Hughservers.com

Just a quick festive edition of Some Sunday Links.

Firstly, this one is a bit late, but the Norad Santa Tracking website is a great christmas site.
Komar.org, has in the past been a bit of a swiz.  For a few years Alex Komar did tell a few porkies about how controllable his lights are.  But this time (well from 2005 onwards) it seems to be real.  Take a look for yourself!

One of my favourite christmas viral videos is the light show that Carson Williams set-up to the Transiberian Orchestra’s Wizards of Winter song.  He’s now set-up a company to sell his expertise to others.

This is a bit late I know (seeing as this comes out in september), but Larry Wall’s yearly ‘state of the onion‘ speech is always a good read. It isn’t just a speech about the Perl programming language, it does touch on a wide variety of subjects.

On the subject of speeches worth reading, this one by Paul Vixie is well worth a read. He focuses mainly on the subject of digital rights and how it affects a non-technical audience. One of the most interesting parts is about how DRM affects the average person. He also touches on how organisations such as the RIAA and MPAA try to monetise the sale of music via the web, largely due to their own greed and ignorance. Another nice touch is the advocacy of buying and ripping CDs, over buying music from online stores.

10 who matter is a interesting article about the 10 people who have been a very large influence on the open source community. It focuses more on those who have played a part since the beginning and who have written some of the most used pieces of software. Not just focusing on some of the more well known celebrities.

For those of you who like your programming, complex and scientific, there is a nice Haskell introduction page floating around currently.

Only one piece of software this week, a cross platorm IRC client, xchat. Originally (and primarily) a unix peice of software. It does have a windows version available, which due to the time taken is a piece of shareware, with the code available. However, others have gone and made their own windows builds. Which is nice. xchat has a whole raft of plugins and nifty features. It also has a nice clean UI and is quite compact and stable.

On the interesting but tough theme, one of the OsX86 guys has figured out how to setup OsX from a pendrive. Which is pretty frigging neat. Not sure it is the most kosher of processes, but hey. Nice if you can do it.

Continuing my round up of various nifty ‘Web 2.0′ sites, I’d like to talk about Basecamp and Freshbook.

Basecamp is part of a suite of web-based software from 37 signals. It is a project management system, but all contained in a very nice user-friendly website. It provides a whole bunch of utilities and features to help people work on projects. It is quite a useful system, if the people working on the project are spread out over a wide area. Probably the only downside to this package is the cost. However, seeing how much some businesses spend on utter crap (sharepoint anyone?), they are pretty well priced. Freshbooks (see next paragraph!) has a similar price structure. A small (but with all the features) try-out account, and then a progression from cheap to moderately expensive.

Freshbooks is a billing/accountancy package, which is all online. You can even go as far as sending invoices via post from the system. It isn’t really something I can see myself using really. I don’t run a business. But for those of you who are freelancers or running a small company, I can see something like this being really quite handy.

I’ve recently been reading a bit more around the art of web design. And one name that pops up quite a bit is Jakob Neilsen’s. Now I don’t agree with absolutely everything he says, but by and large he’s generally pretty spot on about a fair few things. Well worth taking into account when you are doing a design. Admittedly it isn’t always the sort of thing many people are actually interested in. Most people don’t care about such things, doesn’t mean that they don’t find it useful to have a well thought out site.

Might as well be this Sunday’s links.  Ho hum.  Really need to get on top of these…

Well, first an amount of sadness.  Despite his wife and kids making it out ok.  James Kim didn’t.

As usual the Daily Mail continues in it’s fine tradition of quality articles, by posting something written by a raving misogynistic loon.

There is a mighty fine article on linux.com about how various distros go about building a secure release.

Lugradio released their latest episode.  Well worth a listen.

Ack, sorry about the length and quality of this post.