It’s easy to make accented characters (e.g. é and ü) in Linux. Easier than in Windows, actually, because in Windows you have to remember all those crazy Alt codes, and in Linux, it’s logical combinations of accents and letters.

It’s pretty easy to extract just the audio from a DVD in Linux, using Mplayer, sox, and either Audacity or split.

If you’ve browsed through many personal sites at all, you’ve probably seen some of the following things that make me personally cringe. I don’t understand why they’re so trendy, since they don’t improve a site in the least.

This was taken from an email I sent to Jem and Trinity about beginning in Ubuntu Linux. It might also be useful to see my dated Beginning Linux Commands guide. Any questions about something I do or don’t have on here, as well as your own Linux tips, can be posted as comments.

This script will rename all files with one extension to another extension. Example: all files in a given directory that end with .php will be renamed to end with .txt.

Source for enqueue() and dequeue() functions to add and remove data from a queue in a class.

In a Unix environment when working with C++ or C, a Makefile can be a very handy thing. Instead of typing several separate commands each time you update a file and want to recompile, you can just type make and the Makefile is executed.

One of the easiest ways to keep your code easy to update, read, and debug is to keep it neat. That means indentation, documentation, consistency, and logic need to be applied. These are basics in any programming class, and they are just as applicable with coding HTML as they are with C++ or any other programming language.

So you want to display a randomly selected quote on your page, and you want to use PHP to do it; you’ll need PHP support on your server. An easy way to test this is to stick <?php phpinfo(); ?> into a .php file, upload that file to your server, and load it in your browser. If you get a huge table with information about your PHP setup, then you know you have PHP support. If you get a blank page, then you don’t have PHP. :(

A couple of reasons to use PHP in your site:

1. Separation of content from design–when you want to change the look of your page, you can update a few files and every page of your content will be updated with those changes.
2. You have more power than if you used some language such as JavaScript, because it doesn’t matter what the visitor has enabled in his browser.