Happy Birthday to me? (PPZ turns 2)

Wow, reviewing the articles, I just discovered that the Penguin Petting Zoo is 2 years old (this month), and really so much has changed. Not that you haven't moved onto an island (ice burg) to move to Linux, that remains about the same. But we remain almost totally virus and spyware free, while we work in a nice easy to use GDI (Graphic Device Interface), that can easily be rolled on it's side, for page length screen (assuming your monitor can handle it- mine really couldn't). I'm at the point where I don't miss Windows at all. Going back to Windows, I'm as much of a fish out of water these days as anybody else, once I know nothing about programming .NET, but who needs it, anyway?

Welcome to Linux, which all come with Apache, and PHP installed, and PostgreSQL or MySQL or SQLite, ready to rock-n-roll. Plus programming languages; Perl, Ruby, Python, C/C++, Fortran, BASH, all capable of using those database resources. With PHP and Apache, it's not exactly hard to setup your own cloud-computing, but the second you open a portal to WWW, you may become a hacking target. And security is then your own problem. Welcome to the ice burg.

In these two years, I've had a very bad experience with Shared Hosting, and a hack I pissed off. (Not here on Blogger, but on a paid host). He really had that host back-doored, and nothing was safe from him. So my focus changed from being so server-side, to being (AGAIN) more single user oriented. Which has had me studying up on GTK and Python, using SQLite. But most of that is too techie for this blog, so I really don't know how I'm going to handle that, yet?

Other things that have changed; Sun Microsystems took over MySQL, which shorty later was gobbled up by Oracle, causing panic in the open source community, once we are soo very dependent on not only MySQL but Open Office.

This blog was about using Linux as a desktop, the way most of you would. There is still a great fearful reputation that goes with the wild penguins, which is totally undeserved today. A friend is currently trying to setup a Media Server for himself, and is hacking around with Linux, so I'm trying to encourage him to write his reflections for us- particularly once he is such a good writer- we'll see?

So far the evangelism of this site, has not produced even one convert. But every once in a while, it does get noticed. Baby steps, we're only two years old!