Cheat sheets -- one-page summaries of key program commands, language syntax or simply how to do stuff -- are a brillant resource. They're often a great way to explore an application's full potential and can make you an expert in no time at all.

What key combination takes you to the next tab in Firefox? How do you launch the Process Manager in KDE? What's the maximum length of a CHAR string in MySQL? I got all my answers from cheat sheets! (And they are, respectively, Ctrl+Tab, Ctrl+Esc and 255.)

There are some great collections of cheat sheets and some excellent stand-alones. Here's a modest selection ...

Cheat Sheet Collections

• Cantonmat tends to specialise in under-used commandline tools like Awk, Sed, Ed, and Bash. But he has some useful sheets on Perl too.

• AddedBytes is more web-oriented with cheat sheets about Python, Subversion, Regular Expressions, PHP, CSS, HTML, Ruby on Rails... and more!

• Cheat-sheets.org has a huge collection, everything from .NET to Yahoo.

Useful Standalones

• Blender (Hot keys)
• Firefox
• Gimp (somewhat elderly now; 2003!)
• KDE
• Thunderbird
• Ubuntu Reference
• Unix/Linux Command Line Reference
• WikiMedia

Of course that's by no means a complete listing. If you've got a favourite, send me a Comment!




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Posted by Geoff Palmer at 3:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

"It was effectively impossible for a civilian to get us off their machine..."

That quote comes from Matt Knox, a former adware author, interviewed on Philosecurity. Here's a few more...

"Most adware targets Internet Explorer (IE) users because obviously they’re the biggest share of the market. In addition, they tend to be the less-savvy chunk of the market. If you’re using IE, then either you don’t care or you don’t know about all the vulnerabilities that IE has."

"Windows processes... are insanely promiscuous."

"...we were able to make registry keys that were invisible or immutable to anyone using the Win32 API. Interestingly enough, this was not only all civilians and pretty much all of our competitors, but even most of the antivirus people."

Now consider those vulnerabilities in the light of the latest Conficker worm outbreak. As Carla Schroder points out in an amusing blog entry titled I Give Up. Windows Is Proof That People Are Too Stupid To Use Computers, no one actually blames Microsoft...

"Of COURSE it's the users' fault. They're still using this most expensive piece of defective crapware in the entire solar system. But its incurable defects are not their fault."

When asked how people can avoid adware, Knox replied, "Run UNIX." But Schroder disagrees;

"We need to give up the notion that such computer users can be rescued by Linux-- we don't WANT them using Linux. 'It is impossible to make anything foolproof, because fools are ingenious.' "

Posted by Geoff Palmer at 9:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Chris Duckett and Alex Serpo of ZDNet Australia gave Sydney-siders a preview of the all-new Windows 7 --- and proved yet again that Windows users really have no idea just how good Linux is ...

Posted by Geoff Palmer at 10:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

More isn't necessarily more useful. Somehow I've ended up with around 120 fonts. This might be great if I was a graphic designer, but as I typically use no more than half-a-dozen it's actually a damn nuisance. Wading through drop-down font lists is a pain, and it's also a waste of resources since the system previews and caches each one.

Individual font management is simple in KDE. Just use KDE Control Centre or System Settings. But this called for a more robust approach.

Fonts are stored in two places in Linux. User-specific fonts are in

     ~/.fonts

while system-wide ones are in

    /usr/share/fonts/

My personal .fonts folder was empty, and because I wanted to preview the fonts I was operating on, I opened up Konqueror as root

sudo konqueror /usr/share/fonts

then moved to the truetype folder.

I don't like deleting system files (you never know when something'll need 'em) so I just moved the unwanted font folders to the /root directory. To do so, I hit Ctrl + Shift + L to split Konqueror's view, clicked on the right-hand pane then entered /root in the Location Bar. Then it was simply a matter of dragging and dropping folders ...




To see what fonts you're operating on, click on the respective folder and slowly move the mouse pointer over each of the .ttf files to preview its contents ...




When I was finished, I refreshed the system's font cache with the command

fc-cache -v -f

And that's it. Now I'm down to 30 fonts. That's much more manageable!

Did you know ...? If you regularly switch between Linux and Microsoft systems you can install Microsoft's core fonts with the command sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts

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Posted by Geoff Palmer at 9:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)