Weekly Roundup - January 14th 2008

Posted January 14th, 2008 in Weekly Roundup

This is my weekly roundup for the week of January 8th to January 14th 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

Last week I posted about how Google had used the incorrect exchange rates for EFT Payments in December 2007; it turned out to have a happy ending when they corrected the amount and paid the difference. I posted about how Google corrects incorrect payment amount on Tuesday this week.

On Wednesday I posted a PHP error I'd come across on a default install of a CentOS 5 web server when using the image functions, and the solution to fix it: PHP error Call to undefined function ImageCreateFromPNG

Back in November I posted about the SUSE Yast error No such client module sw_single. One of my readers followed the solution and got the error message SUSE Error libpopt.so.0()(64bit) is needed by rpm-4.4.2-140.x86_64 once they'd followed all the steps. In Sunday's post I showed the solution I suggested to him which worked.

There have been a number of posts on various blogs about how Network Solutions Steals Domain Ideas so I checked it out myself and wrote my own article about this on Saturday.

The other two posts for the week were mount howtos for Linux. On Friday, mounting reiserfs partitions on CentOS 4 and on Thursday mounting an ISO image on Linux

Interesting articles found offsite

I'm posting a lot of offsite links in each week's post now so I'll break them up into sections to make it easier to scan.

Linux/Unix Stuff

Ubuntu Geek posted how to flush the dns cache in ubuntu and how to disable internet access for selected users (these will also work for other Ubuntu derived distros such as Kubuntu and Xubuntu)

How to get a colour prompt with the ZSH shell

LinuxJournel had a look at the KDE control center

Linux.com had an article about how to give Wine apps the look and feel of GNOME or KDE. Extract: "Wine allows users to run Windows programs natively under Linux without paying a dime. However, there's a tiny problem: programs running in Wine don't look so great. They don't even try to fit into your native GNOME or KDE color scheme or use your preferred fonts. You could use a Windows theme, but themes make Wine run extremely slowly. Luckily, with a little configuration editing, it's easy to make Wine applications look at lot more like the rest of the apps on your desktop."

And Linux.com also posted about how to upgrade from 32-bit to 64-bit Fedora Linux without a system reinstall.

Software Releases

It turns out that RPM 5.0.0 (reported in last week's roundup) is considered as a fork from the code maintained by RPM.org by RedHat (who originated the RPM format). More information about this at InternetNews.

The Blog Herald reported that WordPress 2.4 will be labelled 2.5, the release is delayed, a security release Issued, and more.

KDE 4.0 was released on January 11th. Read the release announcement, Ars Technica's brief review, and download a live CD here to test it out.

Drupal 4.7.11 and 5.6 fixing security issues were released.

phpMyAdmin 2.11.4 was released

PHP Stuff

A brief introduction to using PHP CLI

A brief introduction to using SQL Lite with PHP

Photoshop Stuff

A tutorial about how to blend multiple photos together in Photoshop

Hardware Stuff

USB 3 was revealed at CES

Other Stuff