google "apt-get install"

A few interesting things to report. After months and months of relentless harassment by various members the evil Debian Mafia, I finally succumbed to peer pressure and installed Debian Linux -- or should I say *cough* GNU/Linux -- on one of my spare machines. My initial impression is as follows: HOLY CRAP! The installer is a bit rough, but once you get past that and get apt properly configured, installing and setting up new software is a joke. It took me about 20 seconds to install Apache (apt-get install apache), then I realized I didn't have PHP4 installed (apt-get install php4). Installing other stuff was about the same. Tom walked me through a dist-upgrade to unstable (more than a bit of a misnomer, I might add). After years of the untold pain and suffering that is RPM, Windows, and MacOS software installs, I am completely in awe of Debian Package management. I'm sure Debian has it's quirks, but for the moment I'm completely hooked. In fact, while I was writing this I just installed ispell to double-check the spelling of a word.

The other interesting bit of news for the day is a little shell script i wrote for accessing Google. You can grab it here.