James Blackwell

Check out google trends for searches on great depression, deflation and bank collapse. People seem to be taking a new interest in history.

Dual heading is quickly becoming a common way to expand one desktop onto two monitors. After all, if one monitor is great, then two must be fantastic! Setting up dual-heading monitors in Ubuntu isn't too difficult, but does come with a couple caveats. This article will cover setting up dual heading just in case you have had problems. Another thing that this article covers is how to easily enable and disable that extra monitor so that you have it only when you want it.

Surprisingly, there is little easy to find information available for how to generate samba passwords, suitable for ldap, from within php5. The answer, though simple, should make any reasonable sysadmin burst into tears.

1. convert the string to unicode
2. run it through pack
3. mhash it (MD4 of all things)
4. bin2hex it.

function GenSambaPass($pass) {
$uni = '';
for ($i = 0; $i < strlen($pass); $i++) {
$a = ord($pass{$i}) << 8;
$uni .= sprintf("%X", $a);
}
return bin2hex(mhash(MHASH_MD4,pack('H*', $uni)));
}

For some time now, I have been warning my friends and loved ones of the impending US crisis. In Henny Penny style, since early 2007, I've been running to and fro warning anyone that I care about that the economy is in serious, deep trouble that has ramifications not just for brokers and rich people, but for them personally. My warnings, unusually pessimistic, ran the usual gamut: "Your aren't going to be able to sell your home.", "Credit cards, adjustable rate mortgages, and other variable rates are going to escalate", "Gas is going to go up and up.". "The stock market is going to crash".

Hans Reiser, (in?)famous for creation of ReiserFS, is to be on ABC's 20/20 on September 2. Information Here

I found a heart-warming letter to the editor, written for athiests such as myself, which I will let speak for itself momentarily. Basically, Mrs. Shannon wants to get all non-christians, especially athiests, out of America.

Senator Ernie Chambers has decided to call God (presumably the Christian one) to court to defend Himself for making terroristic threats, to wit: "Defendant has made and continues to make terroristic threats of grave harm to innumerable persons, including constituents of Plaintiff whom Plaintiff has the duty to represent. Defendant directly and proximately has caused, inter alia (among other things), fearsome floods, egregious earthquakes, horrendous hurricanes, terrifying tornados, pestilential plagues, ferocious famines, devastating droughts, genocidal wars, birth defects and the like.

Update 1 - The transcript of the video has been released. To quickly sum up the video:

• Muslims, unlike Christians, do not do holocausts (examples of provided Christian holocausts include WW2 and 650k Iraqis killed in gulf war II)
• That the US government, rather than being controlled by it's citizens, is controlled by corporations.
• Neo-conservatives such as Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are the ones responsible for the war.
• The US wouldn't be in this mess if everyone believed in Allah.

There is a wide variety of video playing software these days -- mplayer, mythtv, and xine just to name a few. Usually the worst sort of problem that people have to deal with is deciding whether they want to corrupt their free software installations with codecs that are often patently challenged (get it? patent) or limited in redistribution.

A French intelligence briefing has been leaked to the French press that Saudis believe that Osama died earlier this month of typhoid. The rumored death has not yet been confirmed and many major intelligence outfits doubt the veracity of the report. More information here