Gary Matthew Rogers

High capacity disk drives are right around the corner. GameDaily reports that a new technology called HVD (Holographic Versatile Disc) will be available sometime in late 2006. The leading company in place to manufacture such equipment, InPhase Technologies, has announced that such discs will start at the 200 gigabyte capacity. This is great news for those who feel that the DVD-R 4.7 GB leaves something to be desired.

Jacob Wright has posted “a little trick to create a logout from your site if you are using HTTP Authentication”. You can find a simple code example on his website:

http://www.jacwright.com/blog/37/logout-from-http-authorization/

Mozilla Firefox 1.5 beta has recently been released. While I wouldn’t suggest this download for reasons other than curiosity, I would like to briefly highlight some of its more interesting additions:

• Drag-and-Drop tabs – We all love the tabs in Firefox. As such, the Mozilla foundation has taken it a step further by allowing you to drag your tabs around to modify their horizontal position.
• Download Manager – You now have more controls in regard to the download manager. You can have the list cleared each time Firefox exits, upon successful download, or the traditional manual method.
• Image blocking – If you are paranoid about stumbling across an offensive image on the Internet, this feature is for you. You can either whitelist or blacklist sites by domain name. You can even blacklist all domains and only specify domains on your whitelist. Using this method Firefox won’t load any images from any website unless you specifically allow it.

For a more thorough preview of new features and changes, I recommend the following podcast:
An interview with Asa Dotzler of the Mozilla Foundation (Courtesy LQ Radio)

Below is a great resource for those who need a bit of “orientation” when it comes to programming with objects. This series of five lectures is non-language specific, so it is quite useful. I’ve even been told by the author that these articles are currently being used for a high school’s programming course curriculum.

Jacob Wright: Object-Oriented Programming

To aide one’s quest for godhood in the Linux world, might I suggest an extremely handy application called “less�. Less is somewhat similar to the program “more�, but extends and adds some additional features such as:

• forward and backward movement within a file
• searching (including regular expressions) and highlighting
• watches on the end of the file (similar to tail)
• line numbers
• toggle line wrapping (useful for large log files)
• open simultaneous file
• many more (see )

To run less, simply type the following command (prompt$ = your shell prompt):

prompt$ less helloWorld.txt

Below you will find some tips on how to use less once it is up and running.

Navigation:
You can then navigate up and down through the file with the arrows, or the page-up and page-down keys.

Searching:
To initiate a search, simply press the “/� to bring up search prompt. Then either enter a string or regular expression and hit enter. Less will then highlight all matches. To keep searching through the file, simply press “/� and hit enter once more to look further for the previous phrase. HINT: Use the search feature in conjunction with the file watch command to highlight your search phrase in incoming data.

Watches:
To initiate a watch, you can issue the command “F� while running less. This will tell less to start examining the end of the file for incoming data. This can be very useful to keep an eye on raw web access or error logs, as well as system and mail logs.

Wrapping:
To toggle line wrapping, issue the command “-S� while running less. Note that once line wrapping is disabled, you can scroll left and right with the arrow keys to see the extended data.

For more information on using less, please refer to their website at: http://www.greenwoodsoftware.com/less/)

NOTE: If you don’t have less installed, see your specific distribution docs or download it from here.

Take my word for it and add the program “less� to your bag of tricks, right away.