Posts Tagged ‘Linux’

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“No, we’re not ready…”

Wednesday, February 27th, 2008

“…OK, now we’re ready.”

This year I’m going to attempt to join the annual LugRadio marathon - initiated by mrBen (pictured below) - in the build up to LugRadio Live (the original and best UK version, unless someone wants to sponsor me to go to the USA one).

[image]
Creative Commons License photo credit: andy.d

I’ve already started with Season 1, Episode 1 “The Phantom Message“. Even though they’ve improved in both technical and professional terms over the years, listening to that first episode again reminded me why I like(d*) listening so much. Indeed I became their first official fan!

In the spirit of competition I’m going to see mrBen’s challenge and raise it by including all of hashlugradio as well. This is, of course, in preparation for hashlugradio Live 2008 - the event that allows LugRadio Live to share the same time, dates and venue.

* I can’t remember when or exactly why I stopped listening regularly. Maybe I’ll be able to spot it as I go through.

Tags: hashlugradio, Linux, lugradio, lugradio live, podcast
Posted in Linux, Listening | 2 Comments »

Migrated to WordPress

Thursday, February 21st, 2008

First of all, apologies for any ‘planet spam’ caused the change to my feeds.

After what seems like an eternity (but is actually just over a year) I’ve switched the backend of this site from Mephisto to WordPress. The main reason for the switch was my overall dissatisfaction with Mephisto coupled with its lack of development (or a least stable releases) along with the fact that I was maintaining a Ruby on Rails production environment for one application. Mephisto frustrated me in many ways, from its inability to handle archives/pagination to not being able to accept pingbacks to not working with external clients. All of these were fixable, but I really didn’t have the patience or the time.

Here is my tale of migrating from Mephisto to WordPress, and how I achieved it.

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Tags: blog, Linux, mephisto, php, Python, Ruby On Rails, wordpress
Posted in Linux, Python, Ruby On Rails | 9 Comments »

PyRoom

Tuesday, February 5th, 2008

A while back I was discussing FOSS alternatives for cutting out distractions, and one of the pieces of software that I couldn’t find a decent alternative for was Writeroom which is commercial software for the Mac.

Now Bruno Bord (who’s basically French) has come to the rescue with the PyRoom project. I may have to get involved.

Tags: foss, Linux, pyroom, Python, software, writeroom
Posted in Linux, Python, Writing | 6 Comments »

Cast Your Vote

Saturday, January 26th, 2008

The Official Ubuntu Book has been nominated in the favourite Linux book category for the Linux Journal 2008 Readers’ Choice Survey.

All Linux fans should take part anyway, but while you’re there cast a vote for the best book about the best distro <wink />.

Tags: book, Linux, linuxjournal, official, survey, ubuntu
Posted in Linux, Writing | No Comments »

Cutting out distractions

Thursday, January 24th, 2008

On his new blog Write To Done, Leo Babauta talks about how to write without distractions. I wanted to look at a couple of his points from the FOSS/Linux/Ubuntu perspective.

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Tags: compiz, distractions, Linux, productivity, ubuntu, vim, writeroom, Writing, x
Posted in Linux, Writing | 8 Comments »

Spoof!

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008

or Fun Ways To Spend Your Afternoon #4853

This afternoon I started getting mails saying that messages had been rejected due to lack of storage. Over 2000 appeared in a very short space of time – it seems my domain has been spoofed once again. This wouldn’t be a big deal except that my server was already near capacity and this flurry of activity pushed it over the edge. I’d been aware of the space issue for a while, and had plans to address it but quite simply hadn’t bothered until I was forced into action.

My planning had gotten as far as preparing a larger partition for /var, but it was sitting idle. A quick reboot into single user mode, mount the new partition, copy the data, unmount, move & rename the folders, edit /etc/fstab, remount, check everything appears normal and reboot. By far the longest part was copying the data – next time I’m using rsync so I can track progress.

Unfortunately the bounces are still rolling in. I think I’m finally going to have to look into getting SPF set up.

Tags: filesystems, Linux, mail, postfix, spam, sysadmin
Posted in Linux | 2 Comments »

Bestseller?

Wednesday, January 16th, 2008

Just did a quick check on how my book – Managing Software Development with Trac and Subversion – was doing on Amazon UK. They had stock earlier in the week, but it’s all gone now – that can only be a good thing!

I was also really pleased to see that I had made into the top 100,000 bestsellers – number 94,492 to be precise. Considering I’ve seen books ranked over the million mark, I’m very happy with my current position.

Tags: book, Linux, subversion, trac, Writing
Posted in Developing, Linux, Writing | 1 Comment »

Letting the air out of the Air

Wednesday, January 16th, 2008

Unless you have been living under a rock for the past 24-odd hours, you will have heard about the new Macbook Air ultra-slim laptop from Apple. Reactions seem to be falling into two categories:

It’s the latest must have gadget Apple have missed the target

Since everyone else is talking about it, I thought I would join in the fun.

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Tags: air, Apple, Linux, macbook, macbook air
Posted in Browsing, Linux | 11 Comments »

Lies, damned lies, and statistics

Wednesday, January 16th, 2008

Or “Buh-bye Google Analytics”.

As most of the commentary on my previous post about some statistics from this site (as reported by Google Analytics), the figures seemed… wrong.

Even though the Google Analytics code is included on every page I serve, the two obvious causes were:

People were blocking it (this seems more common than I realised) It’s broken in some undefinable way

Seeing as I have full access to my server logs, I decided to go directly to the proverbial horses mouth and see how the numbers work out from there.

The results are interesting to say the least.

Note: These statistics are purely for the same period – January 2008 up to the date of the this post. This means there may be some discrepancy between the GA figures in my other post and this one.

MPB (Most Popular Browser)

Google Analytics Logs
# Browser Percentage # Browser Percentage
1. Konqueror 42.55% 1. Firefox 61.2%
2. Safari 41.13% 2. MS Internet Explorer 15.3%
3. Opera 15.60% 3. Konquerer 6.7%
4. Firefox 0.71% 4. Unknown 4.2%
      5. Safari 3.6%

Bit of a difference, isn’t there?

Operating Systems

Google Analytics Logs
# Browser Percentage # Browser Percentage
1. Linux 45.39% 1. Linux 46.6%
2. Macintosh 36.88% 2. Windows 40.6%
3. Windows 11.35% 3. Macintosh 6.9%
4. (not set) 2.84% 4. Unknown 5.6%
5. iPod 2.13% 5. Sun Solaris <1%
6. iPhone 1.42% 6. FreeBSD <1%

Hmm. Some confusion there.

…and the moral of the story is:

Look before you…

No, wait, too many cooks…

That’s not right. It’s never work with animals, children, or a third party statistics package that relies on JavaScript. Especially when you have access to your own logs. So the real moral is don’t be lazy. Here endeth the lesson.

Tags: browser, firefox, google analytics, konquerer, Linux, macintosh, operating systems, safari, statistics, visitors
Posted in Browsing, Linux | 9 Comments »

Target Market?

Tuesday, January 15th, 2008

Cartoon courtesy of Hugh MacLeod.

It would seem my assumptions about the target market for this site are a bit off.

I skim through my report from Google Analytics every day or so to observe traffic, but I had a bit of a closer look today and noticed something interesting: Safari is the most popular browser to view this site.

Here are some of the more pertinent figures:

(more…)

Tags: browser, firefox, konquerer, Linux, macintosh, operating systems, safari, statistics, visitors
Posted in Browsing, Linux | 9 Comments »

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