miscellanea

A few tips and tricks, from a thread in the Fedora Users mailing list, on how to “to digitize several hundred music CDs” under any Gnu/Linux distribution

Owners of websites that remained frozen for a year or more, because the _projects _they represent also were closed, or greatly slowed down their activity, face a big problem when those projects restart: updating the website without losing all its old content is really, really hard, if not impossible. Here is how I faced this problem with an old Drupal website, with an approach that can work on many other websites running off some database.

I just finished to read a copy of “CentOS System Administration Essentials”, written by Andrew Mallett, which I got from the editor for review. Here is what I found.

The CentOS 6 Linux Server Cookbook is a Packt Publishing title first published in April 2013. You can buy it in paper format (about 370 pages) or as an ePUB or PDF file (black and white only, whereas the ePUB version is in colours). In general I believe, especially in these times of PRISM and widespread economic crisis, that the more people learn how to run their own Free Software servers, the better. I’ve already explained how and, above all, why we should all do this with email and (at least) social networking and online publishing. That’s why, when Packt asked me to review the Cookbook, I accepted.

update 2012/07/13: I have realized only today that from March 2012 Scratch is also available with a GPL v2 license.

Recently there have been two separate discussions on two italian Free Software mailing lists, about the meaning and obligations of the license for the source code of the educational software Scratch. In both cases, I asked (and received) confirmation of my understanding of the license directly from the “Help@Scratch”. The discussions were about two topics that are, I believe, interesting and relevant for everybody considering usage or development of Free Software, especially (but not only) in educational and non-profit contexts. Therefore, I’m publishing the answers I got from the Scratch team here (with their approval), hoping they may be useful to everybody else with the same doubts in the future (but please see the disclaimer below!).

Background

Rss is a wonderful system to get headlines of online news from many independent sources and browse them as quickly as possible, without subscribing to any website, giving away personal information and/or depending on any third-party website to aggregate everything for you.

Yesterday Sergio, a user of OpenOffice Impress, sent to the OpenOffice.org discussion list his list of the “Major Gaps of OpenOffice Impress 3.3 vs. Microsoft Office PowerPoint”.

WordPress is quick and easy to install and update, but the quicker you can make these operations the better, right? If you have shell access to the server where your WordPress copy is installed, it is possible to perform all the operations in Step 1 of the Manual WordPress Update Procedure with the shell script below. It will save you a few minutes, which may seem too little, but is great if you maintain more than one copy of WordPress. That, however, is not the main reason to use a script like this. Its bigger advantage is reducing the possibility of human error by doing things by hand, at the prompt or with the mouse is the same.

Around October 2010 I migrated from Drupal to WordPress my bilingual websites Stop and Strider. Eighteen months later, WordPress has confirmed to be better than Drupal for my own needs, as far as those two websites are concerned (I still stick to Drupal for other websites). There is, however, one part of those WordPress websites that has just become a big problem for me, and is how to keep them (looking) multilingual.