Total quality
Feb 27
SCALE 8x
Feb 22
Being my first Linux conference, overall I had a really good time. Seeing and talking to a lot of famous Open Source figures was pretty kool.
I only managed to see four different talks.
My favorite talk was Jono Bacon’s talk on the evolution of the Free Software/Open Source movement to what now will be fun and rapid development using a new development approach. Essentially, Cononical has developed a Python software development framework called Quickly (reminds me of Ruby on Rails, though I haven’t hacked much on it to even compare its similarities) That makes it real easy to package (.deb only) and publish.
BSD for Linux users:
This talk was mainly focused on the difference and advantages of using the BSD’ s (NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD) compared to Linux. Now more then I ever, I’m thinking of delaying a DNS BIND server on my local network running on OpenBSD.
Basic Introduction to KDE:
As the name implies, it was definitely, an introduction to KDE 4. Although I prefer using Gnome, the
Python for non programmers:
Also, as the name implies, this was a definite introduction to Python. Although I’m not big on Python, I definitely felt like an advance Python hacker by being on this talk.
Even though I only attended the Saturday event, I really enjoyed SCALE. It definitely felt like a community conference and it didn’t felt corporate what so ever.
mod_ruby and eRuby
Feb 16
I finally had some time to install mod_ruby and eRuby on my server.
Prerequisites:
httpd-devel ruby ruby-devel eruby
yum install httpd-devel ruby ruby-devel eruby
Installing mod_ruby was pretty confusing, as module default compilation is intended for Apache 1.3
If you’re running Apache 2.0 or higher, I managed to successfully compiled mod_ruby as the following:
./configure.rb –with-apr-includes=/usr/include/apr-1
make
make install
After the install, then its a matter of just adding the custom ruby http conf file to httpd conf.d directory.
SAMPLE:
AddType text/html .rhtml
LoadModule ruby_module modules/mod_ruby.so
RubyRequire apache/ruby-run
#RubyRequire apache/ruby-debug
RubyRequire apache/eruby-run
#RubyRequire apache/eruby-debug
# Execute *.rbx files as Ruby scripts
Options ExecCGI
SetHandler ruby-object
RubyHandler Apache::RubyRun.instance
#RubyHandler Apache::RubyDebug.instance
# Handle *.rhtml files as eRuby files
SetHandler ruby-object
RubyHandler Apache::ERubyRun.instance
RubyHandler Apache::ERubyDebug.instance
Now I can embed Ruby code on standard html pages serving and running natively using Apache and eRuby. 
Hence, perlninja.pl
References:
http://www.modruby.net/en/
http://www.ptwit.ac.th/seksan/blog/?p=59
WordPress Upgrade
Feb 15
WordPress upgrade went real smooth. At a glance, WordPress 1.4 and 2.9 seem to be worlds apart.
I may not be a perl ninja (just yet) but the domain name kicks ass.
perlninja.pl
I’m LPIC-1 Certified
Jan 30
A month after my initial planning, I finally manage to pass both LPIC-1 exams.
Computer upgrades
Jan 10
I finally upgraded the hard drives on my MacBook, Mac Mini (Server), and my main desktop Mac Mini.
Macbook (Leopard)
For some strange reason, I wasn’t able to clone my existing Leopard system to the new 500 GB as the clone process failed about 10% – 15% completion. So I just backed up all my files and installed Snow Leopard from scratch.
Mac Mini (Leopard)
Unlike with my MacBook, cloning the existing Leopard system to the new hard drive worked flawlessly on my desktop Mac Mini.
After that, upgrading to Snow Leopard worked like a charm.
Mac Mini (CentOS)
Upgrading the RAM on the Mini to 2 GB was simple, the hard drive upgrade was a completely different story. First, I wasn’t able to find any open source program that would allow me to clone to an attach mass storage USB drive. Unless I didn’t read the documentation properly, both CloneZilla and FOG only allow the clone output image to be saved on a network system and not locally, even if its a different hard drive.
Little that I knew. dd was everything I needed to clone the hard drive.
commands I used:
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb
After the dd copy was finished, I rebotted to the new hard drive only to find out that /dev/sda5 , /dev/sda6 and /dev/sda7 were not copied properly to the new hard drive. So I had to reboot into rescue mode using the original CentOS install DVD and ran the following commands:
dd if=/dev/sda5 of=/dev/sdb5
dd if=/dev/sda6 of=/dev/sdb6
dd if=/dev/sda7 of=/dev/sdb7
On my second reboot to the new 500 GB hard drive, Linux was able to boot perfectly fine with all my original settings!!! Until… I opened up fdisk only to find out that I wasn’t able to add partition (I had over 400 GB of free space in the drive) because I wasnt able to modify my existing partition table that consisted of 3 primary partions and 1 extended partition that consisted of three logic partitions within it. So I just download the live GParted program and I was able to created the additional 400 GB logical drive from there.
On the third attempt to boot into the new 500 GB hard drive, Linux had to do filesystem check to /dev/sda7 which happened to be my /home partition. The fsck completely wiped out all of the contents that was in my home directory. Which wasn’t a big of a deal since I already had a full backup of all my files.
Conclusion
Overall upgrading the hard drive on a Mac Mini running CentOS was really painful, but I had the feeling that it could have been worse.
-Alpha01
At least for me that is. Now that I finally installed Chromium on my Ubuntu MSI Wind netbook, Chrome has become my primary web browser in all of my computers. Apart from being extremely fast, it’s not a memory hog like Firefox. After using it daily for a couple of months now, I only seem to notice tiny Flash related issues of which I’m not sure to blame Chrome for the problems due to how unstable Flash is on any browser for that matter.
Chalie Miller is my hero
Dec 3
Almost three years later
Nov 30
I finally got an iPhone.