These Things Matter to Me

Guess Who's Not Crazy: That little Plugin notification in WordPress 2.7

2009-02-08T17:10:00.000-08:00

In my fresh WordPress 2.7 install, the Plugins nav had a "1" next to it that would not go away. I couldn't figure out what the heck it was trying to notify me about.

Here's what I've been trained to think it means:

1 plugin needs attention
(As in, "you're not quite done installing a plugin, you need an API key or something.")
or
1 plugin just got installed. Or enabled. Or disabled.
(And this notification will soon fade away.)

Sometimes it was red.

Sometimes it was grey.

Here's what it actually meant:

An inactive plugin that came with my install, WP-Super-Cache,was eligible for an upgrade. This was installed via Dreamhost who may have packaged some dormant plugins. I have no idea at the moment whether non-Dreamhost installs will run into this.

I guess it's a variation of the "needs attention" design pattern, but given that it was an inactive plugin, and the status of the available upgrade wasn't particularly prominent or connected or linked-to from the Plugin (1), I know I'm not the only one who's been stumped by this. I won't name names, but a WP vet I asked didn't know either.

GUESS WHO'S NOT CRAZY.

The more you know.

Google Video is winding down new uploads, hopefully it doesn't touch Google Apps Video.

2009-01-14T19:11:00.000-08:00

I just read over at Search Engine Land that Google announced it will be shutting down/stopping new development on multiple Google products, including Google Video (so far, just new uploads, not deleting anything, or disabling the search of existing content).

As you may or may not know, Google Apps, the Google suite of collaboration and office tools, includes a video component. While parts of the experience resemble and no doubt share technology with Google Video, the upload and video administration experience are different enough to suggest they're two separate products (with frustratingly similar names ;D), and that Google Apps users shouldn't worry about their Google Apps Video going anywhere.

Still... it got me thinking... consumer Google Docs features roll down to Google Apps customers all the time, it's not so crazy to think that a consumer Google service change could impact Google Apps customers.

For this reason, I posted on the Google Apps support forum asking for emotional closure :D

These Drupal links matter to you 20080909

2008-09-09T15:45:00.001-07:00

Drupal consultancy Lullabot has a new podcast out. It mostly recaps last week's Drupalcon Szeged, and is good as always.

Oh yeah, Lullabot is the primary organizer behind a big Drupal conference, Do it with Drupal. 3 days in New Orleans in December. No BarCamp or Drupalcon, it looks to be a highly curated event, with major speakers from within and outside the Drupal community, 1000-2000 attendees (?). I'm super excited that Drupal is getting a major event like this. The Drupalcons and Drupalcamps are great, but I think this kind of context for Drupal can legitmize in some corporate environments.
I swear I don't work for Lullabot, but another announcement related to them: There are some Lullabot Drupal workshops next week in Portland.
BTW, Drupalcon Szeged was very well documented, often with full videos and slides from the talks. Check out the full session page with links to files and descriptions for the Drupalcon Szeged talks. Bravo to the group who ran it. I've heard only good things from those who attended, that it was a great atmosphere. Also, as somebody viewing from afar, the speed with which they've uploaded videos after the event is quite fast!

This is interesting. Web-learning mainstay Lynda.com has Drupal training videos. As with most Lynda.com content, there are some free samples on the course page. It's great that they have some Drupal training, but it's confusing that they cover MAMP and WAMP installation, but neglect what is by far the most prominent Drupal hosting environment (or any web hosting environment): LAMP (Linux). Maybe the context is proof of concept?
Also, Lynda.com has WordPress coursework up, so Drupal is not the first open source tool to make the cut, but it's still significant that a site mostly known for teaching HTML and Final Cut Pro has Drupal videos.
LA People, DrupalCamp LA is next week, September 13th, 14th

(Very cool Drupal knitting chart by ejhogbin)

How to install the Python prerequisites for the Memetracker Drupal module

2008-09-08T07:12:00.000-07:00

How to install the Python prerequisites for the Memetracker Drupal module.

Usually the installation of Drupal modules is pretty straightforward:

Download module to modules/
Uncompress
Enable
Configure
Profit

But the Memetracker module is a bit different, requiring a bunch of Python stuff, and ideally, "root" on your server. It's not that hard to set up, but if you're not used to installing stuff outside of the Druapl-verse, these notes might help you.

(These instructions are for Ubuntu Hardy Heron. The steps are likely very similar on other Debian-based distributions, including earlier versions of Ubuntu.

I've also successfully installed Memetracker on Centos 5.x/Redhat Enterprise Linux 5.x. I have a document for that coming soon, though the packages and steps are very similar, and you could extrapolate these notes and apply to other Linux versions.)

Most of you should skip to step 2, as you probably already have Drupal running..

1. Make sure you have all "normal" LAMP and Linux utilities installed for your typical Drupal install.

1a. Install the LAMP stuff, mail server stuff that Drupal requires.

# apt-get install apache2 php5 libapache2-mod-php5 php5-mysql mysql-server php5-gd postfix

(Note: Though Drupal core can run on PHP4, the Memetracker module *requires* PHP5, so that's what we're using here. You don't have to go out of your way to get this on Hardy Heron, but there is a small possibility some of you went out of your way to get PHP4, so I'm steering you towards PHP5 here.)

1b. Though not required to run Drupal, these additional packages make life much easier, and it's just a matter of time before you miss them:

# apt-get install openssh-server wget build-essential groff-base man-db unzip

2. Unlike most Drupal setups, you also need to have some Python resources handy to run Memetracker.

2a. The first bunch of Python tools already have nice Ubuntu packages already made up for you.

# apt-get install python-numpy python-numeric python-dev python

2b. Pyclust doesn't have an Ubuntu package made for it. We need to compile it from source (There will be a python-cluster package in the next Ubuntu version, Intrepid Ibex.)

Get the source:

# wget http://bonsai.ims.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~mdehoon/software/cluster/cluster-1.41.tar.gz

(Note, this is the newest version as of 20080908. Please check http://bonsai.ims.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~mdehoon/software/cluster/software.htm for newest version.)

Uncompress the source:

# tar -xvzf cluster-1.41.tar.gz

Now install it:

# cd cluster-1.41

# python setup.py install

You now have all your Python stuff installed.

Let's verify it works:

# python

>> from Pycluster import *

(You will get your Python prompt back if you have your Python stuff installed correctly.)

That's it. You now have your environment ready for Memetracker. There's lots of other stuff you can do to optimize your system for Memetracker, and I have some additional Memetracker documentation coming up. However I noticed an immediate need for this Python stuff to be written down in a step-by-step manner, as many Drupal folks don't usually have to do so much Python/Linux stuff.

When Chrome crashes

2008-09-03T18:05:00.003-07:00

You're almost pleased.

When a page bombs out, it only kills that one tab/window.

Notice only one unhappy tab. The rest go on living.

Monitoring Chrome's Ascent

2008-09-03T12:31:00.000-07:00

In the 24 hours since Google released Chrome, its browser share has reached 2.6%, at least amongst the 45,000 sites tracked by browser stats tool GetClicky.

Do with that information what you like.

(via Techcrunch)

Second big day for Opentape. Community + Policy.

2008-08-26T22:25:00.000-07:00

If you know anything about licensing, and would like to help a great free software project out, considering talking with Opentape. It looks like they need guidance choosing a license, and would prefer to package up some stuff made of disparate permissive licenses (MIT, GPL, etc) along with their own code.
Opentape now has forums! This is great. People are submitting bugs, requesting features... all that good stuff.

New open source music software I'm excited about: Opentape, a muxtape-inspired tool.

2008-08-25T20:53:00.000-07:00

Opentape is an extremely easy-to-install, open source implementation of Muxtape. You unzip it, upload songs, and you're done. No database to set up, no need to edit php files in vi. It looks like Muxtape, except with an unlimited number of songs.

(For those that don't know about about Muxtape, Muxtape is a web-based tool for sharing and listening to music. Like much social software, it benefits from a network effect, getting better and more useful the more people use it, and being hard to explain to people who don't. (Explaining social software to people who don't use it can be frustrating. "It plays music? With your friends?" That's it? Le sigh.)

Muxtape is also basically gone. It became unavailable last week. In their redirect they confirmed some issues with the RIAA. But since the day they went dark, they've made no more public statements about the situation, which is a bit confusing and unfortunate. I don't feel wronged, after all, they were giving us a great free service. But I wish they could communicate a bit more, especially when their software has so many non-infringing uses and passionate users.)

But let's get back to Opentape.

What an opentape looks like for the listener/ visitor (via screenshots from the Opentape live demo):

An administrative view of rearranging songs:
How do you set it up?

Get the Opentape source code to your server, ideally in a place that's in your web's root/user's public area, often this will be "public_html."
Unzip it.
Browse to the Opentape directory on your server, probably something like, "http://yourdomain.com/opentape"
You'll find a fully functioning website awaiting a password of your choosing.
You're done! No database to set up!

Once additional cool thing about Opentape running on your server, rather than on a central service provider's, is that you can actually upload your songs via ftp/sftp, in addition to the normal web-based upload method.

There's also mention of a future ability to federate with other Opentape users across other servers' installations of Opentape.

Let's bring social bookmarking into the enterprise, with Magnolia (and without IBM)

2008-08-24T23:15:00.001-07:00

Last week Magnolia announced plans to open source their social bookmarking software. I haven't been a big Magnolia user (I use the similiarly-purposed delicious), but not for lack of interest or quality. In fact, two of their biggest cheerleaders, Tara Hunt and Chris Messina have always tempted me to port my delicious data in there, by their association alone, but I never got around to it.

But with the recent announcement that Magnolia will go open source, I'm interested not just as a consumer, but as an administrator/ service developer.

I don't really feel like I've had the ability to bring social bookmarking inside the enterprise as a service. For many organizations to feel comfortable going into "the cloud," the service needs to have hooks into SAML -> Active Directory/LDAP, a la Salesforce.com/Google Apps.
OR
I need to have the ability to run things locally on my own server. Until now, neither delicious nor Magnolia had this ability, and now Magnolia will have the ability to do the latter. Let's hope they have a plugin architecture, so somebody can LDAP it.

I'm currently using Drupal and Deki-Wiki in my web/collaboration stack. I could easily see adding Magnolia into that mix. Ideally they could all share user and session information.

The first code for Magnolia (codenamed "M2") is scheduled to drop in September 2008. I'll be watching.

Custom boot messages for your Redhat Linux or CentOS-based virtual appliance

2008-07-16T19:00:00.000-07:00

Upon boot, many virtual appliances automagically start services, log users in, or display helpful messages beyond what a normal OS would.
After all, a primary use-case of virtual appliances is to act more like an application than a full OS, and ideally would like the user to feel like they're only interacting with an application.

One virtual appliance that I use is MindTouch's open source Dekiwiki appliance (btw, I fully recommend Dekiwiki, my favorite wiki software at the moment.).

The DekiWiki appliance, upon boot, without any user interaction or required login, will display something like this:
This is extremely handy. No login to Linux necessary. Just go to any web browser on your network, and go.

How to recreate the magic in CentOS/Redhat/(probably) Fedora

I'm currently making two virtual appliances based on CentOS Linux (A clone of RedHat Enterprise Linux ). I pretty much copied DekiWiki's rc.local, to identify and print out the current IP, whatever it may be, and direct the user to browse there, without having to login. This was partially successful. But after printing the URL and instruction to the user, the console tty was cleared prior to login prompt appeared, making it so all the helpful info was removed.

Where'd my helpful message go? It was cleared by mgetty.

I had no idea why this was working fine in the Debian-based DekiWiki appliance, and less so in my CentOS-based (Piwik, coming soon!) appliance. After a bit of side-by-side comparison, I noticed that Debian's /etc/inittab calls up /sbin/getty, but CentOS (and Redhat)'s /etc/inittab calls up /sbin/mingetty. mingetty apparently clears the screen, and getty does not.

By adding the --noclear option to mingetty, CentOS will stop clearing the screen, and allow your custom boot message to live on.

Notes.

Here's what to edit in /etc/inittab:

BEFORE

# Run gettys in standard runlevels
1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty1
2:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty2
3:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty3
4:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty4
5:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty5
6:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty6

AFTER

# Run gettys in standard runlevels
1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty --noclear tty1
2:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty --noclear tty2
3:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty --noclear tty3
4:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty --noclear tty4
5:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty --noclear tty5
6:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty --noclear tty6

Original rc.local that finds and prints IP in helpful message (thanks Mindtouch!):

IP=`ifconfig eth0 | grep "inet addr"|awk -F ' ' '{print $2}' | awk -F ':' '{print $2}'`
echo
echo -e "\033[1mTo access Deki Wiki, please launch a web browser and go to:"
echo
echo " http://$IP"
echo -e "\033[0m"

exit 0

Managing feeds. The doghouse and the kennel.

2008-07-03T00:05:00.000-07:00

Like many of you, I have a love/hate relationship with my feeds. (Remind me one day to tell you about my feed: bottomless popcorn theory).

But today I'm here to tell you about two helpful strategies I use with my feeds.

The Doghouse.

Invented by a friend of mine, the Doghouse is feed probation. Basically you're marking a feed, by tag, or folder, as "in the Doghouse." You're disappointed in this feed. It's not living up to expectations. There are many reasons why a feed may get sent to the Doghouse. Maybe all of a sudden it went "partial," maybe images stopped working, maybe the past 30 items have been about a topic you're not interested in and you suspect the shift is permanent. Maybe somebody just got an iphone, and ever since it's gone downhill. You don't want these feeds to get mixed in with the good feeds, but you don't want to totally fire the feed quite yet. Send it to the Doghouse.

The Kennel.

The Kennel is just a vacation for feeds. For me, the Kennel is usually when there's nothing wrong with the feed, but I need to edit stuff down either for time or focus reasons. If you have a major project due, and can't deal with distraction, you may want to move all feeds unrelated to your project, to the Kennel.

Maybe it's the week before Macworld, and you just don't feel like reading 12 posts a day about iphone video camera rumors. Maybe you're on a budget, and reading about luxury hotels hurts right now. Maybe you have a Drupal deadline, and only want to read about Drupal and Linux for two weeks.

There are plenty of reasons to drop your feeds of at the Kennel, it doesn't mean you love them any less.

YouTube is still magic

2008-06-29T23:55:00.000-07:00

(A quick thought about YouTube that was too long for twitter.)

The sweet spot in a YouTuber's creative life is right after they feel the power, access, and infinite potential of YouTube, but before they get bummed by the haters. You know, that phase when he/she's making 4 videos a day.

"I said I wasn't going to make another video today, but I just wanted to respond to desi64. Desi64 (I hope I'm saying your name right), I agree with you..."

I know people get impatient with YouTube, and I agree it's a petri dish for many community "don'ts," but I don't think its diversity,activity, and pulse is matched by anything else on the Internet.

Google Reader lets you add notes now!

2008-05-05T18:08:00.000-07:00

Maybe my friends and I just have too high of an opinion of how amusing our commentary is, but we've long-awaited the ability to leave notes on our Google Reader Shared Items. And now, perhaps responding to services like FriendFeed where you can comment on anything, Google Reader lets you leaves notes!

Here's how it looks:

Video: Drupal vs. WordPress. Presentation given at LUGRadio Live USA, 2008. San Francisco, CA

2008-04-15T14:34:00.000-07:00

This weekend Selena and I spoke at the charming and hospitable LUG Radio Live USA, in San Francisco, CA. The topic was Choosing between Drupal and WordPress. It was very civil. A few people have asked for the video of our presentation, so I've uploaded it above with a Flash embed. More ambitious full-on video file to come later.

So much dramz. Choosing between WordPress and Drupal.

2008-04-09T11:44:00.000-07:00

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

Selz and I are giving a presentation on choosing between WordPress and Drupal at LUG Radio Live in San Francisco this weekend. She and I agree to disagree.

Preview screencast of Wordpress 2.5's gallery feature

2008-03-26T09:47:00.000-07:00

Wordpress's Matt Mullenweg previews a very cool feature of the soon-to-be-released Wordpress, small photo galleries in a post without painful manual layout. (And yes, there are plenty of shots of the cool new dashboard.)

Help artists be artists. A defense of drupalmodules.com

2008-03-19T23:56:00.001-07:00

The myth of centralization, the reality of distributed information.

If the Internet has taught us anything, it's that that:

authoritativeness is subjective
information is distributed
if anything ever seems centralized, it's only because giant pockets of activity are hidden, and once surfaced, we can see, "oh yeah, information is distributed!, better to have it available, than invisible!"

This applies to all sorts of activities and information, but today I'm talking about software reference material, in specific, Drupal reference material.

Drupal is an incredibly popular content management system framework. You can call it other things. Drupal helps you make websites.

Drupal's fight to centralize

I'm relatively new to Drupal, quite like it, and recommend it frequently. That said, I have some issues with it, and among them what seems like peer pressure in the Drupal community to not create, or feel self-conscious about creating, Drupal resources outside of Drupal.org. There is a surprising lack of websites about Drupal given how popular it is. This is thoroughly confusing as everybody knows that with both proprietary and open source software, bands, artists, etc... having a breadth of resources/fan sites/ forums is a sign of a healthy, thriving community/market/mindshare. There's a time and a place for "many eyes" and joining large group efforts (like Drupal.org) and there's a time and a place for shirking mass-meetings, votes, digging in by yourself or a few collaborators, and making something totally fresh, especially for "proof of concept." Neither approach is better or worse, but they each have their time and place, and nobody should feel guilty or self-conscious for working hard on their own and making something.

Recently a non-Drupal.org resource was created, drupalmodules.com. This has been mildly controversial within the Drupal community. Drupalmodules.com is too new for me to honestly judge on utility alone, but without a doubt, it's purpose is undeniable: navigating the world of Drupal modules is very challenging, for many different reasons. While many within the Drupal community agree there needs to be a way to sift through modules by "quality" (there are wildly varying degrees of quality), the problem is bigger than just that. Quality aside, it's challenging just to know if you're picking the module that mostly closely scratches your itch... Anyway, Drupal modules: tough to navigate, agreed! Not agreed? That making drupalmodules.com was the right thing to do. Crazy, right?

Apparently there have been discussions for ages on a rating system for modules on Drupal.org, let alone a general redesign of the site, and its sub-sites. Maybe people think drupalmodules.com undermines those efforts?

Really people, there's no downside to having another Drupal resource. In bizarro-land, the downside is that people who believe in centralizing everything, think the cost of keeping track of things and managing quality is not worth the benefit of having constantly-created resources, failing-fast, iterating often, and innovating often. In that reality, people should stop creating things, unless it's a thing inside the heavily formalized, but tracked, "system."

But on my planet, planet Internet, we're enjoying the abundance! (and we have RSS readers) John, thanks so much for working on drupalmodules.com! I hope it doesn't cause you too much grief. I hope you get lots of donations, and don't feel self-conscious about putting ads up on your site (unless you don't like them :D ). Do not feel self-conscious about the success or failure of your site! I hope more Drupal websites get born. I highly dig Drupal, and think it will get better faster not just with an ever-growing gigantic body of Drupal.org community members, but with highly-motivated independent visionaries who use Drupal as a canvas to express their vision.

Don't control artists.

We all know the expression "design by committee," and how it's a derisive term used to describe the dynamic of when the lack of a cohesive vision dilutes quality. And it's no secret that user experience and design is one of the most common criticisms of Drupal. So it's extra discouraging when the very thing that will lead to improved experience and design in Drupal, escape from design by committee, is frowned upon. Big groups are great for fixing bugs, raising money, and lot of other stuff. I don't want the awesome Drupal.org community to go anywhere. I just want it to recognize and appreciate that lots of cool Drupal stuff might not come from Drupal.org, but can still help Drupal.org.

VMWare Linux anti-patterns. How VMware is kind of neglecting the Linux experience

2008-03-17T23:22:00.000-07:00

I like VMware stuff a lot, and write about them regularly, usually in a positive way, so I write this list of VMware Linux anti-patterns with only good intentions.

Lately I've been feeling a bit bummed by VMware's deprecated Linux experience, and Windows-centric mentality. If VMware gets too Windows-centric, it'll only be competing with Microsoft. I want VMware to do well against Microsoft! And I believe that to do so, it needs to deliver an experience that doesn't marginalaize Linux users.

Here's how VMWare can improve the Linux experience:

Improve the vmware-tools install on Linux guests. (All VMware products, all host OS's)
On a Windows guest, you run a binary (by clicking it!), and you're done. On the Linux side, you run a binary (most likely via command-line), and then visually, you'd think you were done. but you're not. You installed it, now you configure it. Seriously, whenever I train or help users with this part, I feel guilty/embarrassed about how idiosyncratic it feels. The output of the rpm/install script never tells you "now you configure it." Sure the docs do. But on Windows you don't have to do all that. VMware, I won't hold you responsible for the command-line parts, that's (mostly) in Linux's hands. But you could longterm do away with the configure, and short-term, announce at the end of the install that, "Now it's time to configure."
Make a Virtual Infrastructure client for Linux.
You made one for Windows. I think you love Windows more than you love Linux. (And yes, I am aware of the web client. I'll pretend you didn't suggest that.)
VMware Converter is way more difficult with Linux than Windows.
- The VMware Converter program itself only runs on Windows
- Converting Linux physical-to-virtual VM's is a more burdensome process for Linux guests, with more rules and hoops than Windows guests have.
I feel like you're slowly taking away ssh/ "service console"/ file system access to your ESX-based products. You've only done this to 3i so far. And there is a workaround. But the vibe I get (I hope I'm wrong) is that you're trying to wean us off of standards communications and file-system access to this stuff.
Give VMWare Server 2.0 a Linux client.
I know you took away the non-web client from both Windows and Linux, but since Windows people can use the new VI client to access VMWare Server, I'm still counting this as a ding against Linux users.

Real talk.

Drupal "on rails." One of the ways Acquia's commercial Drupal will work

2008-03-02T22:06:00.000-08:00

One of the challenges of Drupal is there is always more than module to scratch any itch, including some included modules (especially easy to reach for). And more than once I've chosen a module or approach to solve a problem, only to find out later about a superior solution I wish I would have known about earlier.

So it's a great relief to hear that Acquia will help guide us down the road of module selection by including a bunch on their to-be-released Drupal distro, code-named Carbon.

Modules currently under consideration:

(via a friend, this could be changed later, go here for freshest info (login required))

What’s Included

Carbon will include the latest release of Drupal 6 core along with a carefully selected set of modules. We are selecting modules based on their relevance to common social publishing use cases for both public-facing web sites and intranet team collaboration sites. The module set is still under review. Currently, it includes:

Page layout: Panels 2
Custom content: CCK, Date, Imagefield, File
Views: Views 2
Lightweight markup: Marksmarty
WYSIWYG: Kupu
Scheduled publishing: Workflow, Actions
Image management: As fields - Imagefield, Imagecache; As nodes - Image, Image assist
Events: Calendar
Forums: Forum
Comment spam filter: Mollom
Social bookmarks: TBD
Content rating: Voting API, Fivestar
Search: in core, Solr
Categorization: in core
RSS: in core
Content aggregation: tbd
Workflow: Workflow
Content versioning: Core, Diff
Tag clouds: Tagadelic
SEO URLs: Path Auto
Utilities: Primary Tag, Custom pager, JS Tools, Google Maps, Google Analytics, Wiki freelinks
Import / migration: tbd
Authentication: Persistent login, Securesite, LDAP, OpenID
User Groups: Organic groups
Email gateway: tbd
Email notification: Subscriptions

Two Dudes, One Drupe: Drupalmao, new Drupal videocast

2008-02-20T01:01:00.000-08:00

New Drupal show alert! Drupal enthusiasts probably already know about Lullabot's excellent podcast/videocast. And now they have some company. Drupalmao has just launched, which is a casual, DIY show, not unlike Diggnation, where two friends in NYC/NJ just talk about stuff they'd probably talk about even without the camera there, and it's fun and super informative.

One of the critical skills for any Drupal developer/ administrator is constantly adjusting and tweaking your approach to your site(s) with an awareness of fading/emerging modules and how they're best used. In my first night with Drupalmao, I already learned about one module I hadn't heard of at all, and another one whose name I recognized, but whose purpose I was unclear on.

Keep up the good work guys!

Sun buying Virtualbox-maker Innotek

2008-02-12T09:57:00.000-08:00

(Screenshot of a Windows guest in a Mac OS X host, using VirtualBox)

Most Ubuntu users have long known about Virtualbox, the confusingly-versioned (they have an "open source" version, and a "full" (their word, not fine) version ) VMware Workstation-like tool. It's been in Ubuntu repositories for a while, and I like it quite a bit, though it's never displaced VMware Workstation in my life.

I've been especially excited about the fact that they have a beta version of VirtualBox for the Mac, making it so users on all major platforms can have a similar experience and trade virtual machines around.(Yeah, I know that VMware Fusion virtual machines are pretty much interchangeable with VMware Workstation/ VMware Player machines, but there is no free VMware product for Mac users, so I hate having to check ahead/download trials for users, etc).

In any case, Sun is buying Innotek, and I think it's great. Let's hope they don't pour Java into it! (just kidding. kind of.) One thing that I think has hurt Sun is that it doens't make consumer products. Something Microsoft benefits from, and now VMware, is that consumer behaviors drive corporate decisions. People achieve consumer comfort with a product, and extend the relationship at work. Sun's Scott McNealy would just rail against Microsoft quality. It's not always about quality! It's about not wanting to venture into the unknown. Sun having an easy to use desktop product like VirtualBox is actually pretty unique for them, and a really great change. (Apologies if they make all sorts of other consumer apps I don't know about.)

The latest fashions

2008-01-15T23:07:00.001-08:00

Look at that dude. He got a MacBook Air!
You can barely see it, she got a iPod Nano.

(photo via Funtasticus)

Active Window. A poem.

2007-12-19T01:47:00.000-08:00

something happened!

i will pulse orange

until you pay attention

with a click.

(on Windows or Linux)

early draft here.

Drupal Therapy. Introduction: Drupal is like the Holodeck

2007-12-11T01:29:00.000-08:00

(So, BTW, Amnesty.org just relaunched, using Drupal. via Dries.)

Last year I started using Drupal. I made it into a blog server. It is a fine blog server. For hosting multiple blogs by multiple authors, it might even be my favorite. But because I had previous exposure to Wordpress and its elegant admin panel, I couldn't help but be majorly disappointed by the administrative interface of Drupal. What made it worse was how little anybody talked about its horrible interface. The only people who seemed willing to talk about it were the people who tried Drupal and left.

I stuck with Drupal. I love Drupal. I think it's the best tool for building many types of web applications, but many parts of the administrative experience are ridiculous. I think many people in the Drupal community know this, and are working to change this, but we are likely a few versions away from any of the major turn-offs being healed.

In the meantime, I'm going to give back to Drupal. Not by beating it up about its shortcomings, but by acknowledging them, and working around them. By guiding people through them. People who have poked around Drupal and wrinkled your nose: You are not crazy. You are not stupid. Drupal doesn't make sense at first. But if you walk away, you are turning away from an amazing, amazing tool that likely does anything you were thinking of doing, but more!

Drupal is like a beautiful mansion. No. It's like a the holodeck. No. Drupal is like a holodeck mansion. If you want a loft, it can be an urban loft for you. If you want a beachfront property, bam! It's beachfront property. Drupal can adapt to your desires. But there's one problem. Drupal is a holodeck mansion without a door. There's a little doggy door. You have to get on your hands and knees and crawl. You're going to get very dirty. You might even scrape yourself. But once you've made it inside, there's nothing like it.

Stay tuned for Lesson One in Drupal Therapy: The beginning's not a good place to start.
It will help if you have the ability to use a virtual machine.

Some VMware Server 2.0 Beta screenshots

2007-11-15T00:34:00.000-08:00

...wanted to upload a couple of screenshots from VMware Server 2.0. As I mentioned yesterday, VMware Server 2.0 beta update 1 only has a web-gui.
As you can see below, in a "read-only" way, this doesn't interfere too much. When you actually start to interact with the page, it gets a little more annoying, and you can feel the chug of the thinking and the rendering. I'll repeat that I appreciate that it isn't a draining Java applet doing all of this on the client side. But it's still pretty slow and painful. Aside from performance, the interface and navigation is inconsistent and confusing. I'll try to post about that tomorrow.

Now below you can see the web-ui get even more inconvenient when you want "console." By default, when you select a console view of a guest, you get only a partial view of it, ensconced in scrolly bars. You do have a fullscreen option, but nothing in between, let alone the "fit to screen" option available in the VMWare Server 1.x console client.

To be continued!

1 night with VMware Server 2.0 beta: It sure is web-based.

2007-11-14T08:45:00.000-08:00

VMware Server 2.0 beta came out today, and I've had a couple of hours to play with it tonight. As suggested at VMworld, this is a really different product from VMware Server 1.x. Some changes good, some bad. I don't have the same opinion that virtualization.info, that VMware Server is becoming a less relevant product, but I do agree that there's something lackluster here.

VMware Server 1.x felt whole, right off the bat. With VMware Server 2.0, I have this "well, this is just the beta, surely there will be radical improvements" vibe.

While there are a million good and bad features here, what will save us both a lot of time is for you to know that as of now, VMware Server 2.x administration is totally web-based, and that is almost all you can think about or notice when you're working with this tool. I will give to credit to VMware, they've enabled a lot of functionality (rebooting, creating VM's, etc) on a web-client that somehow doesn't involve a giant, slow Java applet. That said, there are many situations when you feel the web pain. The web page has to "think" and rebuild itself a lot. Console access requires a plugin in your browser (which kinda kills the whole "all-you-need-is-a-web-browser" spirit). People in the forums are missing the fit-to-screen feature you got with the "regular" console in VMware Server 1.x, as am I.

VMware is taking a big risk here. The next version of the (regular) VI client will be able to manage VMware Server guests, somewhat softening the blow of not otherwise having one. But this will only help people who have the (not free) VI. I see the "strategy" here... entice VMware Server users to jump up to VI. However I don't believe it will work, and will actually turn people off of VMware.

Despite supporting more OS's and architectures, I feel VMware Server 2.0 is "less" of a product than VMware Server 1.x.

To be continued.

Oracle VM: Missing in Action

2007-11-14T08:41:00.000-08:00

The Oracle VM FAQ says it will be available for download today. It's not.

Oracle VM is free, and will be available for download starting Wednesday, Nov. 14, 2007, at oracle.com/virtualization. Both Linux and Windows guests are supported.

It's not on the Oracle software downloads page, either.
[update: It later showed up sometime by late-afternoon. At least there was a download button. When I went to download it, it made me give a page of registration info, and then said it'd take up to two days to "process" my info in compliance with "U.S. Export Administration Regulations and applicable export laws." BTW, I'm American, downloading from the U.S. I've never had this happen before.]

By popular demand! Oracle announces deprecated virtualization product.

2007-11-12T23:05:00.000-08:00

How much you want to bet that web-based Oracle VM management tool requires Java? I really want to be wrong about this, but I gotta play the odds. Less certain, but also likely: "works better in IE."
Not that I want Oracle VM, their new confusingly Xen-based, partially open source, only-virtualization-environment they'll officially support Oracle on, to be really be good anyway. I actually laughed when I listened to this keynote at Oracle OpenWorld today:

Virtualization is hot... people have been asking us... Oracle, what are you going to do with virtualization?

Yeah, kinda like how people keep asking, "Hey Coolio, when's your next album coming out?" Like how they do on opposite day!

Like all Xen-based stuff, Oracle VM will only support Windows guests if you have hardware virtualization. Unlike most Xen-based stuff, they're only supporting RHEL3, RHEL4 and RHEL5 Linux, and the wildly popular Oracle Enterprise Linux (if there's any left!).

First post-Leopard VMware Fusion release is out, plus new tool: VMware Importer for moving Windows VM's from Parallels to VMware Fusion

2007-11-12T00:32:00.000-08:00

Just saw a tweet from VMware Fusion developer Ben Gertzfield:

VMware Fusion 1.1 and VMware Importer (Parallels to VMware) beta are out!

Looking over the release dates, it looks like this is the first post-Leopard release of VMware Fusion, so if you have Leopard, you especially want to grab this.

Then there's VMware Importer, a new, beta tool for converting your Parallels guests to VMware (Fusion) guests. The docs say it works with Windows guests (Windows 2000, XP, 2003, and Vista), and that because enough info about your (virtual) hardware will change during the conversion process (just in terms of identifiers I assume, not actual profile), you'll probably need to reactivate you Windows license upon conversion.

While we're talking about Macs, VMware Fusion, and Ben Gertzfield, I might as well link to a pretty cool (video) Google TechTalk Ben gave about VMware Fusion. It's about an hour, and the first 10 minutes are the standard talking points VMware gives about "it's about apps," etc, etc. But at about minute 11 it gets very interesting as Ben talks about how VMware approached certain Mac-specific problems.

Hulu "is actually a step backwards"

2007-10-31T00:31:00.000-07:00

Most of the 311-so-far comments on the this post on the NBC-Universal/Newscorp we-don't-need-YouTube collabo are extremely negative/disappointed about the lack of portability and accessibility of the Hulu content (many non-U.S. people wondering why the site is going out of its way to recreate a completely artificial international restriction on Internet stuff!)
Anyway, so it's negative comment after negative comment, only to be interspersed by the occasional suspiciously positive but hollow atta-boy, something pointed out by commenter Chris Coleman:

Wow, this is so groundbreaking! I am truly thrilled by such great NBC original programming! Just FYI, it's strikingly obvious which comments are planted by NBC. Don't you have anything better for your interns to spend their time doing?

Here's another good one:

Hmmm.... I can only watch these shows while chained to a browser, and in the country the shows air in anyway. Effectively, the only advantage is that I can watch the when I want. As long as I am in front of my computer at the time, and as long as I don't mind a tiny window. Why is this better than recording the shows on a PVR and watching that whenever I want? On a bigger screen? With the ability to skip commercials? With my family? There appears to be no benefit to this whatsoever. If I can't carry it away on an external device, it is actually a step backwards from the TV. The only benefit I can see is if I am overseas and want to keep up on shows. But of course that doesn't work, does it.

And another:

By the time your shows are shown in Europe, I've already seen them through a torrent. Your business distribution model is dead. And now you're trying to perpetuate this model online as well? This is a different world.

And so on.

Benchmarking on Windows with ntimer (real talk)

2007-10-05T01:32:00.000-07:00

Linux/UNIX has a nice little utility called called time.

Time lets you put it before any other command, and will tell you how long it took to run stuff.
I find it very handy for benchmarking. And as a sysadmin, whenever anybody says something seems "slow," you can keep it real with time:

# time cp bigfile bigfile.copy

Bam! You'll show them slow. Run it on a baseline system. Run it on the "slow" system. That's what's up, thanks, time!

But what do you do on Windows? I had no idea. But the Internet is filled with people like me wondering, "is there something like the time command... for Windows?"

There is my friend! ntimer.exe:

# ntimer.exe [command]

Ntimer.exe unfortunately does not come included with XP. You can download it for free from microsoft.com in a bundle called "Windows 2003 resource kit." It's 11MB, and comes with a bunch of other stuff. The binary for ntimer.exe works fine on XP Professional.

These links matter to you. Thursday October 4th, 2007

2007-10-03T20:17:00.000-07:00

UC Berkeley posts entire course lectures on YouTube. Your move, MIT OpenCourseWare
If your Drupal site is on the Internet, you can publish from Google Docs
Notes from a DrupalCon Barcelona attendee
Ubuntero.org is a social network for Ubunteros and their admirers

These Links Matter to You. Tuesday October 2, 2007

2007-10-02T23:14:00.000-07:00

43 Folders switched over to Drupal
New DrupalCamp alert: BADCamp '07, taking place in the Bay Area (northern California) early November 2007
new episodes of LUG radio are noteworthy enough on their own, but this one has an interview with Miguel de Icaza
most of this summer 2007's WordCamp (WordPress un-conference) talks have videos up
(video) If Morgan Stanley can get social networking inside their business and present on Enterprise 2.0, there's hope for you. "Who knows who, and who knows what."

(art from Andrei Robu via FFFFound!)

The Gutsy Gibbon and I: Almost together.

2007-10-01T23:10:00.000-07:00

Gutsy's so close I can feel it.
This weekend I installed the beta of Ubuntu Linux 7.10, Gutsy Gibbon.
A few notes to myself, and just one bug:

Bug: no matter how many Firefox windows I have open, they never begin to "stack up," instead spreading infinitely across the bottom GNOME panel. I never realized this before, but the act of stacking Windows up after a certain point keeps the the title of each window legible. I'm sorry I never appreciated you before, mister/miss Firefox-stacking-window situation.
You don't know what you got, 'till it's gone.
after install via upgrade, sound comes back muted. Not a big deal, but after you install Linux, you're paranoid about hardware not working, so for a minute I thought sound support got worse with Gutsy. You really had me going there, Gutsy Gibbon! But you merely muted me. Not funny, Gutsy. This isn't Punk'd.
gnome-setup has crashed a couple of times. I don't know. I can't reproduce it at will, but it happens.
(not a bug) but I still have to install a special driver to get graphics to work right on a Dell 700m.

(phone from keetra)

Save the date! October 20, 2007: You and PostgreSQL, sitting in a tree! In Portland. A nice dinner, technical talks. And wifi. Hopefully good wifi.

2007-09-18T00:02:00.000-07:00

Next month is the PostgreSQL Conference Fall 2007. $60, free for students. A deal my friends. Tending the Garden is among the organizers, so it's awesome by association.
Be there or be a flat file.

These Links Matter to You. Thurday September 6, 2007

2007-09-06T21:51:00.000-07:00

(GNOME Specimen Screenshot )

GNOME Specimen, a great way to preview fonts, has been updated.
You already know about the Fake Steve Jobs. But do you know about Fake Jonathan Schwartz?
Miguel de Icaza nicely summarizes, and highlights an interesting question regarding the Network Appliance/ Sun lawsuit.
The anatomy of a Drupal Installation Profile
Delicious: Extreme. Makeover. Preview.

These Links Matter to You. Wednesday September 5, 2007

2007-09-05T22:57:00.001-07:00

I didn't intend on being the 5,000,000th person to talk about the iphone/ipod updates today, but I ran across this in a delicious feed:
Schadenfreude: iPhone Price Chopped Already, 8GB $200 Cheaper - Consumerist
Whatever. I was an iPhone-carrying rock star all summer and you know it
by werty to gadgets iphone ... saved by 1 other person ... 1 hour ago
An extremely interesting talk by Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz about emerging markets (video)
Leetspeak: as legit as Kitty Pidgin
Another big media company is using Drupal. This time LifetimeTV. (They join mtv, WarnerMusic, among others)
You didn't hear it from me, but Google may announce a presentation program (PowerPoint-ish) and wiki to go along with GoogleDocs and Google Spreadsheet at the Office 2.0 conference this week

video interview: Wordpress founder Matt Mullenwag

2007-08-15T22:19:00.000-07:00

Above: Wallstrip video interview with Wordpress/Automattic/ Wordpress.com founder Matt Mullenwag. Totally underrated Wallstrip host Lindsay Campbell jokes about his age and competitors. (BTW, something to know going into this interview, Wordpress.com hosts LOLcatz site icanhascheezburger.)

I regularly read Matt's blog, and I've always been impressed with how generous, even, and laid back he comes across in the middle of Wordpress's insane growth and popularity.

Aside: Wallstrip has somehow talked advertiser OptionsExpress into letting Lindsay get edited into and poke fun at their dry commercials.

related: Wallstrip interview with Wordpress-centric co. Automattic CEO Toni Schneider

UbuntuLive presentation slides: Ubuntu Virtual Appliances. Best Practices (ever).

2007-07-22T09:20:00.000-07:00

UbuntuLive is live!
My talk isn't until this afternoon, but I want attendees to be able to have access to my slides to take notes on, without having to wait until after the talk.

.odp slides (Open Office format, edit inside of.)
.pdf slides (pdf format. Less editing options, but simpler for some.)

Like many slides, they don't totally stand on their own without the verbal "filler." I'm making a "prose" version of this presentation at some point to address that :D

Ubunteros: 35% discount at UbuntuLive, O'Reilly's Ubuntu Conference

2007-07-17T20:00:00.000-07:00

Hey there Ubunteros.

A quick post:

If you're interested in attending Ubuntu Live, but just haven't registered because it's 35% too expensive, have I got a discount code for you!

ubu07ucm

That's right, ubu07ucm. Use it when you register here.

With O'Reilly's permission and encouragement, I'm blogging this to encourage your attendance. Of course, if you can't attend for financial or geographical reasons, O'Reilly always does a great job aggregating blog coverage, session files, pictures, and links so that it can be just as good as attending! If you wait a couple months, even more multipedia coverage eventually trickles in.

More on Ubuntu Live, OSCON, and Portland nerd summer soon!

These Links Matter to You. Wednesday July 11, 2007

2007-07-11T20:33:00.000-07:00

That's How I Roll!

New word alert! Clogging: code blogging.
Hot goss alert! HP might be shipping Ubuntu pc's soon. You didn't hear it from me.
Matt Asay on Ubuntu's underreported popularity in the enterprise
A good piece on the Xen train that maybe never came.
a good roundup of open mobile phone, OpenMoko, links (What, is there some other phone people have been talking about?)

blah blah blah iPhone. The empty ring of the word "enterprise," and why business IT needs to understand consumer products.

2007-06-25T18:06:00.000-07:00

LOLz to Anil Dash, who tweeted:

"To people in line for iPhone: people lined up for Windows 95, too, which was equally popular and revolutionary. In 2019 you'll understand."

Now, don't you dare run off and think the point of this post is to mock the iPhone. I'm here to defend it. As a consumer, I'm uninterested the iPhone at this moment (that was Anil's point), but as usual, I'm writing in defense of logic and reason. And the iPhone FUD going around now is ten times more ridiculous than the iPhone hype (though seriously campers, y'all crazy). And so here I am, attempting to temper the FUD, and ignoring the hype.

What's the FUD? That IT departments should not embrace the iPhone. According to who? Well, according to a Gartner Report in ComputerWorld Malaysia (I'm just saying),

“We’re telling IT executives to not support it because Apple has no intentions of supporting (iPhone use in) the enterprise,” Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney says."

Uh oh! It sounds like the iPhone is not... (wait for it). Ready for the enterprise. Well, then, can we give it an award? Can businesses buy them by the barrel? Because in my experience supporting the enterprise, products and tools that are "made for the enterprise" can be as ill-defined and ill-suited for business purposes as anything else out there. And in the past few years, the most useful tools and services appeared first in the consumer space before being integrated into enterprise products. The enterprise can not be assumed to be the place where quality and reliability appear first. It's the place where entitlement and shoddiness get away with murder for years, in the shadows of years-long commitments, contracts and decision-making cycles. The enterprise is where concerns about sharing too much about internal business processes keep problems about information technology tools hidden from view.

In the consumer space, every overheated battery, every slow javascript behavior gets catalogued and squawked about upon arrival. In the consumer space, a single customer can cancel and account or return a product in a day, without fear of violating a 3 million dollar contract, leaving vendors highly incentivized to minimize horror stories. Of course, there are consumer horror stories, but consumers can speak about them freely, while enterprise organizations are paralyzed in a variety of ways from sharing their experiences.

So why again, are we afraid of products that aren't "ready for the enterprise?" I'm afraid of the enterprise ones!

Related:

John Gruber + Daring Fireball's Exchange Exchange (shuts down the whole iPhone security concern. don't even try to go there)
The rise and fall of the 'enterprise' class distinction

JayZ vs. Nas; VMware vs. Parallels. VMware answers Parallels Coherence with Unity. Mac virtualization gets competitive

2007-06-06T17:30:00.000-07:00

(No they didn't. No they did not just use C&C Music Factory in this video. They did. )

Aside from the ridic soundtrack, this video is compelling.

Yes, VMware Fusion is already available for free (in Beta). But this video shows features not currently available in the beta that you can download right now. Most notable is that VMware Fusion has responded to and one-upped Parallels Desktop's ability to have each Windows application be its own little window in OS X, rather than have one "parent" window host all guest applications.

Parallels calls this "coherence." VMware Fusion calls this "unity." They're pretty much the same, except that VMware Fusion can have each window appear individually in OS X's Expose feature, something Parallels does not.

That said, Parallels is fully released, and VMware Fusion is not. And the unity feature doesn't exist in the beta that's out. Add to that the fact that VMware hasn't announced how much/ if it will charge for VMware Fusion (its features are positioned between the free VMware Player, and $189 VMware Workstation).

Related: Comments from the Digg people.

The new Fortune Magazine story on Microsoft, Linux, and Patents. Steve Ballmer, you so crazy! But not in a new way.

2007-05-13T20:11:00.000-07:00

Yes, Steve Ballmer has said cruise-azy things about Linux and Microsoft patents. Yes it'd be very disruptive if every corporate, private, and government user of Linux had to answer to Microsof. But this story has nothin' new.

Microsoft talks about patents and Microsoft intellectual property in Linux all the time. It most recently came up in relation to the Microsoft/ Novell deal, when in the aftermath of the Linux community's hostile reaction, and the business community's confused reaction, Steve Ballmer claimed that every user of Linux uses Microsoft intellectual property. And people freaked out. Not because they were surprised that Steve Ballmer would say that, or that they were concerned it was true. Most of the drama was because the person who said that was now an ally of a major Linux distribution (the Novell-managed SUSE Linux), and while people were used to Steve Ballmer saying ridiculous things about Linux, they were not-so-used to Linux companies having scary deals with companies run by people who said such ridiculous things.

(deep breath)

And today Fortune magazine has a relatively in-depth summary of Microsoft's Linux patent claims. It's really not that great of a story, and has some misleading references in it, but it has a dramatic title, "Microsoft takes on the free world," and yet another mention of Microsoft wanting compensation for the intellectual property it claims exists in Linux, "...It wants royalties from distributors and users." But Microsoft has said this before. And Steve still won't say he'd actually sue Linux-using customers:

If push comes to shove, would Microsoft sue its customers for royalties, the way the record industry has?

"That's not a bridge we've crossed," says CEO Ballmer, "and not a bridge I want to cross today on the phone with you."

So there is no new story here. Microsoft has claimed IP in Linux before, and has stopped short of saying what they'd actually do about it before. As a Slashdot commenter said, "

Here's what the interview should have been:

Microsoft: It's a fact that Linux and free software infringe hundreds of our patents.
Journalist: Which ones?
Microsoft: Well, the kernel violates 60, the GUI violates...
Journalist (interrupting): which 60? Where is the list?
Microsoft: I'm not prepared to disclose that at this time.
Journalist: Well this is a big [effing] waste of my time, isn't it?
Journalist: I went through this same dance with Darl McBride. Call me when you have something to say, bye

Microsoft still won't say exactly what Microsoft patents exist in Linux, so as outrageous as some of the ideas in the Fortune feature are, they're not new. If there's any info here, maybe it's that Microsoft has now specified the amount of patents, (235), but still not what those patents are.

A commenter on Patent Law Blog, Patently-O:

That's like a poker player saying "I win" without showing their cards (code).

Recommended or related:

Tara Hunt's Okay, we won. But what’s the prize? (especially the part about Non-zero Sum Economics)
Matt Asay's Making sense of Microsoft's open source fetish
Robert Scoble's Microsoft about to enter into patent war
James Turner at O'Reilly's ONLamp Looks like Microsoft is ramping up for Son of SCO (I disagree with the "do or die" part, but he's got some great comparisons to SCO here.)

Technorati Tags: patents, microsoft, linux, IP, intellectual property, legal, law, suit, fortune magazine, steve ballmer, cruise-azy, open source, oss, software

Conan O'Brien @ Intel: I like what you've done with the color

2007-05-09T17:07:00.000-07:00

Conan O'Brien did all of his shows in in San Francisco, CA last week. While in the Yay Area, his visited Intel's Santa Clara campus, and its wide palette of greys.

related: San Francisco Chronicle article about Conan's San Francisco visit, and how Intel was only a co-sponsor of the show, together with Sam Wo Restaurant.

Separated at birth

2007-05-07T20:06:00.000-07:00

Just loved.
Looking into my Apache logs tonight, I noticed for the first time, a bunch of Solaris users.
And hey! Requests/ refers from sun.com? For five seconds I got excited by the possibility that somebody from Sun was linking to me. It's no secret I dig Jonathan Schwartz and and many Sun activities. (But at the same time, I don't dig Sun's Java. )

So it was with heavy heart that I realized nobody from Sun was linking to me. They were just embeddeding a gif I have of Tim Oreilly and including it in their blog post. It seems that Tim O'Reilly with a beard reminds some people of actor Dennis Hopper. And this comparison was posted by a JavaOne attendee, which was then aggregated on the JavaOne blog page.

After consultation with an ethicist, I considered my options. Edit the graphic so that my URL would display? No, too stalkerazzi/tmz.com. Change it to a goatse? No, too crass. And besides, the blogger seems really nice, and has a good blog about grid stuff. And his embedding the graphic doesn't really hurt me. But I had to do just a lil something. So I made a little Javalasses joke on the image, and reuploaded the file.

I hope they keep the graphic up, though. We need more Tim O'Reilly. separated at birth memes! (I also heart Tim.)

PS. Javalasses.

These Links Matter to You. Monday May 7, 2007

2007-05-07T17:39:00.000-07:00

(ideally this cat pidgin will be charming, hilarious, and familiar to readers of i can has cheezburger and Anil Dash)

This commenter on Matt Asay's InfoWorld blog has a theory that IBM will buy Novell (to get SUSE), that IBM helped Novell buy SUSE, and that ex-IBM execs are already slowly filling Novell VP spots
Comcast is going to use open source + commercial application Zimbra to manage 12 million + mail accounts
Ubuntu working with Intel on a mobile/ embedded edition of Ubuntu.
Sun is helping port OpenOffice on the Mac with two dedicated engineers.
New York Observer magazine recently relaunched their website using Drupal. With notes on the how. And why yes I will continue to document major commercial implementations of open source software like Drupal until y'all bow down and concede that open source is just fine for "mission critical" applications. Sheesh.

Enterprise Linux's exaggerated value #2: the support you're forced to buy

2007-05-03T20:47:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I began what will probably end up becoming a series of posts about how y'all need to rethink the meaning of the word "enterprise," and related, the value of support. In specific, I called out how "Enterprise Linux," (usually meaning Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell's Suse/SLES/SLED) is overvalued because the packages you pay for often need to be replaced with packages you don't pay for.

Another problem with Enterprise Linux is the way it's sold. You buy the bits and support together. People might think it's hard for an open source software vendor to just sell the bits, when technically, so much of it is "free," and its easier to just imagine all those software dollars are actually paying for "support" (representing commercial man-hours, not free) but the simple fact is many organizations would love to pay for the bits they could technically get for free, and just do without the facade of expensive support, when the support they get from other resources is more responsive.

Photohosting site smugmug was in that boat, and blogged about their issues with Novell and Redhat.

...we loved Red Hat Linux, we loved how good they were at building & testing their software, we loved their mechanism for delivering software updates. We just didn’t need support.

We got on our knees, begging and pleading with Red Hat to let us pay for a “software updates only” license. They wouldn’t have it. “Support comes bundled with updates”, I was told, “no ifs, ands, or buts”. I *want* to pay Red Hat for the valuable service they do for us and the community. I just don’t want to pay for the part we don’t need - human support.

I would really like to pay Red Hat for all their hard work building and testing the software. .. It’d be the right thing to do. But Red Hat won’t let me.

The company ended up going with CentOS, a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux I'll write about another time. Again, you'll notice the author isn't trying to avoid paying for the software, he just doesn't want to pay for a service ("support") he doesn't need.

WHAT WE CAN DO

Many of us who use Linux in commercial situations are more than happy to pay for it. Let's feel comfortable paying for it in different ways. We need to get over the traditional model of a single, central body of developers and supporters being embodied by a single company. There are different currencies and parties involved. Give back to your providers creatively with money, bug fixes, documentation, and sharing your best practicies. Take the time to identify the upstream developers and projects and consider funding them directly. Publicly share your challenges and success stories on the internet, the attention will help future users and the developers by making their project less of an unknown quantity for future users.

But most importantly, be willing to break free of this totally broken tradition of thinking paying a bunch of money to a central body in some way solves your technical problems and protects you. It may make certain people in your organization feel safe, but take the time to run some numbers. What value have you really gotten out of support in the past? Put the burden of determining value on those who sell it.

These Links Matter to You. Wednesday May 2 2007

2007-05-02T21:12:00.000-07:00

even old-school business analyst Forrester says organizations are using open source for "mission critical applications." A less breathless, more helpful informative summary here, courtesy the very articulate Matt Asay.
ya habla Español Dell. puro en directo. Dell's new Spanish blog, Dell en Directo. You already know about the English juan.
Arizona State uses Drupal, and documents their set-up
Dell's improved Linux forums (I haven't figured out how they're improved yet. Taking their word for it. It's possible they're manipulating me in a state of post-Ubuntu-announcement bliss.
some belated notes on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

Enterprise Linux's exaggerated value #1: its "tested" packages are too old to use

2007-05-02T20:05:00.000-07:00

One of the supposed benefits of enterprise (what that word really means reserved for another post, but a good place to start is here) Linux is that the included packages are "tested" and "hardened" (what does that even mean??!?) for the enterprise. The problem is, in the time it takes to test, these packages have grown quite old, increasing the chances that a sysadmin will need to replace them with software from elsewhere. For security reasons, and technical compatibility reasons, you're often forced to upgrade packages.

And you can't just grab updates from the vendor, because even the updates are really old, only marginally newer than the package that you're trying to replace. So you uninstall the vendor package, and either grab a package from elsewhere, or compile the source. And try to remind yourself what exactly you're paying for again...

An example? The just-release Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 comes with an RPM for Firefox 1.5.x. What?

A common dismissal of Ubuntu (not typically described as "enterprise linux") is that "it's fine for the casual user, but not for the enterprise."
Frankly, its packages are more appropriate for the enterprise than any enterprise linux i've seen. For this reason alone I'm very excited about its increasing acceptance in the business community. Even if it starts at the periphery...

Dell's new Ubuntu deal, and vendor support. Do we still need vendor support?

2007-05-01T10:47:00.001-07:00

Some interesting thoughts over on Slashdot's coverage of the Dell/ Ubuntu announcement.
For one user, the announcement is actually a deciding factor in a purchasing decision:

Personally, I have resisted the siren call of Dell for a long time. This changes my mind. I need a new machine and this could be just the ticket -- it was either that or refurb an old HP with a new HD and a copy of Feisty Fawn. I like the idea of it pre-loaded.

And yeah, that's the kind of response Dell and Ubuntu want to hear. But I think it's time we really question the value and definition of support in the way it's been thought of in the past. Support is extremely overvalued, and lack of support is too often used as a reason to squash a great tool or piece of software. Let's examine our commercial support relationships and think of what we really get out of them. Are our bugs fixed faster? Features added more quickly? Do we find out about upcoming products from our vendros before the blogosphere does? When we have a configuration question, whose documentation is more helpful? Community sites and mailing lists, or the official documentation?

I'm very excited that Dell and Ubuntu have a relationship with each other now, and there's no way it can hurt the quality of Linux on Dell hardware. But let's not wait for announcements like this before we feel comfortable pursuing technologies that otherwise trump their commercially supported peers.

related:

Dell interview with Mark Shuttleworth about the announcement, how Linux gets adopted differently in different parts of the world.

more analysis:

transcript of the video interview with Mark Shuttleworth above (zdnet)
BBC news coverage of Dell + Ubuntu announcement
open source advocate Dawn Foster's FastWonder post

Technorati Tags: ubuntu, linux, dell, hardware, support, community, open source

Dell + Ubuntu: Let's contain ourselves, people!

2007-04-30T22:57:00.000-07:00

(Ubuntu Linux CD originally uploaded by excellent Flickr citizen Pen9)

I'm as giddy as the rest of y'all. Yes, Dell will pre-install Ubuntu on Dell hardware.
Some of us have been waiting for this news for a while, either in the affirmative or the negative. After all, it was over a month ago when Dell closed its Linux survey. A bunch of different commercial and community-based distros rallied to get their Linux represented. And then silence. Dell didn't let us know how, when, or what they'd do with the data. They thanked us, but dat about it.
So it was very exciting to hear this evening first a rumor via Dell, and a confirmation via Canonical that yes, Dell will support Ubuntu.

But let's be gracious here :D. DesktopLinux.com wrote "Dell to choose Ubuntu," in a tone suggesting only one Linux could be chosen. Mos def some of this language is left over from the Dell's own Linux survey, where one could vote for only one flavor of Linux for Dell to install. But remember bug #1 people. It isn't that Fedora has majority market share :D. Let's hope Dell's experience of offering Ubuntu is so delightful, they get involved with other flavors of Linux, and get on the right side of bug #1 ;D

Dell to preload Ubuntu Linux on some hardware

2007-04-30T17:54:00.000-07:00

I just have to take this moment in.

[update 11.22PM. Confirmed via Dell KB article!]
[update #2, confirmed on Dell Direct2Dell blogpost]

Dell will preload Ubuntu Linux on some desktops and laptops.

So far, two sources for this story:

1. A Canonical employee (the company most centrally involved in Ubuntu's development and support) who has a great multilingual blog about Linux stuff, wrote:

Ubuntu will be officially supported on Dell computers. Any other details will come on www.ubuntu.com, check it for the official press release

and

2. Desktoplinux.com, who says they've heard the news from multiple Dell sources.

...the Austin, Texas, computer giant will be preinstalling the newly released Ubuntu 7.04. These systems will be released in late May 2007.

According to our sources, Ubuntu will be released on a Dell e-series "Essential" Dimension desktop, an XPS desktop, and an e-series Inspiron laptop.

Technorati Tags: ubuntu, linux, dell, hardware, support, community, open source

Full Circle, the new Ubuntu magazine!

2007-04-25T21:42:00.000-07:00

Though it took me a little while to identify what exactly was going on on the Full Circle website, I gotta once again give the Ubuntu community credit for knowing how to make it easy to learn about, enjoy, evangelize, and contribute to the Ubuntu Linux distribution and its related projects and goals.

Full Circle is a new free magazine from the Ubuntu community. Full Circle is made up of both a PDF, with a traditional magazine layout that you can download (and print), and web-based content that includes forums and articles in development.

PDF available for download in multiple languages here.

These Links Matter To You.Wednesday, March 21, 2007

2007-03-21T17:12:00.000-07:00

Originally uploaded by ldandersen.

What Would Steve Jobs Do? (just askin'. captured in Flickr, via Valleywag)
newbie twitter guide (joining is easy, don't let the guide complicate stuff. but it's good at explaining some parts of twitter)
Can Operating Systems tell if they're running in a Virtual Machine?
pizza party command-line script (-w for ham. duh.)
Open Source CMS's Drupal, Wordpress, and Joomla all have their own songs. I'm not here to judge.
top Drupal gotchas
how news aggregation site Techememe works

Tweetin' Open Source CIO's

2007-03-13T21:22:00.000-07:00

451 group industry analyst Raven Zachary tweets from a conference:

"CIO personality clearly drives levels of tech adoption - watching three CIOs up on stage have varying levels of comfort with open source."

I've been a regular reader of his group's blog, but twitter is a great way to get moment-by-moment feelings and happenings from people, especially people who constantly travel through different spaces, time zones, cultures, and environments.

And oh yeah, this might me a good time to invite you to add These Things on Twitter.

(nerd snort!) These Links Matter To You. Friday, March 8, 2007

2007-03-08T08:03:00.000-08:00

music video: kill -9 ("you stepped out of line, and now it's kill -9" nercdore? sysadmincore)
gaybuntu ("Ubuntu is to operating systems; what Louis Vuitton is to man-bags.")
You Had Me At EHLO (Microsoft Exchange team blog)

These Links Matter To You. Tuesday, February 27, 2007

2007-02-27T21:10:00.000-08:00

Parallels Desktop out of beta! (Mac-tel users rejoice, and read pstam's review)
You can hack your VMware .vmx file to enable experimental 3D support (very cool of VMware to talk about the semi-underground video making the rounds)
using MySpace for a VMware/NetApp blog ? (of course!)
Did you know there is a "major" virtualization conference? It's called "Virtualization Conference." really.
As of February 27th, 2007, 8 of the top 8 vote-getting initiatives on Dell's IdeaStorm website are about getting Linux pre-installed, other open source software pre-installed, Windows software not-installed, and improving Linux support (sheesh, can the drum beat any louder?)

These Links Matter to You. Tuesday, January 23, 2007

2007-01-23T22:10:00.000-08:00

(graphic based on screengrab from IntelliAdmin's very nice Vista interface review)

wowza. Five kinda serious usability issues with Microsoft Vista. ( really well written)
very funny podcast with mostly-Mac blog Daring Fireball's John Gruber, and Panic's Cabel Sasser (this was done at Macworld, soon after The Keynote. Lotsa Steve Jobs mocking that comes from a place of love.)
For real. IBM announced gigantor social software suite, Lotus Connections. This kinda competes with Microsoft's gigantor Sharepoint. Many companies will pay for the privilege of buying these packages, and then learn how to use them and in some cases, if to use them. (see also, Enterprisey) Drupal's Dries Buytaert suggests an IBM/ Drupal collaboration.
wait. that deserves its own bullet-point. Enterprisey. ("...a derogatory term describing sophisticated software architecture which is claimed to be good enough (robust, flexible, etc.) for use in enterprise applications, but in fact is merely excessively complex...")

And which do you choose, a hard or soft option? Drupal 5.0 is out, does Internet, Intranet, content, collaboration!

2007-01-22T22:01:00.000-08:00

(original screenshot snagged from Drupal.org's 5.0 screenshot page)

What's Drupal? Drupal is open source software. Drupal can be used to manage blogs, communities, newspapers, magazines, forums, wikis, on-line video channels, and other kinds of content. You've probably visited a site powered by Drupal, and not even realized it! ('Da Drupes is humble like that.)

A new version of Drupal, Drupal 5.0 was released last week. What's new since Drupal 4.7, its last major revision?

There's a web-based installer! (It's not as nice as the Wordpress installer, but it's easier than Drupal 4.7's.)
The administration panel/ tools is totally reworked since Drupal 4.7. In a good way.
The new core theme lets you change color stuff dynamically with CSS
more!

If you want to check out some sites that use Drupal, the video below shows some famous ones, like MTV UK, This Week in Technology, and SpreadFirefox.com.

(This is a compressed Flash movie of the "What's new in Drupal 5.0" video. Consider downloading the larger, but much higher quality mp4 here.)

While it's easy to find out that software like Drupal is being used when it's running a famous public website, it's a little harder to know when it's being used internally, in corporate, community, and organizational intranets. As it turns out, Yahoo! uses Drupal internally, and outlined the process. Based on this awesome Drupal case study from IBM, one can only assume they use it for collaboration stuff as well.

Related links:

Drupal project lead Dries Buytaert's personal blog (powered by Drupal, duh)
Drupal superstars Lullabot
The Digg.com Drupal 5.0 announcement thread. (for the patient and thick-skinned)

Flashtastic! Adobe finally has Flash 9 for Linux. Also: Flash is good at some stuff.

2007-01-18T01:59:00.000-08:00

We now have a decent Flash version on Linux.
quick notes:

You can get Flash 9 for Linux here
Red Hat will include this in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, released February 28
Novell will put Flash 9 in Service Pack 1 for SLED 10 (date undetermined)
step by step Flash 9 installation how-to for Ubuntu Linux (thanks osnews.com!)
still no 64bit version

Adobe's Linux Flash player has been stuck at version 7 for ages, while Windows XP and Mac OS X sat pretty with Flash 9 for six months. (Let alone version 8, which was totally skipped for Linux)

Less than two years ago, being a couple of versions back with your Flash player wouldn't have been the end of the world. This is as much about Flash's totally reinvented usage, as it is about Linux. Previously, not having Flash didn't make you feel totally left out. Maybe you'd miss some animated banner ads (but they'd probably still work). With the increasing importance of search engine optimization (Flash isn't so easy to index for Google), and social bookmarking (Flash isn't so great with the unique URL's), and people's patience (Flash can get people kinda mad when they have to renavigate 6 steps after hitting the "back" button), web sites managed by Flash were getting less popular.

But then the YouTube/Vimeo/Google Video/Blip.tv/Revver embeddable video storm happened.

(original photos via Chris Pirillo's video experiment)

And Flash was actually really great for video inside of an otherwise non-Flash page. And then people started using it even as an embeddable mp3 player.

(a screengrab of a del.icio.us page set to browse mp3's and podcasts)

You didn't have to download podcasts and other mp3's. You could cleanly play audio and video in a browser page. (Yes, other specialized players/ plugins could previously do it, but way more clumsily than Flash).

With the newly realized ease of embedding video and audio (aided not just by Flash, but by the excellent players being made by the likes of YouTube and del.icio.us), audio and video was being used a lot more not just for entertainment stuff, but for delivering technical, business, and basic communications stuff. (For example, here I have an embedded demo of VMware Fusion Beta. In Flash!)

In any case, the huge wave of new Flash content really stung when you were on Linux, because all over the web, almost any embedded video was a reminder that you were a second-class citizen.

Ideally in the future the web won't be dominated by closed players, and users won't be held hostage by any single company. But given how much better Flash performs these basic multimedia functions at the moment, it's a good day for Linux.

related:

the Gnash project, an source Flash player currently playing stuff up to Flash 7

Graphics bling and proprietary drivers in Ubuntu

2006-12-07T01:59:00.000-08:00

There's currently some discussion in the Ubuntu community about how much proprietary stuff to include in Ubuntu by default (different from letting you grab stuff from the vendor on your own after the install). This is almost always about graphics drivers.

Community member Ante Karamatić had some interesting thoughts on the issue, and then made some points about the state of open source Linux gui bling, too:

Proprietary drivers in Ubuntu by default? Don't. Just don't do that. I don't want them. If someone wants them (or must use them); great, make it as an installer option. 'Yes, I want fancy graphics, even if nobody could help me solve tons of bugs and even if that would break suspend and hibernate and even if that would maybe mean braking GPL' would be an OK option in installer :)

OTOH, both compiz and beryl have serious issues and they should stop working on creating newer, even more useless plug-ins and start fixing some usability bugs; 'java + beryl sometimes doesn't work', 'beryl crashes all the time', 'don't destroy my workspaces', 'F9 is fetch all in evolution; now it doesn't work', 'what's with the flickering in xmoto while running beryl and apt-get update', etc, etc...

These Links Matter to Me: Wednesday, December 5, 2006

2006-12-05T22:05:00.001-08:00

Originally uploaded by kmikeym.

Portland's citywide wifi access launched. Right now it covers SW downtown Portland and industrial SE (coverage map here). It will eventually cover ALL of Portland. Portland's Future Awesome coverage here. Discussion group here.
Firebug 1.0 Beta, a Firefox extension to troubleshoot and monitor client-side web-dev stuff. Related: Firefox Web Developer extension.
Microsoft has some One Laptop Per Child laptops, and is trying to get Windows on them. (They currently run a version of Fedora Linux.) What's going on?
10 Drupal modules you can't live without (You had me at "10.")

These Links Matter To You. Tuesday, December 5, 2006

2006-12-05T01:26:00.000-08:00

How to screencast on Linux
Guess what ubuntuvideo.com has
Miguel de Icaza on Groklaw's over-the-top analysis of Novell's support of OpenXML in OpenOffice (it's true, Groklaw has demonstrated a bit of ignorance here. Almost every distro's interpretation of a project can be a little unique)
Last week was Ubuntu Open Week, where newbies, the curious, and the besotted could meet up in different irc channels and talk about specific topics. Here are the logs.
An image of the One Laptop Per Child laptop is available as a VMware image, FYI

Parallels to VMware: It's On!

2006-12-04T01:33:00.000-08:00

Click To Play

(demo video via video blogger Michael Verdi and blip.tv)

Wowza... So... Parallels for Mac OS X has been out a for a bit. But it's previously been best described as "...like VMware Workstation for a Mac." In other words, cool, but nothing beyond VMware, and if VMware actually had a product out for OS X, then you'd probably grab that.

But last Friday Parallels released a new feature that is pretty compelling, and raises the bar for the concept of "abstraction." Rather than having a parent window that hosts all of the guest OS's windows, there is a "coherence mode" option that has each window of the guest OS appear as an individual window in the host OS, making itSO the experience of using an application in the either guest OS or host OS, is pretty darn similar. Certain keyboard commands and drag and drop is supported between the two environments. The video above demonstrates this better than all these words. Check it out!

VMware Fusion video! (More) virtualization for Mac OS X is close.

2006-11-30T21:47:00.000-08:00

VMworld, virtualization software company VMware's big conference was a few weeks ago.
Among the stuff presented was VMware Fusion. Even though it's not the first virtualization product for Mac OS X , it's definitely the one people have been most excited about.

I'll let the video do the talkin'.

Novell and Microsoft disagree about their agreement

2006-11-21T02:30:00.000-08:00

Our agreement with Microsoft is in no way an acknowledgment that Linux infringes upon any Microsoft intellectual property. To claim otherwise is to further sow fear, uncertainty and doubt, and does not offer a fair basis for competition. When we entered the patent cooperation agreement with Microsoft, Novell did not agree or admit that Linux or any other Novell offering violates Microsoft patents. We strongly object to the usage of our agreement to suggest that members of the Linux community owe Microsoft any remunerations.

Novell + Sun. Two ships passing in the night

2006-11-14T08:59:00.000-08:00

Wowza... so much hub-bub yesterday about Sun open-sourcing Java. It almost drowned out this news:

Samba project asks Novell to back out of Microsoft agreement
They say:

Using patents as competitive tools in the free software world is not acceptable. Novell, as a participant in numerous debates, discussions and conferences on the topic knew this to be the case. We call upon Novell to work with the Software Freedom Law Center to undo the patent agreement and acknowledge its obligations as a beneficiary of the Free Software community.

And somehow this gets connected to the Sun Java announcement. Samba isn't the only one bugged by the Microsoft/ Novell arrangement. While Sun already had plans to open source Java, they had not decided on a license. It turns out that Sun decision to use the GPL is directly related to the Novell/ Microsoft agreement.

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz writes:

... one of the strongest motivations to select the GPL was the announcement made last week by Novell and Microsoft, suggesting that free and open source software wasn't safe unless a royalty was being paid. As an executive from one of those companies said, "free has to have a price."
That's nonsense.
Free software can be free of royalties, and free of impediments to broadscale, global adoption and deployment. Witness what we've done with Solaris, and now, what we've done with Java. Developers are free to pick up the code, and create derivatives. Without royalty or obligation.
Those that say open source software can't be safe for customers - or that commercially indemnified software can't foster community - are merely advancing their own agenda. Without any basis in fact.
They're also fighting a rising tide.

Ubuntu to include Java, now that it's GPL'd
Novell stock down after initial bump since Microsoft announcement (via CRN)
David Berlind correctly predicted Java going GPL, before it happened
Novell blog addresses open source community's negative reaction to Microsoft/ Novell agreement
Sun's Tim Bray on the internal discourse and resistance and encouragement, of the open sourcing of Java

Wallpaper Pakistani: I didn't think he'd write me back

2006-11-05T22:26:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I get annoyed with Spam, but I've laughed out loud a couple of times recently.

Get ready for Open Source Shoes

2006-11-05T20:42:00.000-08:00

I think they're trying to make him look like Steve Jobs there. Even that little media player (that's just there for show, there's no real movie), is really Quicktime-y.

But anyway... shoe company Fleuvog is offering designers the opportunity to submit designs that will be public domain, and that they may manufacture. No, the designer won't get paid. At first I thought they weren't really feeling the open source vibe here, but the more I read it, the more open source it does seem. It's not just open to designers who'd normally get paid for their work. It's open to people who just don't see the shoe they want to wear out there, and want somebody to make it.

Plenty of people have already submitted designs, which you can browse. And they even have a little page about "real" open source software.

TECHNORATI TAGS: fashion, fluevog, open source, crowdsourcing, public domain

Public perception of Xen

2006-08-11T08:00:00.000-07:00

From an osnews.com user:

Xen just hasn't seen enough deployment out in the field yet, and getting it installed and set up is one really long and drawn out task.

Xen doesn't yet have any decent management tools of any description like VMware which is essential in an enterprise product (many would rather just buy VMware for that alone), and performing tasks like adding and removing hardware on a virtual machine is still pretty unstable. They also seem to have a bugs list that never seems to get smaller:

http://bugzilla.xensource.com/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?query_format=spe...

Not to mention that Xensource isn't the usual open source organisation people think of when they think of open source. They are a corporation that is, and has, burned up serious amounts of VC money (http://xensource.com/company/ - look at the VCs), taking on offices at $5,000 a month and making lots of truly ludicrous decisions like using the future Microsoft hypervisor.

Yer, yer. I know that Xensource is separate from the Xen community, but it's silly to think that things like this aren't having a detrimental effect on the software overall. Unfortunately, it seems that the venture capital fuelled soundbites about Xen being ready have been making their way to people who really should be able to see the forest for the trees:

http://www.novell.com/ctoblog/?p=19
(here he's suggesting a Novell exec made a kind of irresponsible statement -ed)

These Links Matter to You. Thursday, August 10, 2006

2006-08-10T18:38:00.000-07:00

There's a big Ubuntu billboard in Silicon Valley right now. Near Oracle. I like how Tim O'Reilly said: "First Ubuntu Billboard Spotted." Are we expecting an army of them? (via perkypants.com/blog)
Intel releases some open source graphics drivers (for Linux). Veddy cool. Usually the crumbs Intel throws me don't work on the version of Linux I need them to (without extreme deconstruction). Thanks, Intel! (via osnews.com)
Diggscaperedilicous: Save to Digg, Netscape, Reddit and Del.icio.us with one bookmarklet (via TechCrunch)
People who know German can get DVD-based Ubuntu Linux training Just sayin'.

VMware for Mac OS X will drop this week at WDC

2006-08-05T11:31:00.000-07:00

Sheesh. I've only been waiting for this for like a fafillion years.

From an InfoWorld article

VMWare is undoubtedly going to show Vista running as a guest under Tiger.

The rest of the article doesn't necessarily demonstrate an understanding of virtualization. I wouldn't pay too much attention to some of the details in there, just the fact they were among the first to write about VMware's scheduled presence.

In any case, I'm totes excited!!

If VMware Player, VMware Workstation, or VMware Server (or all 3!) can run on Mac OS X after next week, that means a whole new population of people, many of whom are already open to playin' with stuff, will be able to dabble in the exciting world ot virtual appliances, not to mention all the other fun stuff you can do with virtualization.

OSCON 2006 Day One

2006-07-25T15:26:00.000-07:00

The first two days of OSCON are dedicated to long tutorial sessions lasting at half a day each. Even though it's total information overload, there's definitely a less wacky atmosphere than later in the week, and less topics covered per-hour.

I checked out Javascript Bootcamp. Amy Hoy gave a super comprehensive overview of Javascript. It wasn't so much a tutorial on how to construct Javascript, but more of a deconstruction that catogorized almost any Javascript part you could think of. Her slides will be on her blog at some point. There was a part of me that would have dug it if she "tied it all together" in a different way, but she was extremely familiar with Javascript, and great at relating it to other languages. So it was cool get such specific definitions of everything.

Also: props to Amy for great design on her slides. Everything... from the font size, to the colors, made them the easiest to read slides I've seen so far at this conference.

The other tutorial from Day One I checked out was Damian Conway's Mastering Vim. Damian is a very engaging speaker, so any talk by him is going to be fun. But he gave a great "tricks" style talk about vim which really spoke to how people use editors, instead of just an item-by-item list. For now slides don't seem to be digitally available :(

TECHNORATI TAGS: oscon, oscon2006, javascript, conference, Amy Hoy, Damian Conway

These Links Matter to You. Wednesday, July 19, 2006

2006-07-19T22:28:00.000-07:00

Windows Server virtualization to support XEN Virtual machines (a vaporware match made in heaven )
dual proc vs. dualcore
more meetings strategies. OK. You're obligated to attend. Now what? (37 signals? critical of meetings? whuh?)
Why Reiser4 is not in the Linux kernel
Slashboinged (measuring and surviving popularity. le sigh)

The Right Chip For The Job

2006-07-19T03:38:00.000-07:00

From an interview with Sun CIO Bill Vass... I'm quoting an interesting part on how he differentiates between different server architectures, and the best application for them:

Because each server is capable of running the same applications, it can be confusing how to choose one over the other. Since I really like cars, I think of the servers in terms of capacity and speed. For mass transit-- such as an application, portal, Web, directory or proxy server--you might need as many as 32 threads at once. That's what the CoolThreads server offers. It is like a bus.
When you need to share memory quickly, in a large database or an ERP [Enterprise Resource Planning] system, you'd use an UltraSparc. There aren't as many threads, but it shares memory well from chip to chip, and it is pretty fast. I think of it like a BMW M5 sedan that can carry a whole family, with room for luggage.
Finally, the x64 Opteron--AMD's chip--runs very fast on two- and four-threaded applications. That's the two-seater Ferrari.
People are used to the idea of a general-purpose chip to do everything in the IT space. We're working on an application profiler where CIOs can enter information and generate a recommendation for how much memory-sharing they need and which chip is best for any given application.

Portland Nerd Summer

2006-07-17T22:45:00.000-07:00

OSCON July 24-28, 2006 aka O'Reilly Open Source Conference, aka Grab That Outlet
FOSCON II: the Ruby Rodeo (free talks around Portland happening the same week as OSCON, often during OSCON off-hours)
OSCAMP (mentioned this earlier. happens same week as OSCON, with the blessing of O'Reilly, overlapping hours with OSCON)
Portland Code Camp v2.0
Geek Fair 2006, Saturday July 15th. brought to you by Free Geek (yes, it just happened. I'm trying to establish a trend here, people. sheesh)
Panic Software's Cabel on The (Portland) Apple Store That Wasn't

Ubuntu's Classroom

2006-07-16T00:38:00.000-07:00

Starting in August, there'll be regular biweekly, real-time IRC-based Ubuntu classes. Topics will range from newbie (email clients), to advanced (kernel stuff, encryption). To see the full schedule, visit the Ubuntu wiki page:

Ubuntu classroom

These Links Matter to You. Friday, July 14, 2006

2006-07-14T23:11:00.000-07:00

Skype protocol reverse engineerd ( allow me to quote Nelson when I say: Ha, Haaaaaaaaa)
Jeff Waugh is leaving (Ubuntu-centric) Canonical ( Jeff's a great speaker and Ubuntu/ GNOME advocate. This change doesn't have to mean anything gnarly. Why such a cryptic post?)
Ubuntu Studio (a wiki all about/ for musicians using Ubuntu)

These Links Matter to You. Thursday, July 12, 2006

2006-07-13T21:05:00.000-07:00

VMware Server is out of beta, still free
like, totally understand /etc/fstab! (did i link to this already? i refer to it a lot. it's updated regularly)
Barebones Windows version for older hardware (they call it "Windows Fundamentals" More like Windows Awesomentals)
Dell wants to simplify its pricing (it's true... so many coupon codes, and different prices depending on where you link to... first the blog, now this. it's like Extreme Makeover week for Dell!)
Mofo cooked an egg on his Macbook
Vanilla Forums maker wonders aloud if open source can work for him (i love Vanilla forums, and think Mark is great. But the question he's asking has been answered many times already... Tim O'Reilly says, "obscurity is a bigger threat than piracy." My variation: "obscurity is a bigger threat than competition!")

The Ubuntu Title Font: Free For All Operating Systems

2006-07-12T20:36:00.000-07:00

More like the quick brown awesome.

via Ubuntu Blog

...$sudo apt-get install ttf-ubuntu-title
will install the font and make it available to GIMP, OpenOffice and everywhere else that you can use fonts.

If you only want the font, to install it on another OS or such, you can get it here. The font is an OpenType Font, which installs just like a TrueType font. The font is licensed using the LGPL...

TECHNORATI TAGS: font, free, lgpl, sysadmin, ubuntu, linux, desgin, resource

These Links Matter to You. Wednesday, July 12, 2006

2006-07-12T08:03:00.000-07:00

Firefox usage get past 15% in the U.S., almost 40% in Germany (wowza!)
Conde Nast (owner of Wired, the paper magazine) buys Wired Digital (the website) (you either care or you don't. it's a long story) (via Valleywag)
Top 10 CEO blogs (barely any of these are CEO blogs, the blogger points out) (via Jason Calacanis)
IBM shines its light on Drupal ( via Digg)
There's an official Ubuntu commercial repository. You can add Opera and RealPlayer to Ubuntu via apt-get (the kicker here is that these non-open source programs are available via Canonical servers. no big whoop) (via Ubuntu Blog)

Operational Competency. Tim O'Reilly, You Like Totes Read My Mind!

2006-07-11T21:59:00.000-07:00

Growing Pains, Operations, and Massages

My friends and I have parts of our digital lives spread out over various hosts and service providers. In both personal and professional use, it hasn't gone unnoticed that many places are struggling to keep up with operational issues. Even the posterchild of scalability, Flickr, is regularly down for maintenance. (With Flickr it's not that disruptive, because they usually give tons of notice, and have a cute message up during downtime. ) But it's indicative of the state of things when the people who literally wrote the book on the subject, are regularly down.

I don't mean to attack Flickr. They probably handle operational issues better than anybody else. But what's going right now is that it's easier to create a tool than it is to master its implementation. And tools and services are getting adopted and integrated into our lives faster than we're learning how to use them, support them,... or live without them.

RUBY ON RAILS
I know of one web-hosting provider who is a leader in Ruby-on-Rails hosting. Though very technically sophisticated and literate, their service-level lately has been horrible for all web-related services, not just RoR. They do concede a change in performance and availability, but blame this on their users not using Ruby on Rails "correctly," hijacking resources from everybody else! This explanation is acceptable with a one-off fluke runaway process. But when the service-level for users and servers has been suffering for months on end, it's time to re-think what's going on! If it's clear that certain Ruby on Rails tacts can kill a server, then tailor adminstration for such occurences. Clear-cut = controllable. But it's not clearcut. It's not predictable, and in the case of this service provider, they should admit that the "right" way to use Ruby on Rails, for both developer and administrator, is still being worked out.

I'm not suggesting Ruby On Rails is a bad tool, simply that the pace of development with the tool has lapped the pace of admistration of the tool.

OPERATIONS: THE NEW SECRET SAUCE
This week, Tim O'Reilly wrote a great post about operational/ deployment challenges of web services, and how operational performance could end up being a market differentiator.

One of his primary angles was comparing open source software to commercial software, in terms of operational options/ tools/ culture. He left the post undecided on whether any differences truly existed. But I was more interested in his phrase, "operational competency," a deceptively simple idea.

Whether software is for free, or for pay; the time, energy, and experience it takes to wire it for your needs is a crucial part of its utility to you. When we start to use and play with tools and services before we achieve operational competency, we need to understand the consquences. I guess this is typical early-adopter risks kind of stuff.

What can we do about these lopsided production: operational-competency relationships?

Related links:

TECHNORATI TAGS: scaling, performance, operations, sysadmin, oreilly, service, servers, deployment, Tim OReilly

These Links Matter to You. Tuesday, July 11, 2006

2006-07-11T08:39:00.000-07:00

Dell's new one2one blog (Dell already had product/ group blogs here and there, but this is one of those human blogs, updated frequently) (via Valleywag)
VMware's VMTN has a Kubuntu 6.06 virtual appliance up
Firefox 2.0 Beta candidates
Tim O'Reilly's Canaries in a Coalmine (Two high-profile Mac users recently switched to Ubuntu Linux. Tim says lots of interesting stuff, like that Redhat should pay more attention than Apple.)

These Links Matter to You. Monday, July 10, 2006

2006-07-10T19:52:00.000-07:00

Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake lets you install VMware Player with apt-get/ Synaptic, without having to visit VMware.com ( Just make sure your Multiverse repository is enabled. BTW, doesn't it seem like Ubuntu and VMware Player are making eachother more and more popular?) (via VMware blog)
O'Reilly keeps getting sweeter. During their OSCON event ('spensive), they're facilitating a free event that happens at the same time, OSCamp. (plus, last year there was FOSCON. Will it happen again?)
There's gonna be a one-day Wordpress Conference Saturday, August 5th, 2006. San Francisco (via PhotoMatt)
There's a WordPress podcast
There's no such thing as a one-hour meeting "If you’re going to schedule a meeting that lasts one hour and invite 10 people to attend then it’s a ten-hour meeting, not a one-hour meeting."

These Links Matter to You. Sunday, July 9, 2006

2006-07-10T01:09:00.000-07:00

Best Week Ever's Mac Ad parodies (let it play through, there are 3 in a row)

Sun working to get Xen on Solaris (article points out Sun's awareness of VMware's popularity and adoption of Solaris guests. Can we see Solaris VMware hosts in the future, please?!?)
videos from RailsConf 2006 are creeping in. (haven't watched any of these, but generally can recommend anything by Why the Lucky Stiff, and just like to point out free videos. coz, duh: free videos)
WordPress announces Automattic Support Network (so cool they did that without using the "E" word enterprise )

Packages You Gotta Install When Running Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake As A VMware Guest (a newbie How-To, and a Why-To)

2006-07-07T22:05:00.000-07:00

When running any VMware guest, it goes without saying that you want to have VMware tools installed.
In the case of Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake, here are some packages that will make VMware tools much happier:

build-essential
linux-headers (for your kernel version)

You can install these packages via command-line:

# sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-`uname -r`

(you will be asked for your password)
Can I break it down for you?

1. sudo: Tells Ubuntu Linux you temporarily want root powers. These are needed to install this software)
2. apt-get: This is a software management tool. It tells Ubuntu to go out and grab some software that's not already installed.
3. install: an argument to apt-get. I think you can guess what it does.
4. build-essential: This a package name. This package happens to include to make, gcc (a compiler), and some other stuff.
5. linux-headers: This is also a package name. This package contains kernel header files that can provide helpful information to other programs in the future. In this case, VMware will find them handy.
6. uname -r: Go ahead and run it alone like that. It prints the kernel release of the version of Linux you're using. By combining it with linux-headers above, we were just adding the kernel release to the name of linux-headers, which were needed to specify which of the many linux-headers packages out there.

TECHNORATI TAGS: vmware, vmware-tools, virtualization, ubuntu, dapperdrake, linux, sysadmin, tips, Dapper Drake, newbie

Open Source Clone of 37signals' Basecamp Released!

2006-07-06T20:47:00.000-07:00

You're probably familiar with 37signals' hosted software product, Basecamp. It helps teams collaborate and manage projects. It's fast, simple, very easy to learn, and has some fanatical users. It's built using the open source Ruby on Rails framework, but Basecamp itself is not open source. In fact, you can't buy it in any capacity to install it locally, proprietary or otherwise. The only way to get Basecamp is to use 37signals' hosted offerings, some of which are free.

Basecamp's hosted-only status makes today's public alpha release of activeCollab, an open source Basecamp-ish application, very exciting. Yeah, lots of people are interested in talking about what this means for 37signals' business. But I'm less excited about having a free alternative to Basecamp (which I do pay for, use, and like), and more excited about having a local install of ~~Basecamp~~ activeCollab. Does everybody want to administer things themselves? No. But once something goes open, it means it can be local, hosted, whatever. It means your data can travel with you as you shrink and grow, or need slight customization. When there's only a single implementation of a way to interact or store data, it can sometimes make people a little scared to totally dive in to things.

activeCollab is alpha, and they barely survived their Digg today. Some people have reported trouble installing it. Who knows how it will turn out. But I'm really rooting for them (That doesn't mean against 37signals, sheesh. Haters.) There are so many cool web-based applications out there. And they're really convenient and fun to use. I just think the next step here is having the same options with them that you do with other kinds of data. 37signals is great about letting you get your data out in some form. It's just a little less useful outside of Basecamp!

activeCollab's page (kinda barebones today, after their Digg)
I found this story via a thread on the Lussumo Community forums (home of the excellent Vanilla forum software, a very pretty, open source, multilingual forum)

TECHNORATI TAGS: application, software, alpha, release, 37signals, oss, opensource, sysadmin, activeCollab, collaborate, standards, hosted, web2.0

Ubuntu List of Lists

2006-07-06T01:24:00.000-07:00

Spiffing Up Ubuntu 6.06
(Ubuntu) Essentials, 2006 edition (a fun, helpful, kinda snarky walk through Ubuntu applications, with a Mac-centric perspective)

"Kipi plugins. It’s just like iPhoto except it calls albums “tags”, exports to Flickr for free, exports to HTML that validates, stores my important metadata in a SQLite database, can be operated entirely with a keyboard, and doesn’t suck."

The Boy Who Cried Cease and Desist

2006-06-18T11:23:00.000-07:00

or
Why software companies, lawyers, music companies, and movie companies and everybody else should go a little easy on the Cease and Desists. For their own good.

Aside it from it being kind of bad p.r. when they Cease and Desist a 12 year-old or a poor grandma who doesn't own a computer, or a web site that doesn't even have a copy of Independence Day on their website, just a link to a 10k script they named independence_day.pl, these companies and organizations should stop Cease and Desistin' coz nowadays, everybody and their brother in the blogosphere's so open about the Cease and Desist letters they get in the mail, that getting a Cease and Desist letter just doesn't seem very serious anymore. It's kind of ho-hum, dig?

Example of both bad p.r., and diluting the value of Cease and Desist:

Last week Microsoft's Vista Beta 2 download site was so bogged down, that Microsoft suggested ordering physical media of the beta download. To the rescue, two Microsoft enthusiasts set up a torrent of the media, relieving Microsoft resources, and ensuring that the workflow of community QA could continue.

Their reward? A Cease and Desist. This post will not take the time to detail the community, business, and technical transgressions taking place here. This post is about how the Microsoft fans were so casual in their mention of the Cease an Desist they got.

Truthfully, Microsoft's exercise of the cease and desist is far from outrageous in this case, it's really not that "evil" of them. My point is only if intellectual property owners don't quickly revisit the hows and whens of Cease and Desistin', the day is coming soon when we will have ALL been Cease and Desist'd, and the message will be a bit watered down.

Don't Shush Me

2006-06-07T18:37:00.000-07:00

Here are some things I've been wishing I knew everything about, inside and out:

puppet.
it's configuration management software, written in ruby. There's a mailing list.
ZFS.
a file system. like so many Sun-born technologies, the technology isn't in question, just whether it'll catch on and be worth making a part of your life.
Solaris Containers and Zones. (AJAX, Sun. Sun, AJAX. Have you met?)
A Sun virtualization approach.
subversion toys.
Today I read on the ruby on rail weblog that there's this nice GUI subversion browser. which of course i need, but can't really deal with right now.

Here are some questions I've been asking myself:

What does "enterprise" mean?
Is there ever a situation where you should buy a product that you can't fully use until a year from the time you pay for it? With computer stuff? With a car? A jacket? Anything?

Content Management System Comparison

2006-05-08T21:49:00.000-07:00

Some stuff I found today relating to content management systems:

http://www.cmsmatrix.org/ - list of a ton of CMS's, where you select up to 10, and it creates a little matrix for you. Unfortunately it doesn't have the most up to date info on each one, but it's a good starting point.
Mambo (cms) forum thread on "Can your CMS handle a slashdotting?"
Drupal (cms) forum thread on Plone vs. Drupal, a little old.

Falling In Love Again. FreeBSD: Not Always Like Linux. Go figure. Lesson 1: Checking For Memory/ RAM

2006-04-29T00:50:00.000-07:00

Right now I'm working on a project that involves FreeBSD, a UNIX flavor I'm not so familiar with. I'm finding many of my fave Linux commands... completely useless.

Let's start with looking for memory usage. On Linux, I'd try the ol':

# cat /proc/meminfo

On FreeBSD? Not so much. (note: there are some compatibility packages that can get you pretty close, but let's assume we don't have those, and we want to do it like the natives do it)

What about.... THIS!?!?

#sysctl -a | grep -i memory
Virtual Memory: (Total: 53359K, Active 12614616K)
Real Memory: (Total: 3993828K Active 3084828K)
Shared Virtual Memory: (Total: 228120K Active: 72076K)
Shared Real Memory: (Total: 107012K Active: 32160K)
Free Memory Pages: 265452K

Booyah!...
And that's one way to check memory usage on FreeBSD.

These Links Matter to Me: Thursday April 27, 2006

2006-04-27T23:10:00.000-07:00

Webinars about web-based sysadmin tool Webmin, (I have a love-late relationship with webmin, btw.)

Redhat Magazine article on understanding virtual memory.

Make for nonprogrammers (on Oreilly's ONlamp site).

Tim Oreilly and Flickr's Cal Henderson talk about how new kinds of web applications challenge traditional database design, at Oreilly's MySQL user conference.

In Your Spare Time: Starting Firefox in Safe Mode to troubleshoot problems with extensions and themes

2006-04-25T23:09:00.000-07:00

Even though we are like elite Navy Seals with highly specialized skills, as sysadmins, we often get called upon to help civilians with mortal tasks. Like troubleshooting Firefox. Sometimes people get too crazy with the Firefox extensions and themes, and wonder why everything looks funny. To separate what's what, have them start Firefox up in "safe mode."

Windows

Use the Mozilla Firefox (Safe Mode) ... shortcut in the Mozilla Firefox program folder on the Windows Start Menu. If you have accidentally deleted this shortcut, you can access Safe Mode by going to "Start -> Run" and entering (using Firefox as an example):

"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -safe-mode

Linux

On Linux, you can go to your Terminal and run:

/path/to/firefox/firefox -safe-mode

Mac OS X

On Mac OS X, it will be in:

/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -safe-mode

All via the Mozilla Zine SafeMode page.

TECHNORATI TAGS: firefox, browser, extensions, mozilla, sysadmin

The More You Know: Where Are Your Pine "nicknames" and Distribution Lists Stored?

2006-04-17T19:40:00.000-07:00

In your home directory, .addressbook is the file that stores your nicknames (aliases) and distribution lists for pine.

~/.addressbook

The more you know!

TECHNORATI TAGS: aliases, sysadmin, mail, email, pine

Tommy Hilfiger Uses Windows

2006-04-17T01:35:00.000-07:00

Just Sayin.

I was innocently reading Newsforge, when this Flash-y ad started moving, and then I found out Tommy was into Windows.

TECHNORATI TAGS: sysadmin, humor, tommy, hilfiger, windows server, Microsoft

Will Xen Be Able to Play (VMware) .VMDK files?

2006-04-15T23:13:00.000-07:00

I talked about how Xensource announced that it will be able to "import" .vhd virtual machines (a Microsoft standard). But as somebody who's made a lot of .vmdk virtual machines with VMware, I'm totally itching for VMware/ Xen to announce that Xen will be able to work with .vmdk machines, too. It'd be great to just throw a machine around to use with as many different virtualization packages as possible.

I'm really hoping an arrangement is in the works. Sure, they're competitors, but so's Microsoft, and they made the deal. VMware has pretty much said their .vmdk standard is available for anybody to use. One would think it's all on Xen, at this point.

TECHNORATI TAGS: vmdk, VMware, virtualization, sysadmin, Xen, Xensource, standards, vhd, Microsoft

These Links Matter to You. Friday, April 14, 2006

2006-04-14T22:30:00.000-07:00

VMware totally revamps their virtual appliance directory, makes it sortable.

You can get Ubuntu certified.

A taggable/ tagged (duh) list of web 2.0 applications (subjective). But it's great for when your friends are like "What was that link thing you showed me?"...

The Yahoo User Interface Library... free javascripts...

Documentation of Microsoft's Mix06 conference: Videos, podcasts, blog... I talked about this earlier, this is the event where Tim O'reilly and Bill Gates shared the stage. But there's lots of other interesting stuff there, too. This event was not just Microsoft stuff. Full sessions to come later.

TECHNORATI TAGS: vmdk, VMware, virtualization, sysadmin, Xen, Xensource, standards, vhd, Microsoft