January 24, 2007, 23:48
October 29, 2006, 18:56
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.
October 23, 2006, 20:01
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?
September 15, 2006, 11:03
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.
September 13, 2006, 18:04
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.
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.
September 09, 2006, 18:22
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.
August 10, 2006, 09:30
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.
August 03, 2006, 11:00
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.
July 29, 2006, 14:02
July 28, 2006, 16:00
Some tech notes
MediaWiki earlier this month released version 1.7 as their new stable branch. The main compatibility change is that it requires PHP 5 which will leave many in the lurch. Couldn't they have waited a year before switching over? It's damn annoying.
No major feature changes other than experimental PostgreSQL support. I'll probably stick to the 1.6 branch for a while.
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Google Code - Project Hosting was released. It looks simple in a Google with projects being organically categorized by tags. Each project also has it's own issue tracking system. There is also Subversion hosting for each project.
However, the Subversion repository browser is suprisingly shit. Why did they even bother when you can't even view the revision history?
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Been watching a previous episode of Systm where they talk about and demonstrate Asterisk.
It's a good intro as it shows you the hardware you need and there's pretty computerized diagrams to get it into your head. I'm hoping that VOIP is something we can get into and offer at LavaNet. We have the expertise and support personel in house.
Be afraid, be very afraid.
