Bruce appears to have taken back this assertion here:
The rumor that China used a system Google put in place to enable lawful intercepts, which I used as a news hook for this essay, has not been confirmed. At this point, I doubt that it's true.
The original essay, linked to in TFP, is dated January 23rd; the update I quote from is from February 8th.
Huh, they're using the Nouveau driver...
on
Fedora 12 Released
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I notice in the release notes they're using the Nouveau driver for NVidia cards. I've been meaning to check the status of that driver for a while now -- but is this common in distros yet? (I'm a sysadmin mostly working on servers, so I'm a little out of touch.:-)
At my current and previous job, we used Drupal for public-facing websites. Although you're asking more about internal sites, and my experience is as a sysadmin (not a developer), I thought I'd chip in with my two cents.
First off, as someone above mentioned, there are modules for everything. That's great -- but when you upgrade, that means you're (potentially) upgrading every module as you go. This has caused us a few problems when, say, you need the very latest 2.x-dev version of something to go with the 6.x series in Drupal (have they fixed that bug you tripped over last time? is Drupal correctly detecting the change in module version?). Or when you're trying to find a module that does what you want, and you're choosing between three different implementations, each of which lacks some feature that you'd like.
Second -- and this is almost certainly my own ignorance -- we've had problems when staging changes to the site; specifically, what happens when you need to merge changes that were made on the current site with what you've been doing on the new & improved site? This was a small problem, but annoying; next time I'll probably take the Big Giant Lock approach and just say "no changes 'til the developer's finished." But there's bound to be a better solution out there, so feel free to correct me.
Third, Drupal is very very flexible in how you arrange it -- which can end up causing problems when you want to toss the thing over to (say) the secretary to maintain or add content to. This was particularly problematic for me because I'd only look at Drupal every three months or so, and promptly forget (say) how to add an item to the menu bar on the top, or the left, or how to add a sub-menu, or whatever. A similar problem was caused by the plugins we were using for image management, which turned images into nodes -- which ended up getting published to the front page because they were new. Once I figured out what was going wrong, it was relatively simple to track down the setting and turn it off...but it is confusing for someone who's not familiar w/Drupal.
Fourth, Drupal permissions are very very granular, and again this can be confusing. Often it seems simpler to just make people an editor rather than try to track down exactly what permission they lack on what particular class of nodes. And yes, that's wrong -- but it's tempting.
Now the disclaimers:
IANADD (I Am Not A Drupal Developer)
Lots of people seem very happy with it
Web development is really not my bag
I don't have a better suggestion
But I think these are things to keep in mind when considering any CMS.
It looks like Dell.ca isn't selling laptops anymore. For reasons (in no particular order) of patriotism, currency and hardware/warranty hassles, I'm interested in buying a laptop with working suspend-to-ram from a Canadian company...does anyone have any suggestions? (I know about the netbooks, but I'm wondering if there's anything else.)
As we pointed out in yesterday's post, the timing of the
Facebook "Error Check System" application and the subsequent Google
search results pointing to rogue antivirus sites was almost too
perfect to be a coincidence.
It's entirely possible that the whole
situation was designed to promote XP Antivirus variants such as
"Antivirus 360" and "XP Police" (Rogue:W32/XPAntivirus). That's the
formula, create something that spawns a search, then be ready to
provide results that redirect to malicious sites.
Either that or the bad guys are very quick on their feet and are
ruthlessly opportunistic.... They're both.
TFA links to the website (botmaster.net...you probably don't want
to go there) that sells XRumer. And what do I see for contact
information? botmaster.net@gmail.com.
Sorry, this is a bit of a sore point for me. At work, we have a
Solaris 10 machine that powers about 30 SunRays for mathematicians.
JDS is fine, but adding other programs is a pain. (Disclaimer coming
up, so bear with me.)
Blastwave: They just had the split. But before that there were
problems. Upgrading CUPS broke printing; they'd moved around some
Ghostscript filters. Upgrading Postfix broke Postfix, because they'd
moved the config files to play nicer with zones, and their script that
should've dropped everything in the right place didn't. These
were stable versions, not the unstable.
pkg-src: Great until you trip over something that won't compile
and spend days trying to track down what it is -- say, 1 package in 20. Sounds like good odds? Try compiling Firefox or Kile, with dependencies stretching back to libc and the Dead Sea scrolls. I'm guessing they
just aren't able to do as much testing on Solaris...and fair enough;
the job of making umpty thousand packages compile on mumble different
OS' is hard enough.
compile from source: fine, unless it's obscure (say, some
mathematical package) that assumes GNU tools all the way, or a Linux
OS, and weird, obscure things break.
download binaries: yes, if they've got 'em.
And now for the disclaimers: No, this isn't enterprise (which was
your point; I was looking for a place to jump into this discussion,
and the mention of Blastwave got me). Yes, a real sysadmin could
compile all this from scratch without problem. Yes, this is an edge
case on top of an edge case (desktops for mathematicians? How
obscure!). Yes, ZFS and dtrace are seriously, jaw-droppingly
awesome.
But this is my experience; so far, I simply have not done anything
remotely enterprise. It's all been server + desktop in small shops.
And for that environment, requirements are changing all the
time. The mail server now needs to do spam filtering and DNS. Yes,
they should be split up, but there isn't the budget. The new guy
wants KDE on his machine instead of Gnome, or needs to try out a new
library to see if it works.
And for these, it's not "set it and forget it"; we need new
packages, or updates to the old ones, all the time. If all the
heartache I described was a one-time thing, I'd do it and be
done...but in this environment, it'll need to be done again in three
months. That means a good package manager (hello, Debian!), or a good
ports tree (*BSD), or an environment that everyone is familiar with
(Linux, because it has just that much mindshare).
Bit of a rant, and less coherent than I'd like. But it's 6am, I
haven't had my coffee yet, and my kid's about to wake up...so I'll
have to leave it there.
The big one: go to LISA. It can be tough
convincing the boss to send their one-and-only IT guy, but it's an
incredibly exciting environment. You'll learn lots, you'll
meet lots, and you'll get to rub shoulders with people doing
incredible things -- and people in the same boat you are.
If you can't go to LISA, start reading
their proceedings. They've just opened up everything to the
public (previously you had to wait a year if you weren't a member),
and there are some incredible gems to be found. The MP3s from LISA '07 weren't
as good as being there would have been (sob), but they're still damned good.
You should still get a membership in SAGE. Subscribe to the mailing lists,
get a subscription to;login:, and inhale deeply.
Look around for professional organizations to join, or other
opportunities. There's a sysadmin group at the university where I
work; there's also a committee trying to figure out what the
university's IT strategy should be for the next 5-10 years. I've been
lucky enough to be involved with both, and they're interesting. Sure,
I run a small shop, but I've rubbed shoulders with (well, envied from
across the room:-) the guy in charge of a cluster of computers
that'll be processing data for the ATLAS
experiment.
Start your own techy/sysadmin conference, a la LUGRadio Live. No, LUGRadio
Live isn't particularly sysadmin-oriented, but I have the strong
impression that the organizers just decided they wanted to hold their
own conference, and they did. And if you look at the schedule for
their US conference, it's got a damned impressive list of presenters.
(I'm considering starting a sysadmin conference next summer in Vancouver, BC...anyone
interested?)
Other sources of info: Planet
Sysadmin (disclaimer: they've got my blog in there), ONLamp, and your local LUG.
(Which, incidentally, is why I voted for the GNU
Software Radio project. If "Think of the children!" is the
constitution's rootkit, "Think of the IP!" is its moneyed, bastard son.)
Came across one in the hallway of a university I sometimes work at;
it had been left for the janitors to take away so I snagged it for my
son. He's almost two, and has fun banging away on it...any time he
starts making his way toward my laptop, or my wife's, we just say,
"Hey, where's your laptop these days?"
Only problem is, my wife has an iBook, and once he notices that his
laptop isn't nearly as shiny as hers we're doomed. Lucky thing I'm a
Linux sysadmin...I can just point to an xterm once he starts wondering
about the difference between his laptop and ours.:-)
First off, you can't go wrong with Essential System
Administration, 3rd Edition by Aeleen Frisch. Really, really
excellent book.
But just as important as the specifics of Unix, I'd argue, is the
general question of how to be a good sysadmin. ("Start by
installing Linux" is my usual smart-ass answer, but I'll skip that for
right now...) The Practice
of System and Network Administration, 2nd Edition, by Tom
Limoncelli, Christine Hogan and Strata Chalup, is a truly excellent
book about how to be a good sysadmin in the general case. I can't
recommend it enough. (BTW, the link for the book comes from the authors' website, so
I presume it throws them a few nickels if you buy it that way.)
LONDON (AP) -- Google Apps today announced its first big hit: an
AsciiArt video streaming proxy aimed at struggling British ISPs.
Coded by a Melvin Haymeggle, a young college student, in a little
under 18 hours, the proxy uses the open-source video player MPlayer, and the video display
library aalib,
to convert streaming video on-the-fly into ASCII
art.
"At first it was just a joke between me and a few friends," said
Haymeggle. "Me and my roommates used it to mess with people leaching
our wireless to watch porn. But then Google App Engine was
announced, and we figured it would be fun to write up some Python
bindings for it."
The announcement comes at a perilous time for British ISPs, who
have been struggling to come to terms with the increased demand for
on-demand video as a result of BBC's iPlayer.
"We were shocked -- shocked! -- to realize that new Internet
applications result in increased use of resources like bandwidth,"
said Charles Freskell, a spokesman for the British ISPs Association.
"We were on the verge of sending a bill to the BBC when this proxy
came along."
The application quickly and seamlessly converts the iPlayer's
1024x960, 24-bit colour, 30 frame-per-second video stream into an 80x25,
8-bit greyscale, 4 frame-per-second video stream. It is estimated
that the proxy will save over 9 petabytes per furlong-fortnight.
Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman could not be
reached for comment. "He's just mad that everyone has forgotten this
was available in Emacs since 1997," said a source close to the open
source figurehead.
Slashdot Mirror
The original essay, linked to in TFP, is dated January 23rd; the update I quote from is from February 8th.
score one for human rights
and score one for google's integrity
today is a good day
No kidding. I'll be very interested to see what Yahoo does, especially given their own cooperation with China's secret police.
Is there anything Emacs can't do? :-)
Oh man, I just started playing with that at the OpenSourceCMS demo, and is that ever nice! Thanks very kindly for the pointer.
Another vote for org-mode. Checklists + todo + export-to-whatever makes awesome.
Another mirror, just in case.
I notice in the release notes they're using the Nouveau driver for NVidia cards. I've been meaning to check the status of that driver for a while now -- but is this common in distros yet? (I'm a sysadmin mostly working on servers, so I'm a little out of touch. :-)
At my current and previous job, we used Drupal for public-facing websites. Although you're asking more about internal sites, and my experience is as a sysadmin (not a developer), I thought I'd chip in with my two cents.
First off, as someone above mentioned, there are modules for everything. That's great -- but when you upgrade, that means you're (potentially) upgrading every module as you go. This has caused us a few problems when, say, you need the very latest 2.x-dev version of something to go with the 6.x series in Drupal (have they fixed that bug you tripped over last time? is Drupal correctly detecting the change in module version?). Or when you're trying to find a module that does what you want, and you're choosing between three different implementations, each of which lacks some feature that you'd like.
Second -- and this is almost certainly my own ignorance -- we've had problems when staging changes to the site; specifically, what happens when you need to merge changes that were made on the current site with what you've been doing on the new & improved site? This was a small problem, but annoying; next time I'll probably take the Big Giant Lock approach and just say "no changes 'til the developer's finished." But there's bound to be a better solution out there, so feel free to correct me.
Third, Drupal is very very flexible in how you arrange it -- which can end up causing problems when you want to toss the thing over to (say) the secretary to maintain or add content to. This was particularly problematic for me because I'd only look at Drupal every three months or so, and promptly forget (say) how to add an item to the menu bar on the top, or the left, or how to add a sub-menu, or whatever. A similar problem was caused by the plugins we were using for image management, which turned images into nodes -- which ended up getting published to the front page because they were new. Once I figured out what was going wrong, it was relatively simple to track down the setting and turn it off...but it is confusing for someone who's not familiar w/Drupal.
Fourth, Drupal permissions are very very granular, and again this can be confusing. Often it seems simpler to just make people an editor rather than try to track down exactly what permission they lack on what particular class of nodes. And yes, that's wrong -- but it's tempting.
Now the disclaimers:
But I think these are things to keep in mind when considering any CMS.
HTH...
It looks like Dell.ca isn't selling laptops anymore. For reasons (in no particular order) of patriotism, currency and hardware/warranty hassles, I'm interested in buying a laptop with working suspend-to-ram from a Canadian company...does anyone have any suggestions? (I know about the netbooks, but I'm wondering if there's anything else.)
...can be found here:
http://nitrolab.engr.wisc.edu/
Fair point -- I never thought of that. However, there are some other links to this:
Maybe this is legit...
You laugh, but that situation is just what F-Secure describes for an unrelated bit of Facebook malware. FTFA:
TFA links to the website (botmaster.net...you probably don't want to go there) that sells XRumer. And what do I see for contact information? botmaster.net@gmail.com.
Sure hope they don't get spammed. Whatever you do, don't publish that email address! botmaster.net@gmail.com -- don't do it!
Blastwave...heh. Which Blastwave are you talking about?
Sorry, this is a bit of a sore point for me. At work, we have a Solaris 10 machine that powers about 30 SunRays for mathematicians. JDS is fine, but adding other programs is a pain. (Disclaimer coming up, so bear with me.)
And now for the disclaimers: No, this isn't enterprise (which was your point; I was looking for a place to jump into this discussion, and the mention of Blastwave got me). Yes, a real sysadmin could compile all this from scratch without problem. Yes, this is an edge case on top of an edge case (desktops for mathematicians? How obscure!). Yes, ZFS and dtrace are seriously, jaw-droppingly awesome.
But this is my experience; so far, I simply have not done anything remotely enterprise. It's all been server + desktop in small shops. And for that environment, requirements are changing all the time. The mail server now needs to do spam filtering and DNS. Yes, they should be split up, but there isn't the budget. The new guy wants KDE on his machine instead of Gnome, or needs to try out a new library to see if it works.
And for these, it's not "set it and forget it"; we need new packages, or updates to the old ones, all the time. If all the heartache I described was a one-time thing, I'd do it and be done...but in this environment, it'll need to be done again in three months. That means a good package manager (hello, Debian!), or a good ports tree (*BSD), or an environment that everyone is familiar with (Linux, because it has just that much mindshare).
Bit of a rant, and less coherent than I'd like. But it's 6am, I haven't had my coffee yet, and my kid's about to wake up...so I'll have to leave it there.
Same again.
Here are a few things that have helped me out:
Hope this helps!
And from the AutoMotivator comes this gem of a poster of John McCarthy. Oh, how I laughed...
They can't, legally, unless there's something criminal going on.
You mean, like telling you how to decrypt DVDs?
(Which, incidentally, is why I voted for the GNU Software Radio project. If "Think of the children!" is the constitution's rootkit, "Think of the IP!" is its moneyed, bastard son.)
Came across one in the hallway of a university I sometimes work at; it had been left for the janitors to take away so I snagged it for my son. He's almost two, and has fun banging away on it...any time he starts making his way toward my laptop, or my wife's, we just say, "Hey, where's your laptop these days?"
Only problem is, my wife has an iBook, and once he notices that his laptop isn't nearly as shiny as hers we're doomed. Lucky thing I'm a Linux sysadmin...I can just point to an xterm once he starts wondering about the difference between his laptop and ours. :-)
First off, you can't go wrong with Essential System Administration, 3rd Edition by Aeleen Frisch. Really, really excellent book.
But just as important as the specifics of Unix, I'd argue, is the general question of how to be a good sysadmin. ("Start by installing Linux" is my usual smart-ass answer, but I'll skip that for right now...) The Practice of System and Network Administration, 2nd Edition, by Tom Limoncelli, Christine Hogan and Strata Chalup, is a truly excellent book about how to be a good sysadmin in the general case. I can't recommend it enough. (BTW, the link for the book comes from the authors' website, so I presume it throws them a few nickels if you buy it that way.)
Thanks very much for taking the time to respond. I appreciate your taking the time to do so.
LONDON (AP) -- Google Apps today announced its first big hit: an AsciiArt video streaming proxy aimed at struggling British ISPs.
Coded by a Melvin Haymeggle, a young college student, in a little under 18 hours, the proxy uses the open-source video player MPlayer, and the video display library aalib, to convert streaming video on-the-fly into ASCII art.
"At first it was just a joke between me and a few friends," said Haymeggle. "Me and my roommates used it to mess with people leaching our wireless to watch porn. But then Google App Engine was announced, and we figured it would be fun to write up some Python bindings for it."
The announcement comes at a perilous time for British ISPs, who have been struggling to come to terms with the increased demand for on-demand video as a result of BBC's iPlayer.
"We were shocked -- shocked! -- to realize that new Internet applications result in increased use of resources like bandwidth," said Charles Freskell, a spokesman for the British ISPs Association. "We were on the verge of sending a bill to the BBC when this proxy came along."
"Of course, we're still going to be monetizing content ruthlessly," he added quickly.
The application quickly and seamlessly converts the iPlayer's 1024x960, 24-bit colour, 30 frame-per-second video stream into an 80x25, 8-bit greyscale, 4 frame-per-second video stream. It is estimated that the proxy will save over 9 petabytes per furlong-fortnight.
Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman could not be reached for comment. "He's just mad that everyone has forgotten this was available in Emacs since 1997," said a source close to the open source figurehead.
drowning out all the more thoughtful status updates on Facebook?
I nearly modded +1 funny for that, but I had to clean the coffee off my keyboard first.
Ze goggles, zey do nossing.
That's a lot of cows.</walken>