Ben's Bits

Several times in the past I've considered building an open source program similar to TinyURL (with some improvements) for my own use. I think it would be especially handy as a way for me to link to other sites from my blog while keeping strict anti-spam measures in place (which sometimes whine about my own off-site links).

I can't believe this hasn't been done before as the code shouldn't be that difficult. I did spend some time recently looking for starter code but didn't quite come up with what I was looking for. Instead I found lists of simialr sites which don't appear to use open source code either the notlong service has links to some of their competitors and the Perl Shorten library gives another list of such services. The closest I have come is this short url php script but I haven't looked at the code yet and I'm tempted not too because I'm not thrilled with the way the short urls appear to be handled and there is no information about how the code is licensed. The last thing I want is to get caught up in a licensing battle like the SCO/IBM case.

If you know of any open source PHP/mySQL URL shortening projects please add a coment and share the wealth.

I recently heard about the nifty Ajaxterm project. The idea is to provide terminal access to Linux servers without the need for a Java client which has been the way this has been accomplished in the past. Obviously the connection is insecure unless you use SSH and relies on the local webserver staying up so their are some limitiations. Nonetheless, this is a cool project and one that could prove useful in a number of system management scenarios.

I have a lot of books, probably far too many and certainly far too many for me to remember what all I have. I often think it would be helpful if I could search a database of my books when I'm checking to see if I have something. There are some sites online where you can do this with a small collection for free or pay to catalog a larger collection but I have two problems with that. First, I don't like trusting comapnies with my data which could be sut off at any time. Second, I have this thing about doing it myself and using open source software. I keep meaning to write a simple PHP/mySQL program to handle this but just have too many similar PHP/mySQL projects that I need to work on first.

I recently came across some open source software that would provide a good atarting point for such a system. Home Library seems to be just what I'm looking for, though it may be a bit immature. I'm going to be keeping my eye on this as I could use somthing to catalog all my DVDs and videotapes as well. I was also pointed towards the bibliophile project at sourceforge. While not a final product itself they have a number of links to catalog like programs on the projects page. While these are more geared towards organizing references for papers they are useful in their own right and apparently might be useful as catalogging software too.

According to NetworkWorld Sam Houston State Univeristy in Texas is moving from Cisco Call Manager to Asterisk for the backend of their VoIP system. The story is being discussed on Slashdot as well.

Score one for open source! As someone who has worked on both the Asterisk and Call Manager platforms I have to say that I much prefer working with Asterisk.

If you run a Linux system and have had the misfortune of having your hard drive crash without a recent backup or RAID configuration you're in for a world of hurt. Thankfully, there are some free utilities that might make things go a bit easier for you.

My favorite utility is a gem called dd_rescue. This program will work quite hard (and efficiently) to recover as much of your data as possible onto another hard drive or a disk image. It does this by reading smaller and smaller block sizes, isolating as much of the good data as possible before copying it off. Of course this program can't bring back data that is in the bad area itself, but it does salvage everything it can. I've used it a couple of times and one time it worked pretty well, recovering all the important data and the other time I got almost nothing usable. If you need a quick and dirty attempt to get things going again as quickly as possible this is your ticket.