Well if anybody knows anything about me, I LOVE smoking hookah. I advise that everyone check out my new hookah blog/directory and store. This site will be your one stop shop for anything hookah. Hookah.ws is everything hookah with reviews, guides, howto, style and tips. Information on tobaccos and hookah smoking technique will help the novice learn how to use a hookah! Whether smoking your hookah pipe at home or a hookah bar or hookah lounge, this is the place for you!

Looking for some new snazzy software for your Windows Mobile phone? There’s a slew of windows mobile software available at Sergey’s new website. Everything you need from backup utilities to that Britney Spears theme you’ve always wanted. Be sure to check it out and sign up today!

Synergy. This piece of software is probably the coolest thing I have come across. This beautiful example of GPL goodness allows you to delegate keyboard/mouse control from one computer across a collection of other computers on the same network regardless of OS. So think multi-monitor with a dash of multi-process, multi-OS and multi-GPU — essentially multi-computing.

Running my Ubuntu laptop alongside my dual monitor work computer with Synergy immediately creates a triple monitor and dual OS system. Besides the inability to drag windows across computers (uhm… think about it, not possible anyways) this software is amazing. It even allows the ability to share your clipboard amongst all the computers and handles window focusing beautifully, as well as many other amazing features. But what can I run it on??

• Microsoft Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me (the Windows 95 family)
• Microsoft Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP (the Windows NT family)
• Mac OS X 10.2 or higher
• Unix
  • X Windows version 11 revision 4 or up
  • XTEST extension
    (use “xdpyinfo | grep XTEST” to check for XTEST)

There you have it. Go try out this piece of wonderful invention!

WM6 Software offers a wide variety of software and downloads for Windows Mobile devices. Alongside the handy applications, there are also many Windows Mobile themes available for download. If you have a SmartPhone or any of the newly equipped Windows Mobile devices, be sure to check our this site for some great downloads!

Palringo is an novel Mobile Instant Messaging client for mobile phones and PCs. Palringo allows you to instantly exchange text, photos, and vocal IMs with groups or individuals. I use this software on my T-Mobile MDA and I love it. It is a very simple and straight-forward instant messaging application that does not slow down my phone! If you sign up for one of their free accounts, you can instantly send photos and audio messages to other Palringo members.

The multiple platform support enables you to stay in touch with your contacts whether you are working at your PC or on the go with your mobile phone. With Palringo, you can keep in touch with friends on popular instant messaging services such as ICQ, MSN, Gadu-Gadu, AIM, and Google Talk. That’s just the start though! See anything interesting? Just snap a photo and send it to your friends instantly. Don’t like typing on quirky mobile phone keypads? With Palringo, you can just talk naturally in the form of short voice clips - think of it like a Walkie-Talkie on steroids.

A while back I ran into a problem settings up a new version control system for our in-house PHP intranet. We have multiple developers working on the intranet at one time, and we needed to maintain independent working environments that we could use to test the overall effects of our code on the entire intranet without interfering with others working copies or with our main development repository environment. We wanted all web hosting for the main environment and independent environments to be done on our development server.

After setting up SVN and a repository for the intranet files, I had to figure out a way to set up the web hosting. In order to provide hosting for all individual copies and for the main copy I had to set up network drives for each user. Each individual copy was in a named folder all under one common folder. I used samba to allow users to access their files and set up apache to serve the PHP content out of each folder. Each user then mapped the folder on their workstations and used whichever SVN tool they wanted to check out the files into their new network drive. Their individual copies were now set up and ready to use.

This system is meant to manage the content for our development copy of the intranet only. After files were pushed through SVN they should then appear in the main development checkout. I set up a cron job to pull updated files from SVN and put them into our primary copy of the development intranet. This was our main beta for our changes to be tested and that primary revisions would be pulled from and pushed live.

This was the best solution I could come up with for this problem. To my surprise I didn’t find anybody else on the Internet with similar problems. This way seems to work just fine for us though and will hopefully help out anybody else looking to manage a project like this.

Hurray! This joyous occasion may not affect the majority of PC users, but it’s going to be a great day for some people! The new release of Ubuntu looks to sport many new software updates leading to improved usability and a new slew of features. GNOME 2.22.1 will now be supported which includes a new version of Nautilus, the native Ubuntu file browser. There will also be a new audio engine that allows advanced channel mixing and even an option to set individual volumes for the specific applications. There will be new native CD and DVD burning options including ISO burning out of box. I’ll be sitting at the edge of my seat until this release, hope you all are too!

This thing is absolutely awesome. After seeing this I was oddly inspired to go out and attempt to do some small systems programming. Already got myself a development board to play around with, but still missing a piece. Anyways, this little robot it pretty sweet, it uses sonar to travel a room and poll for objects that have a good resonance to them and it uses that object as a snare drum. It has a little tail behind it that it keeps rhythm with like a bass drum. It then records one loop and plays another  beat over it to make a overall nice sample. Pretty smart if you ask me! Be sure to check out the project page for the Yellow Drum Machine.

These are my brothers and sisters. We may have never met in person, but I will always remember you. I always remember what happened. I feel astounding love for those that lost their lives. This can be a sick world and none of you deserved this. The name of the shooter will never be written by my hands and will never pass these lips. He will not be remembered.

Daniel Parmenter, age 20, last of Westchester, Ill.

Catalina Garcia, age 20, last of Cicero, Ill.

Ryanne Mace, age 19, last of Carpentersville, Ill.

Julianna Gehant (pronounced Ghee-hant), age 32, last of Mendota, Ill.

Gayle Dubowski, age 20, last of Carol Stream, Ill.

I will be leaving here shortly for the vigil. I am leaving early to join my fellow Huskies in the MLK commons to intercept the wackos that may be coming to soil our grief.

Huskie pride!

Six people died in the NIU shooting. The 7th was the shooters suicide. This will not stand.

And I am pissed, and I need to find the “people” out there from Westboro Baptist that are glad my peers died. They’re glad. I’ve started a peaceful protest over the phone. After some research I found their phone number and have had many conversations with these people. They’ve redefined insanity. I tried my best to give everyone this phone number to call these people and ask why they are doing this. My friend Evan sat next to me as he called and ask why they’re glad that his hometown friend was shot and killed. The lovely Phelps-Roper lady that kept taking phone calls (I believe her to be Shirley Phelps-Roper) said that his friend deserved to die.

I just called and told them we were coming to find them, camera and cell phone in hand. I just got their individual cell phone numbers. No violence. Words are much better. They need to see the blood is not on my hands.