This guy has the goods. His script will take a huge image and display it in manageable chunks to the web browser.

I'm currently working on a document imaging viewer based around this. If this works out, I can replace half our Windows workstations with Linux later this year.

On a daily basis, I do things on our office network that I just can't do in Windows. Don't get me wrong, there's a couple of things I do in Windows that I just can't do yet in Linux, but there's more actual things that get done to our data in Linux that it would just be painful to do in Windows.

Wow. I've done 'dist-upgrade's before and never had these kinds of problems.

After running several times trying to get Ubuntu to upgrade from Dapper to Edgy, I've succeeded in nothing but completely hosing my system.

The first thing it did was uninstall CUPS, Gimp and a lot of theme issues with GTK.

Then it died.

Read on for the rest of the story...
So, I removed the 'broken' package using synaptic and tried again.

Then it removed more, and died. It reported gnome-control-center as broken, so I reinstalled it and tried again.

Smallbusinesscomputing.com has a great article about Linux in small businesses.

From the article:

'While Linux has become more accepted in the business environment, many still view it as geekware. Those companies look at Microsoft the way companies used to look at IBM ? as the safe choice.'

When you do overhead paging with background music, and supply music on hold, Asterisk can do some weird things.

Someone placed on hold told us afterwards that the hold music was 'too loud' and sounded like crap.

Turned out, the MOH was mixing with our background music coming out of the speakers, and mixing with our paging! I had to stop using mpg123 for Asterisk and manually convert my hold music files over to .wav format to force Asterisk to process them internally. This article at AstRecipies describes how to do it.

I'd always known it was possible to do overhead paging with Asterisk. Now I've finally tackled it. I purchased a Bogen amp and speakers and installed 5 flushmount speakers and one bullhorn for the warehouse.

Configuring Asterisk was pretty easy. I had to add a sound card to the server, but that was easy enough.

What wasn't easy was the fact that my acpi settings were causing huge issues with the sound card. The audio would repeat the last 3 seconds of a page forever. It took me 3 days to figure out that it was caused by the acpi=ht setting in lilo.conf - I basically had an IRQ conflict. Things went much smoother after that.

I then added a second sound card to the system. I know what you're thinking 'What was he thinking?!?' but really there's a method to my madness. Configuring Alsa to work with both cards wasn't too awfully tough. I had to specify in the Asterisk alsa.conf for

input_device=hw:0,0
output_device=hw:0,0

That way it used sound card 1. I then installed a slimserver and configured a stream. I used mpg123 to connect to that stream and told it to use the second sound card with the option '-a hw:1,0 '

Have you ever dreaded going to the doctor because you know you'll need a shot?

That's the way Tripwire is if you ask me. It's a pain to set up, and a pain to maintain, but does wonders for security.

Tripwire of course doesn't keep the bad guys out, but at least if your server is compromised, you'll be able to take it offline quickly before they use it as a launch point to hack into the Pentagon or something. The reports are customizable and thorough.

My arm still hurts like heck.

I just tried to run an unshielded cable with headphone out from my phone server to the phone paging amp a few yards away. It has to pass through the conduit with about 60 network cables.

The interference I picked up sounds like a helicopter's blades. 'Swoosh - swoosh - Swoosh - swoosh'

Back to the drawing board.

What the heck?

It goes like this. Under Firefox 1.x I could click on a link to download a PDF file. A dialog opens basically asking 'Do you want to save this file or open it with Acroread?' I would open it directly into Acrobat Reader - not embedded in the browser.

Does nobody else see the connection? I mean, come on 'You use Linux, so if you don't use OUR Linux, we might just sue you for patent infringement.

It seems Novell doesn't quite agree with that statement, but still paid up.