Exactly one year ago today Geekology published it’s first post, “Anime Contact Lenses“. Before starting Geekology I tried my hand at blogging a few times using services like blogger.com and wordpress.com, but never stuck with it for long enough. With Geekology I aimed to finally build a blog I could be proud of and that I’d still be writing for many years down the line.

I started blogging because friends, colleagues, and others tend to ask me for a lot of advice regarding Unix, Apple products, and software development. I love doing research on these (and other) topics, and I’ve always kept notes whenever I find techniques or solutions that are especially interesting, so in early 2009 I decided to start converting these notes into articles in the hope that others who come across similar problems might benefit from them too.

One year later it seems like I’m on my way to reaching my blogging goals; Geekology was nominated (and achieved a runner-up position) for the “Best New Blog” category of the 2009 South African Blog Awards, and I hope to take part in the competition again this year.

Since the 22nd of January 2009 Geekology’s published 200 posts and had 390,000 unique visits from 210 countries (averaging around 2000 unique visitors per day for the past few months), visitors have posted 700 comments, I’ve gained 1200 Twitter followers, and after incorporating ads in May 2009 I’ve received my first Google AdSense Cheque with the second one on its way!

Traffic During 2009

Web Browsers

Read the rest of this entry »

Following on Geekology’s previous posts on Regular expressions (Regex Overview and Regex in PHP), the following is a list of regular expression examples for general use.

Credit Cards:

All major credit cards:

^(?:4[0-9]{12}(?:[0-9]{3})?|5[1-5][0-9]{14}|6011[0-9]{12}|3(?:0[0-5]|[68][0-9])[0-9]{11}|3[47][0-9]{13})$

American Express:

^3[47][0-9]{13}$

Diners Club International:

^3(?:0[0-5]|[68][0-9])[0-9]{11}$

Discover:

^6011[0-9]{12}$

MasterCard:

^5[1-5][0-9]{14}$

Visa:

^4[0-9]{12}(?:[0-9]{3})?$

Dates:

Read the rest of this entry »

When the Lord of the Rings movies were released a few years ago I’d hoped that it would spawn a wave of adult-oriented fantasy movies. Sadly, most of the fantasy movies that came out since then (Harry Potter, The Spiderwick Chronicles, The Golden Compass, Eragon, The Chronicles of Narnia, etc.) were weak adaptations catering for younger viewers.

That trend might change, though. Universal Pictures acquired the rights to Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series last year in a seven-figure deal, and they plan to adapt the first book in the series, The Eye of the World, to a movie format soon. The Eye of the World movie will be produced in part by Rick Selvage and Larry Mondragon of Red Eagle Entertainment, the company that published graphic novel versions of the books.

Additionally, Red Eagle Entertainment is planning to release a line of stand-alone Wheel of Time games for all major videogame platforms, as well as a massively multiplayer online role-playing game encompassing the themes, characters and world of the Wheel of Time novels.

In The Eye of the World, the peaceful villagers of Emond’s Field pay little heed to rumors of war in the western lands until a savage attack by monstrous minions of the Dark One forces three young men to confront a destiny which has its origins in an ancient time known as The Breaking of the World.

Robert Jordan, the author of the books, passed away at the age of 58 due to amyloidosis before he could finish the last book in the series. The task (and Jordan’s copious notes) to finish the book was handed down to Brandon Sanderson who did an excellent job of keeping to Jordan’s method of storytelling. The final book ended up being divided into three books due to its length, the first of which was published in October 2009 at 800+ pages.

So far the movie is only in pre-production; There’s an IMDB profile for The Eye of the World, but it doesn’t have much information yet except for a possible 2011 release date.

If the first Wheel of Time movies are as well-produced as Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, the series’ 15 books could easily become the greatest series of epic fantasy movies yet.

“The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and go, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again.”

3D TVs were one of the big hits at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES). These high-definition television sets feature extremely high resolutions and refresh rates, and will ship with 3D glasses that let viewers experience compatible movies and games in 3D similar to cinema releases like Avatar and Alice in Wonderland.

The videos below highlight some of the key technologies and devices that were introduced.

GeekBrief.TV - Brief 687 - 3D Technology from CES:

Attack of the Show - CES 2010 - 3D Televisions Review:

Kernel and Architecture

The uname command-line utility can be used to check the kernel and architecture of a machine running Linux:

uname -a

… resulting in output like:

Linux ubuntu 2.6.20-16-generic #2 SMP
Tue Feb 12 05:41:34 UTC 2008 i686 GNU/Linux

This output specifies the operating system (“Linux”), nodename on the network (“ubuntu”), kernel version (“2.6.20-16-generic”), and architecture (“i686″), but it doesn’t specify the operating system’s release information.

Red Hat, Fedora, and CentOS Release Info

To check the release information in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, or CentOS, run the following command:

Read the rest of this entry »