Sexy Sexy Penguins

While I am working on a post-fudcon report.  Its kind of hard to work when the network continues to drop packets.  Currently, I’m on-site in Los Angeles, teaching a course.  Why, oh why does this happen?

Cheers,

Herlo

Tags: Level3tehsuck, mtr, xotehsuck

The following two articles were published in the past couple days.  When they were published and made known to me, I was saddened:

Report: OLPC may eventually switch from Linux to Windows XP
Nicholas Negroponte on Sugar and One Laptop Per Child

It appears, that Greg DeKoenigsberg responded (it appears) to these two articles with a great rebuttal in this article:

OLPC Developers are *not* fundamentalists

Thank you Greg, thank you for saying what I feel inside.  As an open source advocate, I see the value and benefit of free software and its power.  I feel good inside when I contribute and don’t feel anything like a fundamentalist.

Again, thank you Greg.

Cheers,

Herlo

Tags: Fedora, gregdek, negroponte, olpc, onelaptop, thank

As I usually do while teaching class, I installed a Fedora 8 machine, and ran yum update.  Today I noticed a strange amount of time for one particular download:

While this is hilarious, its shouldn’t happen.  Any ideas?  I know it didn’t take 28927 seconds (or about 1/3 of a day) to download that foomatic package.

Cheers,

Herlo

Tags: bugs, Fedora, Yum

As an experienced traveler, I regularly run into a situation where the housekeeping staff will put the plug in the tub and leave it there.  Why do they do that?

My reasoning is that its pure laziness on their part, mostly because I am the guest and shouldn’t have to be greeted with a tub full of shower water after a couple minutes of letting it get warm.

Anyway, just a small gripe I had to get off my chest today.

Cheers,

Herlo

Tags: annoyance, hotels, plug, rant, shower, travel, tub

Let me get this out first, I’m a avid fan of all things Mozilla. Even with the limitations they cause, the problems I’ve heard about Firefox and Thunderbird and all that Jazz, I’m still a big fan, current and future consumer of these wonderful applications.

BUT!

Why is it that a bug that has been logged for some time can go so long without being fixed. It sure seems like a very simple fix, but no, its still broken.

What, you ask, am I talking about? Well, its this bug on mozilla’s bugzilla that’s bugging me. While its not a major bug, its annoying and causes me heartache every time I look into my /tmp directory.

The problem is that as Thunderbird creates and moves data around when using a filter rule. It creates temporary files which is all fine and good, but the problem is the code is broken that removes the temporary files. My /tmp directory just fills and fills with these useless little files. It’s driving me insane. Every time I go into the directory to look at something, I’m bombarded with files that are named tmprules-##.dat , where the ## is a number.

Have a look into the directory:

$ ls /tmp/tmprules*.dat | wc -l
492


Why do we need to have 492 files in there? I don’t even have 492 messages I read each day. Come on Mozilla Foundation, take a few minutes and fix this annoying little bug that’s been hanging around since this March!

Cheers,

Herlo

Tags: bugs, rant, thunderbird

As some of you may know, I am the founder of the Utah Open Source Foundation.  On November 10, we’ll be holding the Multi-Distro Release Party, and I planned on sharing Fedora (of course), OpenSUSE and Ubuntu.  Its the only Multi-Distro Release Party going on that I know of, but I could be wrong.  If you live in Utah, you should come, it’ll be a blast!

The point of this post is to ask a simple question, however.  During the promotion of this event, I’ve received suggestions beyond the three big versions of Linux that are being released close to one month from each other.  For example, OpenBSD will be release soon, and Apple released Leopard for Mac OSX, among others.  And while every operating system is welcome to participate in the MDRP, I can’t help but wonder about certain definitions.

My question is what counts as a distro?.  I mean how do you classify yourself as a distro?  Is it a Linux only thing?  Or, is it just Open Source OSes?  Maybe its nothing, and I’m just bringing this up for no good reason.

Your comments are appreciated and encouraged.

Cheers,

Herlo

Tags: 10.3, Fedora, gutsy, linux, multi-distro release party, opensuse, release party, Ubuntu, werewolf

You’ve done it, you’ve gone to your email and clicked a link. The link will happily load into your preferred browser, in my case, Firefox. If you are using gnome-terminal, its a ctrl+click on the link and it works great. I use irssi with gnome-terminal and when someone pastes a link, I ctrl+click and up comes the website in my Firefox. GNOME even will switch me to my own workspace, which is pretty nice!

Except when the link starts with https!

Why is this!

I’ve hunted high and low, searched google for terms like “GNOME click https” with no luck. Frustration has really set in for me, because its not something that majorly affects me but its just enough of a bother. I’ve waited to see if someone else got frustrated enough and wanted to fix this problem as well. So far, no dice.

So, I’m looking for answers to this eternal question. When I click (or ctrl+click) an https link in any application, why doesn’t it automatically load into my browser? Is there a solution to this? Please comment, they are much appreciated.

UPDATE: It seems that from the suggestions I was given, things are working much better now.  Originally, I had the custom option chosen in my preferred applications, and that was pointing to Firefox.  At a whim, I changed it to actually be Firefox, and all is well.

Thanks to everyone who commented on this.

Cheers,

Herlo

Tags: , ctrl+click, GNOME, https

Okay, okay, I didn’t get in, but it was sure fun to take a train trip down to the World Series to see the vibe. I’ve never been quite so close to a World Series game. The closest thing for me was when I got to go to watch the Utah Jazz get beaten by the Bulls in 1997 and 1998 in Salt Lake City. The World Series is much better to me since I’m a huge baseball fan.

For your entertainment, I took some interesting, pics:

I also took some pretty pictures of fall in New England. Not being from here, its amazing how beautiful the leaves can be.

Cheers,

Herlo

Some of you may have seen my mailing list posts to SLLUG, PLUG and Ubuntu Utah. If so, you are welcome to participate here and flame me for asking this question as you may have already answered it there.

BUT

I’m curious as to the history, a farce or truth as to why blootbot is considered a female in Utah? Is there some long truthful story that can be told, or is it that someone just decided? Is it like naming a boat? a hurricane? Call it a fascination, a fanaticism, crazy or whatever, I just want to know the history.

In a recent interview with TimRiker, the maintainer of blootbot, I asked him some tough, hard questions:

16:37 <@herlo> TimRiker: so do you know the history of why ibot/infobot/jbot is a girl?  I'd like to learn it...
16:46 < TimRiker> herlo: infobot is not a girl. well, not all the time.
16:46 < goozbach> don't let Charity hear that
16:46  * maquis sends an email to charity....
16:46 < TimRiker> is Charity a girl all the time? :)
16:46 < TimRiker> ~gender
16:46 < infobot> I'm hermaphroditic
16:46 < TimRiker> ~gender
16:46 < infobot> I'm hermaphroditic
16:46 < TimRiker> ~gender
16:46 < infobot> I'm female
16:46 < TimRiker> ~gender
16:46 < infobot> I'm pregnant
16:46 < TimRiker> ~gender
16:46 < infobot> I'm pregnant
16:46 < TimRiker> ~gender
16:46 < infobot> I'm gay
16:47 < TimRiker> etc.
16:47 < TimRiker> depends on her mood.

I’d like to hear your opinions, or share your fantastic story of how she became the woman she is today. We love our bot, we do, tell the infobot story…

Cheers,

Herlo

I generally don’t recommend or (as in this case) tell people to avoid a particular vendor. Generally, my comments are kept to tutorials and simple to complex configurations, or stories about my failures so that others might learn from me.In this case, I pretty much want to rip APlus.net a new one!

So here’s the story.

A year ago, I wanted to register utos.org as a domain which is currently used for Utah Open Source and its non-profit website. Anyway, I couldn’t find my current registrar Total Online Solutions interweb address anywhere and I needed to register this site. I’d just had the epiphany about how to help Open Source grow in Utah.

Problem was, I needed to register it now, so I hastily went down the list of possible registrars and didn’t want to go with the big guys, GoDaddy.com or NetworkSolutions, etc. After perusing the list for a short time, I came upon APlus.net. I’d heard of them before, and had thought that they might be a good fit, and of course, the price was right. So I signed up for the account and registered my domain, along with an alternate I ended up not using.

This is where my trouble began…

One week or so after I registered the site all was well. The dns was resolving and everything was working well. It could have been faster, but I wasn’t in the biggest of hurries to be honest. APlus.net did a fine job letting me delegate my domain. A few days later, I received a phone call:

“Hello”, I said.
“Hello, Mr. Savage?”, in broken English, “I am calling from APlus.net”.
“Yes?”
“Well Mr. Savage, I am calling to check with you on your new domain purchases and want to make sure everything is to your satisfaction”
“Yes”, I said, a bit annoyed, “its fine”.

At this point I obviously wondered why I’d answered the phone, but since I thought they might give me a free year of registration or something, I stayed on the line.

“That’s great to hear Mr. Savage, is there anything we here at APlus.net can do for you?”
“No, I’m fine. Things are working well”
“Thank you Mr. Savage, have a nice day then”
“Goodbye”

I thought it odd, who’s ever heard of a salesman calling about a domain registration? I mean, how hard is it to delegate your domain and familiarize yourself with their tools. Everything was pretty straightforward. I brushed it off as no big deal, thinking that was just part of their service.

Two weeks later, I received a similar phone call. I won’t repeat it to you. I kindly thanked them and asked how many calls I was going to get. The man didn’t know.

A month went by before the next call came. Like I said, who calls to see if you are satisfied with your domain? I mean really? I was annoyed and asked the gentleman to have his office make sure not to call me again unless there was an emergency. He said he would and indeed, I’ve not received another call since.

But this is not why I am recommending you avoid APlus.net

My real problems started May 15, 2007. The day after I got the notice to renew my domain.

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