Opensource pragmatism

I just wanted to revisit the discussion of software as dogma.  I think it is very important that the open source community get the preference when the software is equal to or better than the closed source version.  But when the closed source version is well ahead of any open source competition, there is a requirement as a professional that I am as effective and efficient as possible.

Yes, this is a declaration that I use closed source software.  Absolutely NEVER when I can avoid it, but always when it is a difference between doing my work/play well.  If I have to get something done and it means I have a binary blob in my Linux installation, then so be it.  Most of us make these compromises often with flash or java as a start, many more even with binary blobs for video drivers, skype and more.  So while I am an open source advocate and recommend transitions to linux and migration from corporate systems for infrastructure to open source servers and software.  But only where they are equal or greater than the closed source solution.

I don't want this to sound like I don't have respect for young software projects who are struggling to reverse engineer and create the replacement software.  I do have a vast respect for the persons who, scratching their own itch are looking to produce the open source alternative, and I've contributed to a couple of those projects in the past doing documentation and testing (I can't program).  I know how daunting and huge such an activity is.

I just wanted to write this post since I've heard, more than a few times, in the last months very derogatory statements against members of the community who participate and contribute just because they have a windows computer for playing video games.  And I have a strong sensation that most of the people to are very critical of that, probably have already binary blogs on thier own systems and that makes them hypocrites, even if the insults are being cast at the wider OS level of consumption, my argument is that a little closed source is just as bad as a lot.  So, unless you are running GNU Hurd linux on your system, then you probably need to silence any condescending remarks to any of the open source community who do use a Mac or Windows for specific tasks that fall outside the area of expertise and excellence by the closed source community.

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CafeNinja
 
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Home Server - Media (tvmobili + subsonic)

As part of my home server project, I've been trying to configure what should be a multimedia server solution.  With PC's, laptops, TV and mobile devices who all connect in the house I was looking for the combinations that would produce the most viewed media on the most devices.

My first attempt was to return to Mythtv.  But after the server took a upgrade to the mythtv package it basically borked the db, and mis-matched with the desktop clients that I couldn't find the correct versions for.

I then tried to look into DLNA compliance a few months back with the introduction of a new TV.  Ushare was simple to configure and it seemed to speak the folder structure to the TV but didn't give the list of files.  I then installed tvmobili which works 100% and serves the files over DLNA to the TV with no issue.

Previous computer solution was Boxee using Samba (windows file sharing) to stream.  This was nice because it would pull all metadata as well as subtitles.   I haven't gotten rid of the Boxee solution, but I will probably look into XMBC for the same purpose without the customization.  XMBC should be a bit more resilient to changes as it is the code base for Boxee.

My newest discovery is Subsonic.  Man, I can't say enough good about this one.  Simple deb package install on my ubuntu server, web interface makes management/configuration completely painless.  It comes with simple and built-in dynamic DNS service.  It does ask for a donation to the project for a license that allows video streaming playback beyond a 30 day trial period.  I will be making that donation.  The web interface offers a flash player playback with adjustable bitrate to support LAN connections or even 3G connections.  Very well developed howto included to help with firewall issues if there and I have to say it's just working.  I've tried the Android client and the performance and results is truly impressive.  Try the demo on your own, see if you think it is work a small donation to the project.

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CafeNinja

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Online vim tutor - web based

For anyone who wanted to have the most very basic of commands to use in VIM in order to break into the command line world, there is a very good online tutorial which is nice for learning vim from a system that doesn't have it installed.  The online version has a specific sub-set of commands which a person would learn from vimtutor, but it is a good start and offers step through video side-by-side.

This might spark the question of "why".  The most impressive first reason to learn vim if you aren't using a linux system would be to log into a system as a user to make a text file in a hidden little corner of their home network.  I have such a server in the house where there is the shared printer, file shares, media and all home servers are run.

Obviously, this is the gateway drug to wanting to learn more, to run vimtutor once logged into that system and then to go online and look up every key combination available.  I still stick to my decision to use vim.  I know the vim vs. emacs war is long and the history trails with the text file bodies of the innocent victims.  I do personally think that emacs is probably much more extensible, but it is default included in 0 popular operating systems.  While every Unix and Linux kernel have vi (vim's grandfather) included and you will never find a system without at least vi.

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CafeNinja

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Featured Interview on The Frostcast - Part Deux

Oops, I did it again.  With the help of Jonathan Nadeau, and making another appearance on the Frostcast.  In this episode we had a very specific discussion on the personal cloud project that I'm working on at the house. 

We talk about the hardware and the server applications being run up to present in more detail than I've covered on the Tin Foil Hat Show to date.  So please, check out his podcast. 

I did discover during this interview that the shownotes for the Tin Foil Hat show are handi-accessible which makes me very happy.  As always I had a great time chatting with Jonathan, and I'm really looking forward to more from him in the future.   I've linked to Jonathan's welcome announcement at the FSF's intern program.  And make sure to stay tuned to all the Frostbitemedia podcasts to hear about his upcoming projects that he told me about off-line.

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CafeNinja

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Featured Interview on The Frostcast

Hey CafeNinja fans, yes there is one of you.  I just wanted to say that I was interviewed on Jonathan Nadeau's podcast called the Frostcast in association with his entire Frostbite empire.

I have a lot of respect for Johnathan and try to treat him as any other of our geek peers as he has done an amazing job of standing on his own and being independent.  If you want to know more about why that may or may not be impressive, please visit his blog site, store and 4 podcasts he produces and be as impressed with him as I am.

In this interview (which was long) we talk about a wide range of topics most of which are Tin Foil Hat related, so please go find his Frostcast feed or search for "Frostcast" in iTunes, and have a listen.  Probably you should subscribe since I will be doing a follow up interview with him in regards to my personal cloud server experiment.  Never mind that he has great content and has had some really good interviews.

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CafeNinja

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Podcast Review Promo material

I'm a bad podcaster, but I have proven that I am a worse producer.

Here is all the promo material that was sent to me after I requested it.  To the defense and credit of these podcasters they were replying to my message that I was ususally sending as recording or just before and none of them really had time to get back to me before post-production was done.

But I did want everyone to hear the promo material that I didn't have for podcasts that I have reviewed that WAS sent to me.

So first for Keith and the Girl, Chema (the glorious) sent me the link to their promo video.



Dann from The Linux Link Tech Show, who I caught on vacation with my request for promo material, sent me the intro music for the show as well as the newest and greatest audio promo for their podcast.


Again, my apologies to the the other podcasters out there that I have "snubbed" by not getting their promo material before I released my podcast, I will confess without exception, that this was always my fault and not theirs.

Enjoy these promo reels and I'll try to give the next "victim" advance notice.  :)

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CafeNinja

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Home Server deployment - Part 1

So I got a home server (nettop system dual core atom).  I'm migrating my current server applications from the wife's desktop (always on) system to the new low power consumption system.

Here is what I ordered:
Shuttle XS35GT Barebones Nettop (No OS) (1.66GHz, 2GB, 500GB, No Monitor)

So I have already migrated dnsmasq (copy config and hosts files), ddclient to update the "way home", nzb grabber and samba which is the method I've gone to since my mythtv setup went bonkers in my 10.10 upgrade.

I'm running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS server to ensure stability.  I'm hoping it should prevent issues with stability.

I've got on the list to re-deploy mythtv, asterisk, openarena-server, a LAMP stack with some CMS system that will let the wife have/manage a website, statusnet and if possible I'll try to set up a server to receive the mozilla sync or xmarks in such a way that my "personal cloud" should be close.

I'm making a conscious choice to not migrate email as that system needs to be higher availability and accessibility than my home dsl and system can manage.

I'll try to chronicle my tales here.  So far it's been pretty easy to migrate servers by installing the server and then moving the configuration file.  The biggest issue so far has been me who forgets network orientation (one IP vs. another) or file permissions.  Outside of that, it's been pretty easy.

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CafeNinja

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Guest Appearance on The Linux Link Tech Show

Hey CafeNinja fans.  Ok, fan.  In November of 2010 I was a guest host on TLLTS Podcast.  Recently I was also a guest and was interviewed on the show.  It ran so long that it got dropped into the TLLTS feed as a single episode.

Feel free to go listen and I would highly recommend you listen to the show and add it to your podcast feed if you haven't already.  They guys there are a lot of fun to listen to, but don't expect them to stay on topic, if you do, you will be disappointed.  If you liked the interview with me be sure to send

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CafeNinja

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Well, it turns out that I can read. I know, who would have thunk? I did a review of "Atlas Shrugged" with Dann Washko from TLLTS (look it up if you don't know). Stranger still is that Dann can read too!

So we were talking it over and decided to do a book review which wasn't really the content for either of our podcasts, so we recorded it and set it up to HPR and it got dropped!!!

If you are interested in hearing what Dann and I had to say then please go listen to the podcast and offer feedback for Dann and I who are actually talking about reviewing other books that we have both read.

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CafeNinja

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Fun CLI uses

So if nothing we have learned that command line interfaces are not for novice users, very efficient, loved by CafeNinja and usually very boring and never any fun.

Well that isn't quite true.  I follow one my my favorite sites commandlinefu.com and have in the last few weeks seen some great fun uses of commands that can make anyone look to be a command line ninja with no further training.

The first command that I noticed makes use of a ncurses dialog box.  The command reads like this:

"dialog --gauge "Processing..." 6 40 36"  This defines a progress par that has reached 36 percent with the other numbers being the measure of the progress box.  This doesn't "do" anything, it is stuck in this way and uses no resources, but can make you look quite busy "processing" something.  It looks like the image I've put here.  You make it go away by just pressing Ctrl+C.


The next one make the screen just spew gibberish from the random number generator.  The only "problem" with this one is that it can drive even new processors to spike 100%, even worse than a run away flash page.  I added the "timelimit" command portion to prevent this running on a system that I'm not watching closely.  The command itself is 'cat /dev/urandom | hexdump -d |grep "25"', and will run crazy on your cpu.  My version is : 'timelimit -t120 cat /dev/urandom | hexdump -d |grep "25"'  This looks like this:


There are other commands that can actually make the progress bar count up like "for i in `seq 0 100`;do timeout 6 dialog --gauge "Install..." 6 40 "$i";done"  which like the first command is only making a dialog box that ins't really doing anything besides counting.  Look for your favorite and post them back here.  I bet we can make a small collection that if launched and run in an individual Terminator tab could always make you look diligent and beat the crap outta any "Boss key".

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CafeNinja

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App Review (Update) : tty-clock - working on Ubuntu

Previously I mentioned an app called tty-clock.  I really do like it, but on Ubuntu it didn't quite compile nice so I thought I would give the quick "howto" get it working.

1.) Grab source code and unpack
2.) install the dependencies with "sudo apt-get install ncurses-dev ncurses-runtime ncurses-term"
3**.) Optional--Open the Makefile in the source code folder and change the $INSTALLPATH=/usr/bin/
4.) Terminal in the source code directory and do "make" (should have no errors) and then "sudo make install".

After that the tty-clock should be accessible.   For your information I use the flags to display seconds, center the time and set the color to blue.   Looks like "tty-clock -s -c -C 6" and I hope that might help you get it working on your Ubuntu system.   I've added a screen grab of my clock so you can see what the command does output.

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CafeNinja

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Command Line Time - tty-clock

I was playing around with Arch Linux (another blog post soon to follow) and I found a neat little cli application.  I should say "cute" instead of neat.  I should also put this application find in the context in which I use it.

The find is tty-clock, it is a simple digital clock with only a few options.  In my daily pattern I have terminator open with multiple screen sessions to multiple servers.  In each of the screen sessions I'm using the byobu (formerly known as screen-profiles) to give myself a "taskbar" for the screen sessions.  This app, is then just one horizontal and vertical split in a screen filled with terminator with many tabs and splits already.  and it just means that without squinting, I can actually see the time.

This is what tty-clock looks like in action.  With just large Atari 2600 generation 8-bit color and date display centered in the open terminator split it is simply understated and serves it's purpose.  ->

I did also find binclock.py which is an executable script and while it serves the same purpose is the binary clock version.  After downloading, just set the python script to executable and put it in your path (/usr/bin/ or so) and run it. So yet one more split with even more time telling fun.






I do want to give all the credit to the links I found these gems at, I was for the most part cruising and looking for Arch Linux stuff and I came across this stuff.  So I found these apps by looking through K.Mandla’s blog, and Yu-Jie Lin's feedburner got me some other stuff.  Seems they are cli junkies like me.

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CafeNinja

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Even a Geek - Happy 18th Anniversary

For those of you who didn't know that CafeNinja was married, it's true.  I can now officially acknowledge it since we seem to have gotten over the probation period, the lab testing phase, the second development cycle process, the planning phase, the initial deployment, integration procedure, the alpha and the beta tests and find ourselves in full-blown "production".

After a short 17yr development cycle I call it "official".   While I write this post with humor, I have the greatest respect for my wife, lover, confident, nurse, supporter, advisor, financial director, child bringer and best friend of 18yrs.  

Love you honey!!!  Happy Anniversary.

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CafeNinja

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Mythtv - wow, why didn't I do that before?

MythTv.  I think most of us have heard about it, but have put if off since it sounded too difficult, or complicated or required a bunch of hardware we didn't have.

Well, this changed slightly for me once I had enough of a media library (don't ask me where I got it from) that it was just becoming silly to manage on one computer connected to the TV in the living room.  With some shows for the oldest son only, some shows for the wife only and then some shows that really should have all of us together in a room at one time, it was becoming too restrictive to tie the media to a dedicated machine, with single user and single space access.

So I dropped in mythtv.  Standard repo stuff from Ubuntu 10.04.  I added all the additional repos that looked interesting and that gave me the server "backend" and the player "frontend" on the house server which had all the media.  I then installed the frontend on 2 mac's, and 4 other Ubuntu systems.  And now everyone can connect and watch their shows without needing to be in the living room.

I had a few glitches, the mac binary frontends were the easiest to set up.  But once done, it's running great.  I will be taking the time to push over the photos and the music since that just makes since as well as it's working for video.

-- CafeNinja

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Mutt - the cool kid's RC file

 I've gotten quite a few recent requests in regards to my muttrc file.  I blame notKlaatu for that.  For those who don't know, it's the file that sets all the preferences in the most awesome text based email reader, mutt.

So I'll keep the post short since the file speaks for itself.  It has comments in it.  As a disclaimer this one is being used with mutt 1.5.20 (2009-06-14) patched with the sidebar patch (see previous posts).

Get a zip of my Gmail prepared muttrc file here.

Enjoy everyone.  Tell your friends to come by and have a peek.

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CafeNinja

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Twitter is dead to me

This is my official blog post to explain my reason for migrating from Twitter to Identi.ca.  I have to say up front that both of these services do about the same job and I have very nearly the same list of folks I follow on both.

Let me just get these points out there and you may all comment as you wish.  I hope that maybe you will consider that my dive into social networking has been quite telling to me in that I still hang with the same geeks in the same IRC channels and some of them have basically become my social network.  I realize that maybe being on every service, and feeling an obligation to make different posts isn't the right way.  I feel that this step will not reduce the number of people who will see my stuff or make suffer anyone who follows me on either network.  This is also just one more step for me to try and reduce the number of social networking interfaces I have to deal with.

1. Open source.  I should put my money where my mouth is and promote the service that is open source.
2. The commercialism of services that scrub Twitter and have profits from the words of the masses bothers me.  You may feel different, and this is not a condemnation of you.  My "boycott" will not make/break Twitter.
3. Function: I enjoy that I get an email to direct reply to my posts on identi.ca
4. Function: I enjoy that conversations are now visible in context.
5. The community on identi.ca seems to be populated with folks who are more like me.  Twitter has just gotten too big for my tastes.  It is too mainstream and I probably won't hang out there.

With all that being said, I think it important in this internet age that I keep my presence and moniker present in the Twitter system therefore, I will be keeping the Twitter account, but all of my posts will be made to identi.ca where there is a "connect" feature that will forward posts to Twitter.   The poor part is that I will never know about folks who @cafeninja me on Twitter.  I would ask that if you don't have an identi.ca account, please DM me in twitter so that I receive an email.  Again, I won't be logging into twitter directly anymore.

If my choice has managed to sever some sort of communication channel for any of you, please post a comment.  I'm human and fallible, maybe there is something/someone I haven't considered.

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CafeNinja

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Inx 1.1 review

After listening to TiT Radio Episode #15, I found the link that was suggested by Azimuth.  This is really, really cool if you want to get some serious command line goodness.

The distro is called inx 1.1  and it is based on ubuntu 8.04 LTS.  It is also only a live distro, currently there are no simple install methods.  There is a Virtualbox image that you can download and just run without any burning/rebooting/hacking involved.  I am going to request that any and all geeks who would like to see this project continue to send feedback to the project.  I think it's fantastic and think it would be a great idea for a meta-package to make sure all the cli/ncurses apps that are used in his menu scripts are there, and then have this as an option from gdm to boot into (saving even more resources).

I am VERY taken with this.  There are just enough tools to do 98% of what people do with their computers and brings it down to the lowest common denominator.  I'm going to be trying to send as much feedback as possible to try and help those guys prepare for a new release using 10.4 when it comes out since there have been some dramatic improvements in the package selection since 8.04 (like screen-profiles a.k.a byobu).  Here is an example of some of the cli goodness you get with this tiny and non-resouce intensive distro:

I will be following this distro closely as it will help me also to have multiple VM machines which actually have some applications in them and do more than reply to ping when testing network apps on my host and home network.  If you look close at that screenshot the RAM footprint was almost 50mb!  Again, that is loaded with apps that are useful if you only take some time to make yourself familiar with them.

Enjoy CLI Geeks, and even if you don't use the whole distro, dig in there and check you the apps that come with the distro to see what you can add your command line arsenal.

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CafeNinja

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Bit of Humor

I heard the audio from this video on one of my podcasts.  Found it on Youtube and just felt I needed to share.



Enjoy!
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CafeNinja

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Barcodes Invented - Google Doodle

 Of very interesting note was the new Google logo.  Clearly in celebration of the creation of bar codes.  I used an online barcode generator to confirm that the one on the Google home page spells "Google".  I thought it would be interesting to both link to the generator as well as create one for the blog.

This is very cool stuff, and if I had a barcode scanner I would probably go crazy making labels and writing scripts to inventory my belongings as well as itemize grocery lists.


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CafeNinja

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Playdeb - what fun!

Ok, I don't know what rock I've been living under.  But today I found a link from our friends at GetDeb to a new beta site called PlayDeb.

MAN!  I've not seen a more comprehensive selection of games for Linux in a long time.  Anyone who tells you there are no games for Linux is lying or very uneducated. 

This site actually adds a repository so you can add/remove games the same way you would any other application.  As well, it should follow that when they repackage new versions of the games, they would come down via the normal system updates.

There is a fab list of the games available on the front page of the site.  They range from First Person Shooters, to car racing and puzzle type games.  Some are simple, some are complex.  It really is a great list if you are tired of snake and mahjong games.

Don't just take my word for it, check it out!  And remember to play as hard as you geek.

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CafeNinja