Michael P. O'Connor

Years ago back in the late 90’s Netscape said that the internet would replace the OS. It has taken almost 2 decades but we are there now. As things move to web apps, the OS is no longer important. I right now type this on a Linux desktop, but I could be doing it on an Android Tablet/Phone or the competitor to Android. OK you might be thinking big deal a blog that no one cares about, but let me put out there Google Docs/Drive. I recently dropped all of my Windows systems and moved everything over to Slackware (see prior posts) I have not had the need to get an MS Office replacement because I can do my Word Processing and Spreed Sheets right in Google Docs. So the need for an office suit is going to be less of a need, especially since I can load a Office document into Google Docs edit it there, and if need by download a Word version of the document. So why as a end user at home would I need to spend over $100USD for software that I don’t need, what features would Office give me that I need as a home user that I don’t get though Google Drive/Document. And with more and more stuff moving to the Android system (and the competitor’s system) and Web Apps the need for this OS or that OS really is not that big, as long as the OS can run a Web Browser for most things people are set, for Taxes most tax software places now offer web based versions also. So unless you are a gamer (ignoring vault) the OS will not affect your ability to do things (well outside of some OSes do have a issue with stability and melware)

Well to help kill of the spam (and since I have not gotten any real email from any one that uses yahoo’s free email in over a decade, with 1 exception only one, and I put that on the whitelist and that email came in yesterday). I have been getting 3 to 10 spam messages a day with yahoo.com as the origination domain, so today, I put *@yahoo.com on the blacklist of spam assassin for my domain, all email coming from there will be deleted. To those that might ask, what if you miss 1 real email from some one still on yahoo, my advice to them would be head over to gmail and get a real email address, yahoo is just for spammers now.

I have been working for about a month now to try to reclaim my email. Every time I get spam, I have black listed the domain, I have updated more to my filters, etc, slowly I am gaining my email back, I have gone from 100 spam messages getting thought the spam filter a day to about 10 now, a bit more work and I might be able to get it down to 2 a day. I still believe that spam will kill of email, it is worthless takes up bandwidth, we need tougher laws against spam, with very high penalties.

I remembered that Linux was good with memory, but this is just more then I expected, I have 8Gb of memory on my tower. I have 3 copies of Eclipse and a copy of Amarok, and many other programs open right now and when I run free I get

mpop@home:~$ free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       8176092    8110428      65664          0     215580    4345580
-/+ buffers/cache:    3549268    4626824
Swap:     16777212          0   16777212
mpop@home:~$ 

all day and still it has not touched any swap space. That is just sweet, it means I have a lot of room to play in on the box.

Thanks to thomas_adam in the FVWM chat room on the FREE NODE irc network, I have gotten FVWM much closer to looking the way I want it to look. See the Screen Shot below.

If you want to mess with my config file for FVWM (but as Thomas said it has alot of FVWM 1.x stuff still in it so if you don’t like that you might want to avoid this file) you can get my config file at http://www.mikeoconnor.net/linuxConfigs/.fvwm2rc

I am resetting up my Linux systems, and I am going back to my roots in Linux going back to Slackware and will be using FVWM for my windows manager, I already know how I am going to set it up. I am going to do a 4×4 pager with the pager in the upper right hand side of the screen and a very basic button bar in the lower left hand side. Don’t need much in the working of the windows manager, I will work mainly off of the bash command line, the way man was meant to use the computer.

Well I have started to clean up my LinkedIn account might take a few days, deleted a bunch of “contacts” in there, last night I cleaned up my Delicious account. Going to try go get all the social network stuff I have going organized correctly. Also I am not going to be one of those that posts the same thing accross all the networks, each Network will have it own stuff, taking into account who I will let have access to it.

FaceBook — only Friends and Family (the most personal stuff, with limits will get there)
Google+ — Mixed bag, what I post will be limited to circles based on the content of the post.
LinkedIn — Professional stuff
Delicious — Mixed any one can see but just book marks
This Blog — Longer (some time rambling) thoughts that any one can see
Twitter — quick short (sometimes poor attempts at humor) posts that any one can see.

All the time keeping in mind the Golden Rule of the Internet — NEVER POST ANYTHING YOU WOULD NOT WANT YOUR MOTHER OR BOSS TO SEE (as any one can forward what ever you say on the net to any one else and you can not fully control it)