Recently in Fun Links Category

After a a few casual tweets, a website is born :)
http://geeksnguns.com/

Phil801 had been discussing shooting to blow off some stress, and I mentioned that it sounded time to have another geeks-n-guns event.  He found the name amusing, and the site is born.  Go check in if you are a geek with and interest in things that go boom!

Found this article on Popular Mechanics recently: 25 Skills Every Man Should Know

Use it as a scorecard, where did you wind up?  I do like that it is updated to include concepts such as backing up your drive.

A large number of the slides from OSCON 07 are now available online (OSCON Slides).  This year there are several of the keynotes that have been recorded also.  While many sessions aren't available, a good number are, and can give you a taste of what was there.  Some will obviously be more useful than others in the way the content was written, but and excellent resource.

YouTube Channel
Blip Keynote Videos

I'll admit, I've become a nintendo DS and Wii nut recently.  It's a convincing package, and I'm supporting it.  The newly announced WiiFit stuff looks really interesting (strangely).  But I just had to laugh when I was passed this video from sarcasticgamer.com (If I did this right, I hope, the video wont' show on aggregators/rss, so you folks can click to see if you want)

Recently I was passed this interesting article describing the ways you can embed videos from The LDS Church's mormon.org in your blog/website/about me page.

http://www.sixteensmallstones.org/embeddable-distributed-content-from-mormonorg

The basic rundown solves the issue that I was looking for.  Which is the desire to "Web 2.0" embed video content from another source (yes, hotlinking is now in with permission).  In this case from mormon.org, which is not by nature a fully user managed site.  The basic concept of it doesn't allow for complete outside control, for reasons I can accept for now.  But the new videos are an excellent tool that  I would like to use.

The article also suggests some enhancements that normal geeks recognize from other shared media sites that are lacking, such as automated redirecting to mormon.org.  This of course is something that would be likely included if that was the design of the product, and hopefully I can help bubble the idea upstream to listening ears.

I'm more than happy to admit that I really don't watch all that many TV shows.  I actually avoid the tv most of the time, and when I do watch, it falls in a very narrow spectrum of TV.  However last spring I was drawn into a new TV show on Fox, called Drive. I quickly began to enjoy the show, and knew that was a bad sign.  As fox normally does with actually interesting shows, they canceled it right away.

There were, however, two more episodes finished, that they never aired.  While we still miss out on what could have been, at least you can now watch those two.  The last two 'Drive' episodes are now available online.

So Dan pointed me over to Gliffy . Using their free trial right now, and I gotta say I'm impressed. Flash based, but it works really well.

Of course it has nice features such as collaboration, public/private content, version control, Yahoo Image Search, and more.

Of course, sheer random images are fun to blog too.

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Local Geek Chalain has a great Vista Review, entitled So Beautiful, So Disturbing

One of the better reads I've had about it recently. A teaser of this great writeup follows:

She gets out of bed and stretches, perfect curves sliding under silky lingerie and momentarily making me forget about breakfast, meatloaf, and whoever it was I was married to before last night. She seems to know this, and smiles at me again, but apparently she's serious about making breakfast. She turns and strides confidently from the room. As she does, I see for the first time the large Microsoft logo splayed across her back. My stomach lurches as I suddenly remember everything.

Windows Vista. I bought a new computer yesterday... and it came with Windows Vista.

Go ahead, read the rest

And now that I've presented on a lot of the included features of Freeside It's nice to show the latest version is now announced stable. Read the changelog here

Now I can work on getting a few more commits in. If you've been using 1.5.8 or earlier, you should seriously look at the great features that 1.7 can offer.
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So many of us have at some point wanted to reverse map a database schema. As I was fighting with DOT syntax last week I decided to look around for a way to slurp in my Postgres schema into Omni Graffle on my mac. Why? Because Omni Graffle is a really really nice looking application.

Well, I finally found DBGraffle4 .

Pros:
* Free
* Works

Cons:
* Slow as a dog (probably mostly applescript's fault)
* Default does not allow password based auth (had to edit the python, ugh)
* Had to install pygres
* You need to have the UML stencils selected for it to work
* You cannot click away from Omni Graffle, it'll die (applescript loses focus)

In the process of looking, I also found a copy somebody made that works with MySQL, which could come in handy.

It's simple, has it's warts, but it worked, and was the only tool of it's kind I could find. So I figured it might help others here.
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