qptech blog

I am very grateful for the gmail invite I received from my brother. The service is still in beta, so it is lacking in a few features, but I think it'll be the best free email service once it's released to everyone. I think that one of the reasons they're limiting the number of accounts right now is that they don't yet have the resources to handle the 1 Gb storage available to every gmail user - so they gotta keep the number down for a while and just release a few invitations now and then as they add storage. Google's computer network (cluster) is amazing right now, and it'll be much more amazing in the near future. I've read estimates that they currently have somewhere between 70 and 100 thousand servers to run the google search engine and all the other services they provide (including gmail I suppose).

Anyways I'm qpmarl@[insert the name of the noted service].com

If you ever write html code, learn to do it right with Cascading Style Sheets. This page shows you some of the things that are possible using CSS. Positioning with tables, changing fonts/colors in html tags, and similar techniques are out-dated and make html code cumbersome and hard to follow. CSS allows you to put your style and layout code all in one place (even in a seperate file) and also allows much more flexiblity than plain html.

W3Schools CSS Tutorial
css Zen Garden
css / edge
CSS Layout Techniques

All these pages have links to other tutorials and stuff, but these are some of the ones I like.

Note: Microsoft Internet Explorer does not fully support CSS even though Microsoft claims that it does. The W3C is the organization that controlls web technologies like HTML, XML, CSS, and many more. They set the specifications for CSS which are very clear on how, exactly, certain code is supposed to be displayed. Microsoft seems to ignore these specifications and just does it however they want. Mozilla does a much better job complying with the standards and I think that the mozilla browser has a lot of nice features and is overall a better piece of software than MS IE. So if you don't use it already, check it out. It's open source and therefore completely free.

Ok, this really isn't a tech post, I just want to let everyone know that this blog exists and this is where I'll be putting all the tech info I want to share.

The main reason for this is that there are probably some people who read qpmarl blog that don't want to read all the tech posts. So I'm seperating them.

Oh, I moved some of the posts from qpmarl blog to this blog. So this isn't really the first post, but it's the first post original to this blog.

Here are some of the linux distributions I've used and would recommend.
slackwareInstall from CD - pretty easy to install and use.
gentoo linuxCD or Internet install. More advanced installation allows you to compile and optimize all software for your specific hardware. Tons of packages to install just about any open source application (not all available on the CDs). Easily updated. This is what I've been using.
Fedora linuxThis is what's become of Redhat's desktop linux. I've never used fedora itself, but I've used older versions of redhat... it's not too bad, but driven by corporate schedules like microsoft. The sometimes release their own versions of certain programs that cause compatability problems.
LinspireThis is supposed to be an easy one. Used to be Lindows, untill MS complained about it. As far as I can tell, you can't download it for free... it costs like $60 plus a subscription fee to keep it updated and junk.
Lycoris Desktop/LXThis is another easy to use one... I couldn't find a free download for this one either, but they should have it somewhere... probably just hidden very well.
DebianThis is one of the more advanced ones. It's what a lot of the real linux geeks use.