Blogs

Even if I favor Ubuntu as my Linux distribution of choice, it doesn't mean I don't consider Red Hat to be the top dog in the Linux world. So I feel the fact that they've released Red Hat 5 today to be quite significant. There's a nice article with a Q&A section in the Linux Format that I found interesting.

(via Slashdot)
There's been quite a bit activity going on lately about Dell offering Linux preinstalled for desktops and notebooks. First of all, it's the biggest request on the Dell IdeaStorm web page. It even got Mark Shuttleworth to provide a bit of insight on his Blog about having big-named OEMs providing Linux as an option on their systems. Quite a bit of noise about it on Slashdot and Digg, and it's even prompted Dell to put up a survey about certain factors about offering Linux.

Me, I'm not so picky about which distribution they use, because I can install any of them if the system will work for only one of them. This means that I won't have to check hardware compatibility lists for any new hardware.

It seemed Go Daddy was having some DNS problems earlier, which prevented any of my sites from resolving correctly. It also affected a few friend's sites that I know are hosted on Go Daddy for some time. In any case, I logged into the Go Daddy site and checked up on my domains. When I reset the hosted nameservers, it seemed to have changed to new servers. Waited an hour or so, and my sites are back up again.

I had recent come from a public forum so that people can present ideas for the future Lafayette Utilities Systems (LUS) residential fiber optics plan.

I'm not even sure if this will get a hit, but my employer, Rader Solutions, is looking for more PHP Programmers in the Lafayette, LA area. Database experience will be very helpful; PostgreSQL knowledge is even better. LDAP knowledge is a plus. Please send me an email at nistre@radersolutions.com or email@nickistre.net for information.

I've complained in the past that the web-links package wasn't available yet in Drupal 5.1; well, as of February 16, 2007, a web-links module was released for Drupal 5.1. I have just replaced my hand-made version of the Blog Rolls with this one. One of my biggest annoyance about the latest version of Drupal has been relieved! Yay!

One good thing about having clean lines of responsibility between different developers in a small company like early on in my previous job is that you're entirely responsible for your own code, so there's nobody else that will come in and make changes without you knowing it. When I was first hired on as a developer/IT support staff at my previous company, green with a Computer Science diploma in the spring of 2001, it was only my boss and I that handled the IT and computer needs of a 50-person company. As the company grew to around 150 people towards the end of my employment there the IT staff responsibilities grew exponentially, and we eventually started hiring more people to help pad out our needs. By the end of my employment there, the IT department had added on two people, one who could do some programming in Access Basic, but primarily did reports and tech support for the users, and another who was going to be largely what my old role was (Administration and Developer).

For those of you running Linux or Solaris, here's a Perl script I found that will verify that your system is properly updated for the Daylight Savings changes in the U.S. for this year:


#!/usr/bin/perl

NoMachine's NX Free Edition Linux terminal client and the Synergy server don't seem to get along when running at the same time, at least on Linux. It seems to be a case of how the programs take over the mouse causes issues with sending mouse events through the NX Client. Not a big problem, as I can just run the NoMachine NX Client on the windows machine to the left while it's running the Synergy client without issue. Or shutdown Synergy server if I need to run the NX Client on the Linux notebook.

Well, I managed to upgrade to Ubuntu Edgy 6.10, though the path to this upgrade was a bit rocky. I've tried to get the ATI proprietary ("fglrx") drivers working with Beryl, but apparently, the latest release of Beryl has something that is incompatible with the ATI driver. After about 4 attempts at making this Edgy-fglrx-XGL-beryl combination work, I decided to give the open-source "radeon" driver a try with the AIGLX extension to X.org.