‘Tis the season to relax and enjoy spending time with your family. If you feel the need, give gifts as well. I know that most everyone is feeling a pinch in their wallets, and its hard to be as giving as the commercials and shows tell us we should be. This is especially hard when you have a young child (or children) in your household. (We have a 3 year old.) There will not be much under our tree this year. Maybe one gift for our son. But we are blessed in so many other ways. We have a large family and we get to see them and enjoy the time we spend with them.^*
The reason I brought all this up because reading information on NORAD’s website, as well as cnet’s article on it, bought tears of joy to my eyes. Whether or not you still believe in the spirit of Saint Nicolas (Santa Claus), if you have small children, or know those who do, try to get together and watch Santa fly over the world. You shan’t be disappointed. And to think, it all started with a wrong number in the 50’s…

_{01. This is no means a post to draw sympathy towards me or my family. I am merely stating the facts. There are a lot of people in worse situations than we are. If you have something like Goodwill, the Salvation Army, or any other charitable organization where you can donate money or material goods that you no longer need/use, please donate them. Even take an angel (or two) from an Angel Tree.}

Yes, there has been a slide-show type wallpaper(s) for Linux for a while available over at gnome-look.org (Just search for animated under the wallpaper section). But now it comes as one of the options for Karmic (Ubuntu 9.10). The process is a simple one if you want to make your own. I will break down the method they used to create the cosmic slide-show that comes default with Karmic.
First, if you go to /usr/share/backgrounds you will see a folder named cosmos. Inside the folder, you will find an xml file and the 9 images that rotate every 30 minutes.
If you want to create your own, I suggest that you create your own folder within your $HOME/Pictures directory. (I do not condone copying files to your root directories when it is not necessary.
Select the images that you want to use, and decide how often you want them to rotate (you will need to know how many seconds that this is so grab a calculator to do the math). Below is the xml file that controls the cosmos wallpapers.

To make it your own, copy the xml file, replace the file names to the path of the pictures, and there you have it, or you can continue reading to where I have disected another “animated” slide-show wallpaper.

---

If you want to look at one that hasn’t been “installed” I suggest downloading the MacAnimated wallpaper pack from gnome-look (Use the first download link, it doesn’t try to sell you anything or really make you wait a long amount of time). After you have the tar.gz file downloaded, extract it (don’t install it) and you can see the xml file in all it’s un-installed glory. (All the install SHOULD do is copy the files over into usr/share/backgrounds.)
I decided to test out to see if I could get the slide-show to work using the MacAnimated wallpapers, WITHOUT having to copy/move the files into /usr/share/backgrounds.
First I edited the xml file to change the directory of where it should look for the files. Here is the original xml file:

to

Just right click on your desktop, select change appareance, click Add (+), and be sure to click All Files on the bottom right and select your xml file. It will work, and your don’t have to “install” it to your system. Happy Wallpaper Animating/Slide-Show-ing!
(This was just a pre-made example that I broke apart. You can truly take any images you want, with any time frame you want to have them change at. Remember, reverse engineering something fairly simple can teach you some things. :))

With lots of googling and failed attempts, not quite right attempts, and then finnaly the product I was aiming at, I have my conky the way I have been wanting it for months. It consists of 11 different files with 1 calling them all together. (Yes, 12 different files, and my average CPU usage is low, and RAM usage is acceptable.)
(Click the image at left for the full size)
It consists of 5 different conky config files (probably could be less if I figured out how to use $voffset and $offset properly), 3 plain text files, the conky forecast config, 2 bash scripts, and one lua script.
The config files are as follows:

My “header” for my desktop

System and Network Config

Weather Config (remember to get your own weather XOAP location)

I just call some plain text files here. Nothing fancy, unless you count fortune and cowsay/think

My own barcode message. I do not include what it really says, you’ll have to scan the screen with a barcode scanner to find out. I was inspired by Google.

Standard conky Forecast config file. Make sure to fill in your own ID and Key

SSC script orginally found here: http://conky.linux-hardcore.com/?page_id=503

External IP Script

Lua Script for background, found here: http://conky.linux-hardcore.com/?page_id=3002

feel free to ask any questions. If I do not know the answer to it, I will try to point you in the right direction.

originally found here: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Microsoft-Vissa,-Hey-Thats-Ours,–More-Support-Stories.aspx

A few years ago, a common free email provider who we’ll call “Yooha” had an outage on one of their load balanced email servers. Since it was only a problem on accounts tied to that server (and because I was in the middle of a fairly time sensitive transaction), I thought I’d send them a note about it in case they hadn’t heard about the problem yet. Here is the text of my email:

----- Original Message ----
From: Jonathan Cortis
To: customersupport@y----.com;
Sent: Saturday, July 22, 2006 7:01:20 PM
Subject: f606.mail.y----.com

Server f606.mail.y----.com is down and not responding to
pings or requests. My wife's email account is always
directed to that server, so she cannot check her mail.
For reference, her username is redacted.

You might want to take that server out of the rotation.

Thank you,
Jonathan

I was quite surprised by their grateful response:

Wow, Jonathan.

Thanks for assessing a very complicated situation, and
immediately coming up with a complete solution.

In fact, we have so little idea of what's going on
over here, perhaps you can come on over and single-
handedly solve it for us.  

We'll get right on your commands, just as soon as we
finish our donuts.

Oh, and after our week off, too.  And, then there's the
matter of finding out which extension cord that is
plugged into...

customersupport@y----.com
818-555-1234

I wrote this script out of my need for a quick method of adding virtual domains. I hope you find this to be of great use.

create a file named addomain

Place this in your file:

Next, change the permissions of adddomain:

Once all that is done, create a new folder to house your virtual domains:

Next, change the adddomain file so it properly points to your .htaccess file (if you have one), and you’re done. To use this script:

The server will do a lookup on that domain/subdomain, and if it shows that the server you are on does not have an IP on it that matches the (sub)domains IP, it won’t let you add that site.

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