Ian keeps bugging me at how great Quicksilver is. Knowning that there must be an alternative built for linux, I accidently stumbled across Katapult. While it still has a little room to grow, Katapult makes a great tool in any KDE toolchest. Press ALT+SPACE, and your widget fires up, ready to take your orders. Since words don’t really do this justice, I created a screencast. Katapult Screencast from Kelvin Nicholson on Vimeo.

When I was younger I hated reading. I mean, I guess I didn’t hate reading, but I always found better things to do. Like dig holes. Times have changed. Throughout middle school I thoroughly enjoyed reading the Xanth fantasy series by Piers Anthony; Dean Koontz was pretty good as well. In high school my teachers spoon-fed me fine literature, with special thanks to Mrs. Bowen-Jones for her AP Literature course. Compared with many people I have talked with at uni, I had the privilege of being exposed to many great works. While the fine details have now somewhat faded, I still remember the overall themes and motifs. At the time I didn’t fully enjoy or appreciate the privilege I had. Indeed, the push from …

Status: ✅ I’ve played with quite a bit of virtualization, especially VMWare for ages. About eight months ago I started to play around with Xen, and got it to work great, except for the fact that the nvidia driver wouldn’t work with the Xen kernel. That said, I’m gonna give another go. Throughout senior high, and especially my last year, I managed to score a bunch of old motherboards and random parts and pieces. Six or so years later, my parents are still finding old motherboards. Considering these computers were mainly P120s with 64-128 megs of RAM, they weren’t so hot. What is one to do?

I must take a few moments to note that the GRE was completed successfully, one more step in the PhD application process. Interestingly, as I walk along the streets, I am routinely asked: “so, what does @!*% mean?” “Heck, I don’t know!” While I would consider my vocabulary broader than that of the average English speaker, she still asked me some rather random words. As a reward, I agreed to go shopping with her. So, today I woke up at 6:00am, she took her GRE, and by 11:30 I was off to lunch and several shops. Those of you who know me can sympathize with the pain I was in, as you know I don’t really like shopping. At one point she was browsing some shoes, and I sat down on the …

School has started again, and it is very hard, as expected. My class has five students, including me. One classmate is from Korea, and the others are from Indonesia. Today, the teacher mentioned that the Indonesian students already speak some Cantonese, so the tones come easily to them. I admit that I’m a little jealous. Otherwise, the past week hasn’t been too eventful. Matsu was wonderful, as you can read, but being back in Taipei is nice too. Ian and I are, for whatever reason, working towards the MCSE+Security certification, and I am behind where I would like to be. I should soon be able to shift into high gear and finish a few more exams. One may wonder why Kelvin is pursuing an MCSE. He …

In the previous few years, I had been fortunate enough to travel a lot. International flights no longer fazed me. After my exam, I jumped on the MRT to Taipei Main Station and had some lunch. Knowing that aeroplane meals are built for “average” appetites, I decided to eat more beforehand. Lunch was mediocre but filling, and I went upstairs to the bus terminal. The bus was already there; it left every 20 minutes or so, and I had plenty of time, but I still purchased my ticket and ran for it.

In the next year I plan to make a little video, nothing fancy likely, but something that will require an editor. However, I don’t own a mac (which rules our Final Cut Pro + After Effect and iMovie, which Ian and I both have had too much fun with. Inside joke.) I’m also a die-hard Linux fan, trying to hold out buying a mac for as long as possible. SF to the rescure. There are four editors listed, and in the next year I’ll try them all. Overalll, they look quite promising.

Yea, you read that right. Three commands and you can run a pen-test on your website/webserver. So, how? kelvin@home:~$ sudo apt-get install nikto kelvin@home:~$ sudo nikto -update kelvin@home:~$ nikto -h www.thoughtdeposit.net As you can see, Nikto is a web server scanner, apparently for over 3200 dangerous files/vulnerabilities. Additional features can be seen at the Nikto website, yet you will certainly want to add this old gem to your webserver toolbelt as soon as possible.

For those of you not needing Apache and the whole kitchen sink, [insert reason here], Lighttpd is a very attractive contender. For me, it has a small memory footprint, which is highly appealing. However, getting SEO urls to work (i.e. utilizing rewrite), isn’t too straightforward. Tada! A little research yields two helpful links: one at lighttpd.net regarding how to use ModRewrite and another showing how to slightly modify the .htaccess file used by OpenSEF and Apache. So…

I’ll admit, I think one of the thickest barriers to entry regarding Linux is variety. I love variety, but general end users don’t adjust well to change (IMHO). Thus enter the stage: Portland. So, what does this mean to the end user? This means that, eventually, the UI throughout linux will all look similar – regardless if it is designed to utilize GTK, QT or anything else (that is, if it is built off the Portland standard).