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Requiem

One hundred years and four days. That's how long a remarkable guy named Norman Vaughn lived, I recently heard on the radio. Norm was an Alaskan adventurer I've met several times. When I first met him, he was in his 80s, taking a sea kayaking navigation class. He was taking up a new sport.

Norm had visited the South Pole with Admiral Byrd, on the first expedition to make it to the pole. Norm had raced in the Iditarod many times, most often winning the Red Lantern award for the last racer to finish each year. Norm was an irrepressible optimist, living his dreams every day, and an inspiration. He died two days before Christmas.

One hundred years ago, there were no computers, no IBM, let alone Microsoft, and certainly no open source software. It would be interesting to compare common attitudes and platitudes from then and now.

We've written about encryption in our newsletters on Freelock.com, but it looks like there are some new options available.

... by attaching 6 keyboards, mice, and monitors to it, of course. Need to provide a place for guests or workers to get online, and not much more? This can be a very cost-effective solution. Build a Six-headed, Six-user Linux System.

Just ran across this: KnowledgeTree Document Management System. Looks like a real document management system to add to the list.

Here's a handy article for setting up/configuring a monitoring service on a web server: BobCares :: Outsourced Web Hosting Support :: Installing and Configuring Nagios

Two quick stories caught my eye today, both related to pointing out the propaganda being foisted on us by large corporations...

A highly technical article that's a great how-to for setting up remote verification of file integrity from a central trusted server. Sys Admin > v15, i02: File Integrity Assessment via SSH

Wow. Here's a great, lengthy article detailing all sorts of things about using Linux and open source software in small businesses. Linux: A Buyer's Guide for SMEs--ZDNet UK.

Windows flaws keep causing trouble for most Internet users. Earlier this week I was at a meeting of a group of tech professionals in the Seattle area, all of whom work with small businesses.

For my photographer and multimedia friends, here's a summary free Linux-based software available for rendering high definition images... Linux.com | High Dynamic Range images under Linux.

Just stumbled upon a pretty cool web interface to a centralized backup system. You can manage a series of snapshot backups of all the computers on your network. It can automatically send a user an email if there's a repeated problem of missed backups.

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it!" Here at Freelock, we're strong believers in that maxim. The problem is, so much about computing is broken these days. And in most cases, we've just learned to live with the problems.

You have had choices. For the past decade, your choice has been between crash-prone and insecure Windows, incompatible, expensive, and slightly strange Macs, or highly technical, user-unfriendly Linux. Times are changing, for all three.