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Fedora 8 Everything Spin Released! — Fedora Unity Project

By Ted Roche on November 15, 2007 in Linux, OpenSource, Technology

The Fedora Unity Project announces Fedora 8 Everything Spin Released!: “The Fedora Unity Project is proud to announce the release of new spin, the Everything Spin. Included in this spin are all the packages available at the time Fedora 8 was released.”

A neat feature of recent ( 7 & 8 ) Fedora releases is the ability to create your own derivative distributions based on the tools supplied with the package. This allows the LiveCD and LiveUSB features I mentioned earlier, and allows independent groups to create specialized disk images (“spins” in their inside chatter) to meet specific needs, in this case, a set of CDs for those who don’t have a DVD handy. I ran into this situation recently with a customer who had chosen to economize on his server specifications by cutting out a DVD that was likely to be used only a few times over the lifetime of the hardware. It’s cool that the Fedora build process has been made public and the tools to do this added to the distro itself.

Red Hat Magazine | I am Fedora, and so can you!

By Ted Roche on November 8, 2007 in Linux, OpenSource, Technology

Max Spevack, the benevolent dictator in charge of herding cats for the Fedora project, doesn’t announce the official release of Fedora 8 today in his posting, I am Fedora, and so can you! in Red Hat Magazine, but it’s out there. (His post is actually a great HOWTO on running Fedora off a USB memory stick, neat trick that that is!) Find the bittorrents and conventional downloads at http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora and hop aboard. I run Fedora, and so can you!

Slide presentations: S5 and Google Present

By Ted Roche on November 6, 2007 in CSS, Home Page, Technology

I’ve mentioned and endorsed S5 (the Simple Standards-based Slide Show System, if memory serves) before, as a great way to write a presentation, and at the same time generate slides, handouts and the HTML to post it to the internet, all as the same set of documents. Creating a set of slides in S5 means I don’t have to worry if the machine at the presentation site has a ‘viewer’ as long as they can read standard XHTML and run Javascript. I can post it directly to my web site archive of shows, and carry it on a USB tab in case my laptop decides not to work.

Google has recently announced Google Present as part of their free Google Apps. It’s a pretty cool AJAXy interface familiar to anyone who’s worked with one the many slide programs. One killer feature is that it will import PowerPoint files, even some of the ugly old ones. You can publish them online as I’ve done here with a Y2K presentation from the dFPUG Conference. The import came over with pretty good fidelity, far better than the original HTML export that PowerPoint 9 attempted. So far, so good. But what happens if you’re planning on doing a presentation and can’t trust the internet will be available (important safety tip here, folks: you can’t trust the internet to be available. Murphy has a special place in his heart for presentations)? Even better news: Google Apps also lets you download a copy of this. It comes down as a ZIP file, handy to throw on a USB tab (you should save an unzipped copy, too) and put in a different bag than the one that holds your laptop. It unZIPs to an HTML file and a couple folders holding the CSS, JavaScript, images and supporting files to run the show and runs from a local disk. You could upload this version to your web site, too, and look what you get: a slick slideshow with slides, fonts and graphics that scale to size of the screen (essential when you discover the projector can only handle 800×600!) and redraw pretty snappily.

Finally, S5 has a competitor! This one looks promising.

Max Spevack: FC6 end of life is December 7

By Ted Roche 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.

MonadLUG notes, 11-October-2007: Ben Scott and DNS

By Ted Roche on October 27, 2007 in Linux, OpenSource, Technology

Late post: a great meeting Thursday night the 11th of October: thirteen people made it to the October meeting of the Monadnock Area Linux User Group, held as usual at the SAU #1 offices in Peterborough on the second Thursday at 7 PM. Thanks to Ken for sponsoring us at the offices, and dealing diplomatically with the double-booking of the space.

Ben had a little trouble finding the place, after a long, long drive from Dover. We forgot to mention in the driving directions which of the dozens of “Use other door” doors the meeting was held behind, so Ben had to find the Boy Scout meeting and the girls volleyball practices before finding us. Charlie promised to update the directions.

Nonplussed by all of this, Ben gave a great presentation on DNS, reprising his previous presentations. He’d replaced the MagicPoint presentation with S5, and had a few technical issues with getting it to behave, but persevered. I expect we’ll see an update to the slides on:

http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/PresentDNS

But the other files there (bind configuration files, sample inside and external zone files, etc.) should be relevant.

Ben gave a great overview of the Domain Name System and how it works from several client OSes, how the trail of DNS queries is processed, the structure of zone files, the structure of the BIND configuration files, and many of the common misconfigurations that lead to errors or just quiet failures.

It was a meeting well worth attending. Thanks to Ben for efforts above and beyond, to Charlie for hosting and managing the meeting, and to Ken and the SAU#1 offices for providing the facilities.

PySIG notes, 25-Oct-2007, Kent Johnson and Beautiful Soup sprint

By Ted Roche on October 26, 2007 in LAMP, OpenSource, Python, Technology

Thirteen people elected to skip watching the second game of the World Series (Go Sox!) to attend the October meeting of the Python Special Interest Group (PySIG), held as usual at the Amoskeag Business Incubator in Manchester, New Hampshire, on the fourth Thursday of the month, 7 PM until… well, 10 PM last night!

The usual slew of announcements was made: the PySIG won’t meet on the usual night due to the Thanksgiving holiday. A meeting might happen the week after, since there are five Thursdays. Stay tuned for the official announcement. Other affiliated GNHLUG meetings are posted to http://www.gnhlug.org and all are welcome.

I had proposed a programming challenge to PySIG: following recent discussions on the GNHLUG mailing lists about attendance at meetings, Jim Kuzdrall had suggested we more closely analyze the attendance data that’s been posted to the GNHLUG wiki [1] for the past two years or so. The data is accessible from there, but the HTML format is not too easy to manipulate into an analyze-able format.

Enter BeautifulSoup. BS is a utility written in Python that parses HTML, with a lot of toleration for somewhat malformed HTML, and produces a parsed tree that can be traversed or queried or parsed into its various elements. Kent S Johnson continued his great Kent’s Korner series with a presentation on the basics of using BeautifulSoup. Kent noted that the documentation on BS is remarkably good, with illustrative examples and exhaustive discussions. BS is in its third major version and continues to be supported by its original author.

After Kent’s Korner, Bill Sconce took the driver’s seat, set up BS on his machine and we began with the kernel of source Kent had supplied to parse the source. The group participated, suggested, yelled at typos, experimented, threw out code, started over, changed the angle of attack, and successfully produced code that not only parsed the existing page, but generated a comma-separated-value file with proper escaping, thanks to the csv module. Along the way, we discussed issued of character conversion (since BS uses the aptly-named UnicodeDammit module and csv wants ASCII), escaping issues, coding styles, and more.

At the end of the presentation, Kent got the projector again to show a somewhat different tack he had used to parse the HTML, with an emphasis on writing small functions to clean each column of the idiosyncracies found in the data (a “Saturday” in the date field, a date field a two-day event, approximated attendance ~24 and so forth) and generate some results: which groups had the highest attendance for the year? No one was surprised that Nashua/MerriLUG was #1, but who knew that PySIG was #2? Woo-hoo! We noted that RubySIG was last, but there’s a good sampling problem: they had just started up early in the year, and a couple attendance figures were missing.

To follow up from the meeting, we intended to merge Kent’s improvements into the group’s code and generate some CSV files that we can make available for download from the GNHLUG wiki for all to analyze, graph, visualize and study.

Thanks to Kent for preparing his Beautiful Soup presentation, to Bill Sconce and Alex Hewitt for arranging the meeting, to Bill again for having the patience to type while twelve people tsk’d at him, to the Amoskeag Business Incubator for providing the fine facilities, and to all for attending and vigorously participating in the meeting!

[1] which actually breaks down to:
http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/PastEvents2007,
http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/PastEvents2006, and
http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/PastEvents2005

Adding a “skin=print.pattern” eliminates some of the “chrome”
surrounding the content.

November 1: Real-Time Linux, Ed Haynes of Wind River, at DLSLUG

By Ted Roche on October 25, 2007 in Linux, OpenSource, Technology

The Dartmouth-Lake Sunapee Linux User Group will be hosting Ed Haynes of Wind River, presenting some of Wind River’s innovations on the Linux kernel to produce real-time Linux. Here’s the announcement from coordinator Bill McGonigle. Should be a fun meeting! Note the the meeting is held in Haldeman building, next door to our past location, in the lower level of the building.

Python Special Interest Group, Manchester, NH, 25-Oct-2007: Kent Johnson and Beautiful Soup

By Ted Roche on October 25, 2007 in LAMP, OpenSource, Python, Technology

The monthly meeting of the New Hampshire Python Special Interest Group takes place at the Amoskeag Business Incubator, Manchester, NH on 25 October 2007 (the 4th Thursday as usual) at 7:00PM. The Beginners’ session precedes at 6:30 PM. (Bring a Python question!)

Kent S. Johnson will be the featured speaker. Along with his regular Kent’s Korner presentation, we’re going to try hacking at some actual code problems tonight: using Beautiful Soup to parse a web page and produce some useful data. Should be interesting.

Organizer Bill Sconce posts the meeting announcement here.

When is a document not a document?

By Ted Roche on October 23, 2007 in Microsoft, Security, Technology

When is a document not a document? Perhaps when it contains executable code. Executable code can do bad things to your computer if it has the security permissions to do so or if it exploits flaws in the way the document readers execute the code. A Word document with AutoRun macros is an executable program in the form of document. A web page containing Javascript (or JScript or VBScript or Java or Flash) is an executable. Without limiting what functionality these executables can access, an action as simple as opening a document or navigate to a web site can open your machine to exploitation.

The latest instance of this is a flaw in Adobe Reader for Windows that allows a specially crafted PDF file to exploit your machine via the mailto protocol link. The SANS Internet Storm Center documents that the PDF mailto exploit documents in the wild, that is, it’s possible for you to catch this nasty bug off a web page or via the mail.

If you’re running Windows and have Adobe Reader installed, make sure you are running the latest version (links are in the article above). And don’t open any files from untrusted sources. And don’t trust any source.

FoxPro Advisor, RIP

By Ted Roche on October 14, 2007 in FoxPro, Technology

From the Advisor website:

This information is for you, if you are a current subscriber to any of these Advisor magazines, journals or guides: Microsoft Access, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Visual FoxPro, Microsoft Visual Studio, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Professional Development, Microsoft Visual Basic .NET, IBM Lotus Software, IBM WebSphere Software, IBM Workplace Software, Novell GroupWise, Business Collaboration, Corporate Compliance, E-Discovery, Law Technology… Your subscription has been upgraded to DataBased Advisor, giving you more than 10,000 articles, tips and downloads — at no charge.

And another kicker:

Even though a new subscription to DataBased Advisor carries a much higher price tag, you are getting it at no extra charge for the duration of your current subscription.

Looks like new subscriptions are $277 a year. Good luck to John and Jeannie on this new venture!

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