Useful Links

Sometimes the simplest game can be every bit as addictive and fun as monster games like Halo 3 or Gears of War. This is probably the reason why games like Pong still remain popular to this day and continue to inspire developers. While there are probably hundreds of versions of Pong-inspired games out there, one that will appeal to hardcore Pong fans and casual players alike is PONG! Multiplayer, a Firefox extension that allows you to indulge in Pong without leaving the comfort of your favorite browser.

By itself, Vim is one of the best editors for shell scripting. With a little tweaking, however, you can turn Vim into a full-fledged IDE for writing scripts. You could do it yourself, or you can just install Fritz Mehner's Bash Support plugin.

Nixstaller 0.2.2 is a command-line tool for creating graphical installers for archived files on Unix-like systems. If that sounds paradoxical, it is. Although Nixstaller is easy enough to learn that you can produce your first installer within half an hour of installing it, much of the process is sufficiently painstaking that it cries out for the automation usually associated with a graphical interface.

Mac-owning free software fans got a treat this week with the release of Camino 1.5, a major upgrade of the Mozilla-based, OS X-native Web browser.

Whether or not you remember the days when DOS was DOS and real geeks played Scorched Earth, a turn-based warfare game with tanks trading shots at each other until one was destroyed, you might find Scorched 3D, a modern remake of the old classic, just as addicting today as those playing the original did then. Not only that, it is the Project of the Month for May on SourceForge.net.

Imagine a customized GNU/Linux distribution, built to your specifications with a minimal amount of effort on your part. If you are running Fedora 7, that dream is now a reality, thanks to Revisor, a graphical interface for building custom install images for Fedora. Taking the shape of a GNOME wizard, Revisor comes close to being an ideal desktop tool. Inexperienced users can use its default settings without much knowledge of what is happening behind the scenes, while more expert users can customize each aspect of producing an .ISO.

They're in ur Intarwebs, creating a programming language. The attack of the lolcats has spilled over to programming, with LOLCODE, a language based on the mangled grammar of lolcats. Pull up a buckit and I'll help wif ur understanding of LOLCODE.

Nowadays, half the free software world seems to be building Gecko-based browsers (and the other half writing plugins for them). With so many available, you might think the Kazehakase browser would hardly rate a mention. However, Kazehakase breaks away from the pack by being one of the few browser projects that is actually thinking of new features and ways to enhance old ones. From its interface to its features for bookmarks and tabs to its customization options for keyboard shortcuts and mouse gestures, Kazehakase is crammed with nonstandard features. You may not want every new feature offered by Kazehakase, but chances are you'll appreciate some of them.

If you have multiple users sharing a single computer, you could probably use an easy way to manage their user profiles. Sabayon can help you create and set up GNOME desktop profiles and assign them to different users. It's similar to Kiosktool for KDE, but for the GNOME environment.

The Vim editor allows you to modify its behavior via scripts, and the Vim community has produced hundreds of scripts that may help you be more productive, or add functions to Vim that you've always wished it would have. Here are five that I find particularly useful.

Many Web sites feature RSS feeds and newsletter subscriptions that let you know when they've updated their contents, but unfortunately, a significant number of sites still don't. How can you keep up with them? Let's build a shell script to automate that task.

Fedora 7 was released last week, a little bit behind schedule, with a spate of new features, updates, and live CD installable "spins" of Fedora in KDE and GNOME flavors. I found a lot of good in this release, but a bug in the FireWire stack that attacked my external backup drive made this release just a little shy of perfect.

TreeLine is a hybrid application that combines the features of a traditional outliner with a free-form database. As such, it offers a unique way to organize heterogeneous data, be it contact information, bookmarks, text snippets, bibliography, task lists, or something else. Moreover, using TreeLine's outlining capabilities you can easily group and manage the mixed data inside the database.

The Kamloops/Thompson School District in British Columbia, Canada, is a free software success story. Gregg Ferrie, manager of information technology for the district, believes its infrastructure may be "the largest Linux on-the-desktop implementation in Western Canada" in public education. According to Ferrie, hardly a week goes by without another of British Columbia's more than 60 school districts consulting Kamloops. Currently, five other districts are considering or planning to implement the Kamloops district's custom-built thin client solution, and the department of education at the University of British Columbia is also investigating the possibility.

Setting up a survey on your Web site can be a simple task with LimeSurvey, a flexible and easy to set up tool for conducting a survey.

Uploading pictures to Flickr via its Web-based interface is a hassle, particularly if you have dozens of shots to upload. Linux users have a better choice, though, in the form of Kflickr, a simple application for uploading shots to Flickr that will have your family photos online in no time.

Google Map Image Cutter (GMIC) is a free software program that automatically slices up images, arranges them in tiles, and puts them into a Google Maps browser. It allows you to embed panoramas or extremely large images into Web pages, so visitors can zoom down to as much detail as they want and pan and scroll with the mouse.

Gmail may be an excellent Web-based email application, but there is no easy way to use it with privacy tools like GnuPG. The FireGPG extension for Firefox is designed to solve this problem. It integrates nicely into Gmail's interface and allows you to sign and encrypt not only email messages but also text snippets from any Web page.

If you need to create a presentation every now and then, but you find OpenOffice.org Impress too complicated and bulky, check out KeyJnote, a tool that turns any PDF document or set of graphics files into a professional-quality presentation with impressive transition effects.

Professor Eben Moglen is a polished speaker, a true orator. It is a real treat to hear him speak, and if you ever get a chance to do so, I heartily recommend that you do. I learned last week that he communicates just as well in one-on-one sessions.