Gimparoo!

I do a lot of coding in C, Perl, HTML, CSS, and coming this semester, Java. I’ve used vim pretty much exclusively, but have recently started wanting to use my mouse when it’s feasible. So, I started looking around and being disappointed for one reason or the other with each of the offerings. First, I tried TextWrangler which almost did it except I didn’t like the way it handled Perl syntax highlighting, and I didn’t like the automatic indenting implementation. I tried a couple of the commercial selections such as TextMate and SubEthaEdit, but seriously, if I have to pay for them, I’ll just stick to vim. Then I found Smultron. It does a nice job of syntax highlighting and the automatic indent is implemented just the way I like. There is page after page of customization options. It’s also open source, which you all know I love. When I’m accessing my server remotely, vim will still work of course, but for homework and projects, I’m giving Smultron a try.

Sorry there haven’t been more posts lately. Here’s some fluff. Pictures of my daughter’s toys in fun positions. Have a look.

From gimp.org:

After four months of hard work we are proud to announce another release of the user manual. It features:

• documentation for GIMP 2.4
• new content, spelling and grammar fixes for English, German, French, Russian, Italian, Norwegian and Spanish
• an alternate CSS stylesheet for HTML

The source files of gimp-help-2.4.0 can be downloaded from ftp.gimp.org. Users should wait until this release has been packaged in a pre-compiled form that is easier to install. Find more information about our goals and how you can help at http://docs.gimp.org.

From gimp.org:

Three weeks later enough bug-fixes have piled up to warrant another bug-fix release in the stable GIMP 2.4 series. Please see the NEWS file for details.

The source code for GIMP 2.4.2 can be downloaded from ftp.gimp.org. Binary packages are expected to become available over the next days. Please check the Downloads section.

The tutorial adaptations on this blog would not be possible without the Creative Commons (CC). All the work on this blog is CC licensed from the start. I’m a huge fan, and believe they are the way of the future for licensing creative works. Please help spread the word by “friending” them on your favorite social network.

From the CC blog:

Looking for another way to support CC? Be our friend! By connecting with Creative Commons on sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Flickr, you can help us broaden our reach and educate the masses about the Creative Commons mission.

So, starting today, we’re issuing a 50,000 friend challenge to our community. We’re asking you to help us expand CC’s overall friend network to 50,000 people across the Web’s various social networking and content sharing sites by December 15 – the date of our fifth birthday party.

Here are some ways you can help our friend network grow. If you aren’t a member of any of these sites, please help us by starting (or expanding) a CC group on any site you do use.

• Join our Facebook Cause, become a top recruiter, or become a CC Fan
• Participate in the 2007 CC Swag photo contest on Flickr
• Become a Creative Commons friend on MySpace or Friendster

Of course, you can also help Creative Commons by contributing to our annual fundraising campaign. As always, we thank you sincerely for your support!

Hat tip to Jon Phillips.

If you’ve made “the switch” and you love The GIMP, check out Wilber Loves Apple, a newish website dedicated to all things GIMP on the Mac platform. From their website:

Hi there! We are bunch of Gimp Fans, who try to provide a proper version for the mac. We are not related to gimp.org. We just admire their work.

I’m downloading their 2.4.1 port now!

This post does not have anything to do with the GIMP. If you don’t care about Linux server administration, you should just skip this post.

I run a very small Ubuntu LAMP server that I use for small tasks such as Perl and C programming and a personal wiki. This morning, I was checking out /var/log/auth.log, and noticed multiple login failures for user ‘root’ from a strange IP; specifically 60.28.201.57. A whois lookup revealed that the IP was from China. The activity is typical of brute force cracking, so I started to get a little worried. Thinking I’d have to bite the bullet and install a firewall, something I didn’t want to do due to the very small amount of resources this server has, I did an apt-cache search for ‘firewall’ and began the tedious process of reviewing the results.

Well, I didn’t have to look long. Not far down the list was an entry called ‘denyhosts’ with the description: an utility to help sys admins thwart ssh hackers. Well this is exactly what I’m trying to prevent, so I went to their website and read up. It sounded perfect, so I went ahead and installed it. Immediately after install, I got a system message saying I had email. The email informed me that IP  60.28.201.57 had been added to the deny list. Wow! That was fast, and easy. I literally didn’t have to do anything. That’s the kind of tool I like! It’s also FOSS, and in the Ubuntu repositories.

In short, if you host a LAMP server, even if it’s not Ubuntu, I highly recommend DenyHosts as a simple solution for preventing this type of attack.

GIMP 2.4.1. has been released to fix a few bugs. Here’s the release from gimp.org:

GIMP 2.4.1 is a bug-fix release in the stable 2.4 series. It fixes problems that were discovered after the 2.4.0 release. Please see the NEWS file for details.

The source code can be downloaded from ftp.gimp.org. Binary packages are expected to become available over the next days. Please check the Downloads section.

It’s here, it’s here! For those of you who waited for the stable release, it’s now available. Head on over to gimp.org and download away. They changed their website design too, so when you get there and it doesn’t look familiar, don’t panic.

EPS is the vector graphic file format Adobe Illustrator saves in. Supposedly you can import these files directly to Inkscape if you have skencil and pstoedit installed, but I couldn’t make it work. So I converted it manually using the GIMP and Inkscape. Here’s how I did it.
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