Blogs

SmsSend - SmsSend allows you to send free SMS to any GSM, connecting to Internet sites using scripts. It is available both for Windows and Unix.

One of the most boring programming tasks in the world has to be
pulling data out of a database and displaying it on a web site. Yet
it's also one of the most ubiquitous. Perl programmers being lazy,
there are tools to help make boring programming tasks less painful, and two of these tools, Class::DBI and the
Template Toolkit, create a whole which is far more
drudgery-destroying than its parts.

Both these tools can do more complicated stuff than that described in
this article, but my aim is to motivate people who may not have tried
them out to give them a go and see how much work they can save you for
even simple tasks.

Emacs Beginner's HOWTO - A part of the Linux Documentation Project by Jeremy D. Zawodny. This document introduces Linux users to the Emacs editor. It assumes minimal familiarity with vi or a similar editor...

There are other very intersting readings/posts and projects!

VOCP - Much more than an answering machine, VOCP transforms your computer into a full-featured call answering and voice messaging system. With the VOCP System, you can create an unlimited number of voicemail, pager and command shell boxes which callers will navigate using their touch tone telephone. You can send and receive faxes, listen to your email using text-to-speech, filter and redirect calls based on caller ID information, run programs through the telephone and more.

I must have started using Linux only a year back but never looked back after that. The reason to switching to Linux was the very fragile Win98 which seemed to crash ever so often, loosing a lot of time and work. Anyway, here's how a Microsoft Certified guy tackles Linux...

rsnapshot - rsnapshot is a filesystem snapshot utility based on rsync and makes it easy to make periodic snapshots of local machines, and remote machines over ssh. rsnapshot uses hard links whenever possible, to greatly reduce the disk space required.

sanity.pl - sanity.pl renames all files in a directory to a sane name; it replaces spaces with underscores, removes semicolons, and replaces German umlauts.

Other interesting projects to browse around...

Google Calculator - Google now has a built-in calculator that evaluates the search box and returns an answer. For instance, type 3 + 4 into google and press "Google Search". Google will come back with 3 + 4 = 7. You can get even more complicated - Google will do logarithms - log(3) = 0.477.... Google also handles units - what is 4 pounds added to 300 grams? Enter 4 lb + 300 g, Search, and Google returns "(4 pound) + (300 grams) = 2.11436948 kilograms".

WTP 0.6.2 - WTP is a Web-based FTP client that features
bookmarks, uploading, downloading, deleting,
moving, and renaming of files and directories. It
allows administrators to limit the hostnames to
which users can connect. Currently only Unix FTP
servers are supported.

There are other very interesting projects going on as well...

Damn Small Linux 0.4.6 - Damn Small Linux is a business-card size (50MB) Live CD Linux distribution based on Knoppix. Despite its minuscule size it strives to have a functional and easy to use desktop.