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 …

This week's TechMail is Control Apache with the apachectl command which pretty much gives a brief primer of the different commands and cool things you can do with apachectl to control Apache.

This week's TechMail is Consider these Linux file management alternatives which discusses three alternatives to the "traditional" file managers (namely Nautilus and Konqueror). It discusses Midnight Commander, Gentoo, and Krusader (and to be honest, I really liked playing with Krusader... mc is an old hat for me, but Krusader was …

Last week's TechMail was Try command-line looping for added efficiency which discusses using loops in the shell to iterate over a number of items while using particular commands (i.e. for loops in the shell). Extremely useful stuff if you've ever needed to repeat something without wanting to hit the …

Was poking around and found some amusing "get a mac" ads on YouTube, done SouthPark style:

South Park Mac vs PC

South Park Mac vs PC vs Linux

OMG... YouTube is scary. You should check out this fellow trying to explain Why Linux is Better Than Windows. I think this …

I've spent the entire day yesterday and another day last week working on migrating the current Mandriva bugzilla 3.0.5 to the new 3.2rc1. You won't see it anywhere official until 2009.0 is released most likely, but having (some) spare time, I wouldn't to put it through …

This week's TechMail is Expanding text with Snippits in Linux, which discusses using Snippits (a ruby app) to do text expansion. Unfortunately, I went hunting for something that worked as well as Typinator or TextExpander on OS X and this was the only thing that seemed to come close. Not …