Tim Hardy

Ross Mayfield reflects:

What was unique about social software and it’s design principles was how it didn’t emphasize tools, but practice and an understanding of social context. Too much of Web 2.0 is not just made of white people, but an alphabet soup of supporting technologies that mean nothing without communities, networks and even real business models. As the market we helped found continues to froth, commentary on new business models based on power laws matters even more.

Joel Spolsky is more succinct:

When people use the term Web 2.0, I always feel a little bit stupider for the rest of the day.

In Debian 3.1, Thunderbird does not launch Firefox if you click on a link in an email message by default. There is no option to change this option from within Thunderbird itself.

Instead, close the email client, fire up an xterm or konsole and type:

find ~/ -name prefs.js | grep thunderbird

This will find the full path to the file that holds the Thunderbird preferences on your machine.

Now you know where it is (the path varies on everyone’s machine for security reasons) edit it and add the following line:

user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.http", "/usr/bin/firefox");

Restart Thunderbird. Now when you click on a link in an email it should open in your favourite browser.

(Adapted from Linux Basics tutorial.)

Tab completion makes your life easier at the command line. Just type the first few letters of a command then hit TAB and the computer will fill the rest in for you. You can do the same with files: just type the unique first few digits of a file and hit TAB and bash will do its magic. If there is more than one match you will be presented with all the possibilities.

There is a way of extending this so that you can do the same with the man command. For example, type “man shut” then TAB and the rest of the word you are looking for, “shutdown” is filled in for you.

To enable this, edit .bashrc and enable tab completion by uncommenting the lines in .bashrc

# enable programmable completion features (you don’t need to enable
# this, if it’s already enabled in /etc/bash.bashrc and /etc/profiles
# sources /etc/bash.bashrc).
if [ -f /etc/bash_completion ]; then
. /etc/bash_completion
fi

Some distros do this by default. Debian does not.