(This post about creating passionate users is dedicated to Kathy Sierra.)
I think this new initiative is an interesting success on Dell’s part. Dell will embiggen their support for Linux by offering Linux distributions on some of their desktop and laptop machines. (What, you’ve never heard of “embiggen”? It’s a perfectly cromulent word.): Dell to Expand Linux Factory Installed Options
Since launching Dell IdeaStorm

If you blog, you should get the Linkify bookmarklet that Laurence Gonsalves wrote.
How does it work? It’s an easy 2 step process:
1. Drag the Linkify bookmarket to your personal toolbar.
2. Dang! There is no step 2! Sorry about that. I, um, got mixed up. There’s just one step.
Now how do you use it? Well, see the link I made to Laurence Gonsalves? To do that, I wrote the words “Laurence Gonsalves,” selected that text, and

(Thanks to SEW for reminding me that I meant to write about this.)
Google recently introduced another nice piece of flair: a “Blog Bar” that lets you pick keywords, and then rotates through relevant posts by fading new links in and out. You can see it in action over on this post by Mark Lucovsky. You can also get a News bar, which is kind of fun too.
It’s really easy to get your own:
Step 1. Go to http://code.google.com/apis/aja

Cron jobs need quiet operation; if a command generates output, you’ll get an email from cron with the command output. So if you want to fetch a file silently with wget or curl, use a command like this:
curl –silent –output output_filename http://example.com/urltofetch.html
wget –quiet –output-document output_filename http://example.com/urltofetch.html
There are shorter versions of these options, but using the verbose options will make code or cron jobs easier to understand if you come back to them

Different Linux distributions package up software in different ways. RedHat uses .rpm files, while Debian and Ubuntu use .deb files. To convert a .rpm to a .deb file, you can use the alien program:
alien -k package.rpm
The -k option preserves the minor version number of a package (don’t worry about it, just do it or read the man page).
Installing a package in Debian or Ubuntu is also easy. To install a .deb file, you can type:
sudo dpkg -i packagename.deb
To uninstall a package, use
sudo dpkg -r packagename

Sometimes when you try to start Firefox, it warns you that Firefox is already running. The message looks like this:

Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing Firefox process, or restart your system.

Usually, you can just kill the firefox process to solve this problem

I picked up a good trick from Russ Taylor in grad school. He kept a “howto” directory, and any time he ended up doing a bit of research to find out how to do something, he’d document it in a tiny file in a howto directory. I picked up the habit, and in my personal howto directory at Google I now have 1750+ little files

Thanks to whoisgregg who pointed out in the webmaster group that my comments were utterly horked. Trying to view a thread gave the error message
WordPress database error: [Can’t open file: ‘wp_comments.MYI’ (errno: 144)]
SELECT * FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_post_ID = ‘538′ AND comment_approved = ‘1′ ORDER BY comment_date

Luckily, doing the Google search [Can’t open file: ‘wp_comments.MYI’ (errno: 144)] found this link at #1, and it gives the answer

Problem: Someone emails you an image file. You can see the thumbnail fine in Gmail, so you save it to your hard drive. But when you try to view the image in Firefox, you get this error instead: The image “file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/whatever.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors