Colin Charles Agenda

On another partition, I popped Ubuntu 5.10 on the Thinkpad R51. I figured I need to eat some of my own dogfood, and give it more use. Here are some notes:

• Installation went smoothly, installing side-by-side with FreeBSD. It however, didn’t write to GRUB that FreeBSD actually exists, and use that as an option for booting. It also, didn’t give me an option (or I missed it?) to say if I didn’t want it to install the bootloader. Anyways, in /boot/grub/menu.lst, add:

title FreeBSD
root (hd0,0,a)
kernel /boot/loader

• My WiFi (ipw2100) actually just works. Ubuntu includes the firmware it’d seem, which explains why RMS doesn’t think Ubuntu is free software.
• 96.9MB of updates were waiting for me the moment I logged into GNOME. The kernel update broke around 50%, but I was amazed to see it resume the download from there. Is this some dpkg/apt cleverness that we could use in rpm/yum?
• I tried to install something (gforge-*), and apt barfed. I presume this is how people mentioned RPM hell and what not… There exists APT hell too, folk.

I heard Cory Doctorow about a week ago (yes, we have cool international speakers here in Melbourne all the time!), and if there was only one thing you’re really meant to take away from his talk, I think I found the gem.

Cory signs a book

We’re usually told content is king. He says thats a myth. Have you seen the six trillion dollar industry, that is telecommunications? (okay, I don’t know if that stat is remotely correct…) So the content is king idea is bollocks. What is really king is community and inter-personal communication. Getting people to talk about it. Humans are terribly social beings, so yeah, go community.

“Trying to kill MySQL by acquiring open source is like trying to kill
a dolphin by drinking the ocean.” — Marten Mickos

And yes, that quote ties in well with the Oracle Bought InnoDB Without a Clue article… MySQL has a great community. And of late, we’re getting a lot more great community contributed content. I do think content is important, but the community is too. And being around over 1,500 MySQL users, all I can say is that there’s great community here. From financial analysts, to DBAs, to students, to storage engine creators. This is one damned good community!

It took me just under five minutes to signup for a T-mobile hotspot account, so I could send my mail. Username already chosen, form resets itself. Find credit card, re-enter information. Submit. Need to fill in the expiry date (which displays fine). Form resets. Repeat.

Funny that the immigration official today at SFO had heard of both Linux and MySQL. He’s apparently some form of online gamer, and has written a few PHP apps himself. I was, to say the least, highly impressed.

Something I noticed as funny. All the baggage carousels had Oracle ads. Must be something Oracle related happening here…

Anyways, I’m still waiting for Arjen to come out. Stewart I know is already at the hotel, and JD should arrive in due time. In the meantime, I’ll attend to mail, and upload Flickr photos at 250KB/s (yes, a marked improvement from the 30KB/s cap I have at home in Australia).

Caught bits of Freaky Friday, and added it to the to-do list. What was fun was She’s the Man. Realized something about myself recently: I seem to be more familiar with the cinemas in Hobart as well as the local grocery outlet (Coles, if you must know) there. Its quite shocking.

I decided to play with ISPConfig. It seemed to stop installation when it couldn’t find the “quota” package. Set it up. Add a new “hosting plan”. The frames break, so I hit the X, and it logs me out. Not very intuitive. To get things going, you need to create a client (its kind of a bummer, if I’m the client for all the sites, right?). Then I try to add a web host, for an email user, and find that the username comes up, as *drumroll*, web1_username!

So upon realizing that this wasn’t the solution for me, I attempted to go ahead and uninstall it. Only to be faced with this funny error:

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /root/ispconfig/uninstall on line 149
Connected successfully

So, I guess this is what a partial deinstallation feels like. Does anyone know what the security implications of running an app like ISPConfig will garner?

Jesse Keating: I am never happy:
Thunderbird
Pros:
– select quoting (with an extension)

Jesse, I did try a bunch of extensions (Quick Reply Extension and TB Reset Quote Header Extension), and none of them get it “right” like Evolution does. Have you had much other luck?

I’ve been using Thunderbird for about six months now, and personally I think Evolution is a lot more mature, even though it comes with its own set of problems. Now the question is, when will Evolution be cross-platform, and make it a true winner (seeing that it has calendering, Palm synchronization, and much more)?

Fedora’s shipping Mono. RHEL5 is likely to ship Mono. When’s Evolution going to be written in C#?

Pete Zaitcev: Torrenting FC-5 ISOs:
I suppose I can uncover the mystery which bothers dwmw2. The main reason I’m torrenting FC-5 ISOs right now is that making my own ISOs from Rawhide RPMs is too much of a hassle. I would need to have all scripts on tap, which copy RPMs, copy comps or whatever it is that Anaconda needs, and, worst of all, generate images/. And God Forbid I hit a bug in installation. Mr. Jones and Mr. Katz would tell me “your ISO must be screwed, use a normal one”, and they would be right.

Pete, I think dwmw2 downloads trees, burns a boot.iso and does NFS installs. Its probably heaps better than downloading them, and making your own ISOs from the tree. It saves a lot of CDs (or CDRWs) and these installs can magically happen pretty unattended. This is my preferred way of installing.

And Jeremy, Peter and Paul are pretty amazing when it comes to anaconda bugs. Very responsive, and always willing to investigate.

Alas, I do torrent ISOs too, because the PPC torrent tends to not receive much traffic, and I’m doing my bit for the rest…