July 2007 Archives

At OSCON I saw a new firefox ad campaign that I just loved.  Behold, the power of the eyes.

I have a nice large poster of this at work now, and we will hopefully be getting some for the UTOS attendees.

A large number of the slides from OSCON 07 are now available online (OSCON Slides).  This year there are several of the keynotes that have been recorded also.  While many sessions aren't available, a good number are, and can give you a taste of what was there.  Some will obviously be more useful than others in the way the content was written, but and excellent resource.

YouTube Channel
Blip Keynote Videos

Hopefully this is a logo you'll see a lot of soon, Come check out all of us presenting at the UTOS conference.  Just contact me, or another LUG or business group leader for your discount code (only $40 for everything).  Well worth the admission, and it goes directly towards helping your local Open Source groups and projects.

 

For anybody interested in billing for an ISP or ASP situation, come check out my presentation on Advanced Billing in Freeside.

Here's a quick way to create a sitemap in movable type (should work for 3.x, I've got it here on 4).

Create a new index template, save it as sitemap.xml (other names can work fine too if you want), then paste in the following:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84">
<url>
<loc><$MTBlogURL encode_xml="1"$></loc>
<priority>1.0</priority>
</url>
<MTEntries lastn="9999">
<url>
<loc><$MTEntryPermalink encode_xml="1"$></loc>
<lastmod><$MTEntryModifiedDate utc="1" format="%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ"$></lastmod>
</url>
</MTEntries>
</urlset>

If you have any other specific pages you want to add, you can just put in an explicit <url> record, with a priority from 0 to 1.0, one receiving the most attention.  You can also add a changefreq [daily|weekly|monthly] to help crawlers know when to look.

When you have that in place, go to the google webmaster tools to submit your sitemap, and add your rss feed while you're at it.

Fresh from the Perl Lightning Talks, add your statistics to the Perl Profile Take a quick survey to help perl understand itself (yes, I set up the joke just for you guys)

Yes, I'm desperately trying to catch up with a week that is passing by too fast.  A mountain of information is sitting in notes on my computer awaiting comment on this blog.

Tuesday was my MJD day.  A day of Tutorials spent listening to one of my favorite Perl trainers, Mark Jason Dominus.  For those not familiar, Dominus is a smart guy with a dry sense of humor, and who enjoys working on code that most people just dont' have fun with.  He is also the author of Higher Order Perl, one of my most recommended books for advanced Perl programmers.

My first session with him was an updated presentation of the same name, Higher Order Perl, the second session was title "Making Programs Faster".  Sadly I cannot link to his extremely thorough slides (It's his job), but the majority of the content was more in depth discussion on aspects of his book, with alternative looks at how the data can be useful.

One review of the Higher Order Perl is the rip off of the Spam skit, it's about "closures, closures, closures, closures, Baked Beans, and closures".  Really a large part of the book uses Perl closures to get across many key features.

Iterators, walk_tree routines, anonymous subs as objects, and parsers were some of the tools used to teach some the different ways to accomplish common tasks Perl programmers face, but in more optimized ways.

The Making Programs Faster class began by looking into the pitfalls of benchmarking, including some of the errors he's found in the common Benchmark module, and showed ways to perform benchmarking more accurately.  From benchmarking we moved into profiling methodologies in perl.  From there we moved on to writing a better POD parser, before finally going over common performance mistakes.

All of MJD's talks carry with them a great depth that helps you understand inner magics of the language in actually useful ways.  But with magic comes the chance for going astray.  Only in MJD's class can you quickly go from a discussion on profiling, to discussing if lemonade is a black body, and therefore measurable by an infrared thermometer.  :)

In summary, really both classes cover content that you can basically find in the book, but the atmosphere, and depth far surpass what you get from just reading.  New examples and QA time really help in understanding.

http://refcards.com/refcard/perl-debugger-forda

A handy link for people who use the Perl CLI debugger.  Didn't know it had one, or don't know how to use it? ask your local Perl Mongers for assistance.

Team Bad Karma is hosting a scenario game this weekend, so come play with Desert Edge as we assault the OpFor (Team Suppressors).  For event information head to : Bad Karmas Events Site

The new Perl Wiki is now up and running hosted via the Perl Foundation. For those of you wiki lovers, you now have a better place for your information. Time to start posting some new information.

So, I completely forgot to print out my gpg fingerprint for the signing party here, so didn't go get any new sigs. But I did see a tool I hadn't seen before: View my GPG Stats

Or:

your key id :

And folks, don't forget to bring a GPG fingerprint to the UTOS conference and get some good signatures, and join the Utah Web of Trust.

As one person mentioned in irc, "GPG is the Linkedin of the real geek world"

According to MJD:

"Why is the animal on the sendmail book a bat? Because both the bat and sendmail suck the life out of you!"

OSCON always pushes the limits in terms of connectivity.  Let's face it, this many geeks, fighting for the available resources.  This year has set new records in my frustration to get online.

1. The Doubletree (where I am) hotel does not have wireless in the rooms
2. They do have wired ethernet, but it's not free this year
1. I can't connect in my room
2. I had to spend several phone calls and lots of time with support
3. No rebooting my computer will NOT help in this situation
4. FINE, send the tech up to check the wire to the wall
5. at least now they are switching rooms to one that has a cable or switch port that will work :)
3. The 'Free Wireless' that they do have is just in the lobby.  Last night it wasn't working
1. spr and I wound up playing Apples to Apples with sirhc and some other folks in the lobby while trying to get online.
4. The Red Lion (not the conference hotel, but closer to the conference) has free wireless in the room
1. They have 179 rooms
   
2. They can have 100 concurrent users :)
5. The OSCON open network is better today than it was yesterday morning.
1. But tomorrow there will be twice as many people, in a smaller amount of rooms for the keynote
6. AT&T's Edge network has been swamped, haven't been able to use it after Sunday
7. A guy trying to use the verizon wireless mentioned the same results (guess it's not just the iphone users)
8. Don't even bother trying to use the local points for the MetroFi free wireless, overwhelmed doesn't begin describe

Basically, if you're lucky enough to connect to anything but the oscon connection (and it will be this way during the keynotes) you won't get an IP. 

Yesterday afternoon was the Pro Postgres class as taught by Robert Treat.  On entering the class I was a little afraid at first that the class wouldn't cover what I needed.  He started off spending a large amount of time covering packaging, then upgrading between versioning, and what version numbers meant.  Not exactly what I expected out of the class.

However, slightly before the break period, the magic happened.  One of the main reasons I wanted this class was because of problems I've had in getting postgres tuned for the performance we wanted.  Personally this has been a major beef of mine for a long time with postgres, the documentation for performance tuning is extremely lacking.  To many times you find the details for tuning are simply 'try changing, and see what happens'.  Not very helpful with live systems that you can't take down just to twiddle a bit.

However this time there was actually some magical help in finding several of the key things we can tune, especially on the solaris based system in question.  Of special note, while shared_buffers is something we had been focusing on modifying, some of the warnings we had read about modifying it we found aren't such a big deal.  default_statistics_target is something that was harped on in our case.  Apparently the default value is '10', and the presenter said the first thing he did on a system was raise it to '100', then run analyze.  Great, glad that's a default.  According to him, there is no reason to want it lower than 100, glad that's a default guys :).  sort_mem, checkpoint_segments, checkpoint_timeout, and effective_cache_size were also given heavier focus on why they should be targets of configuration optimization for performance.  These are major areas of our previous focus, and you can find some some information about them online, but this was much better.  Some other items of interest included using maintenance_work_mem in a per-session basis when altering tables or indexes.  update_prcess_title is an option that can apparently run very slowly on a solaris system, wish that was well known.   max_fsm_pages is one that as soon as he discussed it, I knew would be an issue.  Apparently if the page setting is too low, and you have a highly updated database, this will cause major performance issues.  The best way to test on this was to run a vacuum, and look at the pages information.  If it needed more than it said was available, you need to raise this :).  Once again, would have been nice in the docs, and I know we are now raising ours more than we had, by quite a bit.

After the break we went on to cover various forms of data recovery, from the basic pgdumps (remember the -Fc option), pitr (point in time recovery), availability, slow query analysis, a review of important /contrib entries, and finally some interesting pg query tricks.

I did learn a bit of very useful information.  I was afraid at first, not to mention when he stated, "Trush /contrib more than your own code."  But I wound up liking the content quite a bit.  I have several pacakges that I hope to write more about after I try them out some.

This talk had 'oialline' speaking in replacement for Damian.  He's a little bit drier of a talk of course (hey, everybody is compared to Damian), but definitely knows his stuff.  Heck, he wrote a book on it :)

Definitely a lot more syntax/function oriented at first, compared to damian's class which was more focused on shortcut usability.  let's see how it continues.  Most of the notes are available at the url below (he promised to have his slightly updated version posted soon).

"I've just spent an hour and a half lecturing on various ways to autotype #include around filenames, and the strange thing is I don't use any of them.  I just do an abbreviation."

It was nice seeing at the final point of the lecture was reminding people about the "charity" portion of the software.

This was definitely a different class than damians, which was designed from ticks to making it quick.  This was really a tool for understanding the vim core.  Very interesting, totally different.

Internet Archeology - Going through old code trying to figure out what it did.

Checked into the hotel, registered, and will be ready to feed the brain starting tomorrow.  Spent the last two days touring the old grounds in WA before the conference.  That's the nice thing about this being in Portland is I can visit my hometown.  This time I spent the weekend hitting the old Pike Place Market, Visiting my Sister, and old friends.  One of those suckers even went camping with me up to Lake Angeles .

I had packed very light for a nice summer trip, and was greeted with a heavy downpour :/  go figure.  But I can live with that, and hiked up anyways.  I hope to get some pictures up soon, but I didnt' get very many because my camera broke.  The lens extended as normal, and then no longer retracts.  Because of that, when the camera turns on it starts to try to extend, and since ti can't, it crashes.  grrr..

Well, I received a sad call this morning from my grandmother this morning, a little bit of a call to the reality of the fire season.  See, we have a family cabin that my dad and grandfather built when he was a teenager.  I've blogged about going up there before, it's serious backcountry solace to my heart.  Well, a recent lightening strike started a fire just up the canyon from our cabin.  The benchmark road/canyon is filled with an old forest that is well past it's prime for a heavy fire, and due to years of mismanagement, the whole forest is a large tinderbox (lots of ladder-fuel, etc.).

Well, the fire is currently mostly headed a different direction, but it won't take much, especially with the current coverage to head down the canyon and include our cabin.

The one interesting note about this though, is that my grandmother is one of those people we all know that never got into computers.  After retiring from working for the state of Montana, she retired to living her summers at this primitive cabin, when she called she had some very useful information for me.

"I have an internet number about the fire for you to call..  it's 'H' as in home, 'T' as in toy, 'T' as in toy, 'P' as in..."

I think you can see where that is going.  Out of it though, I found a really interesting site called inciweb, that is a good mashup of several sources of information, if you want to track any fires.  Good maps.  As for the fire I'm concerned about:  Ahorn Wildland Fire


And links to some of our cabin pictures:
Hall Family Cabin Benchmark 1
Hall Family Cabin 2

I'll admit, I've become a nintendo DS and Wii nut recently.  It's a convincing package, and I'm supporting it.  The newly announced WiiFit stuff looks really interesting (strangely).  But I just had to laugh when I was passed this video from sarcasticgamer.com (If I did this right, I hope, the video wont' show on aggregators/rss, so you folks can click to see if you want)

Recently I was passed this interesting article describing the ways you can embed videos from The LDS Church's mormon.org in your blog/website/about me page.

http://www.sixteensmallstones.org/embeddable-distributed-content-from-mormonorg

The basic rundown solves the issue that I was looking for.  Which is the desire to "Web 2.0" embed video content from another source (yes, hotlinking is now in with permission).  In this case from mormon.org, which is not by nature a fully user managed site.  The basic concept of it doesn't allow for complete outside control, for reasons I can accept for now.  But the new videos are an excellent tool that  I would like to use.

The article also suggests some enhancements that normal geeks recognize from other shared media sites that are lacking, such as automated redirecting to mormon.org.  This of course is something that would be likely included if that was the design of the product, and hopefully I can help bubble the idea upstream to listening ears.

I'm more than happy to admit that I really don't watch all that many TV shows.  I actually avoid the tv most of the time, and when I do watch, it falls in a very narrow spectrum of TV.  However last spring I was drawn into a new TV show on Fox, called Drive. I quickly began to enjoy the show, and knew that was a bad sign.  As fox normally does with actually interesting shows, they canceled it right away.

There were, however, two more episodes finished, that they never aired.  While we still miss out on what could have been, at least you can now watch those two.  The last two 'Drive' episodes are now available online.

Yes, the registration is now running on the Utah Open Source Conference.  This is a great opportunity to learn and network with all the Utah area Business and Technology folks, so make sure you sign up.

If you are interested in going, and a member of the Provo Linux Users Group, then contact me (jason) at plug.org to receive your discount code.  And yes, it's a *really* good deal with the code.

For anybody just happening to try and hit local geek James 'Neybar' Lance's web page, it happens to be down atm.  And why?

Clicking will bring up a larger image, but it says:

Uhhuh. NMI received for unknown reason a1 on CPU 0
You have some hardware problem, likely on the PCI bus.
Dazed and confused, but trying to continue.

Now that's a hilarious error message.  As for trying to continue, it's locked hard. :(  Poor James, new hardware time.

At home we have a pretty nice Mistubishi TV that we've had for a few years now.  All of the sudden my wife starts complaining about getting a V-Chip block on random shows, and it won't go away.  Our standard passcode for that type of device wouldn't work.  Another opportunity for google to the rescue (and making this geek look better for the wife).

For anybody that cares, if you get the V-Chip code prompt on a Mitsubishi TV, pressing '9 + QV' will allow you to enter a replacement code.  Nothing like wonderful security.  At least in this case it allowed us to watch "PG" rated tv again.

This year has been a bit of a banner year for my paintball habits.  While a devoted player (it's my main exercise and stress relief), I'm a bit of a cheapskate.  Through hours of play I've often proven that you dont' have to have the best equipment or dump the most paint in order to do well.

As part of Team DesertEdge though, I've been forced into times that I have to "put out" a little more than your average player.  When people are depending on you, in a tournament situation, you need to really do your part.  That dedication from all of our team has led to a good progression in equipment, and play quality.  This year, we reaped some of our first material rewards, a sponsorship from Planet Eclipse.  PE is a quite respected manufacturer of higher end paintball equipment, based in the UK.  For the last several years, their flagship marker has been the 'Ego' line, which was originally based on an autococker style pneumatic system.  A couple of years ago PE decided to branch out with a newer style of marker, and quickly grew a fanbase with the '05 and '06 models.

Starting with the 2007 model, PE re-engineered this system once again, creating a lighter, faster, more compact marker than ever before.  So when we were approached with the opportunity to use this new marker, we were quick to sign on.  Heck, high end electronics, that shoot, who wouldn't?

Received in the Freeside devel and users list today, Ivan announced an upcoming license change for the Freeside package, Going from GPL v2 to AGPL v3.

The purpose of the move is to limit the "webapp loophole", where you could sell access to a modified version of a GPL product, but not distribute the changes.  As Ivan put it:

"I want Freeside to be free for everyone to use and modify, but I don't
feel it is equitable to our community for large companies to fork
private versions of the software and sell access to them in a
hosted/SaaS/ASP capacity to avoid having to make the source code of
their derivitive works available.  This seems to violate the spirit of
the GPL and copyleft, if not the letter (hence why it is called a
"loophole")."

The purpose of this is not to block customized code, but only selling out usage of non-contributed code.  This will not prevent the development of custom plugins, which the Freeside architecture encourages, but only selling hosted access to those. 

Interested parties are invited to particpate in the AGPL draft discussion: http://gplv3.fsf.org/agplv3-dd1-guide.html

What a way to start a day.
Remembered to grab a photo with the phone as I was pulling the tire off.  Serious blowout on I-15.

Yes, the classic Transformers statement.  I just got back from the preview showing, and man was that worth it.  I will say that I went into the movie giddy about finally seeing the darned thing, but with a heavy fear that it was going to be royally screwed up.

Man that was a good movie!  A great balance for the non-transformer geek, as well as us geeks.  I was also very afraid that the violence would be way overdone, and my son wouldn't be able to watch it. While it is big on action, the gore and others is not there to where I would feel bad for my son to attend (but better watch it without them first to make sure about yours).

Definately a winner.  And man which is sexier, Jazz (Pontiac solstice) or Bublebee (with the new camaro look)?