Dissociated Press

A few weeks ago, I discovered (maybe rediscovered… I seem to be forgetful lately) rss2email. It’s a nifty little proggy that converts RSS to emails.

I wrote up a short intro to the tool on Linux.com. Give it a read if you have a few minutes.

I don’t use rss2email for all of my feeds, but it’s damn handy for the select few that I want to notice right away.

If you’d like to try out Gaim 2.0 beta 1, but don’t feel like compiling from source, I might be able to help out.

I whipped up packages this morning with CheckInstall for Ubuntu Breezy, and they seem to be fine. Be sure to back up your .gaim directory before running the beta!. I have seen no problems with Gaim 2.0 beta, but it’s best to be safe. The traditional beta software warning applies — this is not a final release, and it may crash, eat your data, drink all the milk, leave the toilet seat up, and otherwise do crazy and unpredictable things.

Okay, now that that’s out of the way, you can download the i386 or amd64 packages and test it out.

Enjoy. Feel free to say “hi” if you’re online. I can be found online as xonker on Google Talk, zonker on jabber.org, and zonkerjoe on AIM.

If you’re a PostgreSQL fan, but using MySQL because one or more of your favorite open source applications only supports MySQL, the MySQL Compatibility project might be a good thing.

I wrote up a short article on the project that covers the basics.

Spent several days in San Diego last week, attending (and covering) the LISA conference. Good stuff. Had a great time, met some really fun (and brainy) folks, and learned a bit in the process.

For a little more detail, see the day one, day two, and day three coverage.

For this week’s CLI Magic, I looked at a few features in OpenSSH that may be helpful.

The All about Linux blog discusses Kompose, which is much like Mac OS X’s Expose feature.

I’ve installed this on my test desktop, which is running KDE 3.5 on top of Kubuntu at the moment. It’s available from the Kubuntu/Ubuntu archives, so a quick apt-get install kompose is all you need.

Overall, I like it. I’ve been itching for this kind of feature on Linux since I tried it on my Mac. Kompose works pretty well, but it’s dog-slow compared to the Mac version. Obviously, Kompose is still in development and is only at version 0.5 at the moment — so it will probably speed up in time.

We all love screenshots, so head over to the Kompose site for a peek.

Looks like there’s a new site trying to resurrect the “debaday” mission by providing a link to a new Debian package every day. It doesn’t look like the site is quite living up to the name, but I’ll be happy if they manage weekly updates. [Found on Debian Planet.]