I'm a week behind as the 20th anniversary of "Open Source" was a week ago. Back on February 3, 1998 the term "Open Source" was coined as a result of the decision of Netscape Communications Corp to give away the source code to it's Netscape Navigator browser earlier on January 23, 1998. Red Hat has a nice recap of what happened then in its Celebrating the 20th anniversary of open source ...
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This week's TechMail is A Mandriva user kicks around Fedora Core 10: How does it compare? (not the title I chose, but I guess my editor figured it needed my "flare"). Basically talks about my first impressions of using Fedora 10, considering I've more or less exclusively used Mandriva for the last 9+ years, and F10 was my first Fedora install since FC3 or thereabouts. It's amusing to read some of the ...
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Well, technically speaking, I guess this is a bit of a downgrade. But, since I'm not longer using Mandriva and need to get used to Red Hat products (Fedora, RHEL, etc.), CentOS makes sense for upgrading my internal server to. It was also a long week, so I goofed a bit on it (I did backups of mysql and ldap, but didn't do dumps of the data which I only realized after the ...
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Well, today is my last day and so without much fanfare I say "adieu" to Mandriva.
As the title indicates, never a dull moment. You get spoiled with new stuff, then have to go back and re-setup old stuff. Part of this switch for Oden is that the build system goes with him, but of course it's cheaper to just get him new equipment than to send my aging stuff. No problem there, ...
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Some statistics, before I go on holidays until the end of the year.
Looking at bugfix updates, we've seen a steady increase since I've kept track (going back to 1999, although I think in 1999 it was only a half-year of doing updates).
1999: 13 2000: 24 2001: 25 2002: 27 2003: 44 2004: 64 2005: 65 2006: 67 2007: 144 2008: 214 (to-date)For security updates, it's not quite as drastic, at least not in the ...
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I've been saying it for a while, but never really put hard evidence to it. Our community has declined and by the numbers I'll produce, I'm going to say it declined a lot. I just wrote a quick shell script to parse the number of messages posted to each given list (cooker, expert, and newbie) since 2003 (takes the total for each month and adds them together to get the yearly total). ...
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A good friend of mine has over the last little while been feeding me some really great books that have made me re-evaluate a lot of things. The first book is "PresentationZen" (ISBN: 978-0-321-52565-9) which gives some really great ideas regarding presentation design and delivery of presentations. While it primarily focuses on design pertaining to things like powerpoint, the "rules" the author talks about (be they rules of design or rules of ...
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Some lesser-known urpmi tricks I've had to figure out today. The situation is that the machine that had my mirrored files has been moved somewhere else in order to ease up on rsync being an absolute bandwidth pig (great for downloading, bad when it's throwing nagios checks into fits).
Anyways, I've setup both a private rsync repository to get stuff from and an IP-restricted anonymous FTP. Both instances didn't work "out of the box" ...
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The Mandriva community is small, yes, but tight-knit. This can be evidenced by the comments in my previous blog entry and the many emails I received privately, and the many chats initiated on IRC. It has been my honor and privilege to work with you guys, and I sincerely appreciate all the extremely kind sentiments that I received. Despite my "layoff" being short-lived.
The same short-lived layoff cannot be said about two of ...
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Well, I received some horrid news today.
As of December 31st, my contract with Mandriva will be terminated and I will no longer be working for Mandriva. We've got a new CEO now, and he's determined there is to be no remote contractors, and as a result I've been booted from the camp, so to speak. Over the last 8.5 years, I've seen CEOs come and go, restructures, other remote contractors get the boot, ...
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