Planet TLLTS

Daemon by Leinad Zeraus

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book is phenomenal! I had a difficult time putting it down from the moment I read page one. It was recommended to me by Cafeninja and I had no idea what it was about going into it so I was thoroughly blown away. I mentioned the book to my wife and she said he has been compared to William Gibson and I would say that assessment is not far off.

From what I understand this is Daniel Suarez’s first published work and I must say he really hit it out of the park. The character development is great, the antagonist is an extremely thoughtful construct and the events that unfold make it very difficult for the reader to choose a side.

The pacing of the book is great. The level of technology speak is pretty high but the author does a fantastic job making sure the reader understands the tech without slowing one bit. This book is a roller coaster ride and I suspect someday soon we shall see it a movie adaption.




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Today at the dinner table my oldest, Paige, blurts out that she cannot use Windows. Not sure I was hearing her correctly I asked her what she said/meant. She indicated that her friend down the street had a computer with Windows 7 and that she, nor her friend, could figure out how to get songs off the web (legally) or off my daughter’s media player (sansa fuze) and onto her friend’s system and media player (not sure what she has). So her solution? Bring it home and do it on one of the many systems here. Right now she is monopolizing my System76 running Arch, her desktop of choice: Gnome. She also uses a eeePC 701 running Mint.

My daughter is obviously very familiar with computers. She has used many different flavors of Linux and many different desktops including KDE, Gnome, Fluxbox and XFCE. She seamlessly goes from her netbook to my laptop to the mythtv box doing everything she wants to do. When she has question she cannot figure out she just asks. Rarely does she ask more than once and more often than not she figures things out on her own.

What does this say to me? Windows 7 obviously was not made for her. Even more, I throw this in the face to all those who say Linux is not for the masses. Bull crap. It’s not that Linux is difficult, it is that it is more often than not different. Windows 7 is not at all difficult it is just different, and given time I am sure my daughter would figure out what to do or just ask for help.

That is another thing that really differentiates adults from children. Children are more willing to seek help before giving up. Adults, they just thrown their hands in the air and give up.

I do hope my daughter does figure out how to do what she wants to do in Windows, I think it would be valuable for her to have experience across all different operating systems. Right now I am just proud that she is using, loving, and very comfortable with GNU/Linux.

The 120 Days of Sodom by Marquis Sade

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Wow, this book was extremely powerful in its imagery. Violent, perverse, like every single horrid site on the internet. It was a struggle to get through at some points. The philosophical messages were sparse but succinct yet at times were overpowered by the sadistic imagery making it difficult to agree with any tenant of libertarianism. Pure selfishness couched in debauchery is difficult to find appealing on any level.



I would be very interested to know whether these horrors were the fancy of de Sade’s mind or rooted in actual events either he or his cohorts experienced. I shudder to think that out there in this world are individuals who practice the most horrid of crimes depicted in the latter parts of the first chapter and the remaining chapters.



Perhaps I should invest some time exploring the political, religious, and sociological environment that gave rise to de Sade and his fellow Libertines.



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I was sure excited when I saw the announcement that there would be a Linux Mint Debian edition. For some time now, I have been excited to look over practically anything involved with Linux Mint. It’s no secret that it is my favorite desktop Linux.

I grabbed the iso and set about installing it on my current slushbox, which is a 3ghz single core machine with 1gb of ram and a 40gb hdd. Of course I didn’t notice that it had no dvd drive until after I was already frustrated that the dvd wouldn’t boot in the machine. Eventually I came to my senses and hooked in an external dvd drive and was quickly greeted by the installer.

The first thing I noticed is the partitioner. When installing Mint proper, you can just autopartition the drive and use the entire thing. This is not so here, in fact, the partitioner didn’t even recognise my sata drive at all initially. I had to fdisk the thing and create a new partition table (can’t remember what was originally on the drive to be fair) before the partitioner would even see the drive far enough to suggest that I need to repartition it for Mint Debian. Even at that, the menuing at that point is not completely suggestive as to what and how this should be done. Since this was not my first rodeo, I partitioned the hdd with a 2gb swap (twice my memory size) and the rest with a giant root (/) partition. Be forwarned, the disk partitioning on this distribution is not something I would throw at a newbie.

Once the system was partitioned, the rest of the installation was relatively simple. This followed the normal Mint installation and the only thing notable about it was that it was simple enough to not be notable at all. Good job!

After the installation, I always make it a point to immediately do all the updates. The surprising thing here was the number of updates available. The distribution has been available for only a week and there were well over 300 package updates already. This is a good and a bad thing. It’s good proof that people are looking at things and improving them but it’s sort of annoying to have to wait 45 minutes to use your brand new distribution too. The other really notable issue here is that updates on this distribution are not as user friendly as on Mint proper. In the very first update I was asked what to do with some conf files it said I had changed, even though I had hardly had the chance to log in let alone change config files, and worse yet, the updates included grub, which asked me where to install itself. That is a particularly bad thing to spring on a newer user. I don’t understand why it couldn’t have checked where it was already installed except for a pretty poor implementation of the package update. Again, this is a big deal because a new person would have either given up, or had (in my case) a 50/50 chance of picking the wrong option here. If you are calculating odds, for a newbie, that is a 75% chance of horking your new Linux install. That would not be a good way to make a first impression.

Once all the updates were correctly done and I had a clean reboot just to make sure grub was installed correctly, things were rockin’. Over all I was impressed with the desktop. This is the typical Mint desktop that I have grown to love and appreciate since Mint 7. To me, Mint’s default desktop feels like my digital home.

Of course, there were some issues there too. Aren’t there always? Mint Debian is , obviously, Debian underneath and not Ubuntu, so, as you would expect, there are some differences. I found quickly that there was no xterm installed (oh come on people) and when launching gnome-terminal from the run command (alt-f2) I got an error about the default set of quotes not being available or something like that. That is a non issue for me because I turn them off anyhow, but still, that shouldn’t happen.

Running Mint Debian on this machine seems pretty snappy, so I did some resource checking. The entire system was running on only 144 megs of ram (nice)! CPU was a different story. It was running at almost 20% load. In contrast, my other machine running Mint 9 proper was running at 173 mb of ram and 6% CPU. Interesting difference since the other machine has 1.5gb of ram and a single core 1.7ghz proc. Other items of note are the placement of some menu items, etc..

What were my honest impressions? Well, it seems to me, in this instance that Mint can be seen as sort of an abstraction layer. What I mean by that is that Ubuntu used Debian as a starting point and then, in my opinion anyway, added a level of usability and polish on top of that to make a name for itself. In the same manner, Mint proper did that with Ubuntu as a base, adding a substantial, again in my opinion, level of polish. This same polish, applied to a Debian base gives you what we have in Mint Debian today. Unfortunately it’s missing the intermediate Ubuntu polish in there.

This is not to say that I didn’t like Mint Debian. I very much enjoyed it. I am certainly looking forward to seeing it mature and I fully believe that all of the persnickety details I noticed will be fully addressed within short order. For those of you who have been “doing Linux” for a while, you should definitely check this out. For the new guys, give it a month or three. Like I said, I know I’ll be watching this one.

Topics include:

In today's ogg cast, dave does a hardware review, talks about two different media servers, three different games, and a couple of movies too. Hang on tight.

Links:

lottalinuxlinks.com linux user podcast 126 ogg vorbis format;

lottalinuxlinks.com linux user podcast 126 speex format;

ZaReason;

ZaReason Hoverboard;

ZaReason Strata-Pro-15;

Zareason Verix-1656;

hexahop;

Tile World;

FreeDink;

Ohio LinuxFest;

Inglourious Basterds;

Zombieland;

Family Camping through 48 States;

Night of the Living Dead;

Bloody Pit of Horror;

ps3mediaserver; and

mediatomb.

  I don’t even remember where the idea came from, but it was decided that after 365 shows, that’s one for every day of the year, folks, that we would consider that “season 1″ for the LinuxLink TechShow, and we would then, finally, start on “season 2″. Those 365 episodes comprise 7 years of weekly recordings and add up to roughly 30 days of continual audio, day and night. I guess you could say we have been doing this for a while….

  Since last year’s Ohio Linux Fest we have had a few TLLTS Elders meetings to decide upon what we saw as the problems of the first TLLTS season, what we could do to fix them and what kinds of things we wanted to pursue for season 2. We tried to take into consideration the things we had positive and negative comments on from our listener base and years of our beloved “hate mail”

  First and foremost we needed to address our constant audio issues. Long have we had complaints about our audio so we needed to make that a priority. We do have a very complicated setup in that area due to our arrangement of multiple hosts and guests in multiple locations, local and remote, not to mention the extra issues caused by being a live show, which causes us to add even more audio sources. You see, we don’t postprocess audio and dub things in later like promos and intro/outros. They happen as we roll along live, just like everything else. As it turns out though, a lot of our audio issues were actually caused by NOT using the Linux built in goodies. They were caused by our analog setup (mixer, compressor, cabling, etc..) Once we identified that we actually could remove that mess all together and just go digital, things got a lot better pretty fast.

  Other and maybe minor things we needed to address had to do with the loose format of the show, the show and guest planning and general preparedness, the timing of things during the show, regular guest hosts, the website and things of that sort. Boy, there sure were lots of things to work on!

  We decided that we needed to tighten things up a bit with the show format. We settled on trying hard to keep the show times from 8:30pm to 10pm (and no longer). We want to try and divide the show into sections, giving time to any interviews we may have while still sequestering some time for us for a little discussion as well. We decided on using some music as a separator, much like we did early on in the show – an intermission. An exciting addition here would be the possibility of also adding in some “shorts” or short topical audio segments dealing with our hosts specialty subjects. These would be not only a way for us to facilitate an important break in the show, but a way to generate some interest in a recurring topic and also provide a possible stepping stone into the hosts discussion on the second half of the show.

  We decided we would like to get not only some more good new guests, but also to revisit some of our wildly interesting past guests to see what they have been up to. Luckily, the ones I have contacted thus far have not only remembered us, but have also agreed to stop by again to say hello Make sure to check the calendar for who’s coming up and send along your suggestions of people you would like to hear from!

  One of the major things I was tasked with working on and updating was the website. I thought the old one was fantastic, mostly because I designed and coded it, but the other hosts assured me it was time for something new I pursued the great and famous Richard Querin who graciously came up with a great looking front page and theme and sent it to me. A little php work and content by Dann and I and you have the masterpiece you see now.

  I have to say that I really enjoyed doing the show for the last seven years. I get to talk shop with my buddies every week. I get to talk to really cool linux/open source celebrities. I get to meet and make a lot of geeky friends from all over the world, people who I have come to consider as almost family ove the last 7 years. It has been a helluva fun ride and I am eager to put a good start to the next 7, so make sure and head on over to http://tllts.org and join in the fun. The prelude to season 2 was recorded and put up for distribution right at the end of OLF 2010 and the official start happens 9/15/2010 @8:30pm EDT. See ya there!

Today is very important for Linux Mint. It’s one day to remember in the history of our project as we’re about to maintain a new distribution, a rolling one, which promises to be faster, more responsive and on which we’re less reliant on upstream components. Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) comes with a Debian base, which we transformed into a live media and on top of which we added a new installer. It’s rougher and in some aspects not as user-friendly as our other editions, it’s very young but it will improve continuously and rapidly, and it brings us one step closer to a situation where we’re fully in control of the system without being impacted by upstream decisions…….
Read More Here

Oh yeah, I have been busy, but I promised myself I would post some stuff as soon as I got a chance. One of the things I wanted to mention was my recent purchase of a straight razor. I bought this shave set from Amazon a few weeks ago and have finally learned how to shave with it without slitting my throat. Really, though, the reason I bought this was I have freakishly sensitive skin and get horrible razor burn just walking past the razor display in a store. The only decent shave I ever had was when I went to a barber and he shaved me with a straight razor. Combine that with Allan bragging about his wickedly cool badger hair shave brush and I was all of the sudden buying a straight razor.

Once I received the razor, I hit youtube for a couple straight razor shaving tutorials (hey I am not stupid), I put in a brand new blade and I was off to the proverbial races. Although I did nick myself a couple times (the worst was on the second shave) this really is not at all difficult and you get fantastic shaves. I highly advocate at least trying this, you will like it, and I can see no easier and inexpensive way to start than with the set I bought. Check it out!

Ahh, it’s been far too long since I have had anything to say here. I have to say that I have been *legitimately* busy this time. As many of you know, we have come to a close on the first season of The LinuxLink TechShow. That’s 365 (about) 2 hour long episodes over the course of the last 6 years. We are due to start our next 365 at the Ohio Linux Fest in a month. This leaves an enormous amount of prep work and a fair bit of reorganization to keep things exciting and help us start out with a bang.

One of the *surprises* in store brings me to my current topic at hand, my web workers toolkit.

People all have differing opinions about what you really need to do decent web work. As an old commandline jockey, I thought I would share my own.

1) Vim.
Quite possibly the best text editor in the world, I use vim for darn near everything. As a system administrator, it’s indispensable (for scripting) and I find it similarly necessary for web work. Vim has a fantastic (imho) syntax highlighting system which does quite well for html and php highlighting. The only caveat is to make sure to set “set background=dark” in your .vimrc file, unless, of course, you are one of those wierdos who uses a light background in your terminal.

2) tidy or the w3c validator.
I DEFY you to write good code without one of these. There is NOTHING as nice as standards compliant code and without a good validator, you will have nothing like standards compliant code. The reason I listed both of these is that tidy is a program you can use locally to check your code and the w3c validator will check any pages that are accessible via the web.

3) Many different browsers.
Unfortunately, all browsers are not made equal. You can be sure that all mozilla based browsers like Firefox, etc., will display things very similarly, and maybe even throw Google Chrome into that mix, but you may really want to check your code with Safari and IE to be sure things still look the way you had intended, and let’s not forget about a text browser like lynx or w3m to make sure your pages are readable and navigable that way too.

4) Lastly, for me, some good reference material.
One can hardly be expected to remember everything and having some reference material handy for those odd css commands and perhaps php/perl/python/someotherprogramminglanguage could really save you some time and frustration. Never underestimate keeping your old code around for example and never ever underestimate the power of the power of the Google Search!

In a nutshell, that’s generally what keeps me cranking out websites and webpages. What kinds of things do you use? What am I missing out on? Send a long a comment and let us all know what works for you! ( Unless, of course, you use emacs )

I have just started working with splunk a little bit and one of the things I have tried is to hook it up to OSSEC. This, like most things these days, has proven to be interesting to say the least. Actually, it’s a very simple process, however, the documentation is abysmal at best and I spent hours pouring through different websites until I found the correct potion to get things actually working they way they are supposed to. I am documenting it here for future reference. I am currently running OSSEC v2.4.x and Splunk v4.1.4:

On splunk:

Install ossec module into splunk

splunk->manager->data inputs->udp->new
udp port – 10002
set host – ip
source type – manual
source type – ossec
save

Make sure 10002 is enabled

On OSSEC:

vim /var/ossec/etc/ossec.conf
add:
<syslog_output>
<server>172.25.3.3</server>
<port>10002</port>
</syslog_output>
under global config

/var/ossec/bin/ossec-control enable client-syslog

service ossec restart

You should now start getting ossec alerts to splunk…!