Planet TLLTS

It’s getting that time again folks. I don’t see any offers at FLB, so let’s get together and spread the word. Help out your Linux challenged neighbors around the world by giving the gift of technology. Spread the word, donate your old laptop and make someone happy and if it helps you justify buying a new one for yourself, so be it

Save Money!!
Did you know that some places actually CHARGE you to recycle your old computer equipment? You can recycle your old working Pentium + or Mac G4 + class laptop FOR FREE just by visiting FreeLinuxBox.Org.

Go Green!!
Help SAVE the Environment! Did you know that there are landfills around the world full of unused and unloved computer equipment, some of it even leeching toxic chemicals into the ground and none of it biodegrading?! You can recycle your old working Pentium + or Mac G4 + class laptop and KEEP IT FROM THE LANDFILL just by visiting FreeLinuxBox.Org.

Make Someone Happy!!
There are lots and lots of people around your neighborhood, around your town/city, around your country and around the world that would LOVE to have YOUR OLD COMPUTER to use. It may be old and slow for you, but fantastic, brilliant and magical for another, less fortunate person. This is where you can make a difference today! You can recycle your old working Pentium + or Mac G4 + class laptop and MAKE SOMEONE REALLY HAPPY just by visiting FreeLinuxBox.Org.

Even if you don’t have the time or inclination to securely dispose of / reload your old machine with Linux, you can still participate. Contact us and we will do our best to find someone to take care of that for you! Just visit FreeLinuxBox.Org and let us know how we can help!

People have asked me on more than one occasion what’s the best source of news related to Android on the internet? I tell them to go and read Planet Android. This site in an invaluable resource for anyone with an Android phone or is thinking of getting one. Tons of news tidbits come down the pipe every day. There are plenty of application reviews along with their related QR codes (which makes installing them a snap). Throw in some programming tips and opinions and you have a winning combination. Check them out.

Whats the real difference between Linux and Windows? Well, this morning I watched a guy, a typical suit, wait 2 minutes for his email to open *OPEN* on his slick new Lenovo laptop (Windows 7 btw). I, on the otherhand, about have a stroke when it takes me more than 5 seconds (and I feel that is slow). Now you guys can say what you want in Windows defense. Say that maybe the guy has other stuff running in the background (I do too). Say that his computer is virus laden (thats what you get). Insist that his machine is underpowered (bologna, I saw it). I am sure there are other things I am missing as well. The point is, I think using Windows is a lot like hammering in a nail with a gilded monkey wrench. You *can* get the job done, and it might even look pretty while you are doing it, but it’s just not the most efficient or most times the correct tool for the job.
I actually have work to do. I’ll stick with Linux. ‘Nuff said.

It’s been a little over one month since getting my Nexus One phone. So far I’m absolutely loving this thing. It has not let me down once. The G1 was a nice introduction to Android and in general smart phones for me. I’ve previously talked about some of the flaws of the G1 but honestly the Nexus takes the good things and makes them so much better. The Nexus One is insanely faster than the G1. I’m talking about an exponential bump in speed. The 800×480 screen is crystal clear and everything looks absolutely great on it. Navigating through the interface is extremely quick and responsive. Having a standard audio jack is such a nice thing to have after dealing with usb to audio converters with the G1. The battery life on the Nexus One is actually pretty damn good. Another area where the Nexus is head & shoulders above any other phone I’ve seen is 3D acceleration. To really appreciate this feature try the following applications:
Raging Thunder 2 – auto racing game
Speed Forge 3D – hovercraft racing game
Cuboid – rubix cube game

Game emulation is also very good on the Nexus. I’ve run game roms from Sega Genesis, Super NES and even Amiga. They all played superbly. The camera on the Nexus One is 5 megapixel with a flash and the picture quality is very good. So good that I now use it as my main camera for the most part. The camera in conjunction with the new gallery application make photo management with Picasa a joy to use. I actually don’t mind taking pictures and sharing them with other people. The whole photo software stack makes it very simple to do. I haven’t yet tried recording videos with the phone. That’s the next thing on my list of things to do with the Nexus One. In my opinion the Nexus One is the nicest smart phone on the market. I’m a bit biased but I can’t help enjoying watching the iPhone owners I know try it out and get jealous of it.

How do you know that Linux is becoming main stream? You start running into it in the strangest places.

I just took my kid out to get some food at a BBQ place that I have passed several times. The place is called Jimmy’s BBQ in Malvern, PA. Man oh man, this place has got some good BBQ and the Mac-n-Cheese is to die for! While I was placing my order at the counter, the proprietor looked at my Official TLLTS T Shirt (buy one now) and says, “Hey, do you know Eric Raymond?” I said that in fact, I have met him before and he says that Eric likes to frequent the place as well. Well, after having some of the BBQ there I can see why (yummy).

Unfortunately, Eric didn’t show up while I was there or I would have bought him a sandwich, but my daughter and I enjoyed ourselves anyway. Perhaps sometime Eric will take me up on that sandwich offer (Whatcha think Eric?). Until then I will continue to go to Jimmy’s for some good BBQ, and continue to be impressed that not only did those guys know something about Linux, but were even familiar with Eric too (although I suspect he may have had something to do with the former)

Wow! Long time no post! I didn’t realize it had been so long. Lots of things have happened since I last wrote here. I had a little vacation time where I did pretty much nothing, I had a great belated birthday party that many of my friends attended, and I finally got my new NAS.

I really needed a new NAS. I keep running out of room on my old 500Gb NAS, which holds all my backups and media files and such. I have been putting off getting a new one for a long long time (I am a great procrastinator). Finally I broke down and picked up a Western Digital 1TB MyBook World Edition. I quite like it!

This NAS, priced around $170 depending on where you buy it, is actually pretty featureful. It offers cifs, afs and nfs filesharing, has optional ssh login ability and serves an itunes share and streaming media share. This NAS uses green technology, so not only does it automatically go into powersaving mode when not in use, but it uses a low power drive as well, so very little heat, no fan noise, and very low power draw. The gigabit ethernet affords decent speed on data transfers and the built in software is easy to setup and use and will let you get things like individual user accounts running quickly.

All in all, not a bad NAS for the price. In fact, this is probably the most inexpensive NAS I looked at with the featureset I needed. I have never yet been disappointed by Western Digital and that holds true on this purchase as well.

At some point over the coming weekend I will be migrating this blog over to the wordpress.com website:
patdavila.wordpress.com

Currently it’s just a place holder but eventually all the posts on this blog will be available over there. I’ll put up a place holder entry here once the migration is complete.

Annual Conference Highlighting Linux and Free and Open Source Software Announces Initial List of 22 of the More Than 40 Eventual Speakers

With less than 90 days until the 2010 SouthEast LinuxFest, event organizers are proud to announce 22 speakers known worldwide for their work in the Linux and free/libre open source software communities. These speakers include:

Ryan "Icculus" Gordon: Known as "the entire Linux gaming industry", Ryan has ported major commercial game titles to Linux, including Prey, Unreal Tournament, and countless others.

D. Richard Hipp: Author of SQLite, Fossil, and CVSTrac. SQLite has become ubiquitous and is used everywhere from Mozilla Firefox to the iPhone.

Tarus Balog: Lead Developer and CEO of The OpenNMS Group, which has provided enterprise grade network management software developed under the open source model.

Wendy Seltzer: Member of the board of directors for the Tor Project Founder of Chilling Effects and OpenLaw projects, and liaison to ICANN. Former attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It if deals with rights, freedom, or privacy in the digital realm, odds are Wendy is or has been involved in some way.

Jono Bacon: Community Manager for the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, Canonical employee, former co-host of the LUGradio podcast, and current co-host of the FLOSS Weekly podcast with Leo Laporte. Metal Rockstar!

Bradley Kuhn: FLOSS Community Liaison and Technology Director at the Software Freedom Law Center, as well as President of the Software Freedom Conservancy. Bradley is dedicated to promoting the benefits of open source licensing, as well as defending it from potential threats and abuses from proprietary software.

Klaatu von Schlecten Apfel: Host of the Bad Apples and Fedora Reloaded podcasts and correspondent for Hacker Public Radio, Klaatu is a multimedia artist and maintainer of slackermedia.info and the SlackBuilds for LiVES, freetalk, and HandBrake. He has written articles for Linux Journal and Linux Identity magazines.

Dru Lavigne: Director at the FreeBSD Foundation, she has written several books on BSD.

Pat Davila: Co-host of both MythTVCast, and the The Linux Link Tech Show (TLLTS) podcasts.

C. Tyler McAdams: Project Architect at the LinuxDNA project, Tyler puts a whole new meaning to fast by having Linux kernels compiled under the Intel C/C++ Compiler (ICC).

Barry Grundy: A supervisory criminal investigator (special agent) with the US Federal Government, Barry specializes in Linux forensics and its practical applications.

Mackenzie Morgan: A developer and bug wrangler for the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution. When she is not quashing bugs with extreme prejudice, she's probably improving the end user experience in a variety of areas.

Alan Hicks: Slackware developer who also co-wrote SlackBook.

Dann Washko: Co-host of the The Linux Link Tech Show (TLLTS), Dann also is a wealth of practical knowledge in all areas of desktop Linux.

Stephen Spector: Community manager for Xen, which allows multiple operating systems to be run on the same computer through hardware supported virtualization.

Daniel Walsh: Daniel leads the Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) project and is also involved in secure virtualization.

Paul Frields: Fedora Project Leader and Chairman of the Fedora Project Board. Paul is involved in seemingly everything in Fedora from package maintenance to security to documentation.

Greg DeKoenigsberg: Senior Community Architect at Red Hat, founder and first chairman of the Fedora Project Board and Fedora Engineering Steering Committee. Greg currently holds a position on the oversight board for Sugar Labs. Within the Fedora community he holds the distinguished honor of being recognized as 'Lord of the Plow'

Max Spevack: Manager of Red Hat's community architecture team, and former Fedora Project Leader, Max now defines and executes Red Hat's global community strategy.

Michael DeHaan: Michael currently works for Reductive Labs (now Puppet Labs), who develops puppet, a configuration management tool for systems administrators. Michael is the former lead developer for cobbler, an automated provisioning tool.

Baron Schwartz: Director of consulting at Percona, Baron wrote 'High Performance MySQL' which has become the definitive work on the subject. In addition, Baron has created maatkit, better cacti templates, and innotop.

Russell Bryant: Engineering Manager for the open source software team at Digium, Russell is a core member of the Asterisk open source PBX development team. He was Asterisk's first release maintainer when Asterisk 1.0 was released.

The SouthEast LinuxFest plans to extend more than double this lineup of speakers over time. The Call For Papers is still open and will remain so until May 1st, despite an early showing that more than fills our speaking slots.

About the SouthEast LinuxFest: The SouthEast LinuxFest is an annual conference celebrating Linux and free/libre open source software. It is part social gathering, and part educational event. The SouthEast LinuxFest is free to attend. This year the event will be held at the Spartanburg Marriott at Renaissance Park from Friday, June 11th through Sunday, June 13th. The SouthEast LinuxFest is run by the non-profit SouthEast LinuxFest Foundation. For more information, visit http://www.southeastlinuxfest.org or email info@southeastlinuxfest.org or call 1-864-372-9827.

“I see no harm in tinkering with ideas as I do objects, if only to better understand why I don’t believe what I don’t believe.” Mutty P. Dumphy to Alyss Heart in ArchEnemy, book 3 of the Looking Glass Wars trilogy by Frank Beddor.

This is a test post made from the nexus one. Just need to import my old blog postings over.