Why do you need an article on building slide shows in Impress? You don't, in one sense, because the application is simple enough for anyone who has ever seen a slide show to figure out. If you want, you can just plunge in and learn by doing. However, if you take the time to learn, you'll find that OpenOffice.org has two tools to help you organize and automate the process -- and, ultimately, to help you save time.

One of the things I both love and hate about my job is getting assigned new projects. They can be about anything and everything. A few months back I was given an assignment to create some chroot jails for a group of customers so that they could securely upload files with sftp. The requirement was that the customers needed to be able to upload file, but in a secure and private way.

At the Geek Ranch we recently made a decision to implement some software in Python. Or, more accurately, I decided and there was no disagreement. Then Python gets picked as the best scripting language in the LJ Readers' Choice survey. That inspired me to write this article (and get ready for Perl and Ruby fans to start yelling at me).

Stubbornly, OpenOffice.org continues to ship with only a handful of templates. Despite the efforts of several sub-projects and individuals to change the situation, the standard OpenOffice.org download includes only a couple of slide show presentations and a few templates to accompany the wizards available in the file menu. This lack of templates is a serious handicap for many users, and often leaves a poor impression on new users who are accustomed to the selection of templates found in other office suites.

What is interactive fiction?

It all started in 1975 with a man named Will Crowther who wanted to create something for his daughters that tied together two of his loves: role playing games and cave exploration. The result was a game called "Adventure" (also sometimes called "Colossal Cave"). He wrote the game on the mainframe he used at work and while his daughters loved it, others who discovered the game did to, and they shared it far and wide. Stanford student Don Woods discovered the program on one of the university computers in 1976 and with Crowther's permission extended the Fortran original, adding more rooms and treasure. This expanded version was later ported to C and from there to countless platforms and languages. You can still download various versions of it today.

If you've been an Open Source advocate for any significant amount of time, you've no doubt heard someone say, with a sneer in their voice, "You get what you pay for". Let it be noted, I really hate that cliche. It does make me think, however, about what you really get when you purchase the license to use a commercial operating system like Windows or OSX.

If your life is like mine, it's probably more complicated than it should be. There's that full time job, social events, and vacations to say nothing of various side businesses and their associated deadlines. The kids have Cub Scouts, soccer, and baseball. Since we homeschool, we have science club, field trips and play dates. And it seems that everyone we know has 2 email

When working with regular expressions in a shell script the norm is to use grep or sed or some other external command/program. Since version 3 of bash (released in 2004) there is another option: bash's built-in regular expression comparison operator "=~".

apt-get, up2date, yum, pkgtool, dpkg, rpm -- we have lots of ways to avoid compiling programs. For the most part, I don't think that it's because we don't like to compile programs, but rather because most of the modern package management tools take care of dependancies, versioning, etc.

The first time I played with Zenity, I recognized several potential uses for it. While I'm pretty comfortable with interacting with computers with a command line interface, I know many people are not. Zenity creates GUI widgets from a simple command line and can be used from any shell script.

All your phones, are belong to Google — an overview of Android, the new software stack created by Google for the Open Handset Alliance.

Extensions for OpenOffice.org Impress

Extensions have long been written for OpenOffice.org Writer. However, the fact that attention is finally being paid to other applications seems a sign that OpenOffice.org is finally starting to develop an active extension-writing community.

James Gray continues his review of desktop Geographic Information System (GIS) applications with an introduction to the concepts needed to get started with the user-friendly, open-source Quantum GIS.

Going Deeper into GIS: an Introduction to QGIS

I finally gave in and admitted we need Drupal. So, on to installing Drupal 6. No hosting location I work with has it on the

I remember when I was a Jr. Geek and could focus on one programming task at a time. Today, besides having all too many Linux-related tasks, I have an assortment of other things to deal with. This last week, one of my distractions turned into a new programming project.

After a slow start, add-ons for OpenOffice.org are finally starting to reach a critical mass. When I last wrote about add-ons for OpenOffice.org in September 2004, the examples were relatively limited, with extendedPDF the outstanding example.

Recently I have been grumbling about project management, accounting
and organizational software in general. Basically, Gixia and I want to
just build the Geek Ranch rather than be bogged down with overhead.
The reality is, however, this is too big a project to do without some
back-end organization.

As I looked for specific packages for each item I was overwhelmed with