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Over the years I wrote a bunch of applications that generate KML files to be loaded in Google Earth and [if they weren't too big] in Google Maps. The old Google maps made this really easy because you could just put the KML file's URL in the search field and it would load it. The new version makes sharing these a lot harder because you can't just share a URL, you now have to go through importing into My Maps or setting up additional custom displays using the Javascript API.

If anyone knows an easier way to give people a link with which to display render a KML file as an overlay, I'd love to hear it.

This article goes to some length discussing the historical basis for copyrights and how those may or not still be valid for creative works in the 21st century as the cost of making and distributing copies has effectively gone to zero. The author comes to the conclusion that no matter what laws are made or desires are had by publishers (or authors) technologically, the "copy" has ceased to be acontrollable thing that revenues can be squeezed from.
  An interesting thing will be how authors and artists of the late 21st century will make their livings. Already many performing artists [musicians] are moving towarddistributing their recordings under CreativeCommons licenses that allow them to begenerally free to the public.* They then can increase their following and make a better living selling tickets to performances as well as taking donations and selling easy accessto their music.
  The 'donation' aspect of this new model is one that I find particularly interesting. It remains to be seen how it would work out, but I can imagine a day when a music group or author puts up a 'new album/book fundraiser' on their website. Fan donations could build until the cost of the production is met, at which point the group/author makes their work and provides it for download free of additional charges (as it has already been paid for). This "donations/payment upfront" model would strongly encourage increased production by artists (the purpose of copyright), while also providing a mechanism to support smaller/niche artists. I imagine that this model would not produce the huge incomes of current (<2%) superstars, but it should provide reasonable incomes for the vast majority of artists.
  As a example of this model in use is the musician "Cargo Cult". I downloaded his albums (for free in 128kbps mp3 format) and listened to them on my MP3 player for several weeks. After a while I found that I really liked his music and went back to Magnatune and gave him $8 for the CD-Quality version of the tracks. Also, I sent him an email asking about his experience giving away his music under CreativeCommons. He replied back with a short message that basically said "Before I didn't make any money with my music, now I do." Where might we (and our culture) be if this was the dominant model.
  - Adam
 
  *Some, such as theAttribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlikelicense that I use for mywebsiteallow free use only for non-commercial uses.
 

When you've worked with dual monitors for a while, you'll never want to go back.

Why stop at two when you can have 4?

I heartily agree though that its tough to use only one after being using several. I like to use
- one monitor for filebrowser/terminal
- one for code
- one for output/debugger
- one for IM/email

Yeah, the IM/email monitor is excessive, but if you have spares laying around...

- Adam

About a 8 months ago I had a hard drive fail and decided to install Xandros to replace the RedHat 9 that was on my dead drive. I had been happily using apt-for-rpm thanks to the great guy[s?] at freshrpms.net and had long since grown to love the Debian software management way:
1. $ sudo -s
2. # apt-get update
3. # apt-get upgrade/install xxxx
4. there is no 4, its done everything is up to date, nothing else to do.
The web server that I inherited was running Debian, so I had general idea of where to look for configs and things and thought I'd try Xandros for myself as well as try it out in preparation for setting up for my mother. The mother test is yet to come yet as I've spent most of our brief visits socializing instead of messing with the computer. This will happen soon though since I must say that using Xandros has been far and away the most pleasurable Linux experience that I have ever had.

The good:
- As little battling with hardware as I've ever experienced.
- Auto recognizes CDs, my camera, other USB stuff. Finally plug and play without having to write shell scripts to mount/unmount the CD!
- Unlike the rest of the Distros, Xandros cleaned out the 'start' menu, organized them, and got rid of the dozens of choices for every kind of app. This is probably on of the most confusing things about most distros, you pull up the 'Applications' menu and see 2 office suites (KOffice and OpenOffice), 5 email clients, 10 text editors, and 4 sound players. I'm all for choice, but its overwhelming for first-timers and cluttered for everyone else.
- Everything I love about Debian, in a friendly package.
- A 'fast user-switching' button like OSX and winXP so that you can easily switch between X-Sessions without having to know the ALT+F6/ALT+F7 keys

The not so good:
- Its not the most blazing distro, but does [barely] function with KDE on a Pentium200. I am running Xandros without KDE on my laptop/picture-frame.
- It takes up about gig, but I guess this is pretty standard for distros (with apps included).

The 'not good, but problematic elsewhere' dept:
- have to manually configure things to get all 5 buttons working on my mouse. This IS doable though, and I have made up a step-by-step install guide for beginners wanting to set up Xandros. It includes all the little steps I did to get the mouse, DVDCSS, nVidia drivers, etc going. I wrote this up for a friend, but it might help others beginners too, since these things seem to beyond the scope of most distributed install guides.

All in all, I've found it to be VERY user-friendly compared to everything except OS X. At the same time, its Debian, so when I wanted to set up PostgreSQL, PHP, Perl, and Apache so I could do some work, it didn't get in my way.

About a 8 months ago I had a hard drive fail and decided to install Xandros to replace the RedHat 9 that was on my dead drive. I had been happily using apt-for-rpm thanks to the great guy[s?] at freshrpms.net and had long since grown to love the Debian software management way:
1. $ sudo -s
2. # apt-get update
3. # apt-get upgrade/install xxxx
4. there is no 4, its done everything is up to date, nothing else to do.
The web server that I inherited was running Debian, so I had general idea of where to look for configs and things and thought I'd try Xandros for myself as well as try it out in preparation for setting up for my mother. The mother test is yet to come yet as I've spent most of our brief visits socializing instead of messing with the computer. This will happen soon though since I must say that using Xandros has been far and away the most pleasurable Linux experience that I have ever had.

The good:
- As little battling with hardware as I've ever experienced.
- Auto recognizes CDs, my camera, other USB stuff. Finally plug and play without having to write shell scripts to mount/unmount the CD!
- Unlike the rest of the Distros, Xandros cleaned out the 'start' menu, organized them, and got rid of the dozens of choices for every kind of app. This is probably on of the most confusing things about most distros, you pull up the 'Applications' menu and see 2 office suites (KOffice and OpenOffice), 5 email clients, 10 text editors, and 4 sound players. I'm all for choice, but its overwhelming for first-timers and cluttered for everyone else.
- Everything I love about Debian, in a friendly package.
- A 'fast user-switching' button like OSX and winXP so that you can easily switch between X-Sessions without having to know the ALT+F6/ALT+F7 keys

The not so good:
- Its not the most blazing distro, but does [barely] function with KDE on a Pentium200. I am running Xandros without KDE on my laptop/picture-frame.
- It takes up about gig, but I guess this is pretty standard for distros (with apps included).

The 'not good, but problematic elsewhere' dept:
- have to manually configure things to get all 5 buttons working on my mouse. This IS doable though, and I have made up a step-by-step install guide for beginners wanting to set up Xandros. It includes all the little steps I did to get the mouse, DVDCSS, nVidia drivers, etc going. I wrote this up for a friend, but it might help others beginners too, since these things seem to beyond the scope of most distributed install guides.

All in all, I've found it to be VERY user-friendly compared to everything except OS X. At the same time, its Debian, so when I wanted to set up PostgreSQL, PHP, Perl, and Apache so I could do some work, it didn't get in my way.

1. Download the source. (rest as root)
2. untar the archive: # tar -xzf someapp.tar.gz
3. cd to the source directory
4. # ./configure
5. # make
6. # make install

----

How many times have you seen instructions like this?

The other comments on the steps mentioned say "Thanks, that works great!" and things like that, but my compile threw errors and didn't work for me.

The problem is, which I learned after 3 years of daily linux use and 5 distros (including FreeBSD), is that you often need to specify options for the "./configure" step, and those option are found by doing "./configure --help". NOBODY EVER MENTIONS THIS! (sorry for use of caps, but this is a pretty huge problem.)

Compounding the problem is that once you do do a "./configure --help", you are given a huge list of options, but have no clue which ones (and what parameters you need to specify) to get your software to compile. Please tell me where I can find this if there is documentation as to a general process for trouble-shooting compile-options, because I have yet to find it.

Instead of the above example, how about some instructions like the following:

---
All steps are done as root (administrator). # is the root prompt of a command-shell, more info.

1. Change to the source-download dirctory:
# cd /usr/local/src/

2. Download the source (someapp-1.x.x.tar.gz, where the x's are replaced by the latest version numbers, see http://www.mysite.org/releases/ for the latest version information.
# wget ftp://dist.mysite.org/releases/someapp-1.x.x.tar.g z

3. Untar the archive:
# tar -xzf someapp-1.x.x.tar.gz

4. Change to the uncompressed source directory:
# cd someapp-1.x.x/

5. Configure the installer.

Most systems will need to specify the location of your Perl executable:
# ./configure --perl=/usr/bin/perl
Use the following command to find your Perl executable:
# locate perl | grep bin

Other common options that may be needed

AdBlock for MozillaFirebird will block Flash ads as well as images from urls that match one of your search strings. This works REALLY well, I haven't seen an advertizement in over a month now that I have my filters all set up.