Compiling software can be very time consuming. To speed things up, and utilize what you paid for, you can use the -j switch for make. So make -j4 bootstrap will cause make to run four jobs at one time. This speeds things up drastically and will utilize four cores.

Making a directory is no big deal:

$ mkdir ~/temp

But what if you have to make a bunch of directories nested? So what if I had to make ~/temp/temp1/temp2/temp3/temp4 ? Using the -p switch, for parents, the utility will create the structure for you.

$ mkdir -p ~/temp/temp1/temp2/temp3/temp4

This command will create all the directories leading down to temp4.

It's some of the simple things, some of the items the developers obviously cut corners on that ruin my experience with Windows. It is also the lock down, the "hand holding," the obfuscation and hiding of system configuration and administration behind easy to use GUIs.

Not that GUIs are bad, but few things are more frusturating when a GUI is the only method of configuration, and the developer of the GUI has decided that you, the administrator, does not need to change.

A work order had come through at my work several weeks ago stating that one of our public kiosks was prompting for credit card information via the browser whenever a user attempted to use it. This was supposed to be an "internet only" kiosk, which turned out not to be, but was definitely supposed to be a locked down machine.

I pre-ordered the T-Mobile G1, the first phone offering Google's Android operating system, Wednesday, as soon as I had heard it was available.

The Democratic party, not unlike than the Republican party, is becoming more and more extreme.

As the housing correction churns on and housing prices fall to where they should be, the government is considering legislation to purchase these bad debts, these mortgage securities, taking them off the books of the financial institutions.

I ran an installation program using sudo that, after asking where the current version was, which was /usr/bin/, completely emptied that directory.

This should be a reminder that, as secure and stable as Linux is, it is still susceptible to user error and bad software.

For those that do not know, /usr/bin/ is a very important directory in which many if not most of the important system programs are stored. This is the equivelant of deleting the System32 directory in Windows.

Here is the code to zip multiple files and compress them using ColdFusion and Java. I tested it using two picture files and two text files.

One of the complaints many users have about Linux is that it isn't for gamers or lacks decent games. Linux has hundreds if not thousands of games, but it is true that major game manufacturers, as most hardware manufacturers, ignore the penguin.

Being an old school Quake III Arena addict, I was very excited to find OpenArena in my list software I can add or remove from Ubuntu's repositories. OpenArena is based on id Software's GPL id Tech 3.