If you've ever built your own Linux kernel, or installed a hard drive controller card in a Linux box, you know how easy it is to have an "accident" that will prevent the OS from booting completely. Thankfully, Kent Robotti has created an excellent recovery distro called RIP ('R'ecovery 'I's 'P'ossible).
There are a lot of bootable Linux distros out there, but Robotti has a history of making a tight, usable distro called looplinux (a decendant of the first distro I ever installed, doslinux). RIP can boot from a floppy, bootable CD, or even a USB flash drive. It will boot its own Linux OS with a set of basic recovery tools, or let you attempt to boot another system on a different drive. I've had to do both on a few occasions, and without RIP, I would've been totally hosed.
For those of you who use Bloglines, you can add MikeyP.com to your blogroll by clicking here:
But you already knew that, didn't you?
I haven't installed a new linux distro since Mandrake 7.0. And why bother? With autoconf and such, it's relatively easy to download and compile your own apps. Even building a new kernel isn't too much of a hassle, and since I built 2.4.20, I've had no real need to update anything.
Boy have I missed out!
I just brought an old machine (an ancient K6-233 with 64 Mb RAM) back to life with a fresh install of Mandrake 10.1. Instead of rolling my own kernel, making my own partitions, and compiling my own apps, I just let the installer do its thing. And it was flawless, working fine on the first boot, and auto-detecting all hardware, including a WinTV card and a Belkin PCMCIA WiFi card seated in a PCI adapter.
SSH was configured out of the box, so remote management was a piece of cake. And with the help of the Easy URPMI site, I was installing new software packages with ease.
I'm so impressed with Mandrake and URPMI, I'm beginning to wonder: are the days of rolling your own linux distro over? Or have they been gone for a while, and I'm just now finding out?
I was looking all over the place for a simple command-line ISO burning utility for WinXP. XP's built-in CD burning tools are great, but they can't burn ISOs. I considered using cdrecord, but as versatile as it is, it's also damned complicated.
As it turns out, the perfect little ISO-burning utility comes from none other than Microsoft! The utility cdburn is included with the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit, and it couldn't be easier to use. There are also a ton of other killer little utilities in the Resource Kit that are worth downloading, like a command line utility that let's you search and replace text in the Registry. Cool, eh?
Do you Yahoo? Yahoo supports RSS feeds in My Yahoo. You can add the RSS feed for mikeyp.com to My Yahoo by clicking this button:
Recently, I noticed that it was taking forever for a new Internet Explorer window to open on WinXP. For convenience, I always left the Favorites sidebar open, and I realized that having the sidebar open was dramatically slowing IE's launch time. I suppose that for each new window, IE was iterating through the thousands of links I have in the Favorites folder, many of which are still in the folder root yet to be categorized.
Since organizing the Favorites folder is such a major pain anyway, I decided to dump IE's Favorites and find a new bookmark manager program.
LinkStash is an excellent bookmark manager that works with all major browsers, including FireFox. It's fast, easy to customize, easy to manage, and integrates with the browser seamlessly. And I'm actually catching myself searching my local bookmarks before searching Google. Highly recommended.
BTW, after you import your Favorites in to LinkStash, go ahead and delete everything in your Favorites directory (you can re-export them later, if you want). Check out the performance difference in IE!
A couple of years ago, I was looking for a simple linux jukebox script for my MP3 collection. Since it would be running on an old distro, and be exposed on a public port (at the time), I needed the following requirements:
I couldn't find one, so I wrote my own and called it the Venus Music Server. You can read more about it and see screenshots at the Venus Music page on SourceForge.
Oh, did I mention Venus Music is open source?
The Star Wars Episode 3 teaser one-sheet is for sale at http://shop.starwars.com/Product/ProductDetails.aspx?ProductID=503. I don't think it's one of the better Star Wars one-sheets, but worth adding to my one-sheet collection.
A much cooler poster is the Japanese teaser for Return of the Jedi. Check it out: http://shop.starwars.com/Product/ProductDetails.aspx?ProductID=180
Thanks to the MoinMoin ![[MoinMoin]](http://www.mikeyp.com/css/external.gif)
crew, here are the InterWiki's supported on this site:
_MikeyP additions:_
ASIN http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=mikeypcom-20&path=ASIN%2F
Answers http://www.answers.com/
_MoinMoin additions:_
MoinMaster http://purl.net/wiki/moinmaster/
FOLDOC http://foldoc.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/foldoc.cgi?query=
ISBN http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=
RFC http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc
FreshMeat http://freshmeat.net/
BrainBench http://www.brainbench.com/transcript.jsp?pid=
Thinki http://www.thinkware.se/cgi-bin/thinki.cgi/
PythonFaq http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw.py?req=show&file=faq$PAGE.htp
DseWiki http://www.wikiservice.at/dse/wiki.cgi?
DocBook http://docbook.org/wiki/moin.cgi/
AwarenessWiki http://taoriver.net/aware/
PythonWiki http://www.pythonwiki.de/
TamTam http://boo.mi2.hr:10000/TamTamDev/
JuraWiki http://jurawiki.de/
SpackOrg http://www.spack.org/index.cgi/
ESW http://esw.w3.org/topic/
OSPedia http://ospedia.osdir.com/
_Updated 2002-05-10 from http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?InterMapTxt:_
ALife http://news.alife.org/wiki/index.php?
AbbeNormal http://www.ourpla.net/cgi-bin/pikie.cgi?
AcadWiki http://xarch.tu-graz.ac.at/autocad/wiki/
Acronym http://www.acronymfinder.com/af-query.asp?String=exact&Acronym=
Advogato http://www.advogato.org/
AndStuff http://andstuff.org/wiki.php?
Annotation http://bayle.stanford.edu/crit/nph-med.cgi/
AnnotationWiki http://www.seedwiki.com/page.cfm?wikiid=368&doc=
BenefitsWiki http://www.benefitslink.com/cgi-bin/wiki.cgi?
BridgesWiki http://c2.com/w2/bridges/
C2find http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?FindPage&value=
CLiki http://www.telent.net/cliki/
Cache http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:
CmWiki http://www.ourpla.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?
CreationMatters http://www.ourpla.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?
DejaNews http://www.deja.com/=dnc/getdoc.xp?AN=
Dictionary http://www.dict.org/bin/Dict?Database=*&Form=Dict1&Strategy=*&Query=
DolphinWiki http://www.object-arts.com/wiki/html/Dolphin/$PAGE.htm
EfnetCeeWiki http://purl.net/wiki/c/
EfnetCppWiki http://purl.net/wiki/cpp/
EfnetPythonWiki http://purl.net/wiki/python/
EfnetXmlWiki http://purl.net/wiki/xml/
EljWiki http://elj.sourceforge.net/phpwiki/index.php/
EmacsWiki http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?
Foldoc http://www.foldoc.org/foldoc/foldoc.cgi?
FoxWiki http://fox.wikis.com/wc.dll?Wiki~
FreeBSDman http://www.FreeBSD.org/cgi/man.cgi?apropos=1&query=
Google http://www.google.com/search?q=
GoogleGroups http://groups.google.com/groups?q=
HammondWiki http://www.dairiki.org/HammondWiki/index.php3?
Haribeau http://wiki.haribeau.de/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?
IAWiki http://www.IAwiki.net/
IAwiki http://www.IAwiki.net/
IMDB http://us.imdb.com/Title?
JargonFile http://sunir.org/apps/meta.pl?wiki=JargonFile&redirect=
JiniWiki http://www.cdegroot.com/cgi-bin/jini?
JspWiki http://www.ecyrd.com/JSPWiki/Wiki.jsp?page=
KmWiki http://www.voght.com/cgi-bin/pywiki?
KnowHow http://www2.iro.umontreal.ca/~paquetse/cgi-bin/wiki.cgi?
LegoWiki http://www.object-arts.com/wiki/html/Lego-Robotics/
LinuxWiki http://linuxwiki.org/
MathSongsWiki http://SeedWiki.com/page.cfm?wikiid=237&doc=
MbTest http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mbtest.pl?
MeatBall http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?
MetaWiki http://sunir.org/apps/meta.pl?
MoinMoin http://purl.net/wiki/moin/
MuWeb http://www.dunstable.com/scripts/MuWebWeb?
OpenWiki http://openwiki.com/?
OrgPatterns http://www.bell-labs.com/cgi-user/OrgPatterns/OrgPatterns?
PPR http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?
PangalacticOrg http://www.pangalactic.org/Wiki/
PersonalTelco http://www.personaltelco.net/index.cgi/
PhpWiki http://phpwiki.sourceforge.net/phpwiki/index.php?
Pikie http://pikie.darktech.org/cgi/pikie?
PurlNet http://purl.oclc.org/NET/
PyWiki http://www.voght.com/cgi-bin/pywiki?
PythonInfo http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/moinmoin/
SVGWiki http://www.protocol7.com/svg-wiki/default.asp?
SeaPig http://www.seapig.org/
SeattleWireless http://seattlewireless.net/?
SenseisLibrary http://senseis.xmp.net/?
SourceForge http://sourceforge.net/
Squeak http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/
StrikiWiki http://ch.twi.tudelft.nl/~mostert/striki/teststriki.pl?
TMwiki http://www.EasyTopicMaps.com/?page=
TWiki http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/
Tavi http://tavi.sourceforge.net/index.php?
TwistedWiki http://purl.net/wiki/twisted/
UseMod http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?
VisualWorks http://wiki.cs.uiuc.edu/VisualWorks/
WebDevWikiNL http://www.promo-it.nl/WebDevWiki/index.php?page=
Why http://clublet.com/c/c/why?
Wiki http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?
WikiPedia http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/
ZWiki http://www.zwiki.org/
Here's where I'm trying out various features of mikeyp.com. Let's try an image here:
…and an image link here: 
How about trying an InterWiki link
Here is a link to amazon with my associate ID
And here is a full-on amazon buy box:
It's been a while, but I finally updated http://www.mikeyp.com. The new site is a combination blog and wiki, with a few legacy static pages. I'm using a cool blog script called Blosxom, which I've customized with various styles and plugins.
I can't for the life of me understand why people use store-bought margarita mix, especially since a perfect margarita is so simple to make without it. You only need three ingredients:
Just put some ice in a shaker, add 1.5oz tequila, 1.5oz triple sec, and the juice of 1 whole lime. Shake it until it's ice cold, and strain in to a martini glass. Done! Ahhhh… sip the perfection.
Note: if you want to make a Waborita, just add a splash of Blue Curacao to the martini glass.
In my quest to find the ultimate in-car MP3 player, I ended up making adapters for my iPod. I made one for a Honda del Sol, and one for an Audi A4.
The iPod adapter for the del Sol was easy, as the after-market stereo had a line-in. I just made a pretty input jack. Check it out at http://www.mikeyp.com/delsolipod.
The Audi adapter was more challenging, as there was no line-in, nor did I want to string cables through the car's interior. For the line-in, I bought an adapter from http://www.autotoys.com that plugs in to the CD-Changer input. For the cabling, believe it or not, the 2001 A4 has a pre-wired Cat5 cable that runs from the center console to a DB25 the trunk! The result is here: http://www.mikeyp.com/a4ipod.
Ever wonder what I do in my spare time? (What spare time?) A creation of mine, the Suck-O-Meter, has become a popular software necessity for the sophisticated PalmOS user. You can download it at http://www.suckometer.com.
I wrote the Suck-O-Meter a few years ago for the PalmPilot Personal, and it still works on my PalmOS 4.0 Sony Clie. I wrote it in Waba, a slick little JVM that is now open source. Check it out over at http://www.wabasoft.com.
I think it's time for a "Suck-O-Meter 2005", isn't it?
The Urbz: Sims in the City hits the shelves today on PS2, xbox, GameCube, and GBA. A Nintendo DS version will also be available when the DS is released. Platform notes:
The official Urbz web site is http://www.urbzsims.com. Check out the sweet web comics! If you're a comics fan, the artists will be very familiar.
The music in The Urbz is performed by the Black Eyed Peas! Check out some of the tunes at http://www.blackeyedpeas.com/.
I'm watching the review scores here:
http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/ps2/urbz/
http://www.gamerankings.com
http://www.gamestats.com/objects/677/677567/?ui=wishlist
Google Reader
Got Apex?
Wired News
Sci-Fi Wire
GameTab
Good Morning Silicon Valley
Mainichi Daily Japan News
BusinessWeek Online
NASA Cassini Probe
