Charles Bowden at the Marfa Dialogues 2010 from Ballroom Marfa on Vimeo.
Kplice is a really cool technology that let you update a Linux system without having to restart the machine, which in a server environment this is absolutely critical since this will eliminate or minimize server downtime. Even though the software is GPL licensed. I was shocked to hear that Oracle had purchased the company behind Kplice and are now dropping Kplice support for all non Oracle Linux systems. This is absolutely incredible given that Oracle Linux is essentially a fork of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Oracle is not even making the effort to continue supporting Ksplice on other Linux systems. In my eyes, this is far more worse than bitting the hand that feeds you. In terms of tech companies, as far as I know, I haven’t heard of any other multibillion corporation that literately stoled the product of another company, claim that their product is superior, and make completely anti competitive decisions.
This is why the beauty of the the GNU Public License flourishes over any other software license, at least now we in the free/open source software community can foresee a fork of Ksplice in the near future.
Official Oracle KSplice acquisition FAQ:
http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/Acquisitions/ksplice/faq-450488.pdf
For quite a while now, I’ve heard good things about the Ruby Version Manager (if only I knew about it before I installed Ruby 1.9 from source and screwed up rubygems). So I decided to install this application, but to my surprise in reading the documentation, the official install is only made via cloning the latest rvm github repository.
sudo apt-get install git git-core git-doc git-svn
mkdir Git_Repos/rvm
cd Git_Repos/rvm
git config --global user.name "Alpha01"
git config --global user.email "root@rubyninja.org"
git config --global core.editor /usr/bin/vim
git init
bash < <(curl -s https://rvm.beginrescueend.com/install/rvm)
Congratz, I just installed rvm and cloned my very first git repository.
Last week I purchased the book Gray Hat Python, by Justin Seitz. Though, I’m somewhat skeptical that I’m going to be finishing reading the book anytime soon, I started reading it’s first chapter. It appears that the book is going to be mostly based on Python’s ctypes library. Which in short, this really cool library lets you create complex C datatypes and low-level memory manipulation in pure Python code. One thing that really impressed me about cytpes is its ability to call functions in dynamically linked libraries. For example, with ctypes, you’re able to call the printf function from both Linux’s and Windows C runtime libraries, which I think it’s really cool.
Linux
from ctypes import *
love = CDLL('libc.so.6')
msg = 'Hello Baby'
love.printf("Testing: %s\n", msg)
Outputs:
Testing: Hello Baby
MS-Windows
from ctypes import *
msvcrt = cdll.msvcrt
msg = 'Hi'
msvcrt.printf('Message: %s', msg)
Outputs:
Message: Hi
Like a college lecture, Charles Bowden meticulously explains the Drug War in Mexico, failed drug and free trade policies and illegal immigration.
Google+
Jul 4
Google+, yet another social network I won’t be a part of.
I was lucky enough to get a developer invitation from Google a couple of months ago to preview and beta test their Google Storage for Developers service. This was before Google offered their free 5GB trial to the general public. I was given a 1 year 100 GB free storage plan and I only had to pay for the requests. Google Storage is pretty simple concept, essentially all it does is stored application data on “Google’s cloud”. Which according to Google, it’s stored on the same infrastructure that Google runs on. The very first thing that came to my mind when I heard of such service, is that Google is now trying to make a challenge to Amazon Web Service’s S3 service. However unlike Amazon’s S3, I find Google’s service to be far less cumbersome and really easy to work with. To start, Google provides a very usefull Python command line application called gsutil. With gsutil you can pretty much do anything you would do with their web based control panel. As a *nix geek, this is what sold me to this service.
At the moment, I’m currently using Google Storage just to backup my Bash, PHP, Perl, Ruby, and Python scripts and other important config files. (It can’t get any easier with gsutil and cron)
Given it’s access control features, I’m sure I’ll eventually will have more use to it besides offsite backup storage.
Also, since I was an early adopter of this cool technology, I’m the owner of the “rubyninja”, “alpha01″ and “baltazar” buckets on Google Storage’s top level namespace 
.
Brutally Outspoken
Jun 25
Not only is he my favorite writer because of his dark, poetic, and genius writing, I also admire Charles Bowden’s politically incorrect views and opinions.
In an interview with a Utah local news anchor, he states that he hopes everybody who voted to pass the Arizona SB 1070 law (70% of Arizona voters according to the Center of Immigration Studies) , should all burn in hell.
JavaScript Linux PC Emulator
Jun 19
Is just freaking awesome.
http://bellard.org/jslinux/
Good Juarez documentary
Jun 14
They may be a terrorist propaganda media outlet on the Middle East, or at least their seen like it. I have to say Al Jazeera English has become one of my go to source to get the latest news on the drug war. Their recent Fault Lines documentary called “Impunity and Profits” does what no other major English speaking media outlet has done, at least from my daily research of this drug war since it’s begging in early 2007, which is the connection between NAFTA and the War on Drugs.
This less than 30 minute documentary describes how drugs and corporate profits in Juarez are worth more than a human life.
Quotes from the documentary:
“In Mexico, I was well-known as a doctor, everyone knew me. And here, I am nothing….”
-Juarez refugee
“Juarez is the biggest mental institution in the world, it’s the biggest…”
-Jose Antonio Galvan
“the biggest cause of death in Mexico, is the American drug prohibition….”
“Al-Qaeda couldn’t do to Juarez what the US government done….”
-Charles Bowden
