it’s unix, not eunuchs

So most of you know that over 100 more banks are now under a deathwatch by the FDIC.  How can you prevent this from happening to you?  Well, the obvious part is to never keep more than 100k in one bank.  But lets say you just don’t want the hassle of a bank failure to affect you.  Well then choose a good bank!

I know, you’re thinking, I don’t know how to read all those fancy schmancy financial documents.  But wait, there’s someone who will do it for you.  Bankrate.com’s Safe and Sound evaluates banks to see how good of shape they’re in.  My credit union gets a C score.  I’m okay with that because they have a ton of things that I require in a credit union, but be assured, I’ll be checking back to bankrate.com frequently to see if it’s been downgraded.

Link to the bankrate.com tool.

I use a plugin for Wordpress called Simple Tagging.  Unfortunately it doesn’t appear to be maintained at the moment.  I don’t like running un-supported code, but I’m not willing to look for a new tagging system yet.

However, it appears to work just fine if you change the version checking in the php file itself.  I would NEVER recommend you do this for a large site, but if you’re running a small blog like me, you might have use for this.

Edit your simple-tags.php which is found in your wp-content/plugins/simple-tags directory and find this line:

if ( strpos($wp_version, ‘2.5′) !== false ) {

replace the 5 with a 6 and you’re back in business(if you’re running 2.6.)

The new line looks like this:

if ( strpos($wp_version, ‘2.6′) !== false ) {

Sorry it’s been so long since I posted. Things have been busy this summer with family reunions, family visiting, on-call of course, and all the normal fun of life.

So here’s at least a little fun to share. I’m sure you occasionally want to chop up a PDF file into tiny bits and then re-assemble it. For instance if you’re teaching a class and you want to give students the chapter they’re working on and the glossary at the back.

Enter pdftk onto the scene. It allegedly runs on *nix, Windows and Mac. I can only testify for the Windows portion of it. I know, you’re saying, “BUT THIS IS A UNIX BLOG.” Well, I decided that something was better than nothing.

So anyhow, it’s free, go download it here and try it out. Like many command line commands it’s a bit enigmatic, but try the –help flag and you’ll be jamming in no time.