Peregrine

This week, I’m again in Alexandria, Virginia. I arrived yesterday afternoon, flying in at Ronald Reagan National Airport. I took the Metro train into Old Town Alexandria where my hotel is.

The work this week is to teach one of Linux courses for (and at) the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. I’ve been here once before, as some of you may recall.

My hotel is only about a 4 block walk from the Patent Office. Following the first day’s class, I started back only to find that it was just starting to rain. As I completed the first block, I reached a point where I could see farther away between the buildings and knew I had to hurry if I didn’t want to get drenched.

I just love the rain. I normally don’t mind getting caught in it, either. But today, I was wearing a silk tie that my wife recently gave me (no, it wasn’t for Father’s Day, it was a few months ago).

Sitting here working on my notebook for the past couple of hours, I have been listening to Frank Sinatra and a lot of strange sounding thunder. Looking out the window, I can see the rain coming down in droves, pounding the cobbled streets, but I can’t hear it. I think the thick windows are mutating the sound of the thunder. It’s almost like some one is playing it through giant, blown speakers. It’s rather tinny. Weird.

Oh, but I am loving it. :)

On May 25th, I was reading The Wall Street Journal. The cover story was titled, “Credit-Card Issuers’ Problem: People Are Paying Their Bills“.

Why would this be a problem for them? After all, they are in business to make money, right?
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Well, it finally happened: This morning, I had a couple of SPAM comments on my blog for the first time.

I love WordPress; it’s just so easy to deal with the SPAM. Still, it will be nice when open-source people finally create software that fully neuters all SPAM.

I just read this great article by Bruce Schneier.

Privacy is a very important matter. Privacy is a central, core component to liberty and true freedom. If we (US Citizens) don’t pay attention to it, there are forces who would like to take it away. Most of the time, we call those forces terrorists, but there are other more subtle forces also at work in the world.

My good friend, Pete Ashdown has an exellent position on the issue of privacy, and I support him on these efforts.
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Tonight, my wife Charlotte and I went to the Utah Bloggers Conference. I recognized a few faces of people that I had not met before, since they have their faces on the Utah Open Source Planet.

As for those of you who don’t have your photos up there, yet: some of us (like Jayce^ and herlo and I) would have come over and taken your photo for you so you could get it up there, but we didn’t know what you looked like, so we couldn’t find you.

Next time we can’t find you like that, we’ll have to refer back to your photo…wait, um…

So, get your hackergnotchi in to Gabe (at gabe at gundy dot org).

In case you haven’t heard, Google recently made available a beta for the next version of Google Earth. The big buzz is because there is now a native Linux version.

I’ve seen people talking about the Linux version of Google Earth on the SLLUG Members mailing list. I found an entry on the Fedora SELinux mailing list titled, “Step-by-Step Guide To Creating SELinux Policy for Google Earth“. I’ve seen several other people talking about it already.

But, I was surprised to see that no one whose feed is picked up by the Utah Open Source Planet had yet posted on any of their blogs. So, here it is.

I heard about the new Linux version of Google Earth from my good friend, Evan McNabb via Jabber, yesterday. I downloaded the new Linux version and waited until later in the evening to try it out. Video was a bit scan like on my notebook, but I soon cleared it up.

I’d like to see people comment on their experiences with it, so far. I’ll write more about the things I hear later on.

Well, as many of you have noticed, my blog started causing those who were viewing the Utah Open Source Planet to get an SSL Certificate Authorization dialog, again.

For the time being, I have turned off the convert smileies to graphics option.

It turned out, that I had to also pull up the offending post(s) and resave them to get that setting to take effect in the db, which is strange, since it was dynamic for the site last time I fixed the bug. Oh, well.

As many of you who use WordPress know, it wasn’t until the 2.0 release that WordPress supported having your admin interface portion of the site encrypted. The way that they implemented this feature in WordPress 2.0 was to have two different URLs that you can configure, the blog URL (where visitors see your blog) and the site URL (where your admin interface lives).

The two URL idea was the right way to do it. I benefit from it, as the admin interface is on a different hostname from the blog. Unfortunately, the WordPress developers made a couple of small mistakes in implementing the use of the two URLs and that’s where the bug that has affected UOSP readers comes from.

But, I know how to fix these bugs.

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Gabe Gunderson wrote this post in response to my previouse entry, OpenBrainstem Mailman Configuration Fixed.

His first sentance was:

I post this on my blog cause Peregrine doesn’t take comments unless I’m “logged on” and I had it all typed up.

Sorry for the inconvenience, Gabe. You’ll be happy to know that I have now “fixed” this. The “Users must be registered and logged in to comment” option in WordPress was checked.

I was going to add a trackback to Gabe’s article, but I couldn’t find any trackback URLs on his WordPress blog. Oh, well.

I figured out how to get mailman working with my Postfix/maildrop/Dovecot setup.
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This morning, my wife received a phone call from the Hospital where she had the amniocentesis. Although we had already received the preliminary results at last week’s “doctor’s” visit, the final results confirmed that everything is looking great.

The one piece of “news” she got, was that according to the chemical analysis, they are 99% certain that our baby is a girl. Cool! Both of us have wanted it to be a girl.