It all works as follows:

Set up a set of batch scripts (let us call them dummy1..2) which include the following commands:


cd /home/roy/Main/Transfer_Archives/Sites/Roy/
wget -r -l1 -t1 -N -np -erobots=off http://schestowitz.com/


If you are not sure what the latter is doing, type in man wget and read the documentation. Then, set up cron jobs which include the following tasks:

Get local copies of important Web pages (see above)
38 23 * * * /home/roy/Main/Transfer_Archives/Sites/dummy1
38 23 * * * /home/roy/Main/Transfer_Archives/Sites/dummy2
...
Compress all the pages
50 23 * * * tar czvf /home/roy/Main/Transfer_Archives/www-`date +%Y-%m-%d`.tar.gz /home/roy/Main/Transfer_Archives/Sites
Make a copy of compressed pages
58 23 * * * cp -rf /home/roy/Main/Transfer_Archives/ /home/server2/transfer/roy


The last line puts a copy on the SAN, just to be 100% covered. Such scripts allow you to sleep while your sites/files are being backed up.

Google Desktop was made public less than a day ago. There is now a free 700k download for Windows.

Quoting the site, here is what Google Desktop offers:

• Find your email, files, media, web history and chats instantly
• View web pages you’ve seen, even when you’re not online
• New! Search directly from your desktop with the deskbar

Mice are used excessively while much more precise and efficient ways of navigation exist. Generally, when using an application often enough, one needs to learn and practice commonly-used menu accelerators, e.g. CTRL+S to save, or CTRL+ENTER to despatch an E-mail message.

Taking accelerators into a more advanced level, application invocation can be purely keyboard-based.

For Windows users:

Windows allows items located at the desktop to have CTRL+ALT shortcuts assigned to them. I have used this feature extensively for many years. The only flaw is that the desktop rapidly becomes bloated. To get these shortcuts set up, steer towards Properties in the context menu.

Linux/Mac (Panther):

Keyboard shortcuts can be assigned to applications/commands using XBindkeys. Example shortcuts are given in my XBindkeysRC file.

If you are using KDE, you can also use window manager accelerators or mouse gestures, for example ALT+mouse primary buttons to drag windows around.

The HP Tablet PC has just exceeded 1 million sales. Robert Scoble (Scobleizer) from Microsoft said the following:

At any other company that’d be considered an outstanding success. Getting a million people to do ANYTHING is pretty tough.

Walking around the TechFest this week I came to the realization that the Tablet PC is dead.

In the general sense, tablets may not be ideally mobile and handy tools, but they appear to be gnawing at sales of PDA‘s and laptops. The figures challenge critique about their size and reliability. Slashdot recently reported and boasted Linux installations on the Tablet PC, which makes one wonder about the direction tablets may take.

Palm have recently looked into the possibility of replacing Palm OS with Linux on their devices, as well as the provision for Cobalt, which makes Palm-powered handhelds run much, much faster. The next Palm, which is due to be unveiled this spring, should incorporate Cobalt, whose exclusion from the Tungsten T5 was a great disappointment to many.

Cited by: PalmAddict

ver a year ago I started fiddling about with a rendering package called POV-Ray, which stands for Persistence of Vision Raytracer. I never got quite so far, though I was astounded by what can be achieved after a few hours or days of work. One of the better-known artists in the field is Gilles Tran (Oyonale) and his galleries are definitely worth browsing.

Season of the playful penguins from Oyonale