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Max Spevack: FC6 end of life is December 7

By on November 6, 2007 in Home Page, Linux, Technology

Max Spevack blogs fedora core 6 end of life is december 7:

Those of you who dont read the fedora-devel-announce list but who do read Fedora Planet will probably be interested in this reminder: Fedora 8 will be released on Thursday November 8th, 2007. According to our policy of “supporting release X until one month after release X 2”, Fedora Core 6s end of life date will be Friday December 7th, 2007. Fedora Core 6 Zod was released on October 24th, 2006. Its total supported lifespan will end up being 13.5 months. Fedora 7 will be supported until about 1 month after Fedora 9 is released.

This is the Paradox of Change: we want our software to evolve, keep moving forward, improving, but we hate the costs of upkeep. Backup, reinstall, reconfigure, restore, tweak, update, etc. is a long process, though worthwhile. Bear in mind that this is fedora’s legacy: it’s for folks who like to surf the cutting edge, at the cost of flatten-and-restore. If you want more stable choices, there are many, at the cost of not getting to play with (and risk getting cut on the sharp edges of) the latest stuff.

Someone at last Thursday’s LUG meeting asked about the feasibility of upgrading an Ubuntu install done “middle of last year” with the latest 7.10 release, and the folks were skeptical, at best. I recently tried an in-place upgrade of 7.04 to 7.10, but that was a pretty clean and fresh install and it went well. Others have not been so fortunate. The best practices of Freemanizing™ a machine (backup, format, install from scratch, clean installs of new versions, copy over data, preferences, scripts and settings) still has some merit, I think.

Happy Halloween

By on October 31, 2007 in Home Page, Python
Free Software Foundation - click for more info!

Treats this year included getting some of my annual charitable contributions done before the 31st of December. A new contribution this year was to become a member of the Free Software Foundation, the group responsible for the GNU Public License, along with many other good works. Help them to help you. I did.

Study: P2P effect on legal music sales

By on October 3, 2007 in Home Page, Personal, Technology

This is has been sitting around in the draft bin for too long: Study: P2P effect on legal music sales “not statistically distinguishable from zero”
“A new study in the Journal of Political Economy by Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf has found that illegal music downloads have had no noticeable effects on the sale of music, contrary to the claims of the recording industry.”

Great news. Music sales go up and down because demand goes up and down, quality goes up and down, the economy and affordability and attractiveness of music varies.

Book recommendation: CSS, Separating Content from Presentation

By on September 27, 2007 in Home Page, Technology

I wanted to make a strong recommendation you pick up Cascading Style Sheets: Separating Content from Presentation, Second Edition, Second Edition. I read the first half of the book a couple of weekends ago and was so inspired, I tore into one of my websites for a major overhaul. The book lays out the issues of CSS, the tricks to implementations, and the details of how rules and selectors and cascading and “inheritance” (I have to quote it – CSS inheritance is much more containership than OOP’s version of inheritance, a poor choice of terms, imo). The writing is fast-paced, easily-comprehensible and entertaining. Best CSS book I’ve read to date.

Clippy on a rampage: exploit code appears for Microsoft Agent bug

By on September 13, 2007 in Home Page, Microsoft, Security

September 13, 2007 Computerworld —Exploit code appears for Microsoft Agent bug “It took less than 24 hours for attackers to crank out proof-of-concept code targeting the one critical vulnerability disclosed — and patched — Tuesday morning by Microsoft, security researchers warned.” Ouch. A Day One exploit. Hopefully, Microsoft’s distribution of their updated Agent patches via Windows Update will be speedier than the bad guy’s spreading of their exploit.

Seacoast LUG Notes, 10-Sept-2007, Ben Scott on RAID and LVM

By on September 11, 2007 in Home Page, Linux, OpenSource, Technology

Twelve people attended last night’s session of the Seacoast Linux User Group, a chapter of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group, held as usual on the second Monday of the month at the UNH Durham campus, Morse Hall room 301.

Ben Scott had presented “RAID and LVM” and he had lots of information, and attendees had lots of questions, comments and war stories. There was plenty of participation, and Ben was still going strong when I had to
excuse myself at 10 PM. Ben had some good tables in HTML and diagrams in SVG to show the concepts, and used the network to log into his home machine and the GNHLUG web server Liberty to demonstrate the command line and GUI tools used to manage and maintain LVM and RAID. Side discussions included disaster recovery, pros and cons to reliability, redundancy and downtime, and the use of SMART interfaces on hard disk
drives. I’m sure everyone learned something. I certainly did.

Thanks to Ben for the presentation and Rob for hosting the meeting.

Seacoast LUG 10-Sept-2007: Ben Scott on RAID and LVM

By on September 10, 2007 in Home Page, Linux, OpenSource, Technology
  • What : RAID and LVM storage management
  • Date : Mon 10 Sep 2007 (TONIGHT)
  • Time : 7 PM to 9 PM
  • Where: Room 301, Morse Hall, UNH, Durham, NH

For the September 2007 SLUG/Seacoast/UNH/Durham meeting, Ben Scott
will be speaking on storage management using RAID and LVM.

=== About the presentation ===

RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) and LVM (Logical Volume
Manager) let you do more with your disks than create partitions and
filesystems. With RAID, you can combine disks to make larger
filesystems, and/or add redundancy to help protect against disk
failure. LVM takes that a step further, by letting you create
arbitrary Logical Volumes (to hold filesystems), which can be easily
reallocated, resized, moved, and copied (snapshots).

Ben will be talking about some of the concepts, review the tools and
techniques available, and (hopefully) doing a live demonstration of
some of the things you can do. The specifics will be flexible, in
response to attendee demand.

=== About the speaker ===

Ben is a local Linux user, enthusiast, and advocate. He handles the
care and feeding of the GNHLUG Internet server, and is a GNHLUG
Bored^W Board Member.

=== About SLUG ===

SLUG is the Seacoast Linux User Group, and is a chapter of GNHLUG,
the Greater NH Linux User Group. Rob Anderson is the SLUG
coordinator. SLUG meets the second Monday of every month, same time,
same place. You can find out more about SLUG and GNHLUG at the
http://slug.gnhlug.org/ and http://www.gnhlug.org/ websites.

Meetings take place starting at 7:00 PM. Meetings are open to all.
The meeting proper ends around 9ish, but it’s not uncommon to find
hangers-on there until 10 or later. They take place in Room 301 (the
third floor conference room), of Morse Hall, at the University of New
Hampshire, in Durham.

Schedules Direct supplies TV/cable schedules for MythTV users

By on September 10, 2007 in Home Page, LAMP, Linux, MySQL, OpenSource, Technology

“Schedules Direct is a non-profit organization that provides raw U.S./Canadian tv listing data to Free and Open Source Applications. Those applications then use the data to provide things like PVR functionality, search tools, and private channel grids.” Recently, the Tribune Media Services company Zap2It decided to discontinue their free service that had  provided TV/cable schedules to home hobbiests. Schedules Direct was formed by advocates for the various home-brewed PVRs to step in and supply the content. After negotiations with a number of vendors, they ended up back with TMS as their supplier. In a matter of weeks, the Schedules Direct crew managed to set up the infrastructure to provide a 10-day trial membership, a paid subscription service ($15/3 months initially, with a goal of $20/year or less once they establish the viability of the service) and a working infrastructure. Users of MythTV need to upgrade to the most recent (v 0.20.2 or later) version and change their configuration to use the new service. I switched over the weekend, confirmed I could read the new schedules, and paid up for the first three months. What a great example of the community coming together to supply their own needs.

GNHLUG has had several MythTV meetings, and I anticipate more in the future. Jarod Wilson presented a very popular session at the Merrimack Valley Linux User Group last year, and that lead to an effort by Jarod and maddog and others to run a series of MythTV installfests at NHTI.

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