Whether you are a blogger, a photographer or a filmmaker, it is not always clear where your freedom to use content publicly might be legally questioned. When it comes to using copyrighted material, you have more rights than you think.

Whether you are a blogger, a photographer or a filmmaker, it is not always clear where your freedom to use content publicly might be legally questioned. When it comes to using copyrighted material, you have more rights than you think.

Fair use is the right, in some circumstances, to quote copyrighted material without asking permission or paying for it. It is a crucial feature of copyright law and what keeps copyright from being censorship. You can invoke fair use when the value to the public of what you are saying outweighs the cost to the private owner of the copyright,” according to the Center for Social Media site.

Read more (scroll down for the easy to navigate Q&A)

Reinstalling your operating system is never a fun or welcome task, but sometimes it’s unavoidable. Restoring settings and downloaded applications after installing an operating system can take quite a bit of time, so I’ve come up with a shell script to make things a bit easier.

This technique does not take the place of a good external backup. I recommend backing up your important files to a place other than your computer, such as a CD or DVD disc, because with a powerful enough shell script, you could accidentally wipe out hours of work in just a few seconds.

When I installed Ubuntu on my computer, I created a separate partition for the home directory, which is where personal files are typically stored. If you do this, you can reinstall Ubuntu without losing your files, as long as you don’t overwrite the home partition. Since I have the configuration files that reside on my root partition backed up inside my home directory, the files should still be there after I reinstall, so all I have to do is copy them to the correct place.

In addition, I have several programs downloaded from the Internet saved in my home directory as well. After restoring Ubuntu, all I have to do is execute a command to install the programs again. My script can take care of that for me as well.

Learn how…

~ WatchMouse research shows Linux/Apache has less downtime and yields faster websites than Microsoft/IIS ~London, June 20, 2007 – Linux websites have better uptime and load faster than Windows-based websites. Research by WatchMouse, a website monitoring company, also shows that web server platform Apache outperforms the Microsoft IIS platform. Therefore, having a Linux website and an Apache webserver platform offers the best choice for professional web pages.

Read the Press Release or the data behind the claims

This has absolutely NOTHING to do with technology other than I found it while looking for a birthday gift for my son who turns 13 in less than a week. I can totally see how this would be beneficial to hikers and such but I know that people with fanny packs typically let them hang down quite a bit, and the weight of a pack of water should really weigh it down…. which led to the visual image of someone walking around with a straw in their mouth coming from their groin area. Stupid mental auto play, I am now completely disturbed.

Life takes us off the WiFi grid and it should, but your servers might not be so sympathetic. What do you do when you get a page while on the sidelines at your kid’s soccer playoffs or catching that sold out concert? Here are a few ways to help you keep your servers happy and help you maintain your life…

Read suggestions and the rest of this post at my other site, Ask GeekGirl… 

BlogHer has partnered with Scrapblog, the premiere multimedia scrapbook creation tool, to offer BlogHers a chance to win a trip to BlogHer Conference ‘07! Every view my Scrapblog gets will earn me a entry in the sweepstakes! I have embedded it, but you can also go here to see it in all it’s glory…

 From ZDnet.co.uk:

Women are finding it more difficult to break into the IT profession than to progress up the career ladder once they have their foot in the door, research has found.

In a survey of 100 female IT professionals by IT training company The Training Camp, 67 percent said it’s more difficult to even get into the industry as a woman than to gain subsequent promotions once they have secured a tech job.

Once they are gainfully employed in IT, 52 percent of women felt they could move up the career ladder quickly compared to other industries.

Claire Taylor, a systems administrator at software and services company APT Solutions who has worked in the IT industry for seven years, said although she has found it relatively easy to progress in her IT career, when she started going for IT job interviews she came up against an attitude of companies being “less willing to employ women”.

A side note that I want to mention… IT is getting better about then men v. women ratio however, when I went to college, there were even less women in the technology industry. My college had a special program to assist students with expenses if they were women working on a career in a predominately male dominated field (i.e.: automotive, welding…) IT was NOT considered one of them and to my knowledge still isn’t. How sad.

I have never hit a road block getting a position after I was granted an interview but I wonder how many interviews I wasn’t given because I am a woman. Although employers are prohibited by law from asking certain things of candidates, I never felt comfortable using that excuse when I wanted a job. Most interviews I have been in I had to spend a large amount of time explaining how I was going to be able to cover the long and unpredictable hours that come with a sysadmin job while being a mother and wife. I know that attendance is a major factor when looking to hire someone, but I am curious how many men have experienced this line of questioning and how much time was devoted to it if they did.

 Read the rest of the ZDNet.co.uk article here