I just found this site, Ubuntu Administrator, a nice place full of articles, how-tos, tips & tricks about Ubuntu in general, and things like networking or security on Ubuntu systems. A great place for all geeks 8)

Now, if you'll excuse me, my console is waiting! Happy hacking!

I like to do a nice thing from time to time. Today I'm spreading the word about “One Day For Human Rights”. Writing a line or two on this action is the least I can do.

In celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and in support of the Year of Human Rights as called for by the U.N., “One Day for Human Rights” is a project aimed to promote and support the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, by getting the Governments to print this document in our passports.

Human rights is a subject that is rarely spoken of, at least, around here. It needs more attention. And even more than that. So spread the word and be sure to participate on December 10, 2008 in a blog, podcast and/or videocast action:

December 10, 2008 is a very special day because this year marks the 60th the Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. On this day bloggers, podcasters and videocasters from all over the world will take action and voice their opinions on anything and everything related to Human Rights.

Here's a starting point: Ideas for blog posts, podcasts, videocasts

And here are some badges to put on your site, blog, whatever to make it stand out. Cause it needs to stand out. Get Your “One Day for Human Rights” Badge!

And be sure to follow @HumanRightsDay on Twitter.

Cheers!

A few days ago, I found a really great place, full of excellent math and programming problems: Project Euler.

Project Euler is a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve. Although mathematics will help you arrive at elegant and efficient methods, the use of a computer and programming skills will be required to solve most problems.

I was long looking for this kind of place, to get my brain do some serious thinking :) It's a great way to improve logic and math/programming skills.

The problems can be solved by using any programming language, so as I just started learning Python, thought that this is a great way to start with it. As I suck more in math than in programming, my solutions are brute-forced, but I always go back to the explanation of the problem (can be viewed only after you gave the right answer to the problem), to understand the math behind the problem.

There are currently 214 problems and I'm on number 6 right now. If you into this kind of stuff, be sure to check it out, it's a lot of fun :)

Happy hacking!

Last night I came across on a post on TechFounder, about using Zend_Db_Profiler and a good example with real data on optimizing MySQL queries. For “geeks” who SQL speak fluently this will probably be no new stuff, but for great number of web developers (me included!) this will probably come in handy.

Cheers!

I just found a nice web site where you can “smush” your images — Smushit.com. SmushIt takes an image and removes all unnecessary information about it: when was it last edited, what image editor was used etc., but keeps the quality of the image! This is more than useful for sites where there are lots of images.

The result of smushing

There are several ways to provide images to SmushIt:

• Upload an image
• Provide an URL to the image
• Use the Firefox SmushIt add-on

The first two ways are quite obvious; provide an image and it'll process it in a few seconds.

The Firefox add-on is pretty cool: open up a web page where are the images you want to smush, click the SmushIt add-on icon (it'll be in the right corner of the status bar), it will take you to their site and process all the images found on your web page.

When the processing is complete, there will be a table showing details about the smushing. Also a download link will be provided, to download the smushed images in one zip file.

Now run little lurker and smush your images :)