Last night, Lorena and Kelly went to one of those parties in our old neighborhood in Apex where women get together to sell useless foo-foo stuff to each other. I hate those things. And for more than just the reason that the stuff they sell is almost always useless and overpriced. When they left, I decided I was going to install a new internet content filter on the computer on to which we recently installed the amazing Ubuntu Linux 8.04 Hardy Heron. I did some reading in the Ubuntu forums and found something called Dansguardian. I installed that along with the FireHOL firewall and tinyproxy. Then I found a GUI to manage the whole thing that is put out by some of the people who work on Ubuntu CE (Christian Edition). What this all does is allow me to control whatever comes into the house over the internet. The proxy server assures all the computers, not just the Ubuntu computer, are filtered. It is all set up and working. I found some actively managed blacklists that tracks the latest bad stuff. I can manually update them, but I will need to spend a little time to figure out how to automatically perform daily or weekly updates to the lists. I am impressed. It was free, easy, and very, very effective.
This weekend, in addition to spreading some mulch and rocks in the yard, I would like to get the computer set up for programming. It is supposed to be nice this weekend, not too hot, so maybe I should spend as much time in the yard as possible.