I just crashed the debit card reader at Walmart. It had an Ingenico label on it. Here’s what I did… (continued…)
My home server (hosting this site) runs fedora, and my work machine runs gentoo. Running your own net-exposed shop in your (very precious) spare time means…1) you have to keep your system at least *fairly* up-to-date or you WILL get hacked
2) you don’t want to spend all your time keeping everything up-to-date manually
2) you don’t want to spend all your time keeping everything up-to-date manually
So I auto-update fedora (using yum) and gentoo (with portage, of course).
But deep down I know it has more to do with a craving for the newest, shiniest, l337357 shiznit. I don’t just apply security patches to the software I use, I grab newer versions with newer features I’ll never use, I grab any new stuff that comes along that sounds intriguing, and the dependency tree continually grows. Unlike applying security updates, installing new bells and whistles is directly counter-productive to the goal of running a safe, secure, and stable server. There’s no way I can resist the call of the sirens, though. I guess I just need to accept that, and move on (to the next self-induced interdependency update problem).
So which distro feeds my need for auto-updates of everything under the sun with as few headaches as possible? I often find myself bitching about how often fedora is borked by automatic updates via the hodgepodge of repo’s I (have to?) use. But recently, I bumped up gentoo apache and mysql and php versions, and they all had their share of hurdles. The gentoo docs are great – better than anything else I’ve seen – but with the last round of changes I had to google my way out of my jams just like I often do with fedora.
I think my criticisms have been levelled in the wrong direction, if criticism can even be considered appropriate. It’s the speed at which open source development moves, coupled with the complete lack of dictated direction. It’s this big beautiful blazing amebic ball of gooey goodness. Some of the bigger parts are yummy and tasty, while others are past the expiration date and emitting oozing stinky liquids and noxious odors. And ya just gotta roll with it! Pull out the rotten, route around the damaged software. I think it’s safe to say that with the kernel and gcc and apache and perl and php and mysql and cvs as drop-forged tools that you can really rely on, the higher layers can come and go. With me having complete ownership of my own data (and this is what drives me to run my own servers in the first place), it’s just a matter of an occasional SQL session to carry over data from one app to another.
I think I’m hitting my open-source stride. And I think I’m really starting to enjoy the ride. Now I just need to write a cheesy theme song that matches those corny lyrics… which has me wondering what kind of open-source MIDI and sequencing software is available… and here we go again…
Capitalism spawns advertising, and nothing is as saturated and pervasive an example of this as the boob tube. Ever since its cold-war era introduction, it has been been the main vehicle of advertising in America. As a result, I can’t stand to watch it much.The information age brought us some serious improvements, primarily Tivo and all its DVR clones, empowering the viewer, not the studio, to set the viewing time. Tivo made it to the edge of a revolution, but unfortunately seems to have succumbed to the capitalist zeitgeist – you cannot skip commercials, they are experimenting with “popup advertising” when you attempt to manually skip commercials, and it looks as if DRM is in Tivo’s near future. If you go with a more pure open-source DVR solution (aka MythTV), you regain full control, including the ability to flag and automatically skip commercials. But you will become a “DVR hobbyist” long before you ever have a working MythTV setup.
However, there is a better way, available here and now:
Step 1: subscribe to NetFlix
Step 2: swallow up entire seasons of the better TV shows to be consumed in one commercial-free marathon sitting
We’ve enjoyed several shows this way, including some old classics like kid-friendly Bewitched! The modern day choice of the week is Arrested Development, a show that has such deadpan comedic irony it’s had me blowing my drink out of my nose every episode. Cu-CAW, cu-CAW!
Finally getting the last of the kinks worked out of the move to Apache 2.0.
Highlights:* slashcode has not moved up from Apache 1.3; it was time to move on…
* researched the latest blog software releases…
* and chose b2evolution for my news blog…
* and wordpress for my daily life blog
* figured out that in mod_perl 2.0, I need to specify the content type as the first output of the script;
* and relative paths are now broken – using full paths for now…
* still trying to replace my customized PHP4 bookmark4u with something PHP5-compatible…
* went a little mediawiki crazy!
Highlights:* slashcode has not moved up from Apache 1.3; it was time to move on…
* researched the latest blog software releases…
* and chose b2evolution for my news blog…
* and wordpress for my daily life blog
* figured out that in mod_perl 2.0, I need to specify the content type as the first output of the script;
* and relative paths are now broken – using full paths for now…
* still trying to replace my customized PHP4 bookmark4u with something PHP5-compatible…
* went a little mediawiki crazy!
Everything else seems to be hobbling along now…
Hey all, I’m back in black. Once I realized I was spending half my limited geek time recompiling Apache to keep slashcode and fedora and yum and perl and php and mysql and the kitchen sink all playing nicely in the big linux sandbox, it wasn’t so l337 any more. Upwards and onwards…
My new weapons of choice: mediawiki, wordpress and (drumroll…) b2evolution. I hope you like them. But, as always, if you don’t, you can scream out and let me know, right here. Just have some respect as you curse the ground you’re standing on.
Scrape the url all the way back to the metal to get a bird’s eye view of what I have running these days.
Party on.
UPDATE: We’re rockin’ on with WordPress 2.0 on both blogs.
