Get Smart!

I've been using OpenSUSE as my main desktop for almost a year now. The latest release (10.2) is leaps and bounds ahead of many distros out there (I would say Windows as well but that carries less and less meaning as more distros outpace the Redmond Giant). Honestly I much prefer Debian for server distros (Ubuntu specifically) and I think the biggest draw has always been the APT way of package management. You've got repositories of packages, tell me what you want installed, done. Unfortunately, Novell hasn't jumped from the RPM ship yet. SUSE has a graphical installer/updater but it's abominably slow. The pain of SUSEs package management finally got to me today as a simple text editor install (plug: nano) took over 20 minutes to resolve dependencies. A quick Google showed I was one of the few and the brave who stuck with the default installer. Enter Smart. It's just that simple. Check it out for your RPM management needs (still doesn't beat apt-get, but it's pretty snappy).

Beautifully simple XHTML presentations

While preparing for PyCon today I came across an interesting link on the wiki. If you've ever done anything with CSS web design, or dare I say, web development at all, you've probably come across Eric Meyer's excellent site. I haven't been in a while and always went via Google before anyways, which is probably why I'd never seen this before.

S5 is a nifty way to create XHTML presentations that are cross-browser compatible. Even just a light perusal of the intro gives an excellent idea of the simplicity and power of this tool. Many thanks go to Eric for sharing this nugget with the world!

http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/