Here’s how you can get Open Office.org 3.0 under Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex (8.10):

1. Add the Repository under Synaptics as a third-party. Click Add, and paste the following line:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/openoffice-pkgs/ubuntu intrepid main

2. Import this key file, by saving it on the desktop.

3. Back to Synaptics, go to the “Authentication tab”  and import the key file you just downloaded.

4. Reload the indexes, when prompted. You will get a lot of new updates. Get them all.

5. Start and enjoy OOo 3.0 !!!

Original article here.

I found an interesting web site, which can be used with some clever perl scripting to determine the country of origin for any IP address (except the reserver and non-routable ones). This web site will provide lists for all countries, individually or all together, of CIDR IP address ranges. Although the site name sounds like for denying service, its lists can be used for other purposes, such as statistics from log files.

The site is www.ipdeny.com. The address for the actual interesting tables is here.

This web article will give you two methods to obtain the size of files on your Linux system, using only the command line.

Using the stat command, you will get the information quickly.  The command:

stat -c %s myfile.gz 

will tell you the file size in bytes. But you can also get a huge amount of other information about your files, and the other file system globally.

The other trick is rather simple, and use some piping and scripting to get just what you want.

ls -lah myfile.gz  | awk '{ print $5}'

will get detailed information and then parse it to only extract the 5th field, which is the size. This second example is perhaps a bit more technical, but gives you more flexibility, once you know how to use awk.

You like this color pattern from another web site, and want to add it to yours, as a theme or otherwise ? Good. But how ? There is a service on the net that will actually give you the color codes used by another website. It will provide you with sample color circles you can identify, along with the actual hex code for it.  I Like Your Colors is the web service that will give you this. Feed it the URL of the page you actually like, and it will extract the color codes for you.  It is a nice addition to anyone who designs web sites.

The Rubik’s cube, which was famous in the 80′s and that I loved when it came out, is now getting high-tech. Techno Source is expanding its series of Rubik’s Cubes with the Rubik’s TouchCube. There is a full article on BusinessWire. Although it’s a bit expensive, no geek should be without one of those.

You can read the full article here.