Dec 13
Worth a read is the recently published Sneak Peeks at openSUSE 11.0: KDE article (digg), which also features a good interview with openSUSE/KDE developer Stephan Binner. It goes over the media changes, the versions of KDE available, and the work done over the last 9 months in the upcoming openSUSE 11.0 release, coming in just a couple of days now!
I’ve been following the development version (with of course KDE 4.0) for some time now and I’m really pleased about the way it has turned out! Distrowatch and others have been giving some glowing reviews, and the general feel from testers of the release appears to be incredibly positive. The new installer, sexy artwork, super-fast package management, and new official KDE 4 live CD is really making a big change. So congratulations to everyone who made it happen!
Dec 10
I’ll be speaking tomorrow in Utrecht, Netherlands on truths and myths regarding the Dutch Web Guidelines. I’d like to speak more about design in front-end development, but I guess the Web Guidelines are hot, and since I had a role in producing them, I get asked to talk about them. A lot.
As with any usability or accessibility guidelines, there are some myths which keep rearing their heads. These myths came to be in the minds of clients, mostly because because of what these clients have been told by hack, unprofessional front-end developers. You know, the kind who design websites based on what their framework or CMS is able to handle in its more or less standard form; god forbid these developers should know the faintest thing about decent markup. I’m tired of hearing what’s not possible within accessibility guidelines, especially when it’s simply untrue.
We’ll be talking about that.
For the Dutch among you, read more on the Zinformatie website.
Dec 09
* rpm, for Red Hat/Fedora/Suse/Mandriva i386 or x86_64:
http://dl.google.com/linux/rpm/testing/i386/picasa …
* deb, for Debian/Ubuntu i386:
http://dl.google.com/linux/deb/pool/non-free/p/pic …
* deb, for Debian/Ubuntu amd64:
http://dl.google.com/linux/deb/pool/non-free/p/pic …
Repositories (I guess Picasa 3 is in the testing one): http://www.google.com/linuxrepositories/testrepo.h …
Dec 05
Until this week Infobright’s claim to open source fame was its partnership with MySQL that enabled its analytical data warehousing software to act as a storage engine for the open source database.
However, the company is now taking the open source route itself by releasing the code behind its Infobright data warehouse (formerly Brighthouse) as Infobright Community Edition.
Earlier this month the company announced that it was moving to a subscription model for the commercial version of the product, Infobright Enterprise Edition, which comes with “enhanced features, services and support, warranty” amongst other things.
The company has also announced a $10m Series C investment which will apparently be “used largely to fuel the growth of the new www.infobright.org open source community and the Infobright Community Edition (ICE) open source data warehouse”.
Flybridge Capital and Sun Microsystems have joined existing investor RBC Venture Partners on th funding round. The deal is Sun’s second venture investment in data warehousing this year. It joined GreenPlum’s $27m Series C round in January.
Dec 04
Syntext is planning a major release of Serna 4 and has just released a minor release 3.6 in April 2008. Alpha Serna 4 is available already.
Syntext Serna is a highly customizable, multi-platform, pure XSL-driven WYSIWYG XML content editor. It looks and works like a conventional word processor, yet gives you much more flexibility to alter or reuse content while keeping its integrity intact. Serna lets you collaborate on compound documents that contain embedded data from various sources. Content is viewed as an integrated whole that is intuitively transparent to authors. Possible applications of Syntext Serna range from technical and business content authoring to sophisticated PDM systems.
Syntex currently has hundreds of companies using this product since its inception in 2003. They provide Basic support (e-mails, minor releases availability) and Premium support (e-mails, special hot fixes availability, priority bug fix).
If you have used Syntext Serna or products like it and would like to provide feedback, please comment here about the product and your experience with it. We value your opinion.
a2a_linkname=”Syntext Serna”;a2a_linkurl=”http://www.webucator.com/blog/index.php/2008/05/06/syntext-serna/”;
Dec 02
In this fourth part of a nine-part series on Python you ll learn about expressions operators sequences and more. This article is excerpted from chapter four of the book em Python in a Nutshell Second Edition em written by Alex Martelli O Reilly ISBN 5961 469 . Copyright 2 7 O Reilly Media Inc. All rights reserved. Used with permission from the publisher. Available from booksellers or direct from O Reilly Media….
Technorati Tags: media
Dec 01
While upgrading a remote server from sarge to etch including the new kernel, the server did not come up. After attaching a console (thanks Hetzner!) I found out that the network interface got mysteriously renamed to eth2!
After snooping around a bit, I found out that the culprit was udev, more specifically /etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules which says:
This file was automatically generated by the /lib/udev/write_net_rules
program, probably run by the persistent-net-generator.rules rules file.
#
You can modify it, as long as you keep each rule on a single line.
MAC addresses must be written in lowercase.
PCI device 0×1106:0×3065 (via-rhine)
SUBSYSTEM==”net”, DRIVERS==”?*”, ATTRS{address}==”00:0c:76:af:2f:9d”, NAME=”eth0″
It also contained two entries for bogus eth0 and eth1 (usb dongle got identified as a network card?). After removing the and relabeling interfaces everything is back to normal now.
Nov 29
I have a lot of interaction with publishing types. I write a lot, and I edit some, and I do tech reviews and stuff for some publishers, and I co-authored a book, and I’ve worked on two magazines, and a newspaper, and I’m generally fascinated by the technical book market and stuff like that. I’m also someone who is lucky enough that his job is also his hobby. I work in technology, and am always doing something technology related at home in my spare time. Needless to say, I read tons upon tons of technical books.
I almost never post book reviews, in spite of the fact that I read all of these books. Why? Well, to be honest, I couldn’t tell you. It just hasn’t occurred to me to write a book review. Could be because I don’t really value book reviews too much myself I guess. I mean, if there’s a really obvious consensus across a huge number of reviews, I might be swayed. But in general, I find that book reviews are too often the target of astroturfing campaigns.
If there’s a tech book you’d like a review of that deals with things I’m generally into, let me know and I’ll post a review, if I’ve read it (or want to read it). Here are subjects I’m likely to have read books about in the past couple of years:
- Linux, UNIX, and administration thereof
- Python (all levels - I just read pretty much whatever is out there)
- web 2.0 APIs (mostly Google and Amazon)
- Any book about any service that can be run in a *x environment (DNS, Apache, DHCP, Jabber, and most other things that open a port)
- Anything related to generic SQL, database design, or (more specifically) mysql and postgresql.
- HPC (cluster computing)
- Generic programming, software, computer science, or high-level systems design books
- Digital photography (I have a Canon Digital Rebel, if that helps - I do *not* use Photoshop)
- PHP
- Maybe some other stuff I’m forgetting
Nov 12
I was using deprec2 to install RoR, MySQL, Nginx, etc. to Slicehost using the crack_the_nut instructions on my mac. I came to where I had to run the rails_stack (cap deprec:rails:install_rails_stack) and I kept getting an error that said “chgrp: invalid group deploy”.
Deprec automatically creates the deploy group as part of it’s recipes. I was stunned. Upon looking for an hour or two I came across a ‘grep’ that deprec runs. It runs “sudo -p ’sudo password: ‘ grep ‘deploy:’ /etc/group || sudo /usr/sbin/groupadd deploy”. This grep checks the /etc/group file for any occurances of ‘deploy’. My deploy user was named pd_deploy. Users live in the /etc/group file under their group following the following convention:
group: user1,user2,user3
My /etc/group file contained the following:
admin:root,pd_deploy
Deprec found ‘deploy’ in my user, pd_’deploy’, and thought that the group already existed. It therefore failed to create a new one and blew up when it was trying to change a group that did not exist.
To save yourself a lot of hassle, don’t have ‘deploy’ anywhere in your /etc/group file, meaning, don’t have a user with ‘deploy’ anywhere in the name. So no ‘deployuser’ or ‘user_deploy’.
Nov 10
I spent a good portion of my morning injecting some RDFa into my blog. In case you didn’t know, RDFa is basically Microformat’s big brother. RDFa takes the full power of RDF and embeds it invisibly in a normal XHTML page. It takes a little bit to get used to thinking of your data in terms of RDF triples, but when it comes down to it, it’s really not that much harder than coding in support for a Microformat.
I’ve got a bit more data that I can still mark up properly, but for now you can grab your favorite RDFa extractor, highlighter bookmarklet, or Firefox extension and see the semantic goodness hidden just under the covers of this page.
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