Julian's Blog

Scott, me and rms

BTW, I no longer work at LavaNet.

The tracks go off in this direction.

Edgy Eft released last week.. March of the wooden soldiers

Ubuntu 6.10 "Edgy Eft" was officially released last week. There's also a quick overview (release notes) with the main new features and screenshots. Most notably is the new init system, Upstart.

The local Hawaiian download mirror is provided by HOSEF.

Personally, I prefer Fedora but I did use Ubuntu for a while and it's definitely the distribution I recommend to people.

Ubuntu 7.04 "Feisty Fawn" will be released in April next year.

Mozilla Firefox 2.0 to be released tomorrow... IE7 wallow in the mire

Mozilla Firefox 2.0 will be released tomorrow. Do the Mozilla community a favor and download it tomorrow instead of today.

Free Software projects are often served up through one official server which then seeds the release out to local mirror servers. Obviously, if a big release is about to come out, it will be available before the actual launch so that local mirrors can pick up on the release.

It's no big secret so I'm not sure why big media outlets like Slashdot make it out to be. You'd think they'd know better.

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Internet Explorer 7 was recently released. Robert Scoble, a former Microsoft employee doesn't like it.

In my opinion, the only reason a new version of IE is out is because a new version of Windows is coming. So MS feels it can dedicate the resources into bringing out a new browser. Version 6 was released on August 27, 2001, a few weeks before Windows XP.

When will the next version of Windows come out?

Leveraging Free Software presentation

Thanks to those of you who came to my Open Source Pizza presentation at the University of Hawaii tonight. It was really nice to talk in front a receptive crowd with great questions afterwards.

Here are the slides from tonight's presentation:

OpenOffice.org Impress format - 2.2 Mb download

Adobe Acrobat PDF format - 1.5 Mb download

LifeType 1.1 is out

LavaNet 'Ohana Blogs uses the GPL licensed blogging platform called Lifetype.

Recently they released version 1.1 which brings about new features.

I'm hoping to upgrade as quickly as I can.

All the templates that have been installed are compatible and the 2 additional plugins installed.

What would need to be tested in isolation is the upgrade process (especially of the database modifications).

The theming and 'look' of the site would also need to be looked at which may or may not turn out to be the biggest work load.

LavaNet Instant Messenging service?

When Google launched their Google Talk instant messenger, probably the best thing that they did was that they used the Jabber protocol.

Jabber is best known as "the Linux of instant messaging" -- an open, secure, ad-free alternative to consumer IM services like AIM, ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo.

It also meant that they saved countless engineering time and dollars in NOT creating their own proprietary instant messenging protocol. And if you don't like the official Google Talk client, you can use any Jabber client that takes your fancy.

Internally at LavaNet, we've implemented and use heavily our own Jabber server using Free software. There are many benefits of this such as: being able to create and administer our own chat rooms for our work departments; turning off logging of conversations and

Previously, we had been heavy uses of AOL's AIM service.

A real crappy situation as AIM is not encrypted and AOL is the type of company which likes to log your usage and post it on the internet.

Something that we at LavaNet could do is offer a LavaNet Instant Messenging service to the public. I doubt the larger ISP's on the island would bother looking into such a service. They have other things to worry about.

As a smaller ISP we can do such things and discuss them with the public. Anyone interested? Any there other services (especially those which can be implemented Freely) that our customers would like to see? Feel free do drop us a line on our Forums.

This is new LavaNet.

PodPress is a podcasting plug-in for Wordpress

Wordpress already has nice built-in support for podcasting. That's what was chosen to be used for the LavaNet 'Ohana Podcasts.

I found out about a nice plug-in called PodPress. It's something to look into for the future.

Incidently, LavaNet 'Ohana Podcasts is also now listed on iTunes as well as some other directories that I can't recall submitting to. Has anyone had a listen to the podcasts? What do you think? You can also submit comments for each episode.

I'd like to have Planet Feed Reader for LavaNet 'Ohana Blogs

I'm more a tech person. So when I think of things, I tend to think of things from a technical perspective.

Something that I want to have with the LavaNet 'Ohana Blogs is the concept of 'Planets' using the Planet Feed Reader.

What is Planet?

Planet is an awesome 'river of news' feed reader. It downloads news feeds published by web sites and aggregates their content together into a single combined feed, latest news first.

Maybe it helps if you take a look at some such as Planet GNOME or Planet SUSE.

Planet is particularly popular with Free and Open Source Software projects. Part of this is that the FOSS community really embraces the web and FOSS developers tend to be pretty tuned in and write in blogs.

I'd like to get the LavaNet Systems department more involved in writing blogs. Besides myself, only Michael really has an active blog. So we could really open up the communications line with customers on the up and coming aspects of LavaNet and have a Planet for the Systems department. Planet Support would work nicely too.

But potentially we could have other Planets that are more generic and open to everyone. I think it's something unique that I haven't seen the Planet software used for in a large scale (non-tech communities using Planet).

100 x Ubuntu 6.06 LTS CDs from Canonical for HOSEF

In August 2006, I received a shipment of 100 Ubuntu Linux CDs to distribute through HOSEF.

Contents:
Edubuntu, 64-bit, Mac = 10 each
Ubuntu = 70
40 Ubuntu stickers - 1 for my laptop = 39
1 cardboard CD display stand

I put mini "Brought to you by HOSEF" stickers on all of them.

Boxed, labeled and ready to distribute

Edubuntu CD - Close up

Stand

OpenVZ and Debian... Guido presents... GPLv3 discussions... AOL privacy nightmare

OpenVZ is now part of the Debian Unstable repository. OpenVZ has really come a long way since it was open sourced late last year. I'm sure that having OpenVZ packaged up for Debian will bring a whole lot more developers who may already be familiar with VServers.

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Guido Van Rossum in a recent presentation about Python 3000. He was also interviewed recently in the FLOSS Weekly podcast.

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A good discussion on Slashdot entitled 'Torvalds Critiques of GPLv3 and FSF Refuted'. In a way, I much prefer Slashdot to Digg in that the format encourages intelligent commentary.

Some quotes and posts I particularly liked:

Remember that Linus created the Linux kernel. "Trying to build a Free Software system without Linux is trivial; I have three machines that I use regularly without a single line of proprietary code on them, and none of them runs Linux. Trying to build Free Software system without any GNU code is almost impossible."

Is Linus short-sighted? He holds a high a lot of respect. Will he change his mind? "The way Linus sees it is from the "developer" viewpoint. The code is still free from this viewpoint, since all modifications are published. You can modify it and run it on a DRM-free machine.

That's the short-sightedness of Linus' argument (the same short-sightedness that let him get trapped by the Bitkeeper fiasco). There are DRM-free machines now, but that doesn't mean there will be in the future. If the media companies have their way, every desktop computer will have a TPM chip in it, and if you want to view things like HD-content, it has to be enabled and running..."

UPDATE: Stallman, Torvalds, Moglen share views on DRM and GPLv3

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After reading a story about smug "$60 million" boy, I checked out Digg and found out that AOL released the search logs for 500,000 users (over a 3-month period) as a neat 460Mb download. The download's been taken down but by the time you read this it will be seeded heavily on BitTorrent. I downloaded a copy. It's not pretty. It's a privacy nightmare.

RPM for Asterisk... Django 0.9.5... KernelNewbies web site

ATrpms maintains very up to date RPMs for Asterisk. For some reason, perhaps because there are Linux distributions that allow you to run Asterisk out-of-the-box, I thought that Asterisk was some full blown service that was difficult to get up and running.

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The web framework Django recently released version 0.9.5. I first looked at it when it was first released to the public over a year ago and it impressed me. I think I need to revisit some of the Python fundamentals. I've forgotten how to use things like dictionaries and list comprehensions.

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KernelNewbies is a site I found out about this week after looking at some videos from OSCON. I like the 'human readable' changelog for the Linux kernel's that they have. It's sites like that which show you the astronomical speed in with Free and Open Source Software is developed.

The site runs on MoinMoin which I am evaluating for LavaNet as a whole but also using as a personal wiki system running on my local workstation. I've implemented MoinMoin interernally at my former work place and it's cool to see how much they code-base has changed in the past year.

This Summer Of Code project to allow multiple storage system implementations looks especially interesting.

White lines (don't don't do it)

Microsoft recently released Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3. Don't install it.

From this comment:

IE 7 still did not correctly implement the box model, positioning, all CSS1, all CSS2, or any CSS3. The same IE-specific parsing bugs for CSS are in place in IE 7.

Writing HTML and adapting designs for Internet Explorer is a total waste of time. You can spend the same amount of time (if not more) porting over the core parts of a design as you do implementing work arounds to non-standards compliance of IE.

As a result of implementing all these workarounds and hacks, you end up with a web site that is "not standards compliant, less accessible and harder to maintain".

Then again, IE7 like everything else from Redmond is delayed. It was anticipated to ship in late 2005.

Floating around on the web is the Vista/Longhorn Source Code

This is the current email signature of someone I know.

Vista/Longhorn Source Code:

#include <win2k.h>
#include <winxp.h>
#include <extra_pretty_things_with_bugs.h>
#include <more_bugs.h>
#include <require_system_activation.h>
#include <phone_home_every_so_often.h>
#include <remote_admin_abilities_for_MS.h>
#include <more_restrictive_EULA.h>
#include <sell_your_soul_to_MS_EULA.h>
//os_ver="Windows 2000"
//os_ver="Windows XP"
//os_ver="Longhorn"
os_ver="Windows Vista"

RMS on Free Software vs. Open Source

This quote from RMS really brought the issue of the terms Free Software and Open Source to my attention.

It really gave me a better understanding. Or more so it was the culmination of what I had come to realize.

From here.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Beta 1 due in July... Others learning to compete

RHEL 5 Beta 1 is due in July.

The main emphasis is on Xen virtualization support. There's a reason why VMWare and Microsoft have released "free" versions of their competing products*.

The landscape and respect for FOSS has changed such that a few years ago, competing companies would not perform such moves. Instead they would die a slow death and lose market share.

* Note also that the competing products are by in large built on full hardware virtualization. They are slower technologies. End-User-Licenses of VMWare products even explicitly disallow you from publishing any benchmark results.