In today's ogg cast, dave talks about movies, ps3 games, Rockbox on the sansa clip+, and gopher.
Links:
lottalinuxlinks.com linux user podcast 133 ogg vorbis format;
lottalinuxlinks.com linux user podcast 133 speex format;
Moog;
The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus;
Prince of Persia Sands of Time;
Rockbox; and
Null_Pointer by Ken McConnell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I was very surprised how this book sucked me in! I had a hard time putting it down. Some reviewers on Amazon complained they were let down by the ending but not me. I found myself looking forward to firing it up on my Droid each day whenever I could.
One thing that bothered me at first was his constant explanation of technologies used in the book (e.g; Ubuntu is a popular distrobution of Linux; IRC is a text-based group chatting tool (those are my words not his)) in a direct way that took me out of the story somewhat. Instead of telling the the story the author was now instructing me; so it broke the flow. I pondered how he could actually weave this explanation into the story, but that would require getting very wordy. So, eventually I settled on accepting this direct approach for he covered in one sentence what would probably take a paragraph or two weaved into the story and probably detract from the flow even more.
Now that little quirk there is not very big and happens very seldom in the book so I am just being nitpick for nit pickys sake.
If you are a geek, get this book. At $2.99 for the ePub edition it’s a great read. You may be able to get it from the author’s site too but I cannot remember. Great stuff! I look forward to reading more from Ken McConnell. Find his website at http://ken-mcconnell.com/
Check out Ken’s Mystery site at: http://www.johnnybatch.com/
View all my reviews
In today's ogg cast, dave talks to Google Program Manager, Carol Smith about Google Code-In.
Links:
lottalinuxlinks.com linux user podcast 132 ogg vorbis format;
lottalinuxlinks.com linux user podcast 132 speex format;
Brazil; and
As many of you know, RedHat released RHEL 6 recently. I just finally got a chance to install the production version and thought I would share some of my immediate notes:
RHEL 6 Installation Notes: (text/net install)
No boot.iso available. Must use the ENTIRE installation DVD to boot, even for a network install.
Press tab at the boot splash to enter extra parameters – “linux text askmethod” worked appropriately.
Askmethod prompts for URL rather than http or ftp and has you put the entire URL in one line instead of splitting into server / location like RHEL 5 did.
Installer does not ask for registration number – must be done through rhn_register *after* installation has completed.
Install does not ask you for “types” like RHEL 5 did (webserver, virtualization, development).
Post install does not have configuration menu where you can change authentication, firewall/selinux, system services, etc..
That’s about where I am with this right now. The install is reminiscent of RHEL 4 in a lot of ways. I am sure things will change and improve like they always do. The one clearly needed addition right now, though, as far as I am concerned is a boot/netinstall.iso image.
The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The Drunkards Walk was a very refreshing read and it further piqued my interest in mathematics. Now this book delves more into the statistical side of mathematics and gives a fantastic history of statistics and randomness up to the more modern breakthroughs. Never once did I find the material dry as Mlodinow peppered the history with vibrant stories of the many pioneers in statistical theory.
To help the reader understand the points, easy to follow examples were provided. I read this on a tablet with a 7" screen through Nook app for android so the few images and tables still displayed fine.
The Drunkards Walk should be a must read for anyone interested in how statistics are used throughout daily life and how one should properly question/interpret the numbers thrust into one’s path to bolster another’s view point.
View all my reviews
I always love to see what people are doing on their Linux boxen so I figured I would offer up my current screenshot and see if I could encourage you all to do the same. Here I am this morning running Linux Mint 10 (realy nice btw), google chrome browsing my usual websites, thunderbird checking my email accounts, browsing my network shares via nautilus and watching some tv I pulled off my tivo.
So what are *you* doing?
In today's ogg cast, dave talks to the Fedora Project's newest Ninjai, Emily Dirsh.
Links:
lottalinuxlinks.com linux user podcast 131 ogg vorbis format;
lottalinuxlinks.com linux user podcast 131 speex format;
Donnie Darko; and
It’s been a while since I posted last and figured it was time for an update. This past week I installed the newly released 64 bit version of Fedora 14 on my Dell XPS 1330 laptop. I’ve had it running for a few days now and I have to say I’m liking it. It boots up pretty quick. Yum (the package manager) is much improved (speed and amount of software packages in their repositories). Everything seems quite stable and everything worked out of the box with no issues. The only negative with Fedora in general is they do not include any “non Free” software by default. This mean you have to go find a repository that contains these packages. Stuff to enable mp3, h264, wma/wmv and flash playback along with DVD decryption and closed hardware drivers. A bit of a pain but not a huge deal. It’s well documented how to get this stuff installed and its not a major chore. For now Fedora 14 stays on the laptop. It’s been a long time since I ran Fedora/Red Hat on one of my machines. Red Hat does a great service to the Linux community by providing a completely Free distribution of Linux for anyone to download and install on their computers. I recommend everyone check it out.
In today's ogg cast, dave talks to one of the candidates for busiest man alive, Jonathan Nadeau from Frostbite Systems.
Links:
lottalinuxlinks.com linux user podcast 130 ogg vorbis format;
lottalinuxlinks.com linux user podcast 130 speex format;
Frostbite Media; and
The inaugural Northeast Linux Fest will be Saturday April 2nd, 2011 from 10am -3pm, at the Student Center Building at Worcester State University in Worcester, Massachusetts. There will be an after party following the event at Jillian's starting at 4pm.
You know, there are just some things you do not need first thing on a Monday morning. This was one of them…
I came and and started reviewing my reports and was looking at an access report, which is basically a “last | grep $TheDateIWant” from over the weekend. I keep a pretty tight ship and want to know who is accessing what servers and when (and sometimes why). What I saw was monstrously suspicious! I saw MYSELF logged in to 3 different servers 3 times each around 5am on Sunday morning – while I was sleeping.
This is the kind of thing to throw you into an immediate panic first thing on a Monday morning, but I decided to give myself 10 minutes to investigate before completely freaking out.
The first thing I noticed was that the access/login times looked suspiciously like the same times I ran my daily reports on the machines, however, the previous week I had changed the user that runs those reports and this was still saying it was me. I double, triple and quadruple checked and searched all the report programs to make absolutely sure there was no indication that they were still using my personal account (which was probably bad practice to begin with btw). Then I scoured all the cron logs to see what was actually running at those times, and oddly enough, it was just those reports.
I looked through the command line history on those machines and checked again the “last | head” to see who was logging on those machines. Nothing out of place BUT with the “last| head” I was NOT listed as being on the machine on that date! So I ran the entire report command again “last | grep $TheDateIWant” and there I was again, listed right under the logins of the report user.
Anyone catching this yet?
What I had stumbled upon were a few machines that are used so infrequently that the wtmp file, which is what the “last” command uses for data, had over 1 year of entries. My search of “last | grep ‘Oct 31′” was returning not only this year, but my own logins from last year as well.
WHEW!
Moral of the story? Mondays stink – Just stay home!