Planet TriLUG

Mark Turner: Compuserve Classic closing

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:07:44 +0000

Not long ago I blogged about being a Compuserve user way back when. Well it turns out that Compuserve pulled the plug on the “classic” accounts at the end of last month.

Truly the end of an era.

(h/t Mark Hinkle)

Greg Brown: Rest in Peace, Darius Xavier Poteat

noreply@blogger.com (Parlez à la Main) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 18:42:35 +0000

This is Darius Xavier Poteat. I didn't know Darius that well, not past a "hey, what's up?" or a wave hello. He always seemed quick with a smile and seemed to have an immediate and positive effect on those around him. Yet, inside, it appears Darius was a troubled man. Darius ended his life yesterday and I'm sad that I didn't get to know him better and now I'll not have the chance to do so.

Darius, you will be missed, by your family, the people you worked with as well as people who didn't even know you that well. People like me. I wish I could have done something for you.

Goodbye, Darius. Godspeed.

Greg Brown: Cool Star Wars ads

noreply@blogger.com (Parlez à la Main) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:50:16 +0000

These are my two favorites of the bunch:

Kevin Sonney: Review roundup - HeroesCon, iPhone 3GS, and more!

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 01:11:10 +0000

OK, it’s been a month since I’ve updated. The ERP project at work had it’s first go-live, and as we build into the second one, I don’t see my free time to post freeing up much of anything.

But! Tomorrow we leave for AnthroCon in Pittsburgh, PA, and I’m off for 7 days straight. While it’s a “working vacation for me” (in support of Ursula - I’ll be with her in the Dealer’s Room when it’s open, and probably with her the rest of the time too), I’m looking forward to a getaway.

So, since my last update, we ran to HeroesCon 2009 in Charlotte, NC. If you read Ursula’s update, you know that it drained us dry. It actually took me close to a week to recover, which is unusual. I did meet some AWESOME people, and as usual the fans were great. However, I don’t think we’ll be back next year, since sales were “meh.” We’ll update when we know what con we replace it with if we decide to do it.

So, That brings us to last weekend. Last weekend was a BLAST. Why? Ursula’s Signing at Chapel Hill Comics. The Fans were even more fun, we sold out of their stock, and my kids had fun. Everyone’s a winner! Afterwards, we headed to Southpoint Mall so she could check into Mac Games. As long as we were at the apple store, I upgraded to the iPhone 3GS from my 3G.

The 3GS is awesome. If anything it just polishes what the iPhone 3G did right, and added some missing features. That and it’s SCREAMINGLY fast. Much faster than my 3G ever did. Color me impressed.

Ursula, on the other hand, was *NOT* impressed with the number of Mac games in the store. The remodel they did REALLY reduced their software selection, and she wasn’t happy at all about that. I did turn her on to MacGameStore online, and she is now happily playing one of the games she wanted.

My final review of the night is my brand new Stillwater Kilt. As many of you know, I started wearing kilts out to cons and the club. They’re comfortable, they look good on me, and yes, I’m both Scotch and Irish, so I can get away with wearing them. So first I had a Utilikilt - sturdy, comfy, and plenty of pocket space. The I picked up a SportKilt in Blackwatch Tartan. No pockets, but it works well with a sporran, and seems to be a little warmer in the winter than the Utilikilt. Also, the SportKilt uses a velcro waist, so it’s a bit more adjustable.

The Stillwater Kilt is a full-on traditional kilt. Worn higher, with a thick belt and a sporran. Also somewhat heavier than the SportKilt, and definitely higher quality. Can’t wait to wear it out this weekend.

So, if you’ll be at AnthroCon this weekend, drop by Ursula’s space at the SofaWolf Island. We’ll be there. And around Pittsburgh when the Dealer’s room is closed. Stop by and say Hi!

Warren Myers: no carbonation

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 00:58:13 +0000

Couple things I’ve discovered about Singapore - beverages of the adult persuasion are nutty expensive. Soda doesn’t taste the same (and I don’t just mean the better versions of Coke that use sugar).

I actually like the flavor of Diet Coke (the American kind). Coca Cola Light, as it’s called here, does not taste the same. We have a free dispenser at work that squirts-out little cups of the stuff, and it’s just not right. I’ve had it straight from the can, and it doesn’t taste the same there either. Not “bad” - but “weird”.

Since there’re few sodas I actually enjoy, and fewer here than in the states, I’ve called a ban on carbonated beverages till I get back to the states next week.

On the upside, the tea here is really good, and the water’s drinkable

Alan Porter: Two heads are better than one

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 19:26:41 +0000

At work, I got a new PC with two monitors, and I have really enjoyed having the extra screen real estate.

When I worked from home this week, I decided that I needed to try hooking an external monitor to my HP laptop. I was happy that, unlike the last time I tried this a few years ago, it “Just Worked” ™ without any special calesthenics on my part.

I wondered why Gnome decided to put the panels (the bars at the top and the bottom) on the external monitor instead of on the laptop display. To me, it seemed more natural to have the “start” menu (actually, the “Applications, Places, System” tri-menu) on the external display instead of right in front of me.

It turns out that this is really easy to fix. Gnome has this configuration tool that is roughly equivalent to the Windows registry… yuck. You can access it using either gconf-editor or gconftool-2. Inside that deep mine of settings, there is one jewel that tells where the panels should go. So I wrote a quick script to move the panels from one monitor to the other and back.

#!/bin/bash

m=$1
if [[ ( ! -z "$m" ) && ( ( $m -eq 1 ) || ( $m -eq 0 ) ) ]]
then
   menu="/apps/panel/toplevels"
   panels=$(gconftool-2 --dump $menu | \
      grep '<key>.*/monitor</key>' | \
      sed -e 's/^.*<key>//g' -e 's/</key>.*$//g')
   for p in $panels
   do
      gconftool-2 --set "$menu/$p" --type integer "$m"
   done
else
   echo "usage --> $0 [ 0 | 1 ]"
   echo "moves gnome panels to monitor 0 (VGA) or 1 (LCD)"
fi
exit 0

Alan Porter: The Quick Lounge

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:50:59 +0000

In my line of work, I occasionally have the luxury of working from home. When that happens, I prefer to run all of my applications on my desktop PC at the office, and I use “NX” to connect remotely. Specifically, I use the NoMachine NX server on my Ubuntu PC at work (although I am considering trying the open source “freenx” server), and at home I use the “qtnx” client on my laptop, which also runs Ubuntu.

This works pretty well, except my desktop environment does not like the stress of changing resolutions back and forth. It seems that the “panels” in Gnome get confused about where to place the different applets and widgets, since at one time it may have a lot of room, and at another time it may be more cramped.

I got tired of scooting my quick-launch icons around one-by-one, and so I was looking for a container where I could keep them together and move them around as a group. I tried the “drawer” applet, which is available in Ubuntu by default, but that was not quite right. I don’t want to open and close the drawer every time I launch something… I just want the icons to always be there in a group.

I found an applet called “quick-lounge-applet” which really fits the bill. One wonders whether the author meant to say “quick launch”, but perhaps had a poor grasp of English. Either way, this little applet does a great job of keeping my quick-launch icons together in a group, and it can be moved around easily.

After installing the applet (using the normal apt-get install quick-lounge-applet, I found that it was not listed in the “+ Add to panel…” menu. Apparently, Gnome needs to be prodded before it recognises newly-installed applets. There is a simple work-around. Simply re-start the service that keeps track of that stuff: killall bonobo-activation-server. The service will re-start, and there will be a new entry in the “+ Add to panel…” menu called “Launchers List”.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I am in a hurry. I have some quick lounging to do.

Mark Turner: Cheap Thoughts: Disposing of a nylon flag

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 13:54:01 +0000

I noticed this morning that our weather-beaten nylon American flag is starting to tear. The proper way to dispose of the American flag is to burn it. However, how does one burn a nylon American flag without the EPA showing up at one’s doorstep?

Bill Vinson: and now the waiting…

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 04:34:29 +0000

So, pre-op registration/testing for my surgery is all complete and all I have left is the waiting. Now, of course it isn’t too long now, but I’ve considered this to be somewhat of the climax or dramatic pause to my layoff for so long that it is now weighing heavily on me. Not only will this be a somewhat invasive surgery (laproscopic), a massive life change, but also the beginning of the requirement to look for new work. Wow, that seems a lot to compact into a ~1 hour surgery

So, here is what I plan to do going forward (daily if at all possible):

Update a published Google Doc spreadsheet (image embedded below) with my current weight.
Take photos, straight on & profile to visualize weight loss over time (I’m trying out some software to convert a series of images into a video).

The chart which is linked below and on the “Gastric Bypass” page link (top right of the header) will automatically update when I post new weights. I’ll evaluate how often to post new time-lapse weight loss videos (monthly?) and I will blog about any significant changes or when I need a cathartic moment Otherwise, the latest chart and time-lapse weight loss video (once I have enough days post-surgery to warrant one) will always be available on the “Gastric Bypass” page.

Once again, let me know if you’d like to know anything specific or if this turns into information overload I can always set the blog up to exclude these posts from the front page and feeds if the idea holds merit with you all.

I’ll be back soon with more…

Bill Vinson: Art of the Title’s WALL-E end credits interview

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 02:19:28 +0000

John Gruber over at Daring Fireball posted a link to a great interview at Art of the Title regarding the WALL-E end credits shots by Jim Capobianco and Alexander Woo. As the interview explains, the animation tells the end of the story and offers a lot of interesting details on the film and production. Art of the Title even offers a downloaded zip package containing multiple snapshots from the credits. Definitely worth the time to check out if you’re into animation, Pixar, or WALL-E specifically…

Alan Porter: Internet lie: “in stock”

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 02:01:19 +0000

Apparently, on the Internet, the term “in stock” means something completely different than it does in the real world.

Mark Turner: More tomatoes!

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 22:06:54 +0000

We enjoyed our first batch of cherry tomatoes with dinner Friday night, courtesy of our fast-forwarded tomato plants. Travis and I picked another five from our plants this morning and we enjoyed them for lunch!

Our plants have grown so massive that I’m kicking myself for not spreading them farther apart. It’s tough getting to all the goods!

Bill Vinson: Must watch LEGO stop-motion video

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:15:10 +0000

Click here to view the embedded video.

I loved this video as it’s really well done and the original sound/music makes it.

Also, if you haven’t noticed, I find many of my videos through Laughing Squid, just like this one, so I HIGHLY recommend you follow their site…

Mark Turner: No shortage of water … yet

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 10:49:15 +0000

I noticed Friday that we had the first week in a long while in which it didn’t rain. Our spring and early summer has seemingly had rain every 4-7 days but last week was dry. I was missing that smug feeling I expected to have with a large rain barrel (”Lake Turner”) of rainwater that I haven’t tapped since September and another 40 gallons in a separate container. We’ve also been adding the water we run through the pipes before our shower gets hot and also water we collect from the air conditioning condensation, so there’s been no shortage of water.

Now that we’re into the second half of summer we’ll see if this water becomes necessary. I’m going to hook the rain barrel up to a timer again so that my tomato plants get regular water, but I don’t expect my plants to put a big dent in the supply.

Bill Vinson: Pixar’s Up still going strong

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 04:49:33 +0000

As much as I was disappointed to see that Up was a bit too much for Ben at three years old, I’m thrilled to see it continuing to do extremely well on the charts.

If you look at this chart over at Box Office Mojo, you’ll notice that Up is now the 4th most successful Pixar film to date (based on the box office) and it looks poised to hit number 2 in the next couple of weeks if all things remain steady. BTW, if you haven’t visited Box Office Mojo before go look around. It is a great site run by IMDb and it contains a wealth of information for movie geeks.

I take a certain amount of pleasure in this as previously the NY Times reported on toy retailers concerns that Up wasn’t commercial enough. Basically, there is no abundance of Up merchandise as they felt children wouldn’t “buy in” to a story with a 78-year-old man as the lead. Read the article, see if it sounds as idiotic to you as it did to me (not the reporter, but rather the business rationale). I was annoyed and frustrated when I originally read this and now I feel that the reality has proven the point successfully.

Pixar knows how to make “good” movies and the kids will come. Up has proven that yet again and I am always impressed with their output. I really look forward to introducing Ben to this great film in the future.

Tarus Balog: A Week in Silicon Valley

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 19:21:19 +0000

Sorry I’ve been so quiet lately. I spent last week in Silicon Valley (Sunnyvale, to be exact) and it kept me so busy that I wasn’t able to find the time to write anything.

I’ve been to this area of California dozens of times, but I can barely suppress my delight at seeing the headquarters of all those tech companies. Just driving around for lunch is a veritable Who’s Who of the industry. Seriously, as we went to In-N-Out one day we drove past a building that had a sign out front for a company I’ve been talking to for a couple of months about using OpenNMS, but we had never met in person. I dropped them an e-mail and we went out for dinner on Thursday. Too cool.

The company I was working for was right across the street from Palm.

Speaking of Palm, I’m still trying to decide on a new phone. The Palm Pre is out to relatively positive reviews. There is always the iPhone, but until AT&T gets their femtocell solution figured out it is not an option for me. A friend of mine at Google hooked me up with a G1 Android-powered phone, but one of my requirements has to be an easy way to sync my calendar and contacts from my Mac.

From what I can tell, the only way to easily sync your contacts with a G1 is to sync them through Google. I’m enough of a privacy nut that I really don’t want to have my address book on a server I don’t control, so that option is out. For the Pre there appears to be a Missing Sync that’ll work, so that is an option. Bah, I think I just hold off for a few months and see what else comes up.

One thing I really liked about being back in California was the plethora of places to eat. My throat has been bothering me lately, so it was nice to be able to get a big hot bowl of Pho.

On the way to the restaurant I saw a very typically California sign on a post:

I hope they find it.

Tuesday night I got to meet up with a friend of mine from high school named Geoff Davis.

He’s doing some interesting things at Google, and plus we got to try this great Thai place in Mountain View.

We talked past the last shuttle back to San Francisco, so I ended up driving him back to his place in the Haight. It was nice coming over that last ridge on the 101 and seeing the city skyline. I think there will always be a special place in my heart for San Francisco.

On Friday I made plans to meet up with John Mark Walker in San Mateo. Neither of us realized it at the time, but they were having a “wine walk” street faire so it took awhile to find a place to park. As I was waiting for him I wandered around a bit, and came across this Porsche 550. I’m not sure it was authentic, since they are extremely rare and worth north of US$1 million, but it was in any case a nice looking car.

We ate at this Indian place and got caught up on gossip in our little world of open source. He will be moderating a panel with me, Luke Kanies and Michael Coté at the LinuxWorld reboot called OpenSourceWorld in August.

I’m not sure what he was planning with the knife.

I made it home with little trouble on Saturday, ending my third trip out west in six weeks. In addition to the trip in August for the conference, I have only one more short trip to New York City scheduled, so perhaps I’ll get to sleep in my own bed for a change.

Jesse Morgan: Stats, Calc and Loadtests

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 18:49:56 +0000

Preface: Kids, PAY ATTENTION IN MATH CLASSES. YOU NEED IT.

So I’ve been spending a lot of time at work doing loadtests, and one question that keeps coming back is “what metric do we want to use to gauge progress?” We’ve been going with a simple throughput (pages/second), but that doesn’t take into account errors, average times, or samplecounts.

You can have 30 pages/second and have the following conditions:

average page takes 10 seconds to load (300 threads over a 10 second period)
50% error rate (pages that spit out a 500 error can return REALLY fast)
30 threads, 1 second page load

That number doesn’t tell the whole story. There’s also the number of samples, overall error rate, and average, median and 90th percentile page load times.

So how do you come up with a number that covers all of that?

This is my current (unweighted) equation.

The short version is ‘the higher the better’. The longer version is:

higher samples good
higher throughput good
high page loads bad
errors penalize score

Missing from this equation:

proper weighting
KB/sec
Min and Max times
a unit describing it’s awesomeness

So that’s what I’ve done today…

Jonathan Vogel: Setting up WordPress on FreeBSD with lighttpd

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 18:42:35 +0000

I would first like to start off by thanking Mark at RootBSD for hooking me up with a sweet FreeBSD VPS! Their customer service is top-notch. Prices are unbeatable. And best of all… I get an clean untouched installation of FreeBSD.

Please note these instructions are only validated under FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE and PHP5.

Grabbing the right packages

Install lighttpd:

# cd /usr/ports/www/lighttpd/ && make install clean

Install mysql51-server

# cd /usr/ports/databases/mysql51-server/ && make install clean

Install PHP5

# cd /usr/ports/lang/php5 && make install clean

Install PHP5-MySQL

# cd /usr/ports/databases/php5-mysql && make install clean

Configuring lighttpd

Make changes /usr/local/etc/lighttpd.conf with your favorite editor

Setup your lighttpd configuration as you like; I created a virtual host so I could have blog.friedpancakes.com:

$HTTP["host"] == "blog.friedpancakes.com" {
        server.document-root = "/var/www/data/blog.friedpancakes.com"
}

That’s not all. In order for lighttpd to handle PHP properly, fastcgi needs to be configured properly.

Continue editing lighttpd.conf:

Enable mod_fastcgi at the top by uncommenting the line at the top of the lighttpd configuration file.

Before you continue, make sure that you compiled PHP with CGI.

# php-cgi -v

You should get some feedback from that. Now if that’s setup properly, you can continue.

Find the section in the lighttpd configuration file where it says fastcgi.server. Since WordPress uses PHP, this step is required for lighttpd to handle PHP properly.

fastcgi.server             = ( ".php" =>
                              ( "localhost" =>
                                (
                                   "socket" => "/tmp/php-fastcgi.socket",
                                   "bin-path" => "/usr/local/bin/php-cgi"
                                 )
                               )
                            )

Ensure that the binary path above is where you have php-cgi.

Setting up MySQL
Open /etc/rc.conf with your preferred editor. Add the following line:

mysql_enable="YES"

This is required to start MySQL. Now start it up!

# /usr/local/etc/rc.d/mysql-server start

Proceed to create the database WordPress will use

# mysql -u root

mysql> create database wordpress;
mysql> grant all privileges on wordpress.* to "wordpress"@"localhost" identified by "your password";
mysql> flush privileges;
mysql> exit;

WordPress

Now that you have your database setup. Let’s get WordPress on the system. Obviously, make the directories specific to how you configured lighttpd.

# cd /var/www
# fetch http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
# tar -xzf latest.tar.gz
# cp -r wordpress/* /var/www/data/blog.friedpancakes.com/
# mv wp-config-sample.php wp-config.php

PHP

One last thing needs to be done to get PHP to work. When you install PHP from the FreeBSD ports tree, you really are getting PHP at its most pure form. While PCRE is included by default with PHP5, it’s not in FreeBSD. So you must install this part separately.

# cd /usr/ports/devel/php5-pcre/ && make install clean

And that’s it! You should now be able to begin blogging away.

Greg Brown: Of variables and default placeholders

noreply@blogger.com (Parlez à la Main) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 14:44:53 +0000

Netflix might need to update a script:

"Dear Greg,

You recently watched the Streamed Movie. To help us ensure a great experience for all members, would you take a moment to tell us about the picture and audio quality?"

I've watched a lot of streamed Netflix movies but never one titled "the Streamed Movie". I got a chuckle out of the e-mail though.

Chess Griffin: RMS on Mono

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 02:50:23 +0000

I always thought RMS was strangly silent on the Mono issue, other than passing comments or references here and there. He has now posted a short, concise summary of his views on C# and Mono. He sums up his points as follows:

The problem is not in the C# implementations, but rather in Tomboy and other applications written in C#. If we lose the use of C#, we will lose them too. That doesn’t make them unethical, but it means that writing them and using them is taking a gratuitous risk.

We should systematically arrange to depend on the free C# implementations as little as possible. In other words, we should discourage people from writing programs in C#. Therefore, we should not include C# implementations in the default installation of GNU/Linux distributions, and we should distribute and recommend non-C# applications rather than comparable C# applications whenever possible.

The full essay is here.

Mark Turner: North Carolina: first in independence?

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 01:49:33 +0000

I was pondering Independence Day as the Fourth of July is this week. I was thinking how we celebrate our independence on the day the Declaration of Independence was signed, even though independence wasn’t actually won until the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783.

Reading up on this, I hadn’t before appreciated the role that North Carolina played in independence. Earlier on, many of the colonies’ delegates to Congress weren’t authorized to consider any votes for independence. The delegates were limited in what they could consider, and so any thoughts of independence seemed a long way away.

North Carolina’s congressional delegates changed that on April 12th, 1776, though, with a resolution that has become known as the Halifax Resolves. Through the Halifax Resolves, North Carolina granted its congressional representatives the authority to vote in favor of independence: the first colony to do so.

North Carolina: leading the way right from the very start!

Here’s the text of the Halifax Resolves:

THE HALIFAX RESOLUTION

The Select Committee taking into Consideration the usurpations and violences attempted and committed by the King and Parliament of Britain against America, and the further Measures to be taken for frustrating the same, and for the better defence of this province reported as follows, to wit,

It appears to your Committee that pursuant to the Plan concerted by the British Ministry for subjugating America, the King and Parliament of Great Britain have usurped a Power over the Persons and Properties of the People unlimited and uncontrouled; and disregarding their humble Petitions for Peace, Liberty and safety, have made divers Legislative Acts, denouncing War Famine and every Species of Calamity against the Continent in General. That British Fleets and Armies have been and still are daily employed in destroying the People and committing the most horrid devastations on the Country. That Governors in different Colonies have declared Protection to Slaves who should imbrue their Hands in the Blood of their Masters. That the Ships belonging to America are declared prizes of War and many of them have been violently seized and confiscated in consequence of which multitudes of the people have been destroyed or from easy Circumstances reduced to the most Lamentable distress.

And whereas the moderation hitherto manifested by the United Colonies and their sincere desire to be reconciled to the mother Country on Constitutional Principles, have procured no mitigation of the aforesaid Wrongs and usurpations, and no hopes remain of obtaining redress by those Means alone which have been hitherto tried, Your Committee are of Opinion that the house should enter into the following Resolve to wit,

Resolved that the delegates for this Colony in the Continental Congress be impowered to concur with the delegates of the other Colonies in declaring Independency, and forming foreign Alliances, reserving to this Colony the Sole, and Exclusive right of forming a Constitution and Laws for this Colony, and of appointing delegates from time to time (under the direction of a general Representation thereof) to meet the delegates of the other Colonies for such purposes as shall be hereafter pointed out.

Jonathan Vogel: Fried pancakes?

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 23:46:34 +0000

I would first like to introduce myself. My name is Jonathan Vogel and I am a Computer Science student at North Carolina State University. I created this blog to contribute to the blogging community particularly in regards to computers and technology. I may also share some of my thoughts and experiences of my everyday life!

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Erm… You may be asking yourself: “What are fried pancakes?” To tell you the truth, I sat around trying to come up with domain names and this was the first [weird] one that worked!

Tarus Balog: The Internet: Bringing People Together

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 18:09:05 +0000

I love the Internet. I just got called an asshole (well “@#*hole”) by a famous person on Twitter. Not that it is the worse thing I’ve ever been called, but I think it is delightful that someone I’ve never met is able to sum up my personality in so few characters.

The famous person is Nigel Lythgoe, once a producer of the American Idol TV show. I know him best as the producer/judge on So You Think You Can Dance (SYTYCD), a dance competition show that I rarely miss. As someone who knows absolutely nothing about dance, it is amazing that I like this show so much. One of the reasons is that it tends to have a nicer tone than shows like Idol, and the judges seem to realize that their final cut of contestants are all pretty damn talented, thus their criticism is constructive and every cut is a little bit painful.

Now, unless you’ve been in a cave or “hiking the Appalachian Trail”, you are aware that Michael Jackson passed away this week. At 43 I’m close enough to 50 to say that, for anyone, that is a life too short.

I was never a fan of Michael Jackson’s music, but I recognized that he was talented. A friend of mine in college who was contemporary dancer, went to see his movie Moonwalker and I was teasing her about it (where I went to college most of us were musical fascists and would deride anything that didn’t fit into our definition of “good music”). She laughed and said while that his music was definitely pop, he was an amazing dancer, and I can understand that for people in dance his passing is a great loss.

Note: for all of you geeks out there, Mr. Jackson has a patent.

Unfortunately my bullshit meter is pegged by a lot of the “tribute” stories I’m seeing on TV. Plus, I’ve been so inundated with Michael Jackson music that “Billie Jean” is currently a two-day long earworm living in my head (they even had a bluegrass version of it on Back Porch last night).

I follow Mr. Lythgoe on Twitter, and he is trying to organize a Michael Jackson tribute show for SYTYCD (and has talked about little else in the last couple of days). If anyone can do it, I expect he can, as American Idol got permission to use his music two seasons ago, and in fact they are re-running that very episode on Monday.

While I have no doubt that Mr. Lythgoe is trying to honor Mr. Jackson with the Idol repeat (the first Idol repeat in prime time, ever, I believe) and his desire to have a show dedicated to his dance styles on SYTYCD, I had the temerity to suggest on Twitter that all of this flurry of activity might look “slightly opportunistic”. It was simply my advice as an outsider that he should be aware of it. Think about it - if Mr. Jackson’s influence on dance was so important, why wait until now to have a show about it? Wouldn’t it have been at the top of the list when the producers were getting permission to use his music on Idol? I’m not saying that they shouldn’t do it, but there needs to be a certain tone around the show to prevent it from being seen as just a cheap grab at ratings.

For that I am now labeled an “@#*hole”.

Maybe I struck too close to home. Trust me, in 30 days, sad as it is, very little will be in the news about Mr. Jackson. We, as a culture, just don’t have the attention span for it. If you are in the business of news, stories about Michael Jackson are hot right now. If there will be a Michael Jackson version of SYTYCD, trust me, it’ll be as soon as it possibly can be done.

So what does this have to do with open source? Well, unpleasant as it may be, it is extremely important to listen to what your critics are saying. It is easy to dismiss them as a bunch of assholes, but you do it at your own peril. In many cases they echo the thoughts of people you need to reach, and understanding how they think is the first step.

For example, my experience with open source seems to be 180 degrees in the opposite direction from Matt Asay. For better or worse, Mr. Asay is seen as a spokesperson for open source software by some, and I have to be able to respond to his ideas, which range from the bleeding obvious to the downright asinine (with a little truth thrown in to help make them seem legit). While I try not to “feed the trolls” by commenting too much, it is important to my business to understand how people like him think.

In any case I sent that tweet to Mr. Lythgoe with the best intentions and got labeled an asshole. So be it. I would rather have my actions misunderstood and get called names than to be seen trying to make a buck off a dead guy.

Bill Vinson: Review: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 03:57:56 +0000

2.5 out of 5 stars

I went to see Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen last night with Matt and Sean. I had been waiting to see this movie since walking out of the first Transformers flick. I loved the mythos and the style, but most importantly for this type of film, I loved the explosions It was a melding of Michael Bay’s trademark action style with a story line that mirrored what I loved as a child. The first film had it’s own drawbacks, such as Bumblebee urinating on people and some poor CG where it was difficult to tell which robot was which in some of the more fast-paced scenes. On the whole, it was a good action flick. I hope not to disappoint, but this successor does not rate as highly.

I have to say the action sequences are even better. The CG is more carefully designed where motion is less blurring and the robots are more distinct in the fights. When there was action on the screen, I was loving it for the most part. When anything else was going on though, the prospects were a bit more dank. The scale is much more grand with regard to action, number of robots, etc., but this is also leads precisely this movie’s downfall. Outside of say 5 or so robots total, the rest are generic, poorly defined, and ultimately placeholders in the plot. For being a bigger, longer movie, the plot/story line is mostly non-existent and often is riddled with unexplained events. Now, this isn’t truly a deal-breaker given that Michael Bay brought the explosions, but it certainly didn’t help.

Now, come the real problems in my opinion; obvious, yet COMPLETELY unnecessary trash added to the film:

Dogs humping peoples’ legs
Robot humping peoples’ legs
“Rascist” robots – 2 robots based on what appears to be African-American stereotypes. I doubt they were intended to be offensive and many seem fine with them, but I found their inclusion to be at the very least jarring and unfortunate.
Robot “balls” – Ugh, enough said
Cursing robots

Much of this seems to be intended to drive towards the younger demographics, but I’d be curious to know why they did what they did. I’m sure I may be missing somethings, but the above could have been cut without ANY LOSS and it would have been heading in the right direction of shaving 30-45 minutes of the runtime. You see given all of the above, the main pain point for me is that the movie is just TOO LONG. I think if it had been properly edited and moved along a more brisk pace, much of the issues could have been avoided.

Now, don’t get me wrong. It is an enjoyable movie. I’m glad I saw it and will likely watch it on Blu-ray many times in the future when I can fast forward when needed. Bay brought the explosions, the babes, and Optimus Prime. This alone made the movie worth watching, but all of the rest drags its overall value down.

Mark Turner: Taxing online retailers

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 12:51:26 +0000

After fighting to keep North Carolina from becoming a broadband backwater, this particularly galls me. The North Carolina General Assembly is pushing a finance bill that would tax online retailers. Rather than pay a tax in a state where it has no presence, Amazon simply pulled the plug on its affiliate program for North Carolina residents. So rather than doing something positive for the state, the attempt to tax companies like Amazon has actually hurt North Carolina small businesses that depend on those referrals by cutting off access to that income.

This outcome is not surprising. Tax a company with no presence or investment in the state and that company has little to keep it from pulling the plug on serving that state. That hurts our citizens more than it does the companies targeted, and that’s just plain dumb.

I sure would like to see a smarter approach by the legislature towards technology and the Internet. Those who regulate technology should at least make an attempt to understand it.

Warren Myers: that was different

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 12:22:30 +0000

I’ve been in Singapore for two weeks.

Today I stopped at a bar near where I’ve been stayng for a snack and a couple beverages.

It took me a couple-few minutes to figure out what was going on, but apparently the legalized prostitution industry in Singapore isn’t limited to the red-light district.

Hopefully I did a good job of fending them off, but I’d prefer to have not been in the scenario to start with

Mark Turner: UNC-TV explains its tower situation

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 02:24:17 +0000

UNC TV has posted an online video explaining its tower situation and why its DTV transition didn’t go smoothly. It turns out when Congress delayed the original February cutover date WUNC lost its commitment with its tower crew. Therefore it will have to wait until the crew can get back around to switching antennas off its Chatham county tower.

Alan Porter: What was I saying?

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 02:22:39 +0000

Now that I am married and have two kids, I find that I have to edit my stories down to under a minute and a half. Otherwise, the end of the story just never makes it out.

“Hi Honey, how was your day at work?”

“I have to tell you about this new tool we discovered today. We were installing our network software on a cluster of machines, which is usually pretty tedious and time consuming. And then one of the guys pulls out this live CD, and …”

“Daddy, is rice a vegetable or a fruit?”

“Hey kids, put that stuff down and wash your hands and face… now!”

“My friend Drew says that Megan won’t talk to Carter because his sister is mean!”

“I think the dog just threw up.”

What was I saying again? Oh yeah, 90 seconds. Sigh.

Alan Porter: Firefox plug-in: SyncPlaces

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 02:08:11 +0000

Early last year, I decided that my tired old HP laptop wanted to retire, and I started shopping for a new one. However, before I could find a suitable replacement, I discovered the Asus Eee PC, and I knew that I had to have one.

It did not make a lot of sense to buy a new laptop and a new Eee PC as well, so I held off buying a laptop. Over time, the Eee PC became my primary machine. Sometimes, I would plug in an external monitor and mouse and keyboard. And other times, I would just use it by itself. After a while, I migrated all of my old stuff off of the laptop and onto a mini- file server, and I eventually left the tired old laptop powered off.

I started using the HP laptop again when I started working from home, but I never really installed anything other than NX. On a whim, I installed the latest Ubuntu, Jaunty Jackalope (9.04), and that really breathed new life into the tired old laptop.

So now I find myself strattling the fence, sometimes using the tired old (but rejuvinated) HP laptop, and sometimes using the Eee PC. Since I keep most of my important stuff on an encrypted thumb drive, it was pretty easy to switch back and forth.

But there was one thing missing… my Firefox bookmarks.

I don’t like the idea of storing my stuff (tax records, email, bookmarks, or anything else) on a site like Google or xmarks (formerly foxmarks). So I went looking for a plug-in that would allow me to synchronize my bookmarks among multiple machines, but use my own server for storage.

SyncPlaces does a pretty good job of that.

It can sync using FTP (yuck) or https (yay) to a WebDAV-enabled server. It only took a few minutes to figure out WebDAV, and pretty soon I had the same bookmarks on the HP laptop and on the Eee PC.

Greg Brown: Close To Me - The Cure

noreply@blogger.com (Parlez à la Main) — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 19:03:06 +0000

I’ve waited hours for this
I’ve made myself so sick
I wish I’d stayed
asleep today

I never thought this day would end
I never thought tonight could ever be
this close to me

just try to see in the dark
just try to make it work
to feel the fear before you're here
make the shapes come much too close
I pull my eyes out
hold my breath
and wait until I shake...

but if I had your faith
then I could make it safe and clean
if only I was sure
that my head on the door was a dream

I’ve waited hours for this
I’ve made myself so sick
I wish I’d stayed asleep today
I never thought this day would end
I never thought tonight could ever be
this close to me

but if I had your face
then I could make it safe and clean
if only I was sure that my head on the door was a dream too

Mark Turner: Donkey Kong terrorizes Raleigh

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 16:47:34 +0000

My friend Janet sent me a link to this 8-foot-tall Donkey Kong that Gamil Design created outside the Designbox offices in downtown Raleigh. It rocks!

Bill Vinson: HP’s Classic Calculators on iPhone

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 14:33:21 +0000

HP releases iPhone versions of classic calculators | Software | iPhone Central | Macworld.

I never personally used any of these as the TI calculators were what I used in school, but the idea of bringing back an icon is very cool. Now, the prices seem somewhat untenable to me. Now if you loved one of these, it’s definitely worth checking out…

HP 15C Scientific Calculator – $29.99

HP 12C Financial Calculator – $14.99

Greg Brown: RIP Michael Jackson

noreply@blogger.com (Parlez à la Main) — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 12:15:04 +0000

I didn't write this yesterday because I did not feel like writing 'R.I.P.' again and, personally, I wonder to what degree MJ was actually guilty of child molestation. He was found not guilty by a jury of his peers and I still have a bit of faith in the system, even in the "post O.J." chapter of jurisprudence. Besides, as a mortal human being it matters not what I think. I know what my beliefs are regarding what happens after death but I wonder what MJ thought. Did he worry about his treatment in the hereafter? Oh he knows.

Well, MJ, you were a force on the pop scene, that much is undeniable. Dying at the age of 50 can only be described as "untimely".

I said this yesterday and I'll say it again: NO MORE DYING! NOBODY!

Mark Turner: Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 01:13:42 +0000

Two 70s icons checked out today. Farrah Fawcett, sex symbol and actress, succumbed to cancer this morning at the age of 62. Before anyone could properly mourn her, news came that Michael Jackson had also died – heart attack at the age of 52.

Around 1979, these two among the most famous celebrities ever. Farrah as a pinup and Charlie’s Angels actress, and Michael for his never-ending string of hit singles. When I was ten it seemed that every boy on the block had a Farrah poster and a Michael Jackson album.

It seems that when your childhood icons pass away a little part of you goes with them.

David Rasch: Happy Clayton – Father’s Day 2009

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 23:32:03 +0000

Happy Clayton – Father’s Day 2009

Greg Brown: RIP Farrah Fawcett

noreply@blogger.com (Parlez à la Main) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 21:31:32 +0000

Jeez.. no more dying. Nobody. For no reason. No here. Not in Iran. Nowhere. I'm tired of writing 'R.I.P.'.

Greg Brown: RIP, Dr. Jerri Nielsen FitzGerald

noreply@blogger.com (Parlez à la Main) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 14:44:00 +0000

Dr. Jerri Nielsen FitzGerald, the physician who discovered symptoms of breast cancer in herself while trapped wintering over at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station has died of cancer at the age of 57. Her book* is a good read and I do recommend anyone with an interest in South Pole history grab a copy.

Rest east, Dr. Jerri. You were a trooper and will be missed by many.

* Apparently I first linked to a children's version of her book which can be found here. Original link updated to point to the original version of the book.

Mark Turner: Mark Sanford

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 02:21:19 +0000

Anyone not see this coming?

Favorite Tweet: “I believe marriage is between a man and a woman and a hot Argentine chick.” – Mark Sanford.

Mark Turner: Kodachrome

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 17:34:39 +0000

Kodachrome will be no more. Check out some reminiscences, the Kodachrome Project and Kodak’s Kodachrome Sildeshow.

Kodachrome (YouTube)
Paul Simon

When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school
It’s a wonder I can think at all
And though my lack of education hasn’t hurt me none
I can read the writing on the wall

Kodachrome
You give us those nice bright colors
You give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah!
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So Mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away

If you took all the girls I knew when I was single
And brought them all together for one night
I know they’d never match my sweet imagination
And everything looks worse in black and white

Mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away

Greg Brown: Kodachrome. Goodnight, old friend

noreply@blogger.com (Parlez à la Main) — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 12:14:34 +0000

This year marks the last that the 74 year old stand-by Kodachrome will be produced. Goodbye, old friend!

Tarus Balog: All Right Mr. De Mille, I’m Ready for My Close-Up

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 20:17:32 +0000

A couple of weeks ago we found out that OpenNMS has been nominated for a Sourceforge.net Community Choice award as “The Best Tool for the Enterprise”. Many thanks to everyone who nominated us, and I hope you’ll vote for us once more.

As part of the voting process, Ross Turk asked us why we should win this award. I can think of a number of reasons (well, beyond the fame and huge monetary prize), but the main one is that OpenNMS is an example of what can be accomplished with a small but dedicated group of people and the open source development model. OpenNMS can compete with products from companies like IBM and HP, which are orders of magnitude larger, and yet remain 100% free and open software. While there is a commercial company behind the project, it has survived on the business model of “spend less than you earn” and has not accepted outside investment. There is no need for a special, proprietary “enterprise” version of the software - the only OpenNMS version is the enterprise version. There are people out there who believe that it is not possible to create enterprise-grade software under the open source model without some sort of proprietary software “extensions”, but if you understand it and can be true to your community, open source works, which is why I’d like to see us win this award.

Another thing that Ross asked us to do was to make a video showcasing the project. We had a lot of fun with it, and it is now up on YouTube:

As much as I’d like us to win this award, I’m not optimistic. Seriously, the previous winners have included OpenOffice, Firebird and Zimbra - all of which have much more money and many more users than OpenNMS. However, it was worth going through the whole process if just to create this video. I’ve been hoping to capture what it is like to be a part of a vibrant open source community, if just to be able to explain it to others, and this is pretty close to perfection. Many thanks to Jeff and his friend Robbie for pulling an all-nighter to get this done.

At one point in time back in 2002, the “formal” OpenNMS team consisted of just me on my farm in rural North Carolina. Now we have over 20 people in the Order of the Green Polo and over 40 committers. In this video we have people of all shapes and sizes from around the United States as well as four other countries (Venezuela, France, Italy and the UK). For someone like myself with few talents outside of a big mouth, it humbles me to see so much involvement on this project, and it is a honor to be able to work on it with these people.

Check out the video, and for those of you who can’t commit to ten minutes, we’ve also made a one minute trailer, also on YouTube:

If you need a laugh to start your week, at least check that out, and remember to vote.

Jesse Morgan: Jaunty’s Accidental Second Chance

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 17:31:36 +0000

So last week in an attempt to update… something (*shrug*, don’t remember what), I upgraded to intrepid, which bumped me up to kde4. It was a lot smoother this time around, but there were a few bugs left… mainly the fglrx driver didn’t like me. so I decided to go full bore and try jaunty again. it’d been 2 months since initial release, so it should be a bit more stable.

Well, things sorta exploded. fglrx still wouldn’t work. I ended up burning a copy and doing a clean install (my home dir is on another partition now so no data loss!) I got jaunty up and running fine with the radeon driver rather than the fglrx driver, and started getting everything into place. And by ‘use the radeon driver’ I mean remove all fglrx packages so it defaults to radeon (or whatever else).

Knetworkmanager still sucks, but the plasmoid worked properly this time and is quite nice.

When I got to work I burned half an hour trying to get dual monitors working (again, trying to get fglrx working) and found xrandr works great now. I used the following command to set up my dual monitors:

sudo xrandr –output LVDS –preferred –mode 1600×1200 –auto –left-of DVI-0 –output DVI-0 –auto –mode 1680×1050

and the following is the ONLY xorg config I have:

Section “Device”
Identifier “Configured Video Device”
EndSection

Section “Monitor”
Identifier “Configured Monitor”
EndSection

Section “Screen”
Identifier “Default Screen”
Monitor “Configured Monitor”
Device “Configured Video Device”
SubSection “Display”
Virtual 3280 1200
EndSubSection
EndSection

Note the only thing I added with the Display subsection. Anyone who’s been using Linux on GUIs for the past 10 years can tell you how amazing that configuration is, and how far Xorg, xrandr and linux as a whole have come.

Amarok gave me some problems, but I was just missing some codecs. I forced KDE to 96 DPI and the screen looks great. The one thing I’m missing now is a functional Quickaccess plasmoid (on that does vertical mode properly) and I’m good. maybe I’ll write about the plasmoids (widgets) I’m using later.

There are the occasional video glitches here and there- mainly flickers or lines that flash for a 10th of a second and then are gone for an hour or 3. The other thing is when I pop open krunner and begin to type, there’s a little noise in the box. over my text as it tries to resize the window.

Other that that minor annoyance I think I’ve been converted to kde 4. That’s an amazing turnaround.

Alan Porter: Pidgin and Yahoo

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 16:53:04 +0000

I ran into a strange bug with pidgin where I could not log into Yahoo. Strace did not shed any light on the problem:

gettimeofday({1245688276, 23774}, NULL) = 0
open("/home/alan/.gnome2/nautilus-sendto/spool", O_RDONLY...
fstat64(7, {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0755, st_size=4096, ...
getdents(7, /* 3 entries */, 4096)      = 48
getdents(7, /* 0 entries */, 4096)      = 0
close(7)                                = 0
read(3, 0x93c4508, 4096)                = -1 EAGAIN ...
gettimeofday({1245688276, 24697}, NULL) = 0
poll([{fd=4, events=POLLIN}, {fd=3, events=POLLIN},...

Instead, the answer came from a blog post here.

Yahoo changed their login protocol. Pidgin released an update. Ubuntu did not propagate the fix, apparently because it was not a security bug, but new functionality.

The pidgin developers have released an Ubuntu package in their PPA (Personal Package Archive). See the details at the pidgin web site here.

Mark Turner: Moon missions

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 16:46:48 +0000

NASA launched the first lunar mission in over a decade last week. The LRO and LCROSS shared the same rocket launch of June 18th to begin their missions of mapping and probing the moon in support of future lunar missions. Though their missions began the same way, each will end quite differently. LRO go into lunar orbit, producing high-resolution maps for use as potential landing spots. LCROSS will have a more abrupt finish: slamming kamikaze-style into a dark lunar crater in hopes of kicking up signs of water ice.

The missions are due to reach the moon tomorrow morning at 5:43 AM EDT. If you’d like to follow along, you can check out NASA’s moon mission blog.

Alan Porter: South East Linux Fest (SELF)

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 16:44:13 +0000

I spent the weekend in Clemson SC at the first South East Linux Fest.

It was a great chance to geek out with a bunch of Linux enthusiasts, as well as some of the movers and shakers in the industry.

We enjoyed presentations on topics that ranged from SQLite and the fsync() bug to Asterisk, Open Street Map and the Ubuntu kernel. These guys provided a clear perspective of how the open source world organizes and operates on a daily basis. And their projects just glowed with coolness, which created this viral kind of buzz around the entire event, whether you were a casual Linux user or a hardcore developer.

In the vendor area, we were wooed by several distros, a handful of businesses that sell services around open source software, and some content providers (that is, podcasters and “nerdcore” rappers). We were treated to several raffles… woot!

Mad props go out to the planners of the event, which seemed to go off without a hitch.

Bill Vinson: He had me at Kwisatz Haderach…

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 03:18:43 +0000

Click here to view the embedded video.

I loved this roast, but I’m not sure the subject matter entirely engaged the whole crowd at the Radio & TV Correspondents’ Dinner, but I found it engaging and hilarious. Anyone who can spend time with the President’s attention discussing Dune is great by me

Mark Turner: Neda

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 01:26:46 +0000

I watched the disturbing video today of the young Iranian student named Neda Agha Soltan being shot dead and it made me very angry. I know that many Iranians must feel the same way.

With Ayatollah Khamenei determined to stand by this election the stakes in Iran have now risen considerably. I don’t see the forces that have swept Iran this week being easily put back in the bottle. Every student in the streets of Tehran can identify with Neda, and it must now be perfectly clear to them the price they might pay if they wish to succeed.

Freedom can be theirs. The question is: how badly do they want it?

Mark Turner: Father’s Day weekend

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 00:58:10 +0000

Wow. All of this in one weekend.

Friday evening: Seaboard Music featured a bluegrass band. We kept the kids up past 10 PM: a rarity for us.
Saturday morning/afternoon: I spend 5 hours at the Raleigh CAC retreat while the kids attend a birthday party. We later all meet up for a few hours of swimming at Ridge Road Pool.
Saturday evening: The family visits our neighbor’s house for their annual neighborhood party. Dozens and dozens of neighbors are there, and another bluegrass band. The kids make new friends but quickly wear out and Kelly takes them home. I visit some more before walking home around 10 PM.
Sunday morning/afternoon: Father’s Day! A family bike ride on the greenway, followed by lunch. We then make the trip across town to visit my parents. My aunt is visiting this week so we chatted a bit and showed off the kids.
Sunday evening: I grill chicken for dinner. We watch more of my Planet Earth DVDs and tuck the kids into bed.

Now its time for me to relax as this has been a high-energy weekend. Sure beats being bored!

Mark Turner: Father and sun

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 12:15:33 +0000

Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there, and happy Summer Solstice for everyone!

Mark Turner: First tomato of the season

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 02:37:11 +0000

Today we enjoyed our first home-grown tomato of the season! I was surprised to water the plants this morning and find a ripe tomato there but there it was. It was actually already on the plant when I got it from the Executive Mansion by way of an Oakwood neighbor, so at least some of the home in the home-grown part is the governor’s home.

As per family tradition, we sliced it up so that each family member got a piece and enjoyed it with dinner. Now I already can’t wait for more!