Jan-Piet Mens

I've overcome the last hurdle for a Linux deployment: the clock.

Get the Cairo-Clock, and wait for the first complaints that the second hand doesn't move exactly as it does in Vista…

Watch a demo.

Are you also tired of waiting for Adobe's PDF reader to load? At a whopping 22 MB download it spreads itself onto Windows like there is no tomorrow.

Two very nice alternatives exist, which might not have all the features of the "original", but which certainly fulfill my needs.

The first is a very small program named Sumatra PDF. The download is just over a meg and it does what it should: render PDF files. The only feature missing to me is a find command to search for text within a PDF. I've hit it with dozens of different documents I have and there was only one that it couldn't open. Why not try it as a portable app?

The next program, also free of charge, is Foxit Reader for Windows, with many more features, including finding text and creating annotations. There are a number of plug ins available for it, including form operations, but those have to be purchased.

Both of these launch at an incredible speed in comparison with the "original" and are certainly very viable alternatives.

Good LDAP editors are hard to find; the best is Soferra's LDAP Administrator which unfortunately only works on Windows platforms.

Sometime in 2005 I stumbled accross ldapvi, an interactive program for Unix/Linux written by David Lichteblau which allows editing of LDAP entries pulled from an LDAP server using my favorite editor (vi) or whatever is set in my $EDITOR environment variable. A pointer made me look at it again.

The program has had numerous changes done to it, which now make it very workable. Care to see a sample session? I'll set my editor to ed so that I can show you what is happening.

Tremendous. Do note that we aren't simply editing LDIF here, well we are, but that LDIF is being pulled from the LDAP server and optionally written back. Object classes and attribute types and values can be added modified or deleted, as long as the directory server accepts the changes of course (think: schema checking).

At the main prompt, a plus sign (+) will re-enter the editor with schema comments; I can see which attribute types are allowed by the object classes.

This definitely goes into my toolbox again, and I'm going to read the manual.

via.

I stumbled over a Flickr feature I hadn't seen before: Flickr Map.

Users can geo-tag their photographs and place them on a map. When I scroll through the map I see a count of photographs
made in or near a specific location.

Another bit of Web 2.0.