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Weekly Roundup - January 7th 2008

Posted January 7th, 2008 in Weekly Roundup

This is my weekly roundup for the week of January 1st to January 7th 2008, where I look back at the posts I made over the past week as well as useful and interesting articles on other websites and blogs that I might have read.

Articles posted on my blog

Unfortunately a few days ago I did something stupid when messing around with LVM volumes and deleted several hundred gigs of data from my primary desktop computer. So yesterday I wrote a warning post "Don't forget to backup before messing around with hard drives"

On Saturday, I looked at using Javascript to focus a form element onload using the Personalised Plates website as an example. The annoying thing with auto focussing is that if there is a second form on the page focus may be taken away if the user starts typing into the other form, so this post looks at how to prevent this focus stealing from happening.

On Friday, I posted about splitting a large Apache log file with PHP which turned out to be much faster than my initial attempts at splitting it using the grep command line utility.

Thursday's post was about the host operating system reinstall I had done to change my base operating system from SUSE to Fedora. The hard drive wipe posted on Sunday was after this.

I use Google's Adsense on several of my sites and the incorrect exchange rates were used in Google EFT Payments December 2007 so I posted about this.

And finally, Tuesday's article, the first for the month and for 2008 was a monthly roundup for December 2007, looking at the most popular articles on my blog, vistor and RSS subscriber numbers.

Interesting articles found offsite

Linux Gamers looked at 7 first person shooters for Linux

Reinhold Weber looked at a comparison of PHP and Ruby web framework directory structures

Sébastien Wains posted an iptables script for preventing brute force SSH attacks with iptables which blocks hosts trying to connect more than 3 times to the SSH server within 60 seconds. He also posted how to export man pages to PDF.

David Peralty at the Blog Herald looked at how RSS is still resonably unknown by the masses, using his 40s uncle as an example.

The DownloadSquad followed up their look at the Gnome desktop with a look at the KDE desktop environment this week.

makeuseof.com posted download links to 5 packs to make Windows look like other operating systems: Vista, 2 x OSX packs, Fedora and Ubuntu.

Lorelle VanFossen at the Blog Herald posted about bloggers starting new blogs and what they should post about, focussing on bringing something new to the table, ie doing some new or different and not just what's already been done before time and time again.

Lifehacker posted about 10 obscure Google search tricks that you may not have heard of.

Fosswire offers 5 tips to secure your SSH installtion, including enabling key-based logins and disabling password based logins.

Mopedia looked at the new features of the upcoming Ubuntu Hardy Heron which is due to be released in April.

arstechnica.com reported that 2008 could be the year laptop sales eclipse desktop sales in the USA.

crestock.com posted about 50 popular posts about web design from 2007. It contains a list of links with summaries to these useful posts.

RPM 5.0.0 was released

MS released detailed information about Vista SP1

linuxguide.it posted a whole bunch of useful Linux command line commands

Nmap is a port map scanner used to discover computers and services on a computer network. blog four thirty posted an article about NMap for beginners.

There are many Linux distributions that are derived from Ubuntu. Gebuntu is one of these which uses the Enlightenment window manager with bits from GNOME and Xfce on top of Ubuntu. linux.com posted an article looking at Gebuntu.

Smashing Magazine looked at various programming frameworks

And finally for this week, Werner Schamberger looked at the Basics of RSS, looking at benefits, drawbacks, and how to use RSS.