Some time ago I was looking at how to re-size uploaded images in a way that looks good using PHP. I was impressed that when I uploaded a 4M picture to flickr it managed to re-size and compress it into a smaller version that looked correct. I knew they weren't just resizing it so I went on a quest to find out what it took to do the same thing with PHP. The following is step one in that process.
So after doing my yum upgrade from FC5 to FC6 on a desktop I decided to see if it worked any better than FC5 on my old Dell Inspiron 600m laptop. FC5 wasn't bad on this laptop but two things always bugged me: 1) the ATI driver didn't work out of the box at anything above 800×600 so I had to wait for the binary ATI drivers to support chipset and then install that and 2) sleep in any form just didn't work correctly. I'm happy to say that both of these things are fixed in FC6.
Now that Fedora Core 6 is available it is time to upgrade those old crusty FC5 installs. To upgrade from FC5 you can follow these steps:
rpm -Uhv http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/6/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/fedora-release-6-4.noarch.rpm http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/6/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/fedora-release-notes-6-3.noarch.rpm
If you are still on FC4 you can upgrade from FC4 to FC5 first.
At work we have been using DNS Black Lists for a long time to deny spam coming into our email systems. There are a number of places you can check to see if you are on one of these lists but I figured I would write my own web 2.0 version. So here it is my own DNSBL checker. I believe it has most of the major lists on it but if I find more I'll add them. I'm also going to try to post more about how it is all put together.