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I was looking around for a simple php image rotation script so that I could offer rotating banners to my affiliates on ChopperStickers.com.

I found a great one here. Small, simple, clean and it does the job well.

The same place offered this banner rotation script that is a little more advance and provides you with a few more options. Since my affiliate software controls where the links point I did not need the features of the more advance script so the simple rotator suits my needs just fine.

Was looking for a way to generate a PDF catalog for ChopperStickers.com so that visitors could download and print out a catalog of all the stickers we have available on the site. Doing some searching around I came across RustyParts HTML_ToPDF PHP class.

Took some tweaking around and I had to install GhostScript and the GhostScript fonts but I got it working and I think it came out pretty nice.

I created a php script to generate a catalog of all the stickers I currently have available, then I pass that to a php script that generates the my pdf catalog. It can be done on the fly but that takes a bit and uses up quite a bit of server resources so I have a cron script that generates an updated catalog once a week.

If you are looking for away to convert other documents to PDF check out this handy online tool. It has a filesize limit of 2MB but other than that it is pretty nice. I have used it to convert the VFR Newsletter from MS Publisher to PDF and it works great.

Check out Marratech Free

It allows you to set up a small server that will allow you to conference voice and video with up to 5 people for free. Very easy to set up and use.

Biggest draw back is that you cannot secure your conference room with a password so if the room is open anyone can join. Other than that it works pretty well with decent video and audio quality over the Internet.
http://www.marratech.com/free/

I know you have seen the commercials with for the Mac with the guy in the suit as the PC and the casual guy as the Mac. The commercials are pretty funny. Some guys on YouTube have put together a few spoofs of the commercials and they are hilarious.

Check them out here or here.

If you did not already know day light savings time has changed beginning this year (2007).

It will now run from the 2nd weekend in March to the 1st weekend in November. That means that this coming weekend you will need to “spring ahead” one hour on Saturday night.

Your computers clock will also need to be updated so that it will adjust to the new DST.

If you are running Windows you can find information about what you need to do here:

http://support.microsoft.com/gp/cp_dst and http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928388

If you are running Linux just do a search on google for your distro +DST and you will find what you need. I am running Fedora and I was able to update the tzdata using yum.

#yum install tzdata.noarch

Use zdump to check you system to make sure the DST changes have been applied.

My timezone is Eastern so just replace the EST5EDT with your timezone (man zdump for more info).

#zdump -v EST5EDT | grep 2007

It’s funny how the news media is reporting this as another possible y2k. Anyway get your systems patched up and you should be fine.

A guy I work with went to a TWUUG meeting lastnight and saw a presentation on an opensource network and host monitoring program called Nagios - http://nagios.org/

He said it looked pretty cool and was going to give it a try this weekend. I think I might look into it a bit myself. Will let you know what I find out.

If you are interested in keeping up to date with the latest vulnerabilities and security threats checkout the Qualys @RISK Newsletter. The newsletter is delivered weekly and contains a lot of good information on the latest vulnerabilities and advice on how to fix them. This is a great weekly newsletter and I highly recommend it if you are concerned with keep your systems and network secure.

Another great source for network and computer security information is the US Governments Technical Cyber Security Alerts. There you will find current information about current security issues, vulnerabilities, and exploits. Not quite as detailed as the Qualys @RISK Newsletter but still a good resource.

Found this little jewel over here. Great step by step instructions to get Microsoft’s new Vista OS up and running in just a matter of minutes.

Hope you (enjoyed it) learned something.

Most of the website design and editing I do, I do by hand using a text editor such as vim or notepad even but occassionally, especially if I am trying to lay out tables, CSS, or image maps (I hardly ever mess with image maps but sometimes) HTML Kit is an excellent tool to help with these tasks.

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