At the Linux Foundation, I recently had been brainstorming with some my colleagues about ways in which we might be able to reach out to the various local Linux User’s Group (LUGS). So I was quite surprised when I saw a blog posting from Lenovo’s Connections blog asking the question: “Local User Groups – gone the way of the dinosaur?”and even more provocatively, “Has the web now relegated the user group to history, along with dot matrix printers, cassette tapes for mass storage, and dial up modems with acoustic couplers?

Gunnar Wolfis Debian Developer, a Mexican, and is a former member of a Hashomer Kibbutz. He has written an essay on his blog entitled “About the recent events and possible outcomes in Israel and Palestine”. I strongly encourage people to read it, since he talks about the historical roots of the conflict (going back all the way to the roots of Zionism) in a way that while it is definitely not pro-Zionism, neither is it as unfair as some of the pro-Palestinian accounts of the period 1947-1949.

Dear Lazyweb, I’m looking for recommendations for Open Source backup solutions which track incremental backups using a database, and which do not use hard link directories. Someone gave me a suggested OSS backup program at UDS, but it’s slipped my memory; so I’m fairly sure that at least one or more such OSS backup solutions exist, but don’t know their names. Can some folks give me some suggestions? Thanks! There are a number of very popular Open Source backup solutions that use a very clever hack of using hard link trees to maintain incremental backups.

Given the recent brouhaha in Debian, and General Resolution regarding Lenny’s Release policy as it relates to Firmware and Debian’s Social Contract, which has led to the resignation of Manoj Srivastava from the position of Secretary for the Debian Project, I’m reminded of the following passage from Gordon Dickson’s Tactics of Mistakes (part of Dickson’s Childe Cycle, in which he tells the story of the rise of the Dorsai): “No,” said Cletus.

The title of this post was a headline that was probably written by an overly sensationalistic editor at http://www.searchenterpriselinux.com. The actual article, though, was written by Pam Derringer, was a pretty balanced piece (although it obviously could have been more in-depth; given length and time constraints, she talked to as many people as I think could have been expected, including a Sun spokeswoman, two analysts from different analyst companies, the chair of Apache Software Foundation, a Sun customer, and so on).

When I have a moment, I’ll try to tally up the responses that I got to “An ethical question involving ebooks”and see if there are any interesting patterns based on self-identified generational markers. Obviously, this is not a properly controlled survey, so the results aren’t going to mean much, but it is interesting that some fairly passionately written comments came from folks who self-identified as coming from generations that broke with the common stereotypes of their respective demographic groups.

I recently purchased a short story from Fictionwise, which was not DRM’ed, so I could easily get it into a form where I could read it on my Sony eReader. Thanks to that short story, I was introduced to an author, and a character, which I found very engaging. When I decided to find out more about the character, I found that the author had written two additional short stories, and three additional novels many years ago, but has since stopped writing any more books involving that character.

With the price drop, I finally decided to get a 32GB iPod Touch, and I have to admit, Apple has done a really nice job. Its decisions about which applications it decides to arbitrarily blacklist from its AppStore (either now or without warning in the future) is evil, of course, but I don’t plan to develop on a locked-in platform such iPod/iPhone, so that’s not a problem. And of course, given AT&T’s evil customer service, I won’t be getting an iPhone any time soon (life’s too short to play cat and mouse with Apple’s cell phone locking games), this was probably my only opportunity in the short time to play with the iPhone/iPod touch’s e-mail application.

This wasn’t one of the things we were explicitly engineering for when were designing the features that would go into ext4, but one of the things which we’ve found as a pleasant surprise is how much more quickly ext4 filesystems can be checked. Ric Wheeler reported some really good fsck times that were over ten times better than ext3 using filesystems generated using what was admittedly a very artificial/synthetic benchmark. During the past six weeks, though, I’ve been using ext4 on my laptop, and I’ve seen very similar results.

Over the weekend, I converted my laptop to use the ext4 filesystem. So far so good! So far I’ve found one bug as a result of my using ext4 in production (if delayed allocation is enabled, i_blocks doesn’t get updated until the block allocation takes place, so files can appear to have 0k blocksize right after they are created, which is confusing/unfortunate), but nothing super serious yet. I will be doing backups a bit more frequently until I’m absolutely sure things are rock solid, though!