FUDCon Raleigh 2008
© Russell Harrison

I just wanted to remind all the flickr users that took pictures at FUDCon last week that we started a flickr group durring FUDCon 9.  It would be nice to keep that pool going so if you have some pictures you can add to the pool from any FUDCon past or pressent please do.  Those of us that couldn’t make it this time would love to see what everyone was up to.

I took this picture on my honeymoon. You’ve seen it before, but where?

First geek to identify where they’ve seen this picture before wins! © Russell Harrison

Update: No Google searches, its cheating.

OK fine I’ll jump on…
[rusharri@rusharri-lnx-t61p ~]$ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head
207 ls
168 cd
66 more
63 sudo
36 ssh
29 evolution
29 emacs
28 for
24 rpm
23 rm

Yes that evolution in there is from having to do a evolution --force-shutdown all the time because the exchange connector feels much hatred.
[rusharri@rusharri-lnx ~]$ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head
216 ls
164 cd
120 ssh
66 sudo
49 more
40 man
30 ll
29 rm
23 df
18 ps

Late last year the Linux Foundation’s Desktop Working Group posted the results of their 2007 Linux Desktop/Client Survey. I finally got around to trying to take a little bit closer look at the data. I was pretty taken with the work Jef Spaleta has been doing producing maps for various Fedora Project statistics. I wanted to see if I could apply the same tools to the IPs from the responses to the desktop Linux survey. It was surprisingly easy given that Jef had already done all the heavy lifting.

Here they are broken down by survey language and finally all of the responses together.

Tonight I was replying to an email from a friend of mine who wanted to know why I didn’t support Hillary Clinton’s bid for president. That’s a topic for a different post but while looking at each of the candidate’s sites I was struck by something. How important money is to each of them? I grabbed a screen shot of the first screen you’d see on each of their sites.

Lets start with Barack Obama, who’s breaking all kinds of fund raising records.

A donate button and a store link. Seems reasonable, especially considering campaigns these days live and die on fund raising.

On to John McCain:

McCain adds a “Contribute” button to his site. Again seems appropriate, especially considering he has his party’s nomination locked up. He won’t need serious cash for a few months now.

Then there’s Hillary Clinton’s site:

Wow, it seems that 75% of the first screen you see on her site is dedicated to ways to send her money.  This is totally unscientific but I do think it says something about what’s important to them.  You make the call.

Questions © Tim O’Brien

Dear Lazy Web,
We have a bunch of internal blogs at work, or we will soon. Problem is that we have many different ways for people to blog. We’re working on an official solution but there are other ways to blog. For example, some of the wiki’s have blog like features, some groups have set up their own servers, and many of the “collaboration” products out there have similar features. It would be really nice to allow people to post in the solution they like best, yet still have a central location for people to see what’s going on in our “blogosphere” so to speak.

A traditional aggregation solution like planet or Feedjack isn’t going to work because they won’t scale to the number of feeds we’d need to track. After a certain number of feeds are configured in the system its going to spend almost as much time (if not more) crawling the feeds as it would displaying them. Especially when you consider most of those feeds won’t have been updated, crawling all of them each time isn’t very efficient. Its become very clear that a solution more like Technorati is the direction we’d want to go. By only indexing sites when they “ping” it to tell it they have been updated the content can remain up to date without wasting time crawling pages that haven’t been updated.

I’m somewhat surprised that I wasn’t able to just find something to accomplish this task very quickly. It seems like it should already exist and a simple search over a freshmeat should have turned up several options.. I think I’m looking for the wrong things though because I haven’t found anything yet that does what I’d like it to. So dear lazy web what should I be looking for instead? I know it must be out there…

I’ve noticed that my post to this blog are showing up in the planet feeds I’m included in with the caption to the pictures I’ve included in the posts as the title for the post instead of the acutal title. Since I’m frequently using pictures from flickr with Creative Commons licenses my captions usually have nothing to do with the actual posts. Seems like it might be a touch confusing for readers. I’m not really sure what would be causing this or what I might need to do to fix it. Has anyone else with a WordPress.com blog noticed the same thing or is it just me?

Confusion © Smythe Richbourg

My wife’s work computer has Windows Vista installed on it. Mainly because the board didn’t want to be “going backwards”, and Vista is shiny or something. This morning it was helpful enough to move her clock for her automatically for daylight savings time. Something any modern OS should do. Problem is it moved her clock forward two hours instead of the customary one. Now it keeps telling her that she doesn’t have permission to change the time to fix it. Yep they certainty aren’t moving backwards.

Microsoft Windows Vista moving the world forward! One extra hour at a time!

I’ve been playing around with the excellent zotero Firefox extension lately. Which has me thinking about my sources and what is the proper way to cite them. Because I work with Open Source software every day I’m very conscious about giving credit for the work of others. Especially ever since I learned about the Creative Commons.

I’ve been doing a bunch of research at work lately, and even though I’m only posting it on internal wiki pages I wanted to make sure I was doing things correctly. I’d hate for something like this to happen to me. Whenever I need to learn how to do something properly I go look at what the “pros” are doing. So when I asked myself “What is the correct way to cite sources on a wiki page?” I went straight to the biggest wiki in the world. I knew they’d most likely have already tackled this question, and already had a policy to address it. I wasn’t disappointed.

The first thing I found was a new link in the toolbox section of the left column.  Its been there for years, I just hadn’t noticed it before. “Wikipedia - Cite this page” which takes me to a page that I guarantee will save many a school student’s paper grade. At the very top is a disclaimer warning that tertiary sources, such as encyclopedia articles and Wikipedia pages, aren’t considered as acceptable sources by most teachers. The Bibliographic details of the article are listed next. zotero detects these and imports them with a single click. Finally, ready for cutting and pasting, is the proper formating of the bibliography entry of the article for eight of the major style guides, BibTeX, and LaTeX. Now that’s helpful!

Oh, by the way, I did find what I was looking for. There’s extensive information on the proper way to cite sources. There’s a beginners guide, citation templates, examples, and much more. While there isn’t a set standard it apears the most popular method is to use APA style entries in the contents of footnotes.

Wikipedia gets better and better on every visit! Its an excellent research tool as a jumping off point, and I learn so much every time. Just be very carful to stay on topic or this might happen.

Máirín did a great job with some generic posters for the Fedora project. After some discussion on the fedora-marketing list she made a second set with more subdued colors. Some people really missed the more vibrant colors, and I sort of fall in between the two camps. Mainly I feel they should adhere to the Fedora brand a bit closer. You should be able to look at any marketing materials from a distance and know without reading them it pertains to the Fedora Project. So I grabbed her original svg and made a version based on the Fedora logo colors. Considering I’m a total beginner at inkscape I’m kind of proud of how they turned out.

I mean all I did was change a few color values but I can still say “I made this.” Thanks Rahul for pointing me to the font packages I needed so the text would render properly. Here’s my svg for anyone who wants to try some other colors.

Things aren’t over yet but round one is over at least. Multiple sources are reporting that the Yahoo board will reject Microsoft’s hostile take over bid Monday morning. Its looking like thankfully a Microsoft takeover of Yahoo, while not impossible, is unlikely to go through.  Yahoo, has been doing many things right lately and it seems like they’re heading in the right direction for now.  It would be a shame to see that progress reversed.

I’m breathing a big sigh of relief on a personal level simply because I wasn’t looking forward to moving all of my pictures off of flickr. It was going to be a huge amount of work, and I really do like using flickr.

Nashua, Walpole, Claremont, and Lebanon, NH, 11/12
© Barack Obama

I’ve been perplexed for some time as to why people have been voting for Hillary Clinton in the primaries. From a purely tactical standpoint she has the least chance of all the Democratic candidates of actually winning the general election. She is simply a divisive candidate that I’ve long felt has a distinct lack of character. Laurence Lessig has posted a video detailing the reasons he supports Barack Obama. As only Lessig can he’s both confirmed my suspicions about Clinton and confirmed my positive impressions of Obama. I had not made the connection between the tactics employed by the Clinton campaign and those employed by Carl Rove as Bush came to power. This is exactly the type of thing that turns me off to politics in general. Do we want to reward this sort of behavior?

I’ve been voting Libertarian for a while now because I’m simply disenfranchised by the whole system. Its been more of a protest vote since both choices have been terrible. Obama has presented me with with the first Democratic candidate I could actually support. Due in no small part to his policy statements on technology issues. More and more its because I’m coming to believe may actually represent a real force for change in American politics.

Chris Ball has posted a transcript of Lessig’s video on his blog.

Technorati Tags: politics, obama, clinton, lessig, video

I’ve been meaning to make a hackergotchi for a while now. Problem is I’m the one always taking the pictures. There really aren’t that many pictures of me laying around. Anyway something is better than nothing so here you go.

Its the first real time I’ve tried anything in Gimp. Didn’t turn out too bad as an editing job. Nicu Buculei’s tutorial on the Fedora Project wiki was very helpful. Now if only the picture were better…

10. “What happens when you read some doc and either it doesn’t answer your question or is demonstrably wrong? In Linux, you say “Linux sucks” and go read the code. In Windows/Oracle/etc you say “Windows sucks” and start banging your head against the wall.”— Denis Vlasenko on lkml

That pretty much sums up how I feel about things as well. The quotes in the comments are pretty good as well.

TECH SOURCE FROM BOHOL: Top 50 Linux Quotes of All Time <: via Free Software News

People keep sending me “screen shots” that turn out to be Microsoft Word documents with web pages pasted in them. Last time I checked screen shots were images not text documents. When I asked them why they didn’t send me an image instead they said $40 was to much to spend on an application just to take pictures once a month with it. Thankfully, there’s a Firefox extension that does this job quite well, works on all platforms, and its free!

Screengrab! is an extension for Firefox that makes it easy to save a web-page as an image. With it, you can save anything that you can see in a browser window - from a small selection, to a complete page.
Basically Screengrab! let’s you take what you want from a web-page: the entire scrollable document, just the visible bit, or a draggable selection. Screengrab will even save just the contents of an individual frame. — Screengrab! website

I use it to grab all my web page screen shots these days. It couldn’t be easier to use. Just click on the Screengrab icon in the bar at the bottom of Firefox, select save and you’re done. Go get it from the Firefox Add-ons site right now! You won’t regret it.

Screengrab! :: Firefox Add-ons

I went ahead and made a public flickr group for the Fedora User and Developer Conference (FUDCon). I took a few pictures at FUDCon Raleigh 2008 (still going on now) and I’m uploading them now. Anyone who has pictures related to any of the FUDCons (past and present) feel free to post your pictures there.

• Flickr: FUDCon
• BarCamp wiki / FUDConRaleigh2008
• FUDCon/FUDConF9 - Fedora Project Wiki
• FUDCon - Fedora Project Wiki

Max,

As a long time Fedora user (back when it was called Red Hat) I have been truly been thrilled by the progress on your watch. The most important being overseeing the merger of extras and core. An event that marks the final return of the community to the Fedora project. Something that has been long over due. I credit it in no small way as being pivotal in making Fedora 8 the best release yet. The quality is much higher while the innovation has gotten even faster.

An awful lot of brilliant people worked really hard to make this happen. That is the hardest part of your job. Having to diplomacy to find the common ground when truly intelligent people disagree (they are probably both right in a way) Helping convince the business types at Red Hat to return the philosophies that made the company great to start with. Bringing people together is no small skill.

Even way you’re handling this next step shows your class and consideration for all involved. I’m sorry to see you stepping down, but I understand needing a break from such a demanding job. By building on the efforts of your predecessors and welcoming the efforts of new users you’re leaving some very big shoes to fill.

Thank You,

Russell

Would you believe that everyone switching away from Windows could have a profound effect on the environment? According to the California Environmental Protection Agency there could be several beneficial side effects of switching. Not the least of which is potentially 50% less e-waste generated from all those users upgrading their computers just so they can run Vista.

Source: CNN Eco Solutions < via: David Nielsen

Taken from the Fedora Fix Wakeups feature wiki page. It made me a chuckle.

With the introduction of a tickless kernel, any extraneous wakeups cause more power to be used, drain batteries, produce more heat, and use more natural resources, threatening the environment of this baby seal.

Do you really want to kill the baby seal?

Optical Block

For the past few months my TV has been having problems with a blue haze bleeding in from the lower right corner. At first it wasn’t really that noticeable but lately its been accompanied by these blue dots slowly appearing all over the screen. They look very much like hot pixels. Obviously this trend isn’t a good one, so today I did a quick search for “KDF-42WE655 blue dots” and was lead to a Web 2.0 site I hadn’t heard of before.

FixYa is a community site that answers your questions about your broken stuff, and tags both the questions an the answers. There has always been a wealth of information and vibrant communities of smart people on various forums for this type of thing but it has always taken me a long time to find the answer I was looking for. It was very refreshing to find that FixYa has a “blue dots” tag! Unfortunately, the problem with my TV sounds like something called an “optical block” which is a $1100 repair! Thankfully (sort of) I’m not the only one having this problem and Sony has extended the warranty for this problem only. Whew! Of course I have to use their service guys, but I really don’t care if it keeps me from having to buy a new TV.