a blog by Brie Gordon

We're awesome and open source software is our idea!

"I'm a PC and Windows 7 was my idea."

I have been subjected to far too many of these commercials. How, exactly, did you tell Microsoft about how Windows 7 was your idea?

What is so ironic about these commercials is that the virtue they extol is a large part of what I (and so many others) love about open source software. It really is *our* idea. Using Launchpad, development mailing lists, Ubuntu Brainstorm and other tools, my ideas (or code or translations or documentation or artwork) can be submitted to the community responsible for a project and considered in an open, clear process for approval.

Try expressing in a clear, open manner your thoughts about Microsoft. Ask to watch the progress of your idea. Request that you be kept in the discussion loop of the key developers. You'll be laughed out of town.

Why should you take my word for it? Because I'm awesome. No, you shouldn't just take my word for it. Below I've included a bunch of links to ways *YOU* can contribute -- even without coding.

We're awesome and open source software is our idea!

Ways You Can Make Ubuntu Your Idea:
Ubuntu Brainstorm
Launchpad
Community Documentation

Ways You Can Make Linux Your Idea:
The Linux Documentation Project
Mailing Lists

Ways You Can Make FreeBSD Your Idea:
Mailing Lists
Submit a Problem Report
The FreeBSD List of projects and ideas for volunteers

Even more goodness:
A huge list of How to Contribute to Open Source without Coding
Microsoft uses the same channels to contribute to the Linux kernel

Until next time,

Brie

Pretty Pretty Posterous Backgrounds

Posterous is amazingly simple and fun to theme. (Last time, I talked about setting a custom favicon.) That's a nice touch but it's a detail that some will not notice. A custom background, on the other hand, is very noticeable and speaks volumes about you and your blog. Grab an image (may I suggest something from COLOURlovers?) and follow along:

1. Log into your Posterous account.
2. Go to Settings > Theme and customize my site
3. Click Advanced
This is where you can put the custom CSS. Note that how it ends up looking will vary based on what kind of customization you have done already. I am using the Ginza bigpic theme. This is what I did, modify as appropriate.
4. Scroll down to the body section that starts out like this:

5. Right before the closing '}' place some lines like this (remove the spaces):

6. Click 'Save, I'm done!'
Caution: Some patterns are very bold and may be too distracting for your blog or make the text hard to read.

Bonus:
I've attached several patterns from COLOURlovers.com that I think are really pretty. The links for them are below:

[1] http://imgur.com/VTGTy
[2] http://imgur.com/qdIcN
[3] http://imgur.com/1NR2V
[4] http://imgur.com/P9Rog
[5] http://imgur.com/cOpj9

the one I'm using:
[6] http://imgur.com/wJLLa

P.S. I <3 Posterous. The theming docs are complete and well-written if you're interested in doing more with your Posterous blog.

           

Click here to download:

Pretty_Pretty_Posterous_Backgr.zip (81 KB)

HOWTO: Custom Favicon for Posterous

While using the 'Explore' part of Posterous.com, I noticed that a lot of people, myself included, were using the default Posterous favicon. I assumed that we weren't given a choice until I saw Tweetdeck's Posterous favicon. Did they get an exemption? No. They made use of Posterous' option to perform advanced customization.

Here's what you need to do to set your own favicon:
1. Log into posterous.com
2. Scroll down and click 'Theme My Site'
3. Click 'Advanced'
4. Click 'Expand'
5. Remove this line:
    <link rel="icon" href="/images/favicon.png" type="image/x-png"/>

6. Place a line like this where the one you removed was:
    <link href="http://www.unixsysadmin.org/favicon.ico" rel="icon" type="image/vnd.microsoft.icon" />

7. Click 'Save, I'm done!'
8. Click 'OK'

You'll be returned to your blog. Note the favicon! :+)!

ISP Trouble? For best results, do this first.

Occasionally, I experience some network latency and packet loss through my ISP, Comcast. When this happens, I let them know about it - and you should, too.

Before you do that, though, there are some things that you should do, as dumb as they may sound. They *will* help you get through to your ISP.

Reboot your computer. Reboot your router. Reboot your modem. (For the last two, unplugging the power cable should suffice; don't forget to plug it back in.)

Finally, you should gather some data to give them. I like to do this by setting up some pings to places in different geographical locations. I've written a script (tested on Linux and FreeBSD) to get this ping party started. FreeBSD users may have to change the interpreter to #!/usr/local/bin/bash first.

Here is the script:

#!/bin/bash

#### uhoh ###
# ISP Trouble Script #
# Author: Brie A. Gordon
# brie@unixsysadmin.org
# I run this when I'm having trouble with Comcast.

# Replace the line below with the IP of your router.
gnome-terminal -e "ping 10.100.1.1" -t "router" &

# Located in Pittsburgh
gnome-terminal -e "ping cmu.edu" -t "pgh" &

# My ISP
gnome-terminal -e "ping comcast.com" -t "ISP" &

# Located in Australia
gnome-terminal -e "ping news.com.au" -t "australia" &

# Located in California
gnome-terminal -e "ping dreamhost.com" -t "california" &

#Located in Germany
gnome-terminal -e "ping joker.com" -t "germany" &

Dropbox + Your Web Host can be Friends

Your web host won't let you install Dropbox on their server?
That's OK.
Don't want to go through the hassle of compiling Dropbox?
That's OK, too.

As long as you were smart enough to choose a web host that allows SSH, I've thought up an easy/lazy way to do this!

From your local machine:

rsync -e ssh -av yourusername@webhostserver.com:~/ Dropbox/

Type your password when prompted then sit back and watch.

(This assumes that the folder you are in on your local computer has a Dropbox folder and that the files you want to back up are in your home folder on your web hosts' server.)

Holler at brie@unixsysadmin.org or http://www.unixsysadmin.org/contact.html with your thoughts.

Getting Through to Comcast @ComcastCares

Today I was experiencing extreme fluctuating network latency between here and everywhere via Comcast. I started up some endless pings to monitor the situation and called up Comcast. Once I got through Shaq and Ben Stein's irritating greeting this is what I had to go through to get to a real person:

Two complaints about Google and a note on speedy Googlebots.

I have two bones to pick with Google this morning.

First: gMail is not fully RFC822-compliant. I should be able to send mail to myself in this format:

brie@[127.0.0.1]

(Where 127.0.0.1 is the public IP) however Google provides you with a lovely error message when you try to do that. See photo.
There is an awesome RFC822 address parser here that shows that email addresses of this type are acceptable:
http://www.mythic-beasts.com/~pdw/cgi-bin/emailvalidate

The RFC itself is available here: http://www.unixsysadmin.org/documents/

Second:
The (second) biggest gripe about Google Wave is how lonely it is. Well, for those of us with a few friends on Google Wave, it would be nice to get an email (or some other note) when there has been a reply to a wave. I have no way of knowing if someone got back to me short of logging in.

Note: Lots of people complain that Google takes forever to crawl their site. I registered unixsysadmin.org on the 15th (4 days ago) and several little Googlebots have been by (I set up some PHP in my Error Document so that I am notified by email every time they look for the robots.txt file I've been too lazy to set up and don't see it) already. Interesting. My best guess on why is the nature of the domain name. unixsysadmin.org probably sounds like an important site to Google.

That's all for now, assuming you got this far. :-).

Pretty Much Everyone's Feelings about Google Wave

Google Wave is awesome. But no one has any friends on it. I Wave with
my Dad sometimes, my boyfriend and a few people I met on Twitter. Once
more people get invites it'll get cool and then *too* many people will
have it and we'll be off to the next new thing.

picture from Reddit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/a3qeq/my_coworker_drew_this_on_the_company_whiteboard/.mobile

T-Mobile Service Outage - not resolved

Like lots of people, I was affected by T-Mobile's service outage
yesterday (Tuesday). The (really hot) gentleman I spoke to at the T-Mobile store
earlier today told me that it was over and I should expect to start
seeing all of my texts come in. Ten hours later, this is not the case.

I still have reports of people calling me and not getting through
(with no indication to me that I missed a call). I called T-Mobile and
spoke to a woman who 'cancelled my location' to move me to a new cell
tower and stated that she was confident that this would resolve my
issue. She attempted to call me and failed (or forgot) so I am on hold
to call back now. At this point, I am extremely frustrated and losing
money. They offered me $5 as compensation which is insulting.

Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala - RELEASED!

Can't get to Ubuntu.com? Neither can I!

Get your stuff here:

http://noncdn.releases.ubuntu.com//karmic/