Well, actually, I just found about it this week. The NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is "contest" to encourage people to write a novel. The goal is to write 50k words in one month.. from scratch, starting at 00:01 on Nov 1st with the deadline being 23:59 on …

This week's TechMail is Use DropBox to seamlessly sync files which discusses the DropBox service to synchronize files seamlessly and automatically between Windows, Mac, and Linux computers. This service works fantastic, BTW. 2GB of free storage with paid upgrade options. Currently still in beta, but from what I've seen so …

Seven weeks ago I setup a local copy of Bugzilla 3.2rc1 to test the upgrade/migration from 3.0.5, using the templates and data from Mandriva's bugzilla. Tonight it went live on qa.mandriva.com. Although it could have gone up 6 weeks ago, due to the release …

This week's techmail is Improve MySQL performance with MySQLTuner which discusses how to use the MySQLTuner perl script to tune the MySQL server to ensure you're not over-committing resources, that your configuration is sane, and giving helpful pointers on how to optimize your MySQL databases.

Last week's TechMail was Searching with GNOME Do, which discusses the application launcher GNOME Do, a fantastic little application. The thing I love about this is that on the mac I'm used to and spoiled by Launchbar, so this is something similar on the Linux side which is really nice …

Today marks the release of Mandriva Linux 2009.0 (the 23rd Mandriva release!) and for the first time in probably 5 years, I was actually involved with it's development. =) The last few years I've stepped away from any sort of a developers role simply due to lack of time (security …

Found some weirdness with subversion 1.5 today. I had previously upgraded to 1.5.1 when it came out (from 1.4.x) and found I couldn't commit to svn+ssh urls. 1.5.2 fixes that, but has a naughty habbit of upgrading the repository format behind your …

This week's TechMail is Listen to music with open source Banshee which is a brief introduction to the Banshee music player. I actually quite liked the player, despite it not being able to connect to my iTunes library (which I had hoped it would do). Was also a little irked …

Well, when my previous TechMail editor Sonja Thompson asked me to do an interview for TechRepublic a week or so ago, I was up for the gig but little did I realize until yesterday that it was for a podcast. I suppose if I had known that I would have …

The Canadian national do not call list is up which basically prevents telemarketers from phoning you, by registering your phone number(s) in the registry. All I can say is "about damn time".

Anyways, if you're Canadian and as annoyed by those yahoo telemarketers as me, you may want to …