max@pseudogen:~$

Dell Engineering Preview: Oracle 11gR2 RAC on RHEL6

2012-01-04T10:56:00.000-06:00

I've been extremely fortunate to become a part of a really cool research and development organization at Dell just a little over a year ago and I've been working towards publishing some of the fun stuff I've been working on. In recent news I've been able to publish my *very* unsupported tech preview of setting up Oracle 11gR2 RAC (11.2.0.3) on RHEL6 proper (without ASMLib). I hope someone enjoys it and feedback on the related wiki doc would be greatly appreciated. Please note the formatting on the wiki engine we use is a little tough to get used to so my spacing might look a bit odd, I'm working on it, I hope it is found to be useful! :)

The article resides on the Dell TechCenter here:
http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/b/techcenter/archive/2012/01/03/dell-engineering-preview-oracle-11gr2-rac-on-rhel6.aspx

Happy hacking,
-AdamM

help-bash@gnu.org is GO!

2011-11-22T11:10:00.000-06:00

My favorite shell, and quite possibly yours, is now hosting an official user outreach mailing list for discussions related to using, scripting, learning, and more with the bash shell so join up!

https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-bash

Public Fail .... I haz one

2011-11-03T12:55:00.000-05:00

So, I haven't blogged in months as a side effect of being overly busy (I'm doing really good to knock out 5 hours of sleep a night right now). An unfortunate side effect of this enhanced "level of busy" is that I over commit my time without realizing it and simultaneously believe the self told lie that I have my time managed well..... here we go.

First, the fail. I recently was ping'd as an unresponsive maintainer on the Fedora devel mailing list and I would like to publicly take full responsibility, the fault was mine and I hate that it reached a point that someone had to post to the list in search of me. I will do my best to do better in the future. My apologies.

Next, why have I been so busy? .... Well, I'm glad you asked. About a year ago I started a new career at Dell which has been exciting and fun and I absolutely love my job, but as with all jobs there are times where your To Do list gets long in the tooth. The tooth is long and since about July we've been ramped up quite a bit for a number of different projects in my organization, one of which is an attempt to try and make what we do in Enterprise Solutions Engineering more community centric and more open as a process in forms of publications, communication, collaboration and the like. (Much more to come from that link in the not too distant future ... stay tuned!)

What else? Well, I'm also working on my Masters Degree in Computer Science with a focus in Information Assurance and Security, I am scheduled to graduate this December and I'm currently working on my Masters Project that I started over the summer which has been a daunting task but fun along the way because I get to incorporate cool tech from Fedora. Sadly though, this does not mix well with a normal persons sleep nor hobby schedule.

Next up, this one isn't a time cruncher but I thought it deserved honorable mention in the field of "what I've been up to" ..... In August I turned 25 and this year marked a decade of my use of Red Hat so I decided it was time to write my fanboi in ink, literally.

Moving on....

I got married on September 10, 2011 ... yey me!!! It was very exciting and wonderful but also a giant time sink for all the planning leading up to the event (there went more sleep) but I wouldn't have had it any other way and our wedding was perfect!

Once the fairy tale day was over I sadly had to snap back to reality, my final semester of Grad School started the week before my wedding, so as soon as the Honeymoon was over it was a mad dash for the books and I've been hammering out course work along side my Masters Project ever since (along with keeping up with my full time job). All the while I'm attempting my best to keep active in Fedora land, I've been able to update a couple packages, handle some bugs, offer some karma to updates and such but I've clearly not been holding up to par what I would like to and what I have in the past. I would like to do better and I will do my best to make it happen.

None of this is an excuse for my neglect to my responsibilities that I signed up for when I became a package maintainer but I wanted to first say I was sorry for my fail and also to provide a little background around factors contributing to my slip up. I just certainly don't want community members to think I was simply ignoring Fedora or my responsibilities because I am just as much a walking/talking fanboi as ever, I love the project, and I'll be here for a long time to come!

Thank you for your time,
-AdamM

P.S. - I'm on IRC roughly 8+ hours a day because I'm fortunate enough to irc while at work.... please feel free to ping me there if you feel I've missed an email or bug report that was directed at me. Many thanks! :)

Gnome3 from a XFCE user's perspective.

2011-04-11T22:24:00.002-05:00

"Just tried GNOME 3 for 30 seconds. Prefer the old version. Will say bad things about GNOME 3 whenever it is mentioned for the next 5 years." - @1990sLinuxUser

I love this quote because it makes me think of many blog posts I read about Gnome3. I also really like who ever runs that twitter account because its quite entertaining.

I would like to take a moment to state this before we go any farther just so that people know my stance before we get anywhere:

Gnome3 is good, Gnome3 is damn good.

There's a large amount of people who dislike it and don't prefer it and I respect their right to their opinion but I honestly get a little annoyed by people who piss on the hard work of innovators.

Ok, now that's out of the way lets move on....

First, Gnome3 is pretty:

Gnome3 is good. Right out of the gate I have a lot of respect for the well thought out design with its clean and uncluttered desktop. I personally completely respect the lack of panel plugins, the lack of desktop icons, and the decision on the overview layout design for interacting with the desktop in a very intuitive fashion. Gnome3/Gnome-Shell set out to accomplish something and that was to make the Free Desktop easier to use, more productive, and to have a seamless user experience. I think these things have been accomplished with great milestones being etched into the landscape along the way. Many design decisions were made with the idea of current day work flow and user interaction in mind and I can't do anything but respect that. The new integrations with power management, NetworkManager, messenger, and notifications are nothing short of impressive and make for a solid user experience. The additions to the file manager are also highly welcomed and I think make for a far more user friendly file navigating experience. Not to mention the over all innovations in general human computer interaction: Of course we should use our computer peripherals simultaneously! It's wasteful not to. Gestures for window management? Yes, why not? is it faster to zero in on that tiny little box in order to maximize, unmaximize, or close a window or is it faster to click anywhere on that top bar and throw it into a side of the screen and let go? Go ahead and test it a few times with a stop watch, don't worry ... I'll wait ....

.
.
.
.
.
.
Good, you try it? Awesome. See how much faster that was?

The backlash from the community about things like this astound me. This isn't new, innovation in the Linux space isn't new by any means and the funny thing is that each great stride forward is always met with the same response: "Blasphemy!!! How dare you change $x" Think I'm crazy? Ask a KDE dev sometime how much heat they took over the rewrite. Ask Lennart how much crap he's taking over SystemD. Ask Matt Domsch how much crap he's taking over biosdevname. Go ahead, ask them and you'll get a similar response from each of them as you will from a Gnome3 developer and what amazes me is that they are so willing to take the punches and defend their stance. You know why they do? Because they believe in the tech and they know that in a year, the haters will be on to complaining about the next thing and everyone will simply be happier with the changes that they are driving which are being made for the better.

(Yes there were great strides before these I listed and there will be more tomorrow and they day after that .... these topics are relatively current and apply to the topic at hand so if I left out your innovation then I apologize for doing so and for the crap you put up with during the initial development and release of it.)

Alright, lets round this back to me being a XFCE user.... I've been a XFCE user since 2004 (no I'm not the most veteran user out there, if you've been using XFCE for longer, awesome ... good for you). I also really respect other desktop environments in their own right such as KDE3.x and KDE4.x, GNOME 2.x and 3.x, LXDE, as well as the vast amount of window managers turned quasi desktop environment but at the end of the day I always come back to XFCE because its my comfort zone and I like the way things are done in XFCE land. I like the strict standards compliance, the fact that I can rip and replace any one or many aspects of my desktop and replace it with another standards compliant piece of software that I thought was interesting, I love how light weight and simple it is and above all I love that it offers me the feature richness I desire while being discrete enough to not get in my way. Would I be upset if they completely dropped the current implementation and went with something wildly different like Gnome3? Maybe at first, but I wouldn't trash them for their efforts to innovate and I would certainly happily either adopt the new solution or find an alternative because there are a *LOT* of them out there and they are all waiting for a larger user base.

Moral of the story: Gnome3 is awesome but not my personal cup of tea and I'll be staying with XFCE for the foreseeable future.

Also, XFCE is pretty too :)

Congratulations to all those involved with the Gnome3 release!

Happy hacking to all and for anyone interested in Xfce 4.8 ... feel free to pop over to the Fedora 15 Nightly Compose page and grab yourself a bit bucket full of the Fedora Xfce Spin! :)

-AdamM

Texas Linux Fest 2011

2011-04-11T21:44:00.002-05:00

This is sadly a week over due in the blog space, but last weekend (April 2, 2011) was the second annual Texas Linux Fest in Austin, TX. This year was night and day compared to last year in terms of turn out, venue and number of vendors with booths.

There were roughly right around 500-600 people at the event in the Hilton Downtown Austin and we filled their conference rooms right up. The Fedora booth was extremely busy! I even had a couple people from other booths come over and make comments on how busy we were which was a pleasant surprise from fellow exhibitors. Even during the "lunch break hour" (the sessions broke for lunch but the hall where the booths were hosted never had a shut down moment) the Fedora booth was a notably happening location in the exhibition hall. There were vendors from all walks of the Linux ecosystem there: Fedora, Red Hat, IBM, HP, Dell, HostGator, RackSpace, Softlayer, Webmin, Cloud.com, OpenStack, Novell/SLES, LinuxJournal Magazine, and many more (apologies to those who weren't listed ... that's just what I could remember off the top of my head a week later).

The usual swag were big hits, the Fedora buttons, ink pens, stickers as well as pressed media were in high demand and we had a box of Design Suite media left over from the SXSW event that had gone on two weeks before that were extremely popular as not many people knew it existed. Many of the conference attendees who showed interest in the Design Suite were either those who dabble in graphic design or have a friend who does it in more serious context and they've been looking for a good avenue to show off the FOSS alternatives to the proprietary tools these individuals currently work with.

Dell also had a booth across the way from us and they were giving away a laptop at the end of the day. One of our fellow Fedora Ambassadors (Julio Villarreal) ran over and fired up some Fedora on it and the Dell reps who were there were good sports about it and let it run on there all day which I thought was another night avenue to show off some Fedora goodness.

I was also extremely excited to see so many new faces in the crowd, the volume of Linux users who were likely in high school or fresh into the college scene that were very interested in what Fedora is up to and has to offer was refreshing and I hope to see many of them become key players in the Fedora of tomorrow. The OLPC XO was a big hit as was my Genesi EfikaMX Smartbook that I brought along with me to show off what the Fedora ARM development team has been hard at work at (very big special thanks to Dennis Gilmore for putting up with my ultra ARM-noob self while trying to make that thing work in time for the conference). On the topic of Fedora ARM, there was a PandaBoard booth at the conference and a few of their booth exhibitors came over to check out Fedora ARM running on the smartbook and to ask questions about the efforts that were ongoing. They were very impressed!!

There were a number of users who were interested in the alternate desktops (LXDE was extremely popular) available on the installation DVDs that were on the booth table. We gave away roughly 500+ pieces of media, probably 200-ish case badges, similar amount of stickers, all of the buttons (think there were 150-200 of those), all of the stickers left over from SXSW, and a hand full of balloons and temporary tattoos.

The Fedora booth was stationed right next to the Red Hat booth which as I've expressed before I think is a very powerful statement to have us standing next to one another but as our own separate entities. Many times we at the Fedora booth were asked about the relationship with Red Hat as well as if we were Red Hat employees. None of us at the booth this year were "Hatters" and that came as a surprise to a number of the conference attendees but we still the same enjoyed explaining the heritage of the community centric Fedora and its long time relationship to Red Hat. Those talking points I felt were very effective in explaining many things that people "on the outside" don't 100% understand.

All in all I would have to say it was an excellent conference and I can't wait for more like it so that we can go out and show off the awesomeness that is Fedora!

-AdamM

Ask not what your distro can do for you, but what you can do for your distro.

2011-02-08T12:25:00.005-06:00

I've had a lot of mixed feelings in the recent Fedora Community rivalries that have spawned as there are sentiments I agree with and disagree with from both sides but I haven't been happy with how some of the messages have been expressed. Today there was a blog post from spot that addresses many things of that nature. As I read this post I was reminded of a famous quote from John F. Kennedy's January 20th 1961 Inaugural Speech and I feel it applies today still to our Country but also in recent times to Fedora. We live in a community centric culture that is heavily based on merit, those who are willing to put in the time and effort are rewarded with the respect of their peers. We do also, however, exist in a community based around freedom and that affords each of us as contributors to contribute our time, effort, and skills to what we want to. Nobody can dictate how you spend your free time, period.

I'm tired of the fighting. Either come up with a solution and go with it, or just stop. I am directing this at both sides of the qualms too, don't think I'm taking sides or that anyone from one side hasn't done something that has angered the other. We're dividing ourselves and I don't see how its helping anyone individually or Fedora as a whole. So please, "Ask not what your distro can do for you, but what you can do for your distro."

-AdamM

Fedora 14 Xfce Spin with Compiz on top

2011-01-15T01:12:00.004-06:00

I was recently using my favorite Fedora Spin and I realized that there was one key thing I missed about Compiz vs. Xfwm4 (now mind you I think Xfwm4 is an amazing window manager ... but this was an itch that needed scratching), it wasn't the desktop cube, the minimization animations, or any of the many wonderful compiz-fusion plugins. It was the Compiz Scale feature. It's one of those things that I find myself using quite often because of how busy my desktop gets. I am a big fan of Compiz and have been for some time but there isn't any official built in support for Compiz in Xfce 4.6.x (current stable version in Fedora as of the writing of this blog post) so I wanted to find a way to add in Compiz into Xfce in a somewhat "seemless" or "integrated" way. Here's a short write up of what I did and I hope someone is able to use it as a basis to their own path to finding a comfy desktop.

Install packages (as root):

yum -y install compiz compiz-fusion ccsm emerald emerald-themes

These packages will install and give you the CompizConfig Settings Manager as well as compiz "core" and the compiz-fuzion plugins/extensions along with the emerald window decorator which is necessary if you want to have custom window decorations without relying on other Desktop Environment integration pieces.

At this point we will likely want to attempt to run Compiz and make sure we can actually run it:

compiz-manager

This should replace Xfwm4 with Compiz, if not there is likely an error and in that case you will need to diagnose the issue as well as solve it before continuing.

Next we will need to edit the following file with your favorite text editor. If you don't have one I'll recommend the light weight IDE called Geany that comes with the Fedora Xfce Spin by default and is located in the Xfce Menu as follows Menu->Development->Geany. This recommendation comes mainly from the fact that it is easy to use for those not familiar with such editors as vim or emacs and this file is XML which Geany supports syntax highlighting for:

geany ~/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/xfce4-session.xml

In this file you will need to find the section that looks like this:

<property name="Client0_Command" type="empty">

And edit it to look like this (i.e. - delete the above and insert the following in its place):


<property name="Client0_Command" type="array">
     <value type="string" value="compiz-manager">
</property>

At this point you should be able to log out and back in and Compiz will have replaced Xfwm4 as your default Window Manager without any need to do strange "hacks." Thus demonstrating some of the power of standards compliant software and the ability to be interchanged based on preference or personal requirements.

I would like to take a moment to thank the Xfce Developers and Fedora Community for making things like this possible and allowing me to create the best desktop environment for me by using simple customizations/configurations. I'd like to thank Kevin Fenzi as well as Christoph Whickert for doing so much of the heavy lifting in respect to the Xfce Spin and everyone as a whole for allowing me to be part of the process, its moments like this where I truly appreciate the power of FOSS and the communities that form as a result. Long live Fedora!

-AdamM

New Year, New City, and the Start of a New Career

2011-01-03T01:27:00.002-06:00

It has been far too long since I have posted to the world about happenings relevant to myself and to that of the Fedora world so I will attempt to recap a bit.

Where have I been and where did I go?
I left the humble little town of Huntsville, TX which is the location of Sam Houston State University. It is also where I earned my Undergraduate Degree in Computer Science, where I am continuing to pursue my Masters Degree in Information Assurance and Security via correspondence, and where I have spent the last three years working as a Red Hat Enterprise Linux Systems Administrator. While my time there was good, it was clearly time for me to move on so I began looking around for position openings at companies I was interested in working for. I was fortunate enough to get a recommendation from a fellow Fedora Community Member for a position as a Systems Engineer at Dell Incorporated. I was called in for an interview and I will assume I did well because I was later offered the position which I was extremely excited to accept. I now wear a Dell Badge and I wear it with pride, I'm privileged to get to work in a R&D lab on GNU/Linux technologies powered by Dell hardware (yes I have a Fedora machine on my workbench in the Lab). I'm really bad with words so I'll leave it at this: I absolutely love my new job. As a side effect of the new job I relocated to Austin, TX and I again find myself without the literary skill to explain my enjoyment of this town as a whole so I will again say this: I love this town.

What about Fedora? You mentioned Fedora!
I was very sadly out of the loop for pretty much the entire Fedora 14 cycle and I would like to apologize to appropriate parties for that. I am currently working on getting some priorities in line as well as having purchased a new laptop with a bit more power under the hood so that I can do more QA work in VMs. Fedora 15 will hopefully be something I can contribute more time to. I'm regaining interest in the Xfce world after my tangent off to both KDE and Gnome (I'm really just a DE nomad these days, I respect the power and offerings of all three major contenders) so I hope to find myself on the list of co-maintainers of the Xfce Spin once again and with any luck I can find myself there for the ongoing future. I've also in the last week been working on getting my EPEL responsibilities up to date with the latest EL6 release and I'm happy to see that not only is fedpkg proving to be amazing but also that there is an Olive Branch of sorts being extended to active EPEL maintainers lacking a RHN subscription for those interested in supporting EL6 for at least the time being while RHEL clones get up to speed. While this might not remain permanent, it is nice to see those within the firewall seeing the value and user base of EPEL desiring the community supported packages. I personally have two subscriptions that I use at the house because not only am I a big Red Hat fan but I'm always preaching that I don't mind paying for good software and chose to vote with my dollar. That being said, I don't think contributors should necessarily be expected to follow that same guideline so I like that steps are being taken to provide contributors with the necessary tools.

Well .... that's where I'm sitting these days, my apologies for my ramblings if they make little sense. My blog often flows from mind to keyboard without much of a writing fundamentals filter so for my imminent grammatical errors please be kind.

P.S. - For those who have requests in for a couple of my packages to be updated, I am working with them. There's one most notable which is Pida, its upstream release structure has changed a little so I'm going to be spending a little time getting familiar with the new code before slinging packages out.

Night all,
-AdamM

Restructure for the sake of progress.

2010-09-24T12:00:00.001-05:00

There has recently been a lot of chatter about the future of Fedora, vision statements, goals, progress and where to go from here. I would like to voice my opinion on the topic and for all who disagree please let me know why and voice your solution because I am always open to new ideas and I am definitely not saying this is the only way to continue or to solve the current issues but its the idea I had.

First off, what's the problem? Well from my perspective there are a few but I only want to focus on a couple right now: There's a lack of focus which makes marketing really difficult as there are so many things to promote and we have such a breadth of innovation wrapped up together offering a multitude of solutions which is confusing for newcomers. This is something I would like to think that we as a project aren't fond of. Others might have opinions of what they think are problems and they might very well be problems, but these are the ones that I personally think I can offer an idea for solution.

Our lack of focus is pure marketing pain: This rounds out a bit of the recent talks about Vision Statement which I'm not against as many appear to be and I think the blog post from Thorwil nails this right on the head. What can we do, where can we go and how do we do it without breaking up the community? My proposal for this is to continue the Fedora Project in a similar manner as it is going now but to migrate a little on how the Fedora Distribution is handled. I think we as a group should focus on the concept of a "Fedora Experience" and ask ourselves "What makes Fedora, Fedora?" I think we need to strip out a lot of our ambiguity for the official Fedora Distribution. Lets get rid of the KDE LiveCD, lets throw out the Spins, and lets let the Fedora Distribution focus purely on the default Gnome offering along with all that entails as a start to finish desktop experience, the "Fedora Experience". Now before you get angry and want to throw me to the sharks please just read on and save the flame mob until the end. I just don't see a way to be able to carry on the way we are while continuing to grow adoption. If we refocus on just one installation of one environment then we are decreasing the strain of the documentation team, the QA team, release engineering, the design team, the marketing team, and others who partake in the wonders of the Fedora Distribution as we've stripped out the ambiguity of "Its Fedora because it came from fedoraproject.org" or "It's Fedora because its all one package repository" and we just focus on one environment.

"But Adam, you're just pissing people off and they will leave the project"

This is true and this is false, this is inevitable and its completely avoidable, this is heavily a loaded statement. My idea is that we will restructure ourselves into forking off brands who operate under the same parent project, The Fedora Project. The idea is that those of us interested in KDE (or $other) will break off and make "Kepi Linux" (random name I selected for sake of example) and what is Kepi Linux? Kepi Linux is a distribution of linux focused on delivering a KDE centric experience that is based on the Fedora Project, it is a brand. I'd like to take a moment to quickly direct everyone's attention to Steve Yegge's talk at OSCON 2007 it's only about 25 minutes but if you don't have that kind of time the jist is, "The look, feel, packaging, and naming of a product, i.e. the brand, is more powerful than the function." I want people to take that and think about it hard for a moment because as much as you'd like to argue it at first, when you mull it over you know its true in at least some capacity. So back to the Kepi Linux example, now we have this new brand, new identity, and new outlet that packagers and developers can come together an work on that allows the specific group to focus on their own space. Essentially the KDE SIG within the Fedora Project would be the driving force behind Kepi Linux. As long as it is structured such that we are still using the same package repository, still using the same build environment, same bugzilla instance (maybe with some changes for branding), the same account system, continue contributing code, content, and packages to the same project and still share the same over all goal of leading the advancement of free, open software and content then I think we can still as the community at large stick together while being slightly more focused on our own areas (brands).

This idea probably isn't perfect and I understand that a paradigm shift like this would require a *LOT* of work from a lot of people but I think it would be a positive change in the long run. If we were to make Kepi Linux we could even have an "About Us" page that describes how we are the KDE SIG and that Kepi Linux is a sub project of the Fedora Project but is different from the Fedora Distribution, this way we are removing the confusion from new users because if they want Fedora and they go to get.fedoraproject.org there is one option, period. We are removing the over saturation of the Fedora brand which I like to think will result positively.

Just my thoughts on the topic, take them for what you will.

-AdamM

Personal Priority Queue

2010-09-07T10:00:00.000-05:00

There comes a day when I realize that I've found myself drowning long enough that something has to give. I contain only a certain amount of cycles that can only perform so many instructions within a finite amount of time. Sadly, no matter how much sleep I try and do without, I can't keep up or catch up and its time I enact a priority queue with my time.

Lets take a quick rundown of what gets higher priority and renice what is in need of it. First and foremost is my family, period. Highest priority is obviously set to my family. Then we make our way down the chain to the essential tie between my day job and graduate school. We'll apply them equal priority. Following that we can lump in randomness and hobbies with equal priority but the only thing I really want to discuss is Fedora. I love Fedora, I love working on Fedora and I wish I could work on it all day, everyday but a sad reality is that Fedora doesn't pay the bills and Fedora doesn't land me a Masters Degree (though I do try to incorporate Fedora into my assignments in my graduate courses when ever it is applicable).

What does this mean? Am I leaving Fedora? First off, I don't think I will ever leave Fedora because I believe in it too much and I love the community, what it stands for, and the efforts that are put into the project by it. However, I am going to have to scale back my time allotment which means I'm going to have to be more conservative with my excitement as it has gotten my hands in many pots and stretched me too thin ultimately causing my current predicament. I wanted to be able to contribute to Fedora in every way I am capable but the unfortunate fact is that I just can't pull it off. My problem is that I get too excited about too many different aspects of Fedora and I want to contribute all I can. I want to be a part of Fedora Design, Fedora QA, Fedora Ambassadors, Fedora Python SIG, Fedora Java SIG, Fedora KDE SIG, Fedora XFCE SIG, Fedora Desktop Team, Fedora Cloud SIG, Fedora ARM SIG, and other areas of the Fedora project that I find extremely interesting. Here I sit trying to find a way to keep up and I can't, I just can't. I will continue to maintain my packages and hang out in irc as much as possible but beyond that I am going to have to attempt to gracefully duck out of my other Fedora endeavors until I can find the time to really get back in the mix. I thank you Fedora, as a project and a community for offering such a cultivating and welcoming arena with so many outlets that I find so interesting that I want to dive in head first. I must take care of some other aspects of life right now but you will always be near and dear. In hopes that I am able to dive in full swing at a later date, I bid you all good luck and will continue to lurk around. :)

dvtm - dynamic virtual terminal manager

2010-06-24T13:23:00.002-05:00

Not too long ago I found myself in need of organizing my terminal sessions, I had too many windows open and it was cluttering my work space and bloating my alt+tab layout. I poked around the internet and found the likes of Terminator[0] and it was nice but not my personal preference so I did a little more poking and I found my way to dvtm[1]. dvtm is a dynamic virtual terminal manager that will essentially perform tiling window management from within a terminal window. It was originally a port of dwm to ncurses and has made my life eponentially easier since I found it. I wanted to show off some screenshots in hopes that others might find it fits their needs!

The package was already available in Fedora but since I spend a large amount of my time on RHEL machines for my day job I went through the processes to get it into EPEL, so everyone can have dvtm! :)

Here's some screenshot awesomeness (same apps, just different layouts within dvtm):

Hope people want to give it a shot! Also, be sure to read the man page, all the questions I could imagine were answered there. Happy hacking! :)

[0] http://www.tenshu.net/terminator/
[1] http://www.brain-dump.org/projects/dvtm/

Big Fedora Logo For Fedora Planet!

2010-06-18T15:57:00.003-05:00

Here's a big Fedora Logo (or at least as big as blogger.com will let me post) for those who were upset with the Ubuntu Logo that found its way on the planet.fedoraproject.org today. Enjoy and long live FOSS software!

Getting CyanogenMod on your Motorola Droid (Android 2.1 OTA) from Linux.

2010-06-07T14:31:00.003-05:00

Step 1: Download sbf_flash[0], and follow his directions with 1 modification, shutdown your phone and hold "UP" on the directional pad before "just plugging it in" (note, the screen will be blank/black and have some white text on it in a very primitive font, if that's what you got you're good) and I believe the application must be run as root. Also, the sbf image you will need is SPRecovery[1]

[0] http://blog.opticaldelusion.org/2010/05/sbfflash.html
[1] http://www.mediafire.com/?jgt1gjgx5gv

Step 2: Download CyanogenMod's latest release (at time of this writing it was 5.0.7) and copy it to the root of your SDCard and rename it "update.zip"

http://koush.tandtgaming.com//motorola/sholes/update-cm-5.0.7.1-Droid-signed.zip

Step 3: Shutdown your phone and reboot into SPRecovery by holding the 'x' key on your keyboard while it powers on (be holding 'x' before you hit the power button just to be sure). This should boot you into SPRecovery.

Step 4: Make a backup!!! You are going to want to make a backup here just in case something goes wrong. Use the volume up/down buttons on the side of your phone to move the selection up and down and the camera button on the side of your phone (power button takes you back to the previous menu).

Step 5: Flash the update, select "install" and in the next menu tell it to allow update.zip, then select "Install /sdcard/update.zip"

Step 6: Install the Google Apps, first copy the gapps file over to the root of your SDCard, rename it "update.zip" overwritting the old one. And repeat Step 5 remembering to hold 'x' while booting to get to SPRecovery.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/mnzmk1nytt2/gapps-passion-EPE54B-signed.zip

Step 7: Reboot and enjoy

NOTE: If your phone goes into what appears to be an infinite reboot loop, pull the battery and then hold 'x' again when you power back up to get back to SPRecovery and tell it to do a wipe of user data, its an option in the main menu. This happens but not always so don't be alarmed if it does.

Step 8: (Optional) Download ROMManager from the App Market and buy the extremely reasonably priced Premium version that will monitor new releases of the ROM as well as automate the flashing process.

NOTE: ROMManager is going to require a different Recovery image but it will handle the installation of this and will continue to make life awesome for you .... again, *highly* recommended.

Feel free to come hang out in #koush on irc.freenode.net if you have questions or just want to talk about the awesomeness that is CyanogenMod on the Motorola Droid!

Death to ARM, Long live ARM!

2010-05-17T23:51:00.005-05:00

Not all that long ago I wrote a blog post that expressed some frustrations I was having with ARM as a platform but in retrospect I think my statements were a bit hasty and overzealous. I stepped away from the unique aspect of ARM boards that make them so appealing, they are different, they are disjoint, but they are also extremely capable. We live in a world where you can't walk into the middle of a town and throw a rock in any direction without hitting a person carrying an ARM device which is an extremely powerful statement. Its a platform where extremely cool things are happening, it is the reigning champion of consumer embedded devices and as cloud computing (yes, I hate the term too but bear with me) becomes more and more the way of the future, embedded computing really will be a more viable solution for the dawn of tomorrow.

What does this mean? Well, that depends on who you are and where you sit in the world. It means to me that I think we within the Fedora Community need to put more efforts into the Fedora ARM SIG and even though I am an ARM SIG member I probably made my fellow Fedorans(?) a bit upset with my outcry as well as dealt myself a bit of a credibility blow which I have only myself to thank. In an effort to bring myself back from my current state I in the process of gearing up for doing some actual contribution to the Fedora ARM port, I've got a book entitled "Embedded Linux Primer" by Christopher Hallinan that I'm almost half way through and I've got a GuruPlug on order from GlobalScale because even if I hit fits of frustration along they way it would be ignorant of me to claim that embedded computing doesn't power the world, ARM is leading the way in that market, and I feel this is an area that Fedora could be great in. So lets hope that Apple doesn't buy ARM and screw us all. Long live Fedora and long live ARM!

UPDATE: I have cancelled my previous order of the GuruPlug in favor of a SheevaPlug for two reasons. 1) The GuruPlug requires me to buy JTAG board to do dev work and I don't want to shell out the extra cash. 2) I'm hearing reports of GuruPlugs doing random reboots when using the ethernet port. So now I just have to wait for my SheevaPlug in the mail!

Vote with your dollars

2010-05-04T11:14:00.005-05:00

"Vote with your dollars," a phrase a co-worker said to me when we started discussing smoking vs. non-smoking dining options. It's an idea that has stuck with me ever since and I find myself applying it to anything I do these days. For example, I pay for a Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription for my house even though I could run CentOS. Why do I do this? Because I want to support Red Hat, I want to vote with my dollars and let them know that I appreciate what they do for the open source software community at large with all of their endeavours.

This past weekend I found myself at a store, I won't say which one because I need not endorse them and they certainly don't need or want a mention in my measly little blog. At this store I was on a mission to purchase a portable mouse to go along with my new Asus EeePC 1001P (which I recently blogged about). The netbook is wonderful but when I've got it sitting on a desk I'd rather have a real mouse. As I was cruising for a perfect selection I found myself with two mice to decide between, both were capable and according to their boxes they had almost identical feature sets but one was cheaper. If I were a regular consumer, I would have grabbed the cheaper one and gone on with my life and not thought anything of it, but I am not a regular consumer. I'm a voter. There was another difference between these two devices and that was that the more expensive one had an image of Tux on the side and a listing for "Linux kernel 2.6+" in the system requirements field. I was sold. I voted with my dollars and gave my money to Logitech as they took the time and money to verify functionality on a Linux machine and to print the information on their labels. So kudos to you Logitech and I thank you for your help in the struggle to push the Linux movement. While many might find this victory small and meaningless, I think this is a big statement to the world. We came, we dominated, and now your peripherals wear our insignia. I happily paid the extra money to the company that was willing to give me some peace of mind that when I plugged that mouse in to my Fedora 13 Beta powered netbook that it would work and it did and I'm happy.

Why I hope Intel breaks ARM in half

2010-04-22T09:50:00.002-05:00

I've been a growing fan of the ARM platform for a while now but as time goes on my frustrations with the extremely drastic differences between ARM boards has begun to get under my skin. I've often thought to myself, "Why can't we just take an x86 machine and shrink its components to make an embedded system on a chip that walks, talks, and acts like the same old systems we're used to?"

In walks Intel to slaps me in the face with a big fat, "oh yeah ... we're totally doing that" and I love it. Its an amazing concept because I can take this SoC that will give me potentially days of battery life and run software that I've been running on my laptops, desktops, and netbooks since I've owned a computer. You know, software like the entire Fedora Distribution and all packages that might entail.

Intel recently demoed tablets and cellular telephones running on Moorestown CPUs that are claiming to be twice as fast as the current Pineview line of Atom processors as well as sporting a two to three times longer battery life. I'm a proud owner of an Asus EeePC 1001P and I'm getting about 8.5 hours of battery life on that thing with casual wifi browsing and a couple ssh sessions opened and this is all powered by an Intel Atom N450 which is a Pineview core running Fedora 13 Beta (full Gnome, etc. and it runs like a champ). With these claims of two to three times battery life, we really are approaching literally days of computing on a single charge from a processor that I can just fire up Fedora on. I like where this is going.

Lets go on a tangent for a moment, Apple has put a bid out to purchase ARM and I honestly hope they win it so they can absorb another platform just to kill it off. My hope is that Apple will win ARM, developers and distributors will not want to pay Apple/ARM prices or deal with their unreasonable developer agreements and will find comfort in Intel's Moorestown. Android and MeeGo are already supporting the Intel Moorestown line thanks to thier Linux roots and I like to think its just a matter of time before the mobile market abandons ARM all together. With the trend of tablet computers and smartbooks starting to gain some speed I think to myself, why divide ourselves as developers among multiple different ARM specs instead of having a standard target archticture that's been around for decades? But I digress.

Back on topic but keeping in mind the content of the tangent, lets think for a moment what this would mean for mobile platforms. Now, I want to start with the disclaimer that I love Free and Open Source Software but lets face it, half the internet runs on Adobe Flash. So while Adobe is beating its head against the wall trying to reinvent Flash for mobile platforms using several different abstraction models to keep the insanity of supporting all flavors of ARM from killing them entirely, Intel is quietly about to unleash the answer to their problem. To be honest, I don't care about Adobe in this respect (sorry Adobe, I just don't) but what I do care about are end users. If the end user can get a brand new Moorestown powered netbook with a day or two of battery life, double the performance of the current Intel Atom processors, and slap Fedora on there with out of the box support for everything they need as well as the option to add third party repositories for things such as Flash then I'm on board. Because in reality, the only reason x86 hasn't made it to cellular phones yet is because Intel hadn't found a way to pull off the battery life needed to do it. Now that they have, and I say we break an ARM or two.

Fedora 13 Beta - Asus EeePC 1001P

2010-04-18T18:00:00.002-05:00

It's tax season again and I got money back, not a very large amount but enough to cover a new budget netbook. With the budget in mind and the goal of long battery life I did my research and it was clear that the Asus EeePC 1001P (160gb version) was going to be top notch for the price. This little netbook (that I'm making this blog post from) is powered by the latest Intel N450 Pineview processor which offers some attractive bits in terms of battery life and form factor since it allows for a 6 cell battery that is almost entirely flush with the body of the netbook. For under $300 (USD) it is advertised to get up to 11 hours of battery life and is showing between 8 and 9 hours of battery life in real world usage.

I ordered it off Amazon.com and it arrived via FedEx on my doorstep yesterday afternoon and as per the included documentation it needed to charge for 8 hours before its first use. While I don't entirely trust or believe the battery needs that much time sitting on a charger I decided to play it safe. Once that horrible waiting period was over I was finally able to get it powered up and get Fedora 13 Beta installed. I was lucky enough to guess the right BIOS key so that I could get this little guy to boot from the USB stick with Fedora 13 Beta on it before Windows 7 (that came pre-loaded on this) ever got the chance to infect my CPU and other components.

Fedora 13 Beta installation went fine, but upon reboot the wireless card was not detected at all which was discouraging as all I could find on the internet were sources of needing to use ndiswrapper to make it function. Now, Fedora being notorious for leading the way and keeping in mind that I'm running a development build I had the bright idea to plug it into an ethernet port in order to download updates that have been rolling out as the bug squashing ninjas (Read: Fedora Contributors) find and fix problems in preparation for stable release.

Downloads done, presto rebuilds done, package installs done, reboot, wifi!!!

So here I am on my brand new netbook running Fedora 13 Beta + updates with *everything* fully functional and I couldn't be happier. One last piece is to find out why gnome-shell won't run but from what I understand its a graphics card specific bit because there are lots of reports of people having it up and running on other systems which is only a minor set back as gnome-shell is only a tech preview and is under heavy development itself. All in all, I'm extremely satisfied with Fedora 13 Beta + updates as well as with my Asus EeePC 1001P. Only recommendation I'd have to anyone in the market for one of these EeePC 1001P netbooks is to test out the keyboard, its just a preference thing. I like the keyboard on this quite a bit but I know of some who aren't fans so be sure to give it a test run before sinking the cash in.

Final words: Fedora continues to kick hind parts and take names, everything on this brand new netbook is working wonderfully and I couldn't be happier. Many thanks to all those involved in making my computing experience this amazing!

-AdamM

Texas Linux Fest 2010

2010-04-12T10:59:00.003-05:00

This past Saturday was the Texas Linux Fest 2010 and Fedora's very own Max Spevack was a featured presenter. The Fedora crew (Max Spevack, David Duncan, Scott Collier, Julio Villareal, and me) arrived at 8am to setup and we transformed a simple and somewhat boring table with a plain white table cloth into an interactive environment for Fedora and the community at large via an impressive event box. The event box contained all the tools needed to make our booth top notch and in my opinion a contender for "best in show."

I would also like to note that there was a Red Hat booth right next to us where Thomas Cameron and a fellow 'Hatter' named Shawn(sp?) (I never caught her last name) were stationed. I want to mention how powerful of a statement I personally felt came as the result of Red Hat and Fedora having separate booths right next to one another at an event like the TXLF because while there is a closely knit relationship between Fedora and Red Hat, the two as entities are separate. While these two are separate they are not necessarily disjoint and I think it is a powerful move to make that distinction to the Linux community who is not aware of that fact and still have the uninformed misconception of Fedora being Red Hat's development playground. I consider it important to show up standing shoulder to shoulder to represent our specific areas to the Linux community.

With that said, on to the starting line! At 9am the doors flew open at the Texas Linux Fest and the line from the registration counter was out to the parking lot. We had prime real estate and as the participants were funnelled through the entrace and were brought in through a walkway that ran right by the Fedora booth. The booth got immediate attention and the day was off with a bang, people everywhere, we were running through media quickly, the tattoos were a great success, ink pens being taken, and all the usual reactions I would expect conference goers to have to swag. The main piece of the "swag grab" that I enjoyed was that the people who would come up to the booth didn't just grab and go, they would walk up, we as Fedora Ambassadors would engage them in conversation and a few minutes would pass (or hours in a couple instances) and they would pick up a couple items from the table and continue on their way.

We had one gentleman who was having issues with his Broadcom wireless card (surprise, surprise), he was a relatively new user and I was happy to help him. We scrambled around for almost an hour trying to find a free network drop to plug his laptop into an ethernet cable to install the appropriate kernel modules from rpmfusion. Once wifi was setup and successful, the gentleman who I had been helping quickly ran to the tables of other distributions who apparently hadn't had as good of luck as I had in getting his wireless to function and said, "The Fedora guy made it work." I'd call it a victory :)

As the day went on, conversations of everything from wacom tablets to ARM Architecture strategy was discussed between Fedora Ambassadors and those in attendance of the Texas Linux Fest. We at the Fedora booth used a convertible tablet laptop that I had from work to have a hand written "running list" of topics to take away from the event as a somewhat informal way of gathering information based on what the community is interested in, what they would like to see from the Fedora Project in the future, and what they love about Fedora now. We had quite a bit of positive feedback and a few requests for the future of Fedora, I'd call this a win as well.

All in all it was a spectacular event and I look forward to next year's TXLF!

I unfortunately lack a high quality camera, but David Duncan is not bound by this limitation and has some amazing photos here.

I went ahead and exported the output of the Xournal document from the tablet writings to a pdf and it can be viewed here.

UPDATE: I got word from Thomas Cameron that Shawn's last name is Briscoe. So thank you to Shawn Briscoe for coming out and kicking hind parts along with Thomas Cameron at the Red Hat booth! (I know this is a Fedora Ambassador's report but if you're this far in my blog post then you know my opinion on the co-existence of the two groups).

Package Management with Fedora

2010-03-29T22:17:00.002-05:00

On March 3, 2010 I met with the Sam Houston Association for Computer Scientists in order to give a presentation on Package Management within Fedora. The Sam Houston Association for Computer Scientists (SHACS) is a student chapter of the ACM at Sam Houston State University and is an organization that I have been fortunate enough to be invited back to a number of times to present about Fedora and on this occasion I was fortunate to have around 30 people in attendance.

This Presentation was given about package management. I began covering about the overview of what a package is, describing how packages are groupings of files and metadata about those files in order to be installed unto a functional system. Some of these files may be executable, others will be for configuration of the executable application, documentation, or many other types of content. At this point I asked one of my favorite rhetorical questions, "Why should I care?" I went on to explain about how this concept can be used to break users from the bounds of their commonplace "next, next, finish" installation methods, the constant upgrading of individual applications one at a time, and using yet another utility to upgrade the operating system itself.

Going away from this concept for a moment, RPM makes its way on to the scene of the presentation with a quick overview of the history, what RPM is as a package format including a quick overview of macros and standards they represent, and then moving on with RPM the essential utility that allows us all to survive in a package powered world.

Now that have learned to install packages, what about all the dependencies? How will we be able to handle all of this by hand? Short answer: yum. Long answer: Yum is the YellowDog Updater Modified and it performs a large number of important functions and the most commonly known is that it automatically installs dependencies of packages without any further user intervention. Now we go back to the original rhetorical question, "Why should I care?" Well here we are, lets imagine being able to update, install, and remove any application on your system with a single tool, a single application, a single interface. Now take that and imagine it is also able to update itself along with everything else on your system. That's exactly what we have. None of the old traditional concepts that have snaked their way into proprietary operating systems that plague the planet, but pure open source package management that is your one stop shop.

"But Adam, I don't want to use the command line! It's scary!!" Don't fret! Here comes PackageKit to save those who are mouse interface inclined! At this point in the presentation I walked through some basic steps of how to navigate through PackageKit which took a very short time since it is so pleasantly straight forward.

Last little bit of the presentation is going over the concept of a repository so that users know where their code and content comes from, the ideas of where it comes from and the flow of developers/packagers that contribute to a repository that once tested and proven stable it released upon the public for installation via tools such as yum.

That's all for now! Apologies for taking so long to write up a report.

-AdamM

Slides from presentation (odp)

FUDCon - Day one : The awesomeness that is.

2009-12-07T11:22:00.001-06:00

So Day one has come and gone. Let me put this simply, Fedora User and Developer Conference Toronto 2009 is epic freaking win. We have essentially destroyed the BarCamp style conference because there are too many interesting projects that are talk worthy going on within Fedora. There were so many proposed talks that the entire schedule got pushed back an hour and a half due to the pitch of talks and the voting on topics. The rooms were packed, some talks were pushed out to the back with standing room only if you didn't make it to the room on time and these were not small class rooms, this is quite a large university we're being hosted at.

There was also a lot of very cool efforts being put forth in order to do a "live FUDCon" for those of us Fedorans and all interested parties would be able to participate and get in on the FUDCon action from remote locations. We had irc transcribers for each session as well as audio/video for the rooms in which had the hardware/facilities to do so.

For those of you who were unable to attend, please feel free to check all the logs here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Toronto_2009_BarCamp_Schedule

I attended the "Observing Fedora with SystemTap" session during the first round of sessions which was quite impressive. You are now able to perform in depth analysis of any aspect of your system because there is support in the kernel for observing essentially everything and getting reports back. I loved this both from the systems admin side where I want to try and track down issues and bottlenecks as well as from the developer side because it could potentially make targeting down bugs very easy. I did the irc transcribing for that session so I highly recommend checking out the log http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fudcon-room-1/2009-12-05/fudcon-room-1.2009-12-05-17.13.log.html

Second round of sessions I attended the State of X / State of the Kernel which was a presentation by X and Kernel hackers (respectively) that was quite enlightening to the future plans of kernel and X technologies and it continues to impress on how much is being done and how fast it is happening. The open source support for hardware, including things like USB3.0 (which is already there even though the hardware isn't out and nobody else has support for it), is incredible. I also irc transcribed that one, so I highly recommend checking those out also ;) ... http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fudcon-room-1/2009-12-05/fudcon-room-1.2009-12-05-19.06.log.html

Third sessions round I went to the "Designing the future of Free Software Operating System User Experiences - GNOME Shell (Gnome3 UI)" session which honestly got me excited about Gnome again. I actually got so excited that I yesterday got in touch with one of the gnome-shell package maintainers and got myself approved as a co-maintainer and my idea is that since Gnome Shell is currently in Fedora 12 as a tech preview, and since we as Fedora are generally the first for everything I figured "why not push git snapshots of the latest features of the gnome-shell UI out to those who are interested in next generation user interfaces?" Yeah, I thought so too. Gnome3 will be a great advancement in user interaction with a computer, it is the first time (that I can think of) that anyone has ever completely attempted to redesing how a user interacts with their machine. There is no longer just the age old "let me click this button that sits in a panel that gives me a menu listing what applications I have access to". It is a completely new take on the world of desktop computing and its definitely a project to keep your eye on. I irc transcribed this one also ... check it: http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fudcon-room-1/2009-12-05/fudcon-room-1.2009-12-05-20.10.log.html

Fourth round is up and I found my way over to Mo's "Designing UI mockups in Inkscape" which was extremely useful in so many ways. I actually used what I learned in her session later that night to throw together some mockups of an idea myself and herlo (irc nick on Freenode) were throwing around of Paul W. Frields pet project called PulseCaster (https://fedorahosted.org/pulsecaster/). So, not only was the session quite good and I almost immediately found a use case for the knowledge and techniques that I learned from the presentation but I also found a bug in Inkscape which I had others verify and we confirmed an already existing bug in bugzilla. I <3 FUDCon.

Last session of the day I walked into a session called "Moksha and Fedora Community -- Real-time web apps with Python and AMQP" which blew my mind. This is Web3.0 (not by definition, but that's what I'm calling it), Luke Macken and J5 completely just stepped over web2.0 and said "pffft, childs play" (well not really but in my mind I assume it went something like that). This session showed off technology that allows real time message passing in a web browser as well as "native" support for standard protocols. The project page is https://fedorahosted.org/moksha/ and I think everyone on the planet should take some time to go there and enjoy the demo, prepare to have your mind blown. Oh, and I also irc transcribed that one as well http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fudcon-room-3/2009-12-05/fudcon-room-3.2009-12-05-22.07.log.html ... presentation slides found: http://lmacken.fedorapeople.org/moksha-FUDConToronto-2009.odp

Ok, so sessions are done but we are in now way, shape, or form done. It is time for the "State of Fedora" speach by the Fedora Project Leader, Paul W. Frields. This is where our fearless leader takes the time to look back and look forward, take note and discuss what we've learned and what we can learn. It was a heart felt speach adressing a lot of things that are so great about our community and what makes Fedora so great. Paul also announced the codename of Fedora 13, which is Goddard (I probably mispelled that, sorry). This was a solid way to wrap up an amazing day.

Alright, that was Saturday. Stay tuned, I will report on Sunday (which was also awsome). I will probably report a little on today as well, but today seems to be at least somewhat consumed by attempting to get my blog updated to reflect the awesomeness that is FUDCon.

Community and the Loyalty that follows.

2009-11-09T10:43:00.002-06:00

I would like to start with a statement: I eat, sleep, and breath Fedora.

In my time within the Fedora community I've grown to love everything that the project is and stands for. Its offered me opportunities to learn new things and give back to the community as I am able to. I've also grown a large amount of loyalty to the project. There's another aspect of the Fedora world that is disjoint but still very closely related: RedHat.

I am a RedHat Enterprise Linux administrator by day, this is how I pay the bills. Though there is another part of that which I have grown into, the community. The RHEL and Fedora communities definitely merge at some point and its amazing to see. We see projects like EPEL[0] that attempt to broaden RHEL's horizons and past projects like Fedora Legacy[1] that attempted to bring the Fedora world a longer life span much like RHEL's. Disjoint but very much related.

Back to loyalty, I recently made a post[2] about RHEV being a failure becuase it required Windows in order to run the RHEV-M portion of the product and I was promptly chastised for it as you would expect any loyal community to do. I was spoken to by both RedHat community members as well as Fedora community members, including but not exclusive to some of those that bridge the gap, and at first I was defensive.

I had to step back and ask myself though, why be defensive? Have I not faught this fight before? Have I not defended the decisions of those within my community have made, just as these members are doing?

Then it dawned on me, I'm not being flamed or shunned. This is my community, these are my people and as I am theirs and they are simply trying to show me that I'm making a mockery of nothing.

I was upset because RedHat had released a product that required a Windows box in order to use the full feature set, but this is a temporary issue and there was no revert in functionality and nothing was being taken away from me. This was simply another example of the tried and true methods of RedHat purchasing an emerging company and opening their once closed software such that the world of F/OSS may benefit.

As our favorite Hello Kitty touting community member put it: "if Red Hat had never released the product you would not have access to the feature AT ALL. now you can access it with windows, and a little later with linux." She is absolutely correct.

Did I over react? Yeah, probably. Should I have? No, probably not.

This is where I find myself, as a loyal community member to both Fedora and RedHat. Even though I stand within these divides I somehow overlooked the processes I know and understand that must be taken. In my dayjob I know these enterprise decisions well, our vendors paint us the picture of the race to market constantly. So why do I get angry when RedHat does something that every other company does? I sometimes forget RedHat is a company and companies need to make money for themselves, for their shareholders, and just in general to move forward. I forget sometimes RedHat is a company because of their embrace into this community, their shared loyalty with their community, and their epic (yeah, that's right... I said epic) list of contributions to this community.

For sake of my loyalty, I apologize for my oversight towards the process.

In Fedora we trust.

-Adam

[0] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL
[1] http://www.fedoralegacy.org/
[2] http://pseudogen.blogspot.com/2009/09/rhve-redhat-failure-not-soon-to-be.html

Get to know a Fedora Ambassador or User

2009-11-09T09:04:00.003-06:00

Name: Adam Miller
IRC Nickname: maxamillion
IRC Channels: #yum #linode #centos-devel
#fedora-noc #fedora-mini #fedora-bugzappers
#fedora-qa #fedora-spins #fedora-kde
#fedora-campusamb #fedora-ambassadors
#fedora-admin #fedora-devel #fedora-python
#epel #rhn #rhel #centos #fedora #xfce
#Cyanogenmod #moksha
Location: Huntsville, TX USA (Sam Houston State University)

RHEV - The RedHat failure not soon to be forgotten

2009-09-04T11:04:00.003-05:00

Lets take a moment to look at Open Source Virtualization, there's Xen, OpenVZ, UML, KVM, and VirtualBox. Now for the datacenter you're really only looking at Xen or KVM (though OpenVZ seems to have a little bit of a following in the datacenter, its not an "Enterprise" offering from the big companies). Xen is on its way out, lets be honest, it has moved further away from the upstream
kernel as time goes on and Citrix is Microsoft friendly so people will embrace the FUD. What's left? Oh, KVM.

KVM is a really cool concept, I'm a big fan of turning the linux kernel into a hypervisor. That's just a really cool idea and has apparently proven itself to be quite useful and in some reports it is claimed to be faster than Xen so all the better. RedHat buys Qumranet, good move, now what? Lets write an Open Source Virtualization Suite that rivals the likes of VMWare ESX/ESXi + vSphere such that everyone in the world can enjoy the benefits of virtualization without being bound to closed source software from companies like VMWare. Again, good move. So what next? Lets force our Open Source faithful as well as all our customers to run a Windows box in order to use this pleasant administrative interface that front ends our completely Open Source Virtualization Environment. Wait ... what? You're kidding right? Nope.

So the office where I work has a site license for RHEL, lets just say that we weren't a mixed OS environment which would be completely feasible seeing that we have a site license. So you're trying to tell me that my CIO cut a FAT check to your company for a site license of an Operating System (as well as a nice repository full of software) and now I have to go elsewhere for another Operating System (that is closed source no less) in order to run your next generation Virtualization Suite? Kiss my ass.

If I were to roll out Open Source Virtualization tomorrow on RHEL, it would be RHEL 5.4 KVM + Convirture[0] not RHEV because I don't have a Windows box in sight.

I've heard rumors floating around that the plan was "get to market fast, port to Java later for cross platform". That's awesome, but in the mean time you're pissing people off and last time I checked its not good to make those who pay your bills angry. I'm not giving up on RedHat, I still really respect them as a company in many many ways (many thanks for all the sponsoring of Fedora!) but I feel like they really dropped the ball on this one, come on guys:

"We will be the leader in Open Source Virtualization" -
Brian Stevens (CTO & VP, Engineering)

Yes, you will but you need to work on moving the management end to an Open Source platform so your statement doesn't seem loaded.

Thanks.

rant.end()

-Adam

[0](http://www.convirture.com/index.php)

Firefox: The progression of popularity and the stigma of the Geek.

2009-07-03T16:03:00.002-05:00

Lets take a moment and look back about 5 years at the state of the GNU/Linux desktop from an emerging web based world. There was really only two web browsers worth mentioning, Mozilla and Netscape (which in hindsight were essentially the same thing). The problem? They were heavy set in terms of the resources they required, so what happened? Mozilla released Phoenix, and it was amazingly fast and nobody could believe how quickly it would fire up and run on their old Pentium II machines that they slapped Linux on in an attempt to breath some life back into them.

At the time only those "in the know" were running the browser but it was quickly gaining steam just in time for a name change to Firebird due to angry people with trademark hooks on the name and for a decent amount of users this caused enough confusion for there to be a riff in its general usage but as time progressed and users were aware of the name change things were back to normal. Forums were booming with the merits of the browser as the popularity gained, it was insane how fast your browser could be. It truly raised the bar for expectations of what users compared all other browsers to. Now that we've gotten some happy users, lets go ahead and change the name again. This time the Firebird database people are upset so Mozilla politely obliged and changed the name again. Thus, Firefox is born and the web browser revolution is under way. Firefox hits the ground running with features no one can compete with, it is wildly extendible, is "secure" (I always use that word with a grain of salt), open source, and its fast. This is truly innovation that will go down in the history of computing.

Lets fast forward to today and walk into a room of GNU/Linux aficionados and ask "What's your opinion of Firefox?" and as we make this inquiry let us remember that this was the same demographic that half a decade ago was singing the praises of the now main stream browser. The responses you will receive are probably going to be something along the lines of "I don't use FirefoxOS", " pwns Firefox in the face", or "Bloatware is annoying". What happened? Geeks are fickle creatures, that's what happened. We love the latest and greatest tech that nobody else is using because its new and shiny, its fast, it shows promise, and because nobody else is using it we are somehow elite for doing so. What about when that new shiny tech reaches maturity and succeeds in a big way? Firefox happens.

Here's the reality of the situation, yes webkit is cool as hell from a geek standpoint because its new and its shiny but Firefox is tried and true, it supports all the latest and greatest web tech, is popular as hell, its well supported, stable, "secure" (remember that grain of salt), cross platform, fast, extendible as ever, open source, and it just flat out works. I'm not saying you should turn your nose up at webkit in any way, shape, or form because it truly is the new shiny tech that shows a lot of promise. But I'm tired of people bitching and moaning about Firefox's "issues" when all the arguments I have heard thus far are simply cases of a Geek stigma haunting what is now too mainstream to be "cool" or "l33t" enough for those of us who pride ourselves on our technological prowess.

Lets try to be Geeks and be happy for that which emerges from our depths as a great mainstream success in the user share market.

Campus Ambassador Presentation: Introduction to Fedora

2009-04-02T00:36:00.003-05:00

I recently gave a presentation over Fedora Infrastructure to the Sam Houston Association for Computer Scientists (Sam Houston State University student organization for the CS department) and I had quite a bit of fun with it (though some of the audience seemed a little overwhelmed as they are college students and this is a bit enterprise level for them, but I think it was very important to introduce such a system to them). I appreciate the Fedora Infrastructure in a big way because being a systems administrator is how I pay the bills and I have an incredible appreciation for what the Fedora Infrastructure team does on a daily basis to keep Fedora as a whole working smoothly.

I started out in a large class room with a big white board and a projector hooked up to my Fedora 10 (Xfce Spin) powered laptop. With dry erase marker in hand I began to boggle the student body's minds. Here is a brief overview of what I covered. (It's not entirely brief, but I covered a LOT of material in the hour I spoke so I tried to sum up where I was able in my Ambassador Report)

Key points:
- What is infrastructure? -> Infrastructure in terms of fedora is a series of integrated tools that drive fedora forward and creating an extremely powerful development environment.
- Why does infrastructure matter? -> Infrastructure matters because without it the development cycle would largely be chaotic, with it we can bring procedure and structure.
- Fedora Infrastructure Team has a motto that is posted in the topic line of their irc channel, it is "We run the servers that run Fedora" and this is largely true because without the infrastructure, not much happens. The infrastructure team, just as the development team, is made up of volunteers who are willing to contribute their time towards the greater good of the project as a whole.
- Core Components of Infrastructure -> FedoraHosted, Koji, Bodhi, BugZilla (I felt this deserved inclusion even though its not managed by Fedora Infrastructure team), Fedora Account System, Package Database, Mirror Manager, Smolt, Planet, Fedora People. (I completely forgot fedora-cvs in my slides but there was a white board on the wall that I was drawing how the entire Infrastructure fit together and was able to add it on the fly.)
- What does it mean to me? -> As a developer, contributor, or even just as a user these are the components that are relied upon to keep everything functioning. We need a build system for new packages, we need an update system, we need a bug tracker, we need a place for new packages to be submitted, we need web space for miscellaneous Fedora work including but not limited to the new package review request procedures. This makes it all possible.
- Fedora Hosted -> What would be considered "upstream", this part of the Infrastructure allows developers to host their project with a ticket tracking system, a version control system, and a wiki. Each piece is extremely useful for a collaborative development environment and offers the developers choice in cvs, bzr, svn, git, or hg.
- Fedora CVS -> I know I don't have a slide on this, many apologies to all, I really can't believe I did it, but I did cover it. This is the place where packagers upload packages for inclusion into Fedora, package patches are stored here, and builds are spawned from here.
- Koji -> If you're a packager then this is an element you will get quite cozy with, it provides a build system to submit packages to. Koji offers a web front end that will allow for yourself and others to monitor the status of your build, the logs, obtain the resulting package or source package, also allows for what are called "chain builds" (I went into a quick overview of this on the board), and offers a grounds for the package to be built on multiple architectures in one wonderfully automated swoop.
- Bodhi -> Provides for an update management interface, integrates with bugzilla, will push based on karma, allows for tagging of update type and can recommend reboot for users who use PackageKit. Also provides statistics on updates. This is the system that pushes out to the mirrors.
- Bugzilla -> Place to file a bug against any component of Fedora, it allows for keeping all related parties up to date on current happenings of a bug.
- Fedora Account System -> Where so much magic happens its amazing, this is truly where the integration of the entire system comes to light. When you create a Fedora Account you are able to be granted privileges to any other component of the Infrastructure. The Account system will keep track of user information, group memberships, permissions, security keys, among other useful information.
- Package Database -> This is not only a user searchable database for those on the web, it is also a web based management interface for access to different packages. It ties in information with fedora-cvs, bodhi, koji, and bugzilla as they pertain to the package. This is a wealth of information that I've never experienced in other development environments.
- Mirror Manager -> Package updates are pushed through here, mirrors are literally managed (name kinda implied that one) and it provides a quite impressive management interface to those who want to run a mirror of their own either public or private and fine grained choice of what "branches" of the repositories to host.
- Smolt -> Statistical accumulation of hardware information. I personally think this is quite unique in the sense that anyone can go and check what hardware is popular and from what vendor which I can only imagine to be valuable information to those who develop kernel and system level components of the GNU/Linux platform and most notably for Fedora.
- Planet Fedora -> Aggregate blog posting, great place to get news on what is currently happening in the Fedora world (or planet if you prefer).
- Fedora People -> This is where contributors can post whatever they need in a web accessible location for current work, no matter if it is documentation, art, a package, or other piece of the grand Fedora puzzle. This is the place for it.
- How is it all developed? In an open source environment, by the community, in a collaborative and innovative manner... just as it should be.
- Technologies used to develop the Infrastructure -> Python, TurboGears, Kid, Genshi, SQLAlchemy and Cheetah.

Slides available here.

First ever Fedora Ambassador Tech Talk

2009-02-24T00:42:00.002-06:00

Gave my first tech talk as a Fedora Ambassador, I presented to the student organization at the University I attend known as "Sam Houston Association for Computer Scientist" (SHACS for short). I wanted to introduce my fellow classmates to the wonders of open source, Linux, and most notably: Fedora. I was lucky enough to have received an Ambassador Kit from my sponsor so that I was able to hand out free media, buttons, stickers, and a couple t-shirts to those in the audience who were already on the Fedora band wagon and were just interested to hear what I had to say. This was a big hit, I thank inode0 for my kit.

Key Points that were covered:

* What is open source?
- Open source is software such that you can download, modify, and redistribute its source code as per the license it has been released under.
- Open source != freeware, open source is not inherently "free as in beer" that is just a common side effect. (Case and point: Red Hat Enterprise Linux)

* What is Linux?
- Linux is a kernel that is coupled with the GNU userspace along with thousands of open source projects to provide a full featured operating system, and in the end is commonly referred to as "Linux" for short hand.
- Linux is currently the largest open source project of its kind and supports more hardware than any operating system in the history of computing (Thanks to Greg K-H for that zinger of a quote)
- Linus Torvalds wrote and released the first version of Linux as a sophomore in college (this is the time to develop and innovate in an open environment, we are the future)

* What is Fedora?
- Fedora is many things, it is a distribution of Linux, it is a community, it is an infrastructure, it is an outlet for ideas to come to life in ways that did not used to be possible.
- Fedora is a place to jump in and get involved in all stretches the Linux and open source world, it is a place to bring your interests, your talents, and your concepts in order to contribute to the greater good.

* Why should you care?
- Fedora means a lot to me because its a project that makes a point to work with upstream open source projects in an attempt to better the open source world as a whole. Its development process reflects this and if/when you get involved you will see this too.
- We are all computer scientists, we are all college students (or professors), and now is the time to get out there and do something with our knowledge, and do it in an open manner.
- Now is the time to truly innovate and do so out in the open (Notice I keep saying this? Hint, Hint).
- We owe it to ourselves, we owe it to our community of developers and users, and we deserve better than the proprietary wares that have been peddled onto us for so many years.

* Who uses Fedora?
- Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux. Runs Fedora
- IBM Roadrunner, fastest supercomputer on the planet. Runs Fedora
- NASA and the FBI. Run Fedora.

* How to get involved?
- The wiki covers all sorts of documentation on how to get involved. I am planning another talk on how to get involved covering everything from making a Fedora Account to getting a package accepted by Fedora all the way to pushing it out to the repositories through the wonderful infrastructure that is available.

* How to get/give help?
- Referenced the audience to the wiki page on communications, discussed the different roles each mailing list plays as well as irc channels.

Ended with a QA section.

Special thanks to Max Spevack for his slide show that I based mine off of and also for maintaining the statistics, I covered them in my slides and it was nice to have real world numbers to show. The map was also a big hit, graphical goodness is always fun.

EDIT: Forgot to upload the presentation slides, now available here.

To Twitter or not to Twitter...

2009-01-15T13:44:00.002-06:00

So... I haven't posted in ages and its mostly a time constraint, I'm busy all the time but I hope to post here more often in the near future as a do more concurrent programming research for my professor. I have however started to twitter. I always said that I wouldn't, but I did and I promised myself it would only be for things that don't suck (mainly technical posts). The only reason I did get a twitter account is because I have a T-Mobile G1 with the almighty Android OS and there's a twitter client in the Market. So I can quickly post from where ever, when ever, while I'm doing what ever. Which makes it nice. Hope to post half decent cognitive thoughts in the near future, laters.

Quote to go with current events...

2008-01-28T14:13:00.000-06:00

I haven't posted in a while, and this technically isn't really a post but a quote that I had to slap up somewhere because I feel it is all too fitting for what is happening in the world around me.

"Naturally the common people don't want war... but after all it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country."
-- Hermann Goering, Nazi and war criminal, 1883-1946

A Simple Lexical Analyzer .... Enjoy.

2007-09-06T11:31:00.001-05:00

I got bored and wrote a simple lexical analyzer and thought about walking through explaining it but in all honesty its rather self explanatory especially with the inclusion of the diagrams I made and the BNF grammar I am supplying to go with the code snippet.

The grammar simply parses words or phrases in a file with white space as a delimiter and requiring that all words or phrases start with a letter and are followed by any combination of letters and digits.

BNF:

G[<Word>]

<Word> ::= <Letter> | <Letter> <LetterDigit>
<LetterDigit> ::= <Letter> | <Digit> | <LetterDigit> <Letter> | <LetterDigit> <Digit>
<Letter> ::= a | b | c | d | e | f | g | h | i | j | k | l | m | n | o | p | q | r | s | t | u | v | w | x | y | z
<Digit> ::= 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9

A graphical representation of the grammar:

And the finite state automaton:

Finally, the code ... in python of course :)

Note: If you copy and paste this code it will not work because for one reason or another I can't get blogger to format the tabs correctly, please download the code from the link provided at the bottom.

UPDATE: Now featuring code indentation goodness.

###############################


#!/usr/bin/python
import sys

class SimpleLex:
    """@Author: Adam Miller - Simple lexical anyzer"""
 
    #allowed alphabetic characters in grammar
    alpha = 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'
 
    #allowed digits in grammar
    digit = '0123456789'
 
    #white space symbolic representation
    wSpace = ' \n \t'
 
    #grammar table of relations
    table = [
            [1,3,0],
            [1,1,2],
            [2,2,2],
            [3,3,3],
            ]
   
    #relations of type and their state index
    relations = {
        "alpha":0, 
 "digit":1,
 "wSpace":2
 }


    def __init__(self, file_name):
        """open a file, extract contents, close file,
        initialize character list, and state variable"""
        self.f = open(file_name, 'r')
        self.lines = self.f.readlines()
        self.f.close()
 self.chars = []
 self.state = 0
  
    def scan(self):
 """process the file's contents one character at a time"""
 for line in self.lines:
     for c in line:
                # 3 is the error state
  if self.state == 3:
      print "Error"
      self.state = 0
      self.chars = []  
  # 2 is the success state  
  elif self.state == 2:
      print ''.join(self.chars)
      self.state = 0
      self.chars = []
     
  #let table drive state transitions 
  self.state = self.table[self.state][self.lex(c)]
  
        """print final character buffer because the loop will end
 execution and not let the last success state be checked"""
 print ''.join(self.chars)
    
    def lex(self, c):
 """return the correct relational index to the type of c"""
 self.chars.append(c)
 if c in self.alpha:
            return self.relations["alpha"]
 elif c in self.digit:
     return self.relations["digit"]
 elif c in self.wSpace:
     return self.relations["wSpace"]
 else:
     return 0

#use the code i just wrote
if len(sys.argv) < 2 or len(sys.argv) > 2:
    sys.stderr.write("Usage: sampleLex  \n")
elif len(sys.argv) == 2:
    lexer = SimpleLex(sys.argv[1])
    lexer.scan()

###############################

For your viewing pleasure, a small example of the "little lexer" in action:

###############################
adam@pseudogen:~$ ./simpleLex.py lexFile.txt
hello
world
from
my
ub3r
l33t
lexical
analyzer

###############################

The code, the diagrams and the file used in this example are all available here.

Computer Science: Through the eye of those on the other side of the looking glass

2007-09-05T17:20:00.000-05:00

So I sit there in front of my faithful computer hacking away at what I am pretending to be homework so that I think I am actually being scholastically productive. As I sit, I receive and instant message from a good friend of mine who is a Computer Science Major at Rice university and he has a question about some Mac software's auto backup capabilities, and I answer to the best of my knowledge and the conversation comes to a halt. I simply assume he is troubleshooting something for someone and more likely than not it is for his girlfriend for she is the proud owner of an Intel MacBook, but never the less I go back to my procrastination like a good student.

A few more minutes pass by (could have been over an hour for all I know, procrastination isn't really the best time keeping activity) and I get an instant message from my friend's girlfriend stating that she has been given the task of writing an essay about "What Computer Science is" for her introductory computer science course at Rice (we will assume for all practical purposes that this course is for non-comp sci majors). And she exclaimed to me about the daunting tale that was writing said essay along with the irony that went with the fact that the word processing software she was using had crashed and she lost everything, but being the good student she is she trudged on and rewrote it from scratch. Though, this time, with a different attitude and a delightful spin on it all. Her essay was far too priceless not to publish somewhere and I got to it first! So, without further a due I present to you "What is Computer Science?" by Rachel Gittleman:

" Earlier this evening I wrote a short essay on the deﬁnition of computer science, a discipline I am familiar with only through the inﬂuence of a computer scientist I have been dating for nearly three years. I did not let him read it because I was embarrassed by how little I actually knew about the subject, and as I was in the process of saving and ﬁnally being done with the humiliating exercise, my word processor crashed and took my hard-won essay along with it. Even with the help of said computer scientist boy-friend, the essay proved to be irrecoverable.

So what is computer science? A couple of hours ago my answer was as optimistic and technical as possible for someone who really has no idea what she is talking about. I stressed the dichotomy of the discipline as both a study of computation and computational machines--theory and practical programming, math and engineering. I mentioned the relative newness of the discipline compared to others in academia (I even dropped famous names), and conjectured that views on computer science must be very different now than a mere decades ago, but that at its essence, the ﬁeld is about what programmable machines can do and how to make them do it. Having my word processor crash was disheartening and, after fruitlessly trying to recover the document, I was convinced to rewrite the essay in its current form.

Computer science is new, rapidly evolving, and incredibly broad. It has the power to drastically improve the quality of our lives over incredibly short spans of time, and in the past few decades it has provided us with earth-shatteringly new tools that quickly have become integral parts of the daily routines of even the most computer- illiterate (myself sadly counted among them). Although these qualities make computer science fascinatingly current and applicable in a way that the older sciences and humanities are not, there are also inherent downsides, particularly when it comes to accountability. The constant demand for new programs and applications and the inability of most of the public (again, including myself) to understand what goes into making them naturally results in buggy programs that can crash without notice, taking hard-working students’ single-spaced essays on computer science with them. I think the public would do much more than sigh and send an error report if a mechanical engineer built something so easily broken.

I still think computer science is the study of computation and computational machines, and I still think that it is an exciting new discipline that I want to know more about (that is why I am taking an introductory course after all), but I also want to make sure to express my hope that one day all that theory and engineering and programming will eventually be accountable for making me a word processor that will not crash."

Why Kernels don't matter:

2007-08-15T12:00:00.000-05:00

In the vast world of UNIX-like environments we are confronted with users who will make a statement such as "I run Linux" and honestly think that is the all encompassing term for the environment they know and love but this ultimately bothers me for the simple fact that kernels no longer matter and what these users need to understand is the its GNU that needs to receive the credit. Now please, before you spam my inbox with "Power to Tux" emails just hear me out.

Lets take into account the only thing that 95% of users are only concerned with three aspects of a kernel:
1) does it support my hardware?
2) is it secure?
3) is it stable?
And by no means in that order but lets just address them in the order listed.

Does it support my hardware? Well that all depends on which kernel you are looking at but in reality of the current state of mainstream kernel development, it is more likely than not that all of your hardware is fully supported with exception only to wireless chipsets simply because the whimsical world of open source wifi is a cruel and unusual whore. Also, a notable point about hardware is simply that if you just purchased the latest and greatest hardware it is more likely than not that the current development version of the kernel of your choice supports it even if the latest stable release does not and yes this isn't wonderful news, but good things come to those who wait. One last thing to mention about hardware support is that in the event that one open source kernel supports hardware, all the rest (mainstream) do as well.

Is it secure? In short, Yes. Every mainstream and widely accepted system kernel today has a level of security that is acceptable enough to at least a large group of followers. Does this mean "Install, run, secure"? No, of course not. A kernel can only be so secure by default and still be deemed usable. This will raise the question, "but how do I make it secure?" and the answer is ancient and often used to torment new users but simply: "Read the Manual" and this is not meant to be clever, snide, or coy but is sincere in the fact that contributors spend hours documenting software so please do not allow their efforts to go in vain.

Is it stable? That is honestly a question that I can not answer for you because the definition of the word 'stable' in the software universe appears to be translated very loosely. Is it "Microsoft stable?" Yes, and then some. I will be willing to bet that any *n?x style kernel you use will be more stable than anything The Blue Empire will wrap up and try to sell you. Is it "debian GNU stable?" That is more likely not to be the case, but at the same time many people find the debian definition of "stable" to be far too strict (I find it to be perfect, but its all a matter of opinion).

Now that all three main concerns have been addressed where to go from here? Well, how about clearing up how kernel's don't matter? OK.

When you boot into your "Linux" installation you are actually booting into "GNU/Linux" which is in fact just a port of the GNU userspace to the Linux kernel. "Is there any other port?" Yes, many. The GNU/OpenSolaris port, the debian GNU/kfreebsd port, the debian GNU/Hurd port, and the debian GNU/NetBSD port are all prime examples. These are quite possibly not all the examples, but my knowledge of the debian GNU world is more intimate than my knowledge of other GNU communities/project. If the average user was to sit down to any of these kernel ports of the GNU userspace they would more likely than not know the difference simply because "the kernel does not matter."

Now, allow me to retort against myself and attempt to offer food for thought. Kernels do matter, it matters very much so if your kernel is capable of many things including POSIX compliance for semaphore capabilities, pthreads, and other important features that are necessary for porting applications. Your kernel also matters in the sense of resource management, if it has a sufficiently fast network stack (and more importantly is that something you are worried about), if it has an efficient process scheduler, if it can multitask without excessive overhead, if it can allocate memory in a timely manner and continue to manage memory efficiently, etc... There are many aspects of a kernel that must be taken into account in selecting one that is "for you", but again .... these things do not matter to the average user and thus "Kernel's don't matter."

This has been yet another random babbling brought to you in part by a very bored 'Me' ... hope you enjoyed.

debian etch stable release

2007-04-11T10:34:00.000-05:00

debian GNU/Linux has officially released their version 4.0r0 code named "etch" ... I am a few days late on posting, but basically the results of my installing it are this:

debian came, debian dominated, enough said.

..... my home desktop will once again be running debian for the foreseeable future.

Windows 2000 "mock source code"

2007-04-09T17:37:00.000-05:00

/* Source Code Windows 2000 */

#include "win31.h"
#include "win95.h"
#include "win98.h"
#include "workst~1.h"
#include "evenmore.h"
#include "oldstuff.h"
#include "billrulz.h"
#include "monopoly.h"
#include "backdoor.h"
#define INSTALL = HARD

char make_prog_look_big(16000000);
void main()
{
while(!CRASHED)
{
display_copyright_message();
display_bill_rules_message();
do_nothing_loop();

if (first_time_installation)
{
make_100_megabyte_swapfile();
do_nothing_loop();
totally_screw_up_HPFS_file_system();
search_and_destroy_the_rest_of-OS2();
make_futile_attempt_to_damage_Linux();
disable_Netscape();
disable_RealPlayer();
disable_Lotus_Products();
hang_system();
} //if
write_something(anything);
display_copyright_message();
do_nothing_loop();
do_some_stuff();

if (still_not_crashed)
{
display_copyright_message();
do_nothing_loop();
basically_run_windows_31();
do_nothing_loop();
} // if
} //while

if (detect_cache())
disable_cache();

if (fast_cpu())
{
set_wait_states(lots);
set_mouse(speed,very_slow);
set_mouse(action,jumpy);
set_mouse(reaction,sometimes);
} //if

/* printf("Welcome to Windows 3.1"); */
/* printf("Welcome to Windows 3.11"); */
/* printf("Welcome to Windows 95"); */
/* printf("Welcome to Windows NT 3.0"); */
/* printf("Welcome to Windows 98"); */
/* printf("Welcome to Windows NT 4.0"); */
printf("Welcome to Windows 2000");

if (system_ok())
crash(to_dos_prompt)
else
system_memory = open("a:\swp0001.swp",O_CREATE);

while(something)
{
sleep(5);
get_user_input();
sleep(5);
act_on_user_input();
sleep(5);
} // while
create_general_protection_fault();

} // main

/* I saw this posted on the ubuntuforums and thought it was too funny not to post here as well.... enjoy :) */

The case of the missing switch statement

2007-03-15T22:16:00.000-05:00

For all my C/C++ and Java programmers out there who have some to know and love the reserved word switch would find it rather interesting to venture in the direction of a language that lacks such a statement, just as I had. I have recently divulged into the realm of what I will call "open source at its finest" by learning the Python programming language. Python is a very verbose, flexible, powerful, and object oriented interpreted programming language (details, if you want/need them, here) that I have grown to love over the past month in my adventures of learning its ways, but I recently stumbled across something that I originally thought to be an oddity: the lack of a "switch" or a "case" statement. I later discussed it with a friend of mine who simply said,"why do you need a switch statement?" and I really couldn't find a solid answer. He later went on to explain how a switch statement is simply a way to make a complex/nested if statement faster because when it compiles there is just a static jmp (for those of us sadly stuck on a x86 machine) statement in the assembly to where it needs to be instead of multiple compare operations. Thus, since python is interpreted, it would never reap the benefits of this optimization.

Though, if you are simply stuck on switch statements you can take the following Java code:

int x;
//read in a value in some form or fashion and assign it to x
switch (x) {
case 1: this.someFunction(); break;
case 2: this.someOtherFunction(); break;
}

To the following python code (Note: the python code is utilizing the power of the "dictionary" data type that is part of the language)

self.x = #read in a value in some form or fashion to assign to x
mySwitch = {
1: self.someFunction,
2: self.someOtherFunction
}
callFunct = mySwitch.get(x)
callFunct();

#Neither of these code examples have been compiled or run respectively, just coded off the top of my head ... so if there is a slight syntax error, sorry :)

So... it can "be done" but what advantage does that code have over this python code?:

if x == 1
self.someFunction()
elif x==2
self.someOtherFunction()

Well, that honestly depends on who you ask and in what respect you are asking it but for all practical purposes there really isn't an advantage or disadvantage either way its just mainly stylistic preference.

Why did I write this?
Well, I am bored ... it is spring break and this was one of the best ways I could think of to kill time and procrastinate from actually writing the lexical analyzer and parser for my compiler theory class. And yes, I am writing a compiler in python ... why? because I think it will be funny.

/me

The linux merit badge

2007-03-09T11:59:00.000-06:00

When I started on linux, it was the black magic of the computing world. Novell hadn't bought SuSE, HP wasn't writing drivers, Dell hadn't honored its existence, and pretty much the only company actually doing anything with it was RedHat. Back in the days where Gnome 1.x and KDE 1.x reigned supreme, blackdown was the only way to get Java functional without heavy hacking, the 2.6 kernel had just recently gone stable and so many users were scared to upgrade, x86_64 wasn't even a publicly released concept on the hardware end of the spectrum much less the software world, PowerPC was still going strong over at the Apple Camp, WindowsXP was much anticipated by the Microsoft huggers, and when you said "I run linux" people automatically assumed you knew what you were talking about, and at the time there was a 95% chance that you really did.

Fast forward to today: Vista is released, Novell owns SuSE, RedHat offers Certifications, Canonical rushed in and took over the linux desktop market with throwing millions of USD at their Ubuntu distribution, HP writes native linux drivers for their printers and random peripherals, Dell is now offering linux on PCs, specialty companies are all over the place offering linux centric services and hardware, and any noob with a computer that is set to boot from cd-rom can run and, in most cases, install linux on their computer. Is this a good thing? Well, yes and no.

Yes:
More users means more support, which is a very good thing.

No:
I am annoyed with people who won't read documentation to learn things on their own, this up and coming generation of linux users wants to be spoon fed everything. When I started I was taught how to use man pages and learned that google was my best friend.

I recently started as a TA for one of my professors teaching an Abstract Data Types and programming algorithms class in Java at my University and there are two, only two, linux users in the class of roughly 25. That doesn't bother me so much, linux isn't for everyone and it still has an "under dog" aura about it, but when I started speaking to these linux using students (who run Ubuntu) I quickly realized they know nothing about linux. They don't realize that Gnome != "a version of linux", they were lost as soon as I opened a terminal window, and weren't familiar with even the trivial task of checking their screen resolution. I asked a few questions regarding the Operating System and simply got the reply,"I dunno, when I installed it just worked" and I thought to myself "That is horrible" but as the day went on I truly thought it through and realized that this is a mile stone for desktop linux. Yes, they are under informed but ask your grandmother what the difference between explorer.exe and iexplorer.exe on a Windows machine and you will receive a blank stare. What has happened is that the linux merit batch, as I like to call it, no longer certifies your knowledge of linux but simply your endorsement of the open source movement by being open minded enough to use something different and see what the "under dog" has to offer. Your level of involvement and further reputation you have earned along the way will prove your skill level.

Conclusion:
The linux merit badge has lost a little power behind its punch but at the cost of betterment for the movement as a whole. The GNU/Linux world stands to gain a lot from the fact that your "average Joe" can use it as a desktop system without flaws. Will linux ever take over the desktop market? I don't know, nobody can really know, but I think we are at least stepping in the right direction of strengthening our user base in numbers and as time goes on and curiosity is sparked I think the next generation of linux users will educate themselves out of desire, not necessity. So basically, the "Yes" outweighs the "No" and I think the "No" will work itself out with time.

/me

Ubuntu: crash, burn, or burst into flames....

2007-02-10T00:31:00.000-06:00

Its been a while since I have posted, and to anyone who reads this I am sorry. The semester is full swing and I am taking a compiler theory class that appears to be rather time consuming, but enough about me....

As everyone knows, Ubuntu has teamed up with Linspire as described here and Linspire's CNR will be ported to Ubuntu's upcoming Feisty Fawn release.

What is my take on this?
Well, we can look at it from multiple points of view. At first glance I don't like the idea basically because of my old debian habits and ideals but if I take a moment to truly think about exactly what this will do for new linux users and general desktop users who don't want to bother with the command line, or the annoying complexity of synaptic, I can't seem to find myself to completely turn my back on the integration. Also, in the event that Ubuntu is given any say so in the development cycle of CNR I could see them taking it to a productive place that it has never reached. Ubuntu obviously has some brilliant developers on their team, staff or volunteer alike, and I would like to see where they could take the whole CNR idea.

I know, short and sweet ... but I had a sour taste in my mouth about it in the beginning but after some mental exercise about the topic I think it will turn out to be a positive addition to the Ubuntu world so there isn't a whole lot more to say.

/me

Fun quote

2007-01-10T18:38:00.000-06:00

Windows XP - The 64-bit wannabe with a 32-bit graphics interface for 16-bit extensions to a 8-bit patch on a 4-bit operating system designed to run on a 2-bit processor by a company that can't stand 1-bit of competition

Interesting link...

2006-12-31T20:28:00.000-06:00

I doubt anyone reads my blog, but just in case you do. This link is too cool to miss.

http://www.100mb.nl/

C Follies:

2006-11-19T02:11:00.000-06:00

So here I set the stage for what can only be called a "Geek Moment." I find myself sitting at work like a good student employee, but like every other Sys Tech on the planet with nothing to repair, I look to the Internet for entertainment and there I find the all mighty instant messenger. On this interesting communication tool, I converse with a very good friend of mine who will just be referred to as Derr in order to reserve some level of confidentiality. Derr and I, both computer science majors but at different Universities, often find ourselves talking about computer related topics and on this day we spoke about the C programming language and its follies. The main issue with C's follies is that they are not so much a problem with the programming language, its the fact that the average programmer lacks the understanding of what is actually happening behind the scenes and have been spoiled with languages like Java that will raise a compiler error when trying to do something that could later be viewed as "stupid" by the system.

Allow me to begin with a simple code segment:

#include

int main(int argc, char** argv){
printf("%d\n%d\n", 100==true, 1==true);
int x = 100;
if(x)
printf("true\n");
else
printf("false\n");
}

Here the standard bool type has been included and thus the macros for true and false are able to be used, as C defines it: false = 0 and true = anything not 0. And thus the statement "100==true" should evaluate to true (or as the system defaults, a 1) as well as the statement "1==true" then we go into the if statement where if(x) is translated "if x is true, then do ." Which should print out the string value "true" or so most would think from their first look at the code, but in fact that is not how C evaluates this expression.

So what happens when this code is compiled and ran? (compiled with "gcc testbool.c -o testbool")

max@iPseudogen:~/cTheory$ ./testbool
0
1
true

Why does this happen? I'm not entirely sure, but I assume its because the logical operator == does not logically compare in the same manor, or abide by the same rules, as an if statement comparison. I would also assume this could make for some interesting program run time characteristics if one was to use a bool returning function and expect C to follow its own rules about the bool type as stated above.

Next, something slightly more complicated and brings up the point of how a programmer who does not understand the inner workings of a system could fall into error by bad programming technique:

int *x;

void f(){
int y = 1;
x = &y;
}

void g(){
int y = 400;
}

void main(){
f();
printf("%d \n", *x);
g();
printf("%d \n", *x);
}

What happens when this is compiled and run? (" gcc stackframe.c -o stackframe.c")

max@iPseudogen:~/cTheory$ ./stackframe.c
1
400

Now, why would this give different output if the printf statements are verbatim?
When the function f() is called, the system puts its function call on the "call stack" and since the local int variable y is created within the function, its memory allocation is also performed in the stack space. Then x, an int pointer, is assigned the memory location of the local variable y the programmer has now saved the address to a position in the stack space. Why is this bad? Well, it is demonstrated in this example. When the next function call is made, the first function is now finished and popped off the stack, the memory space on the call stack is deallocated, in order to be used later by another function and the system does just that: it uses that space for the next function and (low and behold), it defines a local variable as well and places it in the memory location that the previous locally defined variable was held in. Thus, we have demonstrated the ability to alter a global variable by defining a local variable and assigning it a value. Why is this bad? Well, go write some large scale project and have this be one of the errors in it, debugging would be fun don't you think?

I must make a disclaimer that Derr was the one who came up with the code examples and all credit must be given to him, so uhmm... yeah, that was the disclaimer.

Are there more little interesting things like this? Of course, I'm sure there are C follies that Derr and I have never heard of, but these were the ones discussed on that day and found it interesting enough to blog about while I sit here on my couch with my Xubuntu powered iBookG4 bored out of my mind. Now are there tools out there to catch things like this in C code? Yeah, probably ... just thought this was good food for thought.

-Adam

Top down approach to programming

2006-08-29T20:44:00.000-05:00

Here we sit in a world of object oriented everything and procedural programmers are considered elitist or engineers, and here is my opinion on what is needed for an efficient programmer today:

Beginnings:
Everyone needs to start somewhere, but where? Well this is, has, and always will be a matter of opinion but from what I have read and experienced through interactions with a lot of other programmers I believe Java is the appropriate place to begin. Why? That's a good question and I believe it is because the basic syntax for assigning values to variables of primitive or "built in" data types is easily translated to other languages with very little effort along with translation of basic operations: if statements, switch statements, for loops, while loops, etc. Also if this language is taught properly the essence and power of object orientation will be in tact for the pupil to go on to learning polymorphism, inheritance, design patterns and/or good programming techniques.

Higher Education:
The second language I think someone should learn will be C++ because we are able to handle actual pointers, deeper concepts of reference vs. value passing, true system ram can be manipulated while still being able to create objects, perform simplified basic I/o and translation from imported libraries to included headers (also known as libraries) is not difficult when moving from Java.
Then on to the mother of languages known by elitist as the god send: C. I think C is essential for programmers to learn in order to understand what is actually happening behind a method call in Java like the popular whatever.toString(); Along with many other applications of how important and efficient pre-processor declarations can be, etc.
Finally, assembly language. Yes it makes you want to run and hide, it might even make you cry but it is required in my world. If you aren't at least taught the theory of gate logic and have a firm understanding of how much work is actually done in a stack with registers and memory addresses then you fail at life. Without the appreciation for what the compiler does for you so your programming language of choice is not so intolerable to code in that you rip your hair out more often then you already to, then your path in the computer science world has been lead astray and once again, you fail at life.

Real World Applications:
Now that the data structures have been thought, the pointers are understood, type casting is second nature, reference and values are no longer something that have to be thought about because you can differentiate the two as though it were child's play, recursion makes more sense than the English language, and you can tell me how your processor is actually representing floating point numbers.... You are now ready to practice what I like to call "real world programming languages" like Python, Perl, Php, Ruby, C#, VB.net, etc. Yes, we have graduated from the "Top Down Approach" and can now appreciate all the hard work our predecessors put into these robust languages. Why? Well because you understand what is actually happening when you pass python the parameter myString = "hello"; and can further appreciate the power in doing so. Now just because I have deemed these as "real world" doesn't mean that the others aren't used in the real world it just means I don't believe they should be used as teaching tools but more as industry level languages that should only be used where applicable.

Is it perfect?
No. Nothing is perfect and this is simply a blog and thus an opinion, my opinion on how I think computer science, in respect to programming languages, should be taught.

... that's today's two cents, take them for what they are worth.

Commercial Linux Software .... What it needs to succeed

2006-07-27T13:12:00.000-05:00

I've been reading a lot of technical articles at popular tech sites about software vendors writing a Linux version of their software. Great!!!

This means a few things:
1) Linux is being recognized by the industry as an entity that must be acknowledged because we are not going anywhere.
2) The suits are becoming aware of Linux in general and feel that there is a possibility of a market of profitability within the Linux world, which is something I think will contribute in a positive way. (Novell has proven that fact)
3) Users who were once upset because their favorite/most used application on other platforms is either on its way to the Linux world or is already available and this will drive the user base in a positive fashion.

What needs to be done in my opinion:
I think companies looking to create and distribute Linux software need atleast 5 developers on hand that run only Linux and each run a different distro. Each of these developers needs to be using one of the most commonly used distros in order to distribute packages that will play nice with the systems they target.

You need a developer running one of each: RHEL/CentOS/Fedora (I don't care which), SuSE, Debian, Ubuntu, and Slackware.

Why?
Because each of these operating systems account for approximately 90% of the Linux world through child/derived distros, etc. Each of these developers should be working together to write or port the software and then package it for the distro they are working on. That way when I go out and purchase this incredible piece of software for my home machine that runs Xubuntu or for my server that runs debian; I am able to run into work to my SuSE workstation and also have the convenience of the same software. Also, I am able to spread the word and nobody is left out (because even Gentoo users can install tar.gz if they must).

Is it full-proof?
Probably not, but I think that most of the community (if not all) that is willing to pay for quality software will agree that this is a wonderful idea and would make the acceptance of commercial software into the Linux world a much more fluent process.

... That's my piece, late.

Why I don't like MySpace....

2006-07-24T01:38:00.000-05:00

Here is the problem with MySpace: They are getting too popular on the web.

What happens to things that get too popular on the web and aren't stable enough to back it up?
They get bought out by Microsoft.

What will happen if MySpace gets bought out by Microsoft?
Microsoft will have an extremely popular wide open community that will become their favorite e-Advertising base and there isn't anything anyone could do about it.

Then What?
Well Microsoft would start to integrate MSN and MySpace services, your .NET password would work across all services seamlessly, now including MySpace, and thus all users of MySpace would be required to have an MSN account and vice-versa. There would no longer be a web mail login, it would simply be a control panel to access, modify, and update all of your current .NET enabled services. All of this playing into the monopolistic nature and then once again regaining social web dominance in favor of the evil blue empire. Then, before you know it there is an applet reserving real estate on the up and coming Vista applet bar and Microsoft is tracking every aspect of your web life thus sparking messages from the applet bar like so "I noticed you haven't blogged on Friendster in a couple days, nor have you added any photos to your MySpace, and your MSN mail box is filling up at an alarming rate. Wait, your coffee cup is still half full and you have only drank two cups this morning, shall I call a doctor via VoIP or should I just have Starbucks deliver another Capuccino?"

I am done writing about this and if you don't get the point yet, you never will....

..... Long live Tux.

The state of the GNU/Linux desktop, *buntu on the right track

2006-07-20T23:45:00.000-05:00

Over the past year I have watched Ubuntu and its partner iterations spring from "that thing Canonical is doing" to the most widely used distro on the planet.

Do I mind?
Yes and No, No and Yes. At first I was greatly upset at how much credit and praise Ubuntu was getting for all of the debian community's hard work (mainly because my heart belongs to debian), but now we are in a time of playing nice and each organization progressing together with one another to create a development process that will benefit both projects as equally as possible. (Sources on this found here and here) But now that everything has been sorted out I am one happy camper and now consider myself a "debuntu" user because my server still strives on debian's incredible stability and security but my desktop reaps the ease of use benefits of the *buntu world. I say *buntu because I am an advocate of all Ubuntu flavors because each one offers all the great features as the last but along with the specified desktop environment that fits the target user the best.

What do I run?
Xubuntu. It gives me everything I ever wanted out of a desktop computer for personal, school, and work purposes and it does it all faster. The first time I mentioned to a friend that I ran Xfce on my new machine their reaction was a tad in the "shocked" state because they were under the impression it was a sub-par desktop environment in feature set and only existed for the interest of older hardware. I let him try Xfce for himself and quickly realized how far it has come and how fast it is. While I understand that Thunar is still under development and has some features that the user community would like to see put in it, even in its unfinished state it holds the crown of file managers in my book. So for me, Xubuntu is without doubt "for the win."

Have I tried all flavors of *buntu?
Sure have. Do I like them all? Of course, each one brings to the world the power of debian with the ideals of what the Ubuntu community sees as needs for the desktop along with special configurations for different desktop environment.

Is Xubuntu(Xfce) for everyone?
No, of course not. There are multiple choices because everyone has a different idea of how they want their desktop to interact with them, I just like things simple and fast. Once it is all said and done, its all about personal preference.

Conclusion:
For personal computing, I think *buntu is where the future lies. Yet I like to consider myself a realist and I must say that I believe Novell/SuSE is where corporate Linux is headed in the direction of.

pseudoCube64 lives ...

2006-06-09T03:53:00.000-05:00

Well my new box is up and running, debian-amd64 official sid release and i must say it is blistering fast, but it also is coming along in stride towards the testing branch and then on to stable ... sid is currently the only working official branch of debian on the amd64 architecture to my knowledge and it runs xfce4 like a dream.

specs:
-Athlon64 3200+ Venice Core
-1GB low latency ram (i forget what brand and model)
-180GB SATA hdd
- nVidia GeForce 6200

... i know, nothing stellar but it is one hell of a jump over the pentiumIII box formerly known as pseudogen, which unfortunately had a power source failure reciently.

/me

my iBuntu-G4

2006-05-31T14:22:00.000-05:00

Well, I am currently posting from my CS470 class on my iBook G4 running Ubuntu Dapper Drake (RC), it is supposed to be stable in the next few days, and I must say that this does nothing short of kick ass. Everything functioned flawlessly (minus the Airport Extreme, but that was expected and the beta driver functions rather well) and I couldn't be happier with it. .... i dunno, just posting to post....

/me

PDP-11 ... dead, but never forgotten.

2006-03-27T19:16:00.000-06:00

The PDP-11 is/was a processor/processor architecture (to my knowledge, there was only the one before it went to the way of the dinosaurs) that at one time dominated large scale main frames and dumb terminals at a blistering 4MHz or 8MHz option. Now thats no news, nobody cares about old processors that can't keep up with cell phone processors these days, but one of my computer science professors lived in the binari code of this chip and decided to bring it up in my processor architectures 2 class and went over the rather unique fact that it took all of its opcode instructions in octal, a very alienated way of doing things but since it was a 16-bit microprocessor it actually makes sense, and since my prof LIVES for this thing; it has been brought to my attention that our next assignment will be to code an emulator for it which i am strangely excited about doing. So once that is complete, i will be posting a link to a place you can download my emulator if you have any reason to want to.

... also, here is a link i google'd very quickly but haven't read over, though it looks interesting towards the architecture.PDP-11.org

/me

fscking nUbs

2006-02-18T03:02:00.000-06:00

it kills me how many people talk about how their store bought machines or even custom machines dominate so much because they have a 3.8Ghz proc or multiple gigs of ram or some massive hdd when about 85-95% of these people have no clue what they are talking about. it isn't rocket science to put together a computer these days but how many of these "computer geeks" around here who claim to know that they are doing have any idea about their chipset, their north/south bridge, their memory bandwidth or its latency?

....ok, thats my rant ... i'm done.

Open Source Community and GNU/Linux essay ... 0wn3d

2005-10-04T03:36:00.000-05:00

“Liberation from the past. Freedom from outdated ideas.” The known world is concurrently run by digital networks of inter-operating machines constantly and consistently transmitting data in order to keep our hectic lives in functioning order. One company, Penguin Computing, has taken this truth to heart and appealed to the customers logical, ethical, and emotional aspects of the decision making thought process through offering leading edge GNU/Linux solutions.
In our world, computers run our lives. Within this world there are big players in the Corporate aspect of the computer driven world: Microsoft, IBM, HP, Dell, Apple, Intel, AMD, and many others. Yet, in rebuttal to the large corporate network, an Open Source Community formed, comprised of computer scientists, software engineers, and hackers forged together to bring the leading in Information Technology to the world with an open mind and open standards. The logical attraction to this concept is simply the fact that when a large community of abstract brilliant thinkers comes together, they produce results. Because there is no corporation pressuring dead lines, the results produced are “done right” with stability, security, and performance in mind. Within this association the GNU/Linux operating system spawned and has, in the past 10 years, proven its worth within Enterprise Information Technology solutions and is now making its strategic move to the home desktop. Simply put, Linux is on the rise for greatness and Penguin Computing is not only helping move it along, but preparing for what tomorrows innovations shall bring. The performance and stability offered by the Linux kernel is simply unparalleled, thus making it the perfect base for such a advanced technological movement that will bring us into the next phase of this hectic life and even those phases in the future to come. The advertisement for moving to the technological world that is GNU/Linux, or more commonly known as just “Linux,” is appealing to the logical aspect of the human brain in the form of a decree. Stating that One will no longer be trapped by the old corporate owned Operating Systems, but will be freed and liberated by the Open Source Community to have choice and experience real world computing in an all new manner.
During the course of each individual's life, they develop their own set of ethics. In the life of an IT Professional, they develop a concept about the freedom of ones mind: the true spirit of a hacker. This ethical trademark will very quickly pave the path to a Linux solution and, as stated within the page found in the magazine and on their website, Penguin Computing is here to cater to those needing guidance in areas from corporate server and data center side all the way to the home desktop. This open minded apprehension brings on the ethical commitment to the community that features such technologies and elucidations. Drawing attention to the unfortunate fact that monopolistic companies like Microsoft offer lesser server systems as multiple thousand dollar “top of the line” computers while those informed and educated in the field are drawn to, not only the concept of but, the actuality of what Open Source offers and how much more advanced of a manner in which it is offered. Not to mention the cost efficiency due to the fact that Open Source Software is freely distributable and redistributable by law under the GNU GPL (General Public License) and all that requires money is support and administration; something already required to run even those Corporate licensed and developed Operating Systems.
Every person not only has their mental capacity to render decisions based on logical and ethical stand points, but many decisions are influenced by One's emotions about a certain topic. In the world of Open Source, many of its users, supporters, and developers are very passionate about being true to the ideals that Open Source portrays within its community. Penguin Computing grasps and understands these concepts and advertises in favor of these feelings of loyalty by recognizing the technological movement in a political rendition. Showing the Penguin, the GNU/Linux mascot, standing along side the founders of the single most powerful nation in the world puts forth the emotional bridge between the foundation of this country and the loyalty that goes along with the next generation of computing foundation with Linux and the loyalty that accompanies it. This concept is understood put forth in a logical sense to appeal to the emotional aspect of decision making and then transported to possibility of a purchase of a computer system is created due to the knowledge that emotion is generally one of the strongest tools to sway a choice in the human thought process.
We are now liberated from the past, and have achieved freedom from outdated ideas. With the help of Penguin Computing, the Open Source community and the GNU/Linux Operating System appealing to the most influential sections of the persuasive method as declared by Aristotle: logic, ethics, and emotion.

The Evil Blue Empires ....

2005-07-16T07:31:00.000-05:00

Note to the world, Best Buy not only sucks but sucks even worse to work for ....

P.S. - Microsoft still sucks just a little bit harder than Best Buy.

/me

Ubuntu Linux dominates the PC world....

2005-07-02T05:21:00.000-05:00

I find myself killing time at Barnes and Noble every now and then. This last trip to the cafe portion of the store, I sit down with a cafeine fix and a few magazines, LinuxWorld Mag., Linux Mag., and PC World. PC World has a list of 2005's top 100 products and guess what Ubuntu Linux scores? #19 .... a linux distro has invaded the Windows world and is kicking ass while taking names; needless to say, I am very amused and satisfied by this for many reasons and one of the main reasons being the fact that Ubuntu is a Debian derivitive.

So I flip open LinuxWorld Mag. next and it is kind enough to have a column giving a rather large amount of props to Debian for being the most stable, most un-talked about bad ass distro around and informs most people that Debian's inovation is widely used, but most people don't realize that when they use Ubuntu, MEPIS, Knoppix, Damn Small, etc. that they are actually using a Debian system that has been customized for whatever each distro aims at. Next the article goes on to exclaim that the apt system that has been around in Debian for many years is just reciently being ported to distros like SuSE, Fedora Core, Mandrake, and other rpm based distros by using the new apt4rpm system that is taking the linux world by storm ... so what is the moral of this blog? the simple fact that Debian dominates all, always has and always will ... thus is why I have their trademark swirl tattooed on my left ass cheak and running on my server ... that's right ... got a problem with it? kiss my tattoo .... and my server :)

/me

My English Class....

2005-04-05T10:12:00.000-05:00

I currently sit infront of a dumb terminal (and I use the term loosely) in English 165 taught by Rita Raju, the stupid bitch that has yet to merit a degree, but for some reason they are allowing her to teach us.

First, I want to go off on a tangent about the damned terminal I sit infront of. Not only does this peice of shit run on WinXP but it is also a Dell. I don't have a big beef with Dell, it just annoys those of us who got excited when they claimed to offer Linux as an alternate OS when purchasing hardware from them and then renigging on the offer. Then we shall get to the machine itself, they put far too much money into CPU speed and not enough into amount of RAM, the damned thing is running somewhere around a 2.8GHz P4 and only has 256MB of RAM. My workstation in my dorm has the same amount of RAM, but I am also only running a 1GHz PIII and well ... Linux can manage memory much better than this interesting chunk of code. Then we must focus on the interesting fact that the network (WinStall) packages are managed by students who aren't entirely fluent in the working of a network nor their protocols, thus making one think that the network would be sluggish at best.

Now, back to the stupid bitch standing infront of me. I have an issue with a human being who claims to have been a teacher of English for 15 years and yet still can't speak it worth a shit, I seriously want to throw something at her with the hope to correct her speach upon impact. Her grammar is annoying and she enjoys telling me that my essays are plagorized (spelling?) because I am too lazy to make a works cited, FUCK HER. She is the most contradictory human being on the planet and there ins't a single student who respects her, enjoys her class, or can take her seriously. If she was not in control of my grades, I would without a doubt, 0wn the shit out of her.

/me

Testing... 1... 2...

2005-03-08T06:43:00.000-06:00

Ok, and thus my first rant. I attempt to sit down a few days ago to write something intelligent about the fact that my University's definition of Computer Science for Non-majors is rather pathetic and low and behold my new found "google-zon" service felt the need to deny my the ability to update my blog. Not to mention the second review I plan to do in the (hopefully) not so near future about the new google file system that in my belief is the first step towards the Google-Grid, and the fall of modern news, fact, and civilization. But no worries, by then I hope that by then we will all be intelligent enough for our opinions to be worth while for spectators. Oh, and I will also be publishing my friend's rant about our campus food and will make note that it is his writing, but I can't not put it out on the web for the world to see. Ok, well until next time.... $exit

/me

A new beginning

2005-02-23T12:12:00.000-06:00

On this day we embrace not only the start of a new blog, but the beginning of my own personal rebirth into the world in which I find myself. I named my journal after my computer, cheesy you say? Then you obviously don't know me that well. Anyways, I will do many random things with this blog, everything from ranting about life to writing reviews about certain technologies from cell phones to super computers, it will prove to be quite the compilation of randomness.

/me