In a story sure to appear in a “News of the Weird” column soon, InformationWeek offers this nugget;

Give AOL credit for persistence. The company has a court order giving it permission to dig up the yard of a Massachusetts couple, the parents of a convicted spammer who owes AOL millions of dollars. The company thinks Davis Wolfgang Hawke, 27, buried bars of gold and platinum around his folks’ home.

Hawke’s mother, Peggy Greenbaum, told The Associated Press that she doesn’t believe there’s anything valuable in the yard. “I don’t care if they dig up the entire yard,” she says. “They’re just going to make fools of themselves. We certainly wouldn’t allow him to put any gold on our property.” She’s planning to go to court and get an order to block the excavation.

The gold and platinum bars are believed to be buried in a two-acre yard in Medfield. Hawke, who has used different names in the past, lost a court case to AOL, which won a $12.8 million judgment. Authorities say they can’t find him, and he recently missed a court date.

AOL last year showed a federal judge receipts traced to Hawke for more than $350,000 in purchases of gold and platinum, and now the company wants to dig up his parents’ lawn. Metal or no metal, that might give him an incentive to resurface.

Source

In the August 21st edition of InformationWeek, Sony resellers are reported as saying that Sony is dropping out of the desktop monitor market. The cause is given as “stiff price competition”.

Sony should reconsider. Their monitors are the least of their problems. At least I haven’t heard of a Sony monitor bursting into flames or installing a rootkit in the user’s computer.

One of the greatest strengths of the Linux operating system is the power of the command line. One of the greatest weaknesses of the Linux operating system is that it’s not easy to remember all the commands that can harness that power. Many reference books include a smattering of commands that will accomplish a limited number of tasks. Scott Granneman has compiled a collection of Linux commands that will allow you to do almost anything you need to do from a terminal. To make it even more indispensable, it is small enough to fit into your laptop case or backpack so you can have it available whenever you need it.

The Linux Phrasebook doesn’t include a lot of flashy graphics or irrelevant comments. Each topic is laid out in a way to make it easy to understand and implement a specific command. Granneman gives you a scenario in which a particular action would be applicable, shows you the command as it would be typed into a terminal, and concludes with a brief description of what the results will be. With an average of one command per page, nearly 370 commands are covered in this one book.

A complete contents listing and index make finding the command you need a breeze. Despite the paperback book size of the Linux Phrasebook, each page is easy to read, with margin space for your own notes. The layout is perfect for the purpose of this book.

If you’ve ever needed to quickly find a way to view the status of your network interfaces, list your Samba shares, execute shell commands, or print find results into a file from a terminal, keep a copy of the Linux Phrasebook handy. It will put you in command of your system.

Linux Phrasebook
Author: Scott Granneman
Paperback: 400 pages
Publisher: Sams (June 12, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN: 0672328380
SRP: $14.99 USA / $18.00 CAN / £10.99 Net UK

This blog is unique from others I post to in a couple of ways.

It’s not my usual choice for software. I’m using Movable Type instead of my previously preferred Word Press. Why the change? For one thing, MT is now available for free to personal bloggers. Secondly, it’s the platform I use with my entries in the Lockergnome newsletters. I want to test it and see if posting with MT is any easier or more intuitive than WP for a personal blog.

This blog is also different in that it’s being hosted on its own URL. Jebers blog is at, well, jebersblog.com. That makes it easier to link to, as it no longer is appended to a website with another URL. So jebersblog is both a TLD and a URL. Aren’t acronyms just too geeky?