Click not just at the 1,000-entry mark, it’s also 2 years old

In my recent post, in which I related how I missed the fact that Click had reached its 1,000th post, I neglected to mark another blog milestone:

Click is 2 years old. I had forgotten, until I looked at the monthly-archives list on the lower left side of this page, that Click began its life in August 2006, under the auspices of now-former Los Angeles Daily News online guru Josh Kleinbaum. He let me pick the name, which was a nice thing.

I had been doing some technology blogging on my own, but the chance to do it for the Daily News has been, for lack of a more sophisticated cliche, a wonderful experience.

Not the least of that wonderfulness is being able to write exactly what I want with no interference whatsoever. The blog is here, I write, and that’s all there is to it.

That said, I’m trying to broaden its appeal somewhat. My weekly print column aims at a more general audience (not that Linux, OpenBSD, old hardware and free, open-source applications don’t play a part in it), and I’d like to give that audience more in this blog than the nerdish revelry that comes with succesfully writing to my OpenBSD disklabel and not blowing the whole system to bits while doing it.

Once again, if you work at the Daily News, or any Los Angeles Newspaper Group paper, and you want to write about technology your way, I’d love to have you do it here. I’ll set you up right away.

And thanks, readers, for stopping by, writing comments and linking to all of this froth and circumstance.

The Click archives: Every post in this blog on one page

Seriously, people, I do a lot of work on this Movable Type installation, and I never knew that the archives page for each of the L.A. Daily News blogs features a link to every single post in the blog.

It also features links to every category page, separated by months, as well as author category pages (which most blogs, including this one, really don’t need because they’re basically one-wo/man shows).

It basically offers a link to every static HTML page generated by Movable Type for this blog. Yep, MT builds a whole lot of pages.

Approaching the Singularity at Microsoft

And you thought all Microsoft ever did was roll out endless iterations of Windows and Office in between buying some competitors and threatening to sue the rest — but there’s something going on up in Redmond, Wash., that looks like genuine innovation.

Yep, Microsoft has been working on a new operating system — one they say is unencumbered by four decades of computing history — called Singularity. They’ve been hacking away at the thing since 2003, but this week saw the first public release of the code. I can barely understand what they’re talking about, and it looks as if installing the thing gives you a very Unix-like command line.

Mary Jo Foley of ZDNet on Singularity.
Larry Dignan of ZDNet on Singularity.
Singularity on Wikipedia.

And in what looks like a very un-Microsoft move, the company is actually inviting academics and others to download what they’ve got so far and play around with it.

The whole point here is that Windows, based on the MS-DOS of the ’80s and a whole bunch of earlier Windows releases after that, and even all the Unix derivatives (including Linux and the BSDs), which go back to the Multics days of the ’60s, have at their core a whole lot of ideas that might not be the best for today and tomorrow’s hardware and the uses we make of it.

And who has deeper pockets than Microsoft to fund just such a project?

If the Singularity project does move forward, it could give Microsoft an advantage in the server room, where Windows isn’t exactly breaking any records. And Singularity — or something else totally new and not encumbered by legacy code — could even become the basis for a new desktop operating system.

I bag on Microsoft a lot — many of us do — but it’s nice to know that even a few people up there in Redmond are trying to innovate instead of litigate, give something potentially worthwhile to the world of computing, and give people who will never try Linux a reason not to suffer with Windows any longer.

Another desktop-focused OS of note: Haiku is buiit on the now-defunct BeOS operating system and is designed from the ground up to excel on the desktop. I saw a demo at SCALE 6x, and while I was impressed, I’ll be more impressed when the project is further along. Besides being tuned to do the things that desktop users want to do quickly and well (with a heavy emphasis on multimedia), Haiku’s filesystem-as-database approach is certainly novel.

And when you see how hard it is to get a nascent OS off the ground — look at how long Microsoft takes — the progress made since the ’90s in Linux, as well as OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD, is pretty amazing. It just shows you the value and power of the open-source development model.

Can Microsoft match it?

Totally unrelated: So I’m Googling to find an answer to something, and all I get, pretty much, are my own articles on the topic. But I found out that this Estonian (yes, Estonian) Web site, FreeSoftNews, links to just about everything I write. Thanks!

Foresight, hindsight, Debian, BSD, Linux books … and the 5 a.m. problem

I’ve taken a few days off from OpenBSD, and in the interim I ran the NetBSD live CD for the first time on the Gateway Solo 1450 (the $0 Laptop). Again, it looks great, but I’m so far from figuring out how to manage the CPU fan in any of the BSDs that I’m not optimistic about running any of them on this laptop. I wish it were different, but until the heavens open and the path forward is made much more clear, I’ll stick to desktops (and my old 1999-era Compaq Armada pre-ACPI laptop) for BSD.

During that time, I booted into Debian Lenny on the Gateway and installed 141 updates. Debian Lenny is moving along very quickly. I’m ready to put an Etch install alongside it for comparison’s sake during the wait for Ubuntu 8.04 … which is two months at this writing.

The best text editor for the job: The other day, I needed to do some work at home, and I wasn’t having a great time with the Gedit text editor in Lenny. I somehow thought that Gedit had a way to change the case of words, but the Lenny version (Gedit 2.20.4) didn’t seem to have it. Was I imagining it, or did the Gedit in Ubuntu 7.10 have this feature? (See below for the answer.)

Anyhow, I need a better editor … so I went into Synaptic and installed three: Geany, Bluefish and Scite. I’m going to try them all out. So far I can’t seem to change the case of letters automatically in Bluefish, but there are so many features that can help with Web development that it’s probably worth using. But for the level of work I’m doing, I’m relying on Geany the most at the moment. I haven’t used Scite much, but I do plan to give it a try soon.

But … GEdit does have the ability to change the case of words/letters. Under Edit — Preferences — Plugins, there’s a Change Case plugin. I enabled it, and now I can change case via the menu with Edit — Change Case. I prefer to use the keyboard to do this … so I’ll probably keep the other editors in contention.

Foresight Linux: The Foresight Linux booth at SCALE 6X was fairly busy. I could barely get near it during the show, and since I didn’t really put 2 and 2 together and remember that Foresight is dedicated to presenting the latest in the GNOME desktop environment, I didn’t linger. But I do want to give Foresight a try. It has separate install and live images, so I downloaded the live CD image and am m going to see what it’s like.

I’ll be your server: I’ve never set up a server, and all this work with OpenBSD makes me want to roll one myself. I’m going to try to do one on the local network with NFS, Samba, FTP and Apache. I’ll probably try in OpenBSD and Debian as well as Damn Small Linux.

Two excellent Linux books: Since I’m not made of money, I got both of these from the library. The “Linux Administration Handbook, “ by by Evi Nemeth, Garth Snyder, Trent R. Hein and an army of more recent contributiors, is a hefty tome that’s long on advice, Unix/Linux history and what people like to call “best practices.”

While much of the book is flying right over my head, and I don’t think you could really administer a system without a secondary reference that’s specific to the Linux distribution you’re using, this is a very valuable book that every serious Linux user should have. Especially when it comes to servers, there’s a lot of information here.

“Linux Administration Handbook” is heavy on the philosophy of how to set up and maintain a system, and amid a sea of distro-specific how-tos that expire with every six-month release, that’s a good thing to have. Still, what books like “Linux Administration Handbook” make evident is that at one level, most Linux systems are more alike than they are different, and the skills you develop using one distribution are very much transferable to the others. However, there are pointers everywhere in the book to specific instructions for Red Hat/Fedora, Debian/Ubuntu and Suse.

And if you want to see how professional sysadmins (or at least the good ones) go about their work, this is the book to get. It can’t be the only book on your Linux shelf, but “Linux Administration Handbook” pairs very well with a doorstop-sized distro-specific how-to (like the “Unleashed” series of books, or Mark Sobell’s “Practical” guide series) to help you get a handle on making Linux work for you.

The other book I got from the library, “Linux Administrator Street Smarts: A Real-World Guide to Linux Certification Skills,” by Roderick W. Smith, is a great book for anyone who wants to figure out how Linux works from the command line. The book doesn’t assume a vast knowledge of Linux or Unix. It offers many tips, instructions, and again, “best practices” on how to configure and manage a Linux system. This book is also not distro-specific; instead, it’s one of the best command-line-centered books I’ve seen when it comes to basic system administration.

I don’t know how good “Linux Administrator Street Smarts: A Real-World Guide to Linux Certification Skills,” in helping you get actual “certification skills,” but it will definitely help with the basics of setting up and maintaining a server or desktop.

Smith’s style is clear and concise — a rarity in these kind of books, which often leave me more confused than not. I definitely recommend taking a look at this “Street Smarts” volume.

So I had two winners here. I would probably buy both of these books, but that said, I still turn to Carla Schroder’s “Linux Cookbook,” which I’d love to see updated, and Michael Stutz’s same-name-but-different “Linux Cookbook,” which could use an update even more.

If I was in a buying mood, I’d get a more recent O’Reilly book, “Linux System Administration,” by Tom Adelstein and Bill Lubanovic, and I really like Chris Negus’ new “Toolbox” series of distro-specific books. They’re fairly cheap and filled with good, timely tips, emphasis on the “timely” part. If only all of these great books were updated every couple of years instead of five years … or never.

Click frequency: The “publish every day at 5 a.m.” thing hasn’t been working out so well of late. I just haven’t had all that much time to do entries in advance, but I have had an entry every day … just not prewritten to publish at 5 a.m.

One man’s FreeBSD: I admire this guy, William Denton, for chronicling eight years of personal use of FreeBSD.

Debian … ah, Debian: In case it’s not evident, I still really enjoy using Debian. While I’m a great believer in the slimmed-down application mix in the default install of Ubuntu (which is based on Debian) — with less indeed being more, on many levels I’ve had a whole lot more success with Debian.

I’ve done the default GNOME install of Debian, the Xfce and KDE installs, a “standard” install to which I’ve added X, and a few “standard” installs that were console-only. The flexibility of Debian is legendary, as is its stability and usability.

Some of my hardware has been supported better by Ubuntu at times, but I keep coming back to Debian. I’d love for Debian Lenny to support the Alps touchpad as well as Ubuntu Gutsy does. I’m hoping it’ll happen before Lenny is frozen, and I will be trying Ubuntu Hardy when it comes out, but I’d love for Linux in general to get everything right for my Gateway laptop.

But since fan management has gotten worse, not better, over the past six months in the Linux kernels I’ve used, I’m only cautiously optimistic.

OpenBSD: CUPS runneth, plus the NetBSD live CD, (again) why I’m doing this, and Click’s new publishing schedule

OpenBSD doesn’t use the CUPS printing system by default, and while I’ve been successful in using Apsfilter in Damn Small Linux (but not in Debian), now that I’ve figured out all the quirks in CUPS and my office network-printing situation, I prefer to use CUPS to manage the many network printers at my disposal.

OpenBSD tip: Whenever installing software in OpenBSD, it’s a good idea to save whatever messages the system prints on the terminal screen for later reference. Nowhere is this more important than in the installation of CUPS, which requires a bit more user intervention than I’ve experienced before. Who am I kidding? I’ve never installed CUPS before in my life — it’s always “there.”

Anyhow, back to OpenBSD and CUPS. As is always the case, you need to use sudo or su to root to install CUPS:

$ sudo pkg_add -i cups
(enter password when prompted)

or

$ su
(enter password when prompted)
# pkg_add -i cups

The system then kicks out the following:

To enable CUPS, execute ‘/usr/local/sbin/cups-enable’ as root
To disable CUPS, execute ‘/usr/local/sbin/cups-disable’ as root

Starting cupsd will overwrite /etc/printcap. A backup copy of this file is saved as /etc/printcal.pre-cups by ‘/usr/local/sbin/cups-enable’ and will be restored when you run ‘/usr/local/sbin/cups-disable’

As I said above, SAVE THIS IN A FILE. You might need it.

This is not enough to get CUPS going. You must do this as root (or, again, with sudo):

# /usr/local/sbin/cupsd

Now you can open a browser (in X, I used Firefox, but I think you can even use Lynx in a console), go to http://localhost:631 and configure your printer(s) as usual. Since everybody’s situation is different, I’ll leave instructions for the rest of CUPS up to you, except for one thing:

In OpenBSD, chances are you will need to find the right driver for your printer. I went to the CUPS Web site, more specifically to the Printer Drivers page, found the driver for my printer (an HP Laserjet 2100, if you must know), downloaded it and used it when configuring my printer in CUPS.

That’s not all. By default, OpenBSD doesn’t tell your system to automatically start the CUPS server at boot. I’m sure there’s a more correct way to do this, but I added the following line to /etc/rc.local (again, you must do this as root or with sudo):

/usr/local/sbin/cupsd

Looks familiar, doesn’t it? It’s the same way we started CUPS in the first place. And now it’ll start without any intervention by you on your next boot.

By the way, with CUPS controlling my printing, I can both print in X and from a console. Just use the old lpr command (with the name of the file you’d like to print):

$ lpr filename

Your file will print to your default printer. You can also specify a specific printer, print a certain number of copies, and do all sorts of other clever things at the command line.

NetBSD: While I’m having a lot of fun working with OpenBSD, I’m itching to repeat all of this with NetBSD. I didn’t expect the NetBSD Live CD to run on my Compaq Armada laptop, what with the CD using KDE and the laptop only having 64 MB of RAM, but after a lengthy booting process, I did get to a console in NetBSD from the live CD, and wireless networking on my trusty Orinoco WaveLAN Silver PCMCIA card worked out of the box.

But the laptop’s doing so well with Debian Etch, I’m wary of making any change. Still, I might keep my data in a Linux partition, wipe off Debian for now and give some other things a try. I can always reinstall Debian if that’s the way things go.

As far as my converted thin client test box that’s now running OpenBSD, of its three hard drives (any of which can be easily plugged in to run different OSes at any time), I’ve got one drive that I use mainly for Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, and another one with Xubuntu 7.04, Slackware 12 and Puppy 2.17 that I use rarely. That will probably become the NetBSD test bed at some near-future time.

Again, why? In case you missed the last time I answered this question, I’m playing around with the BSDs so much … because they’re there. Just as I don’t think it’s a great idea for everybody to just run Windows, it’s also not such a great idea for the free, open-source software world to be about Linux and nothing else. Even if there are 300 Linux distributions out there, there’s only one Linux kernel (albeit in many, many versions). The BSD operating systems are developed differently, and while FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD and, yes, DragonflyBSD (sorry I haven’t mentioned that one until now) all have specialized uses, there’s plenty of software available — at least in FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD — to run them as any kind of server as well as a fully functioning desktop computer.

And while the FreeBSD project has spawned PC-BSD and DesktopBSD on the desktop (the last one’s pretty obviously aimed that way, given the word “desktop” in its name … but I digress), there’s no reason these other operating systems shouldn’t be tested, used and enjoyed in the same manner.

Yours in operating-system diversity,

s.

… but wait, there’s more:

Interesting blog: Larry the Free Software Guy is looking at “Eight Distros a Week.” I went quite far back into his blog, and I plan to return often.

Take once a day: You might have noticed that Click is now publishing once a day, usually at 5 a.m. Pacific time. Rather than pushing out five entries on some days, even more — or none — on others, I’m trying to get ahead of myself a bit and make this blog more predictable for both me and you. If “breaking news” intervenes and I have something to say about it, I’ll post during the day, but for now, look for a new entry at every morning at 5 a.m. Pacific. And no, I’m not awake that early — the magic of Movable Type enables me to schedule posts to appear at any time in the future.

Scale 6x — the ‘e-mail room’

I’m filing this from the SCALE 6x “E-Mail Room” in the Los Angeles Westin. They’ve got a little thin-client network going, with little client boxes from Solar Systems PC running Fluxbox. And since the browser is Iceweasel, I figure it’s Debian based.

The good part — I was able to drag the $15 Laptop — the Compaq Armada 7770dmt — back to the car.

SCALE 6X — An interview with publicity chairman Orv Beach

We all know that Linux is a kernel, an operating system, maybe even a socio-political movement (it depends on whom you ask), but in a sense, Linux is about people — those who create, use and promote it.

One of those people is Orv Beach, publicity chairman for SCALE 6X — the Southern California Linux Expo — being held Feb. 8-10 in Los Angeles. Since I’m covering the convention for Click, I took the opportunity to interview Orv after hearing from him about getting press credentials for the event, which I wouldn’t miss, by the way. And if you do plan on attending, Orv told me that using the promo code CAST when registering for SCALE can get you 40 percent off of admission.

Orv, where do you live, how old are you, and what do you do for a living?
I live in Simi Valley, California, with my wife Beth. I’m 58, and I have four grown kids and four wonderful grandkids. Professionally, I’m the IT director at Simi Valley Hospital.

How did you first discover open-source software, and what part does it play in your work and home life today?
I’ve been interested in technology all my life. I got my amateur radio license when I was 17, and enjoyed building radio equipment as much as operating.

I got my first computer in about 1979, and when amateur packet radio was authorized by the FCC, it was a natural to use a computer with it. A popular packet radio program at the time was TNOS, written by Brian Lantz. It ran under DOS, and was a communications program & BBS. Brian had an active users group and was happy to add features to TNOS. As it grew in size, the C compiler he was using had more and more difficulties compiling it (It was Borland Turbo C, I think). So he moved TNOS over to Linux to use GCC as the compiler, and a large percentage of his users followed him.

I got Linux from a programmer at work. At that time it was 16 floppies, and that minimal version didn’t include X Windows. I ran it on a 40 MHz 386 with 8 Megs of RAM. I’ve been using Linux steadily ever since and moved my desktop computer over to it full time about six years ago, and my wife’s about four years ago.

At work, while Adventist Health isn’t a full-blown user of open-source software, they’re edging that way. The web programmers at our corporate office seem to have fallen in love with Plone. Some of the programming groups are moving to Project.Net for project management, too. Locally, I use Nagios to monitor over a hundred devices on our hospital network, and we use ZoneMinder to monitor some video cameras.

Now that SCALE is in its sixth year, how big was the convention the first time around, and what kind of growth has it seen? How many exhibitors, speakers and attendees do you expect this year?
SCALE is an offshoot of the “LUGFests” that SCLUG (the Simi-Conejo Linux Users Group – http://sclug.org) held every 6 months where they met at the Nortel building in Simi Valley. They were miniconferences, with people demonstrating open source software and even a few commercial vendors. Even as limited as they were, they drew Linux users from all over Southern California. SCLUG held 4 of them before Nortel closed down that building. (There’s an article on LUGFest III here).

The last LUGFest, LUGFest IV, drew 400 people over two days. Based on the response to the LUGFests, we knew we were filling a need for information and education on open-source software.

So after a hiatus of a year or so, SCLUG, UCLALUG and USCLUG jointly started SCALE. The first was held in the Davidson Conference Center at USC. It was one day, with two session tracks. We had 11 speakers spots and a panel, and it was a struggle to fill them. That first Linux Expo drew 400 attendees.

Contrast that with SCALE 6X, which will be held in February, five years later: The main Expo is now on Saturday and Sunday, has 32 speaker slots and two keynotes spread over four session tracks per day. You’d think that number of topics and speakers would be impossible to come up with. Yet we received over 105 submissions to our call for papers! Whittling them down was difficult, and it was painful, as we had to turn down lots of good proposals. We expect to have about 1,500 attendees for SCALE 6X. The Westin hotel will be bursting at the seams.

Latest spam-comment tweaks for Movable Type 4

I’ve made a few changes in my spam-fighting techniques for Movable Type 4. I had the spam filter set at +3, but just about every “legitimate” comment was ending up in the spam file.

I changed the spam-filter setting to +2, and now I’m getting only a few obvious spam comments per day in the “non-spam” comment area (none of them are published until I do so manually, so it’s not like all the effort behind sending out this large volume of spam is doing anything for those foisting it upon me).

And I think I figured out why some legitimate comments are ending up marked as spam: fake e-mail addresses. I’m not sure why Movable Type asks you for your e-mail address and Web site (as if every one of us even has a Web site …), but the system appears to check whether or not the e-mail address supplied by a commenter is legitimate. If it’s not, you can guess what happens (the comment is marked as spam).

So all those commenters who think they’re being clever by not providing their real e-mail address — NOBODY but me sees it, by the way — all it does is get your comment routed to the spam file, where I can usually recover it before it gets automatically deleted. But still …

Anyhow, since I’m habitually checking the spam comments for legitimate comments that are stuck in there, I started DELETING the spam comments after I check them. I was running up 2,000 spam comments per five days (the length of time I have them set to remain in the system). Since it’s so easy and quick to erase ALL spam comments (there’s a button for it — and did I forget to say it’s fast?), I’ve been getting rid of the spam as soon as I check it. It makes it way, way easier to check the spam the next time — and it takes a load off of the system as well.

So in a nutshell, I’ve “weakened” the spam filter slightly, but I’m also zapping the spam myself instead of letting the system do it automatically. Less spam means plucking your comment out of said spam, should it land there, is much easier.

So far, this is working for me. … I’ll probably have the whole thing nailed down by the time we go to Movable Type logins for commenters.

Movable Type spam filter not so great

Remember yesterday (I remember it like it was yesterday, which it was) when I I thought I had the spam problem in Movable Type 4 under control? Well, today I find about five obvious spam messages — with URLs and everything — in the non-spam comments.

And worse, a comment from an AUTHENTICATED TYPEKEY USER was marked as spam? If anything, a Typekey comment should post immediately — that’s how I have the system set. I immediately marked the commenter as “trusted,” which means his future comments should have no problem getting posted.

But how could the MT spam filter let me down that way? A Typekey comment? I repeat: A TYPEKEY COMMENT. Unbelievable.

Obviously, I’ll need to keep an eye on the situation.

Spam management in Movable Type 4

We currently have comments on most of the Daily News blogs set to accept both “anonymous” comments — meaning from just about anybody — as well as Typekey-authenticated comments. And we haven’t yet made the move to Movable Type-authenticated comments (see — you have a lot of choices in MT 4 … and while confusing, it’s nice to have options), but that’s where it’s going, I’m told.

I was about to turn off anonymous comments, but then I got a sweet Distrowatch link about a week ago, bringing quadruple to quintuple the usual traffic, and I didn’t want to shut potential commenters out.

I realize that many people might not want to sign up with Typekey, and entering a comment while logged into the Typekey system is confusing (the name, e-mail address and url boxes remain after you’re logged in, but they SHOULDN’T BE filled out), and I’m pretty much waiting for the Web-biggies here to get the Movable Type login comments working.

So I decided to try adjusting the spam filter once again. Under Preferences — Blog Settings, click on Spam, and see what your spam filter is set at. All of ours default to 0. I started with +4, but that caught too many legitimate comments, and I finally settled on +3. That flags most of the spam as spam, which I have set to delete when it gets 5 days old. That way I can quickly scan the spam to see if any legitimate entries got caught in the filter. But I don’t have to do anything to the 99.99 percent of spam comments that I don’t want on the system — they just go away when they reach the age of 5 days.

So far, the only spam to get through has been these weird Obama entries that don’t have a URL embedded in the comment (unlike 99.999 percent of the other spam). I suppose that the only problem is that “real” commenters who include URLs of any kind in their comments might not make it past the filter, but that’s why I quickly scan the spam (Under Manage — Comments, click on Spam Comments on the right side of the screen to see them — and make sure you have your “view” set up for 100 rows with “action” buttons enabled on top and bottom, so you can restore/delete at the top or bottom of the long list).

And anybody who absolutely, positively must put URLs in their comment can sign up with Typekey and leave an “authenticated” comment. Right now, those go right through (though that parameter is also modifiable in MT 4).

I no longer spend a considerable chunk of time marking comments in “nonspam comments” as the spam they truly are. The easy change in spam-filter from 0 to +3 has taken care of it for me.