Planet TLLTS

One month ago I decided to take the challenge and see if I could blog all month long for November’s National Blog Posting Month. I was absolutely sure that I would fail.

Amazingly enough, I did not.

So, what does this mean? Does it mean that I will continue posting an entry every day? Not a chance. Does it mean that I have somehow fulfilled my childhood dream of being a writer? Nope. Did it even help to make me better at writing? Well, that is subjective. I believe that it proved to me that I can muster the discipline to write something down if I need to, if there is a goal involved. Whether my writing style or content was any good is really your call, as I am slightly biased and sometimes overly critical as well.

What I would love to see come out of this exercise is encouragement for other bloggers. If I can do this, surely anyone can, and I do enjoy seeing posts from my friends on LinuxPlanet.org. My challenge is for my friends there and you who read this blog to pick up the torch and whip into a blogging frenzy! Seriously though, it can’t hurt for linuxy and geeky folk to flood the web with some interesting stuff. It’s good exposure and great entertainment.

So, who’s next? Who will take my challenge? Dann? Pat? Allan????

This is the final chapter in the saga of my broken Thinkpad T23.

Many of you know that I have been using my T23 for testing distributions lately, and before that for a headless server. The reason for that is that the machine has this flaky video problem where sometimes it works, sometimes it does not and other times it “sort of” works. As you can imagine, that is not very conducive to testing out desktop distributions. I certainly has been problematic lately.

I have been lamenting what to do with this especially this month as I have been trying to generate some content for the blog. How am I to do distro testing and such without a desktop machine to test on? The solution came the other day in an email from an old LUG member.

It seems that Stuart, a member of my old LUG, who’s mailing list I am still subscribed to, had a couple spare laptops he was offering up. He posted them to the list and I just happened to be watching my email when the post went through. I jumped at the chance to replace my old beater with something almost as old but fully functional. I arranged to go pick up my new(old) machine that very night.

For a measly $25 and 4 hours worth of drive time I picked up a nice little Thinkpad X31. It has 1.5gb of ram, 120gb hdd, internal wireless B and G and will make a great little laptop to do multitudes of testing on. It even came with Windows 7.

Now I didn’t keep Windows on the laptop, in fact it got a clean Linux install the second it hit my house, but on the way home, I did get a change to check out W7 a little bit. Honestly, I think XP was windows done in crayon and 7 is windows done in maybe sharpie or something. In my opinion, Windows 7 is trying very hard to be a rip-off of OS X, except they have this cartoonish interface. It’s not very professional looking (to me anyway) and I can tell you for sure that Linux on the same machine completely blows it out of the water. In two words, I found it cartoonish and clunky.

Just to tantalise you a little, since I brought the machine home I have attempted to install 5 concurrent distributions on it and actually put 2 of them on. I also learned a lot in the process about Grub 2, but all that is for a different post on a different day, so keep watching and reading!

Today in the U.S.A. we are celebrating Thanksgiving Day, which is a day where we try and remember what we are really thankful for. I thought I would share my hot list.

I am thankful for my God. Many don’t like it and most don’t understand, but my life changed dramatically when I accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior. Before that point I felt that I was simply spiraling into the abyss. I was in a bad place. He turned that around for me.

I am thankful for my family. I may not always say it, but these people are my immediate support system and it’s for them and because of them that I can manage to get up in the morning most days and function.

I am thankful for my friends. This includes all of you, who read this stuff and send me encouraging emails and such. Thank you wherever you are and I hope you have a great Thanksgiving day too!

Not to be outdone by Danns fantastic sounding fried wontons, I figured since it’s getting colder a little pepper pot would be tasty for those long days where geeking out is making you fiercely hungry.

* 1-2 lbs Ground Beef
* Couple cans cubed Potatoes
* 1 or 2 cans Carrots
* 2 quarts Beef Stock
* 1 Med Onion
* 1 bag Pot-pie noodle squares
* Black pepper
* Red Pepper Flakes
* Hot Sauce

Chop onion and put in large pot with ground beef. Add a couple shots of your favorite hot sauce and a quarter to half teaspoon of red pepper flakes. Brown ground beef with onions in large pot. When beef is cooked, add potatoes and carrots. Cover everything with beef stock until about 3 inches above solid ingredients. Bring to a boil. Turn heat down to simmer and add appropriate amount of noodles. Cook until noodles are tender. Add ground black pepper to taste. Serve!

Due to the overwhelming response of 4 people on the idea of doing a Linux System Administration show, I have decided to do it anyway. I know - glutton for punishment. I believe I will do this in a video format, or I will at least try. I need to work out just how to get that accomplished, but we’ll see what happens. What I do need from you 4 listeners/readers/watchers is a NAME and (hopefully RFQuerin is reading) a LOGO

As always, hit me up with suggestions, questions or concerns at linc dot fessenden at gmail dot com. Thanks!

Wow! What a weekend!

We had a great time again this year, no surprise. It’s always great to be able to hang out with all your friends and all you linux folk and TechShow listeners are my friends!

My thoughts are still a bit disjointed from the weekend so here are some random notes about OLF this year:

Special thanks to Richard Querin and Mordancy for the new logo and t-shirts. They were fan-freaking-tastic! We took small donations in exchange for a TLLTS t-shirt this year and that provided us with enough money to pay some of the booth and bandwidth fees and get a good head start on getting some more shirts for next year’s festivities.

Prentice Hall, Neuros Tech, Oreilly and APress deserve BIG thank you’s for once again sponsoring us with some excellent giveaways for our free raffle this year.

This weekend was the start if our 7th broadcast year on the TechShow and I am still consistently amazed when someone walks up to me, recognizes me and tells me they listen to the show!

I saw Ubuntu’s netbook remix v 9.10 boot from bios to full desktop in 4 seconds while I was there. Astounding!

Oracle has this python sql interface that they are working on that is probably one of the coolest things, as a developer, that I have seen in a long time. It’s like stuffing bash into the sql command line. Nifty things like colored columned table listings, easy piping from sql command line to bash commands and files. This was some seriously cool stuff. I can’t wait for them to get it working with not only orcacle but mysql and postgres too!

This year was definitely the year of the netbook. It seems like everyone had one, they were all constantly using them, they all loved their netbook and anyone who didn’t yet have one was dying to get one. I must have seen hundreds of them this weekend and they were all running Linux except one.

The one netbook that wasn’t running Linux was at the booth right next to ours. They were the guys from Haiku, the new BeOS implementation. This is some seriously neat stuff and these guys are to be commended. While not ready for primetime just yet, they are going that direction full force and have some really slick stuff going in their favor. This OS is FAST man. I saw an average netbook doing some AMAZING video rendering feats like playing high def movies while running 3D video demos at 700fps and the thing wasn’t even breaking a sweat. There was another old thinkpad laptop playing 5 different videos at the same time with no lag whatsoever. I Bet it won’t Be long Before this OS has the full attention of, at least, some video processing nuts! You can bet I’ll be keeping an eye on this one.

There are a few things I will do differently next year, mostly with my time management, like getting there a day earlier, but I had a great time. If you haven’t been to one yet, make sure you go because you are missing out. Put it on your calendar for next year. I’ll see ya there!