Watching the spiraling price of gold (the spot price as of this writing is $1,213.40/oz) has been a humbling experience for me. There are all kinds of marketing forces happening to cause this, but if you follow what the Austrian School folks are saying, this is not a surprising trend at all. Central banks around the world are dumping their U.S. dollars and buying up gold, which is driving the price up. But I think this is different than just another commodity bubble, because the way gold is perceived–as a store of wealth.

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We have been running Drupal for some time now and we have noticed that it generates a very large amount of warnings in our log files.

The warning is in link with improperly formatted strings. PostgreSQL tries to follow the SQL specification to the letter and that means you cannot use the backslash character to escape special character sequences (such as \n for a newline character.)

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I’m happy to announce the release of a new version of SLiteChat.

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A little while ago I decided, finally, that I’d had enough of dealing with Microsoft Vista on my laptop (an HP Pavilion dv7). I had been running Kubuntu Jaunty (Ubuntu with the KDE4 interface) using VirtualBox, and was pretty happy with it. I thought that it worked out pretty well because Vista seemed to handle all the hardware angles and at least I could still get to Linux when I needed it (for example, to make builds for my open source application, SLiteChat). However, when giving a talk about CMake to my company’s client, and using my laptop with a projector attached, the networking decided to freeze, thus making my talk impossible to continue.  That’s M$ Vista for ya. :/ Fortunately, I could switch to VirtualBox and at least illustrate stuff from the command line, but this frustrated me beyond belief. So I decided to take action and install a better OS on my system.

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I just upgraded my laptop to Ubuntu Karmic. Wow what an impressive OS!!!!! I also moved away from KDE, and well you know what? Gnome works really really well, so much better than KDE 4, I’m sad to say. And I was a big KDE fan up until recently!

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I suppose I ought to post to this blog once in a while, eh?!

Is there anyone out there listening? Does anyone care?

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More and more, we hear talks about hackers entering personal accounts on systems such as Facebook, Twitter, ecademy, Plaxo

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If you have not seen it yet, the W3C now has a new look.

http://www.w3.org/

They are using a Web 2.0 system with PHP running on their server along Apache version 2.x. In other words, they most certainly are running Linux as their server operating system.

And for those who do not know that yet, this is the consortium that takes care of making your browser work.

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My apologies that this did not go out yesterday–I'm learning more and more about our Drupal system and, well, it took me by surprise that posting to my blog does not also post to the Newsletter (okay being facetious here ). So here is the original missive:

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A great product. Using Turnwatcher on my laptop and displaying the player's HUD on my TV has taken my game to a new level! I've reduced the time it takes to run combat by at least 30%!

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