Welcome to the New Blog

March 12, 2007 Leave a comment

I’ve updated my blog to WordPress. It’s been a long time coming, but I finally put aside the time to do it last night. Please let me know ASAP if you notice any problems. I’m still getting some things configured, but so far so good. Using WordPress should give me a lot more flexibility than I had before, and not having my blog on an Open Source platform always bothered me. Once things stabilize, I’ll be adding some additional bells and whistles. One huge problem I’ve run into is that the old permalinks are currently broken. This is very bad. The problem is that Blogware doesn’t export the needed information to migrate this information. I’ve sent them an email to see if they can do it for me manually. In the meantime I have 302’d everything I could. When going to an old article, you’ll get redirected to a list of posts from that day. If Blogware is able to send me the information I want, I’ll update the system to 301 you to the correct post. I really apologize for the breakage and hope it will be cleaned up soon. The feed entry you have should be transparently updated already. The only other issue I see is that the export didn’t respect line breaks in a sane way, so some posts are ugly. I’ll manually clean up at least the posts on the home page. Let me know how things are operating from your end. Thanks ;)

–jeremy

Filed under Linux, LinuxQuestions.org, Open Source

The LQ Wiki is now an OpenID Consumer

February 28, 2007 Leave a comment

As promised, the LQ Wiki now allows you to log in using OpenID. You can convert an existing account if you have one, or simply login with an OpenID as a completely new user and start editing. I’d like to thank Evan, whose extension made adding this relatively painless. One thing to be aware of if you are thinking about implementing OpenID (you should be) and are planning to use curl. Some versions deal with RFC 2818 – 3.1 Server Identity differently than others. A snippet:

Matching is performed using the matching rules specified by [RFC2459]. If more than one identity of a given type is present in the certificate (e.g., more than one dNSName name, a match in any one of the set is considered acceptable.) Names may contain the wildcard character * which is considered to match any single domain name component or component fragment. E.g., *.a.com matches foo.a.com but not bar.foo.a.com. f*.com matches foo.com but not bar.com.

What does that mean to you? Well, I was using jeremy.lq.myopenid.com to test. In some implementations of curl (7.12.1 in this case), the *.myopenid.com cert works fine for that domain. In other implementations (7.10.6 in this case), you get a error:

certificate subject name ‘*.myopenid.com’ does not match target host name ‘jeremy.lq.myopenid.com’
Just something to be aware of as many of the gratis OpenID providers seem to allow this situation to happen. Hopefully you’ll come across this blog post before banging your head on your desk for 10 minutes wondering why code works in some places and not others.

–jeremy

Filed under Linux, LinuxQuestions.org, Main Page, Open Source, OpenID

LQ Radio ogg RSS Feed

February 5, 2007 Leave a comment

A quick update on the LQ Radio ogg RSS feed. From day one we have supported ogg at LQ Radio. In fact, every audio release we've ever done has been released in both mp3 and ogg format. That being said, the RSS feed for podcatchers only offered the enclosure in mp3 format. About two weeks ago we started offering an ogg feed in addition to the mp3 feed. In that two weeks, a full 5% of subscribers have moved over. If you're subscribed to the mp3 feed and are able to use ogg, I'd encourage you to move over to the unencumbered format at your leisure. To clarify, we are committed to supporting both formats long term.
–jeremy
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Filed under Linux, LinuxQuestions.org, Main Page, Open Source, podcast

MySQL Stats

January 17, 2007 Leave a comment

I just logged into the LQ MySQL server to get some statistics. I have a couple ideas for some optimizations and wanted to get a baseline on things. I fired up mytop and got the following:
Queries Total: 1,033,746,636 Avg/Sec: 112.80 Now/Sec: 119.93 Slow: 667
Cache Hits : 478,453,845 Avg/Sec: 52.21 Now/Sec: 56.15 Ratio: 46.28%
Not too shabby – one billion queries since the last MySQL restart. Almost all of the “Slow” queries are either me doing maintenance (some of which just simply use long queries) or queries going on during our snapshots (which I plan to move to the slave soon). I think we have a good handle on the current LQ growth, which continues to be fantastic. Performance is important, but we're also adding some interesting features in the near future. Stay tuned.
–jeremy

Filed under Linux, LinuxQuestions.org, Main Page, MySQL, Open Source

SCALE 5X and LinuxWorld Summit – It's going to be a busy week

January 12, 2007 2 Comments

Well, I've just confirmed bookings for both SCALE 5X (where LQ is a sponsor) and LinuxWorld Open Solutions Summit (where I'm on the speakers list). Considering the events are only a couple days apart but 2,795 miles apart, it should be an interesting week. I do have one day to “sleep in my own bed” in between the two events, so it should work out fine ;) I attended SCALE 4X last year and it was a great event. I'm really looking forward to both of these. If you'll be at either one and would like to meet up, drop me a line.
–jeremy

Filed under Linux, LinuxQuestions.org, LinuxWorld, Main Page, Open Source

Moved LQ to XCache

January 7, 2007 Leave a comment

I just moved part of the LQ infrastructure (the main site) from APC to XCache. I haven't necessarily been unhappy with APC, but I've seen a lot about XCache recently so I figured I'd check it out. We have some other performance improvements planned for LQ in the near future, but every bit helps. If you notice any difference, let me know. LQ gets a good amount of traffic and we're planning for solid growth this year, so ensuring the infrastructure is scalable and performant is critical for us. If there's a big difference either way, I'll report back here. Next up is to see if Xdebug works with XCache enabled (last time I checked, it didn't work with APC enabled).
–jeremy

Filed under Linux, LinuxQuestions.org, Main Page, Open Source

LinuxWorld Open Solutions Summit

January 2, 2007 Leave a comment

Looks like I'll be on the “Ask the Experts” panel at the upcoming LinuxWorld Open Solutions Summit in NYC.
Bring your toughest open source problem to our crack team of LinuxWorld.com contributors, open source developers, and IT security and administration professionals! From software selection, configuration, and hardware, and bandwidth requirements to the unpredictable human elements that make an IT project succeed or fail, you'll get working answers and pointers to open source projects, documentation, and online forums that will turn every problem into an opportunity.
I don't have a ton of detail beyond that yet, but I do know fellow panelists include Jeremy Allison and Donald Becker. If you'll be near New York City (or need an excuse to go to NYC) on February 14-15, I highly suggest you check out the LinuxWorld Open Solutions Summit.
–jeremy

Filed under Linux, LinuxQuestions.org, LinuxWorld, Main Page, Open Source

Voting Has Opened for the 2006 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards

December 31, 2006 Leave a comment

With the new year right around the corner, voting for the 2006 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards is now open. There are 21 categories this year. Based on feedback we dropped a couple polls that had either consistently low turnout or landslide (90%+) victories and also added a couple new polls. We have set a record for number of votes each and every year we've done this, and I expect the same this year. I think we improve the process every year, but it's not too late to suggest improvements for this years poll (and even if the suggestion doesn't get implemented this year, it may impact how we set things up in the future). This is your chance to have your opinion heard. Vote now!
–jeremy

Filed under Linux, LinuxQuestions.org, Main Page, Open Source

Google and the Issue of Trust

December 31, 2006 Leave a comment

Sparked by a post by Blake Ross, many are starting to question Google. The “tips” issue seems to be the tipping point for many. To be honest, that issue doesn't bother me much. For me, it came when they deprecated the SOAP API. In my mind, that marked the first time Google made a decision based on something besides technical merit. If they had dropped the SOAP API for something like a REST API, I'd have thought much differently about the situation. The replacement, however, was the AJAX Search API which is in no way comparable. The SOAP API allowed you to do whatever you needed to do with the data. The AJAX Search API doesn't allow you to do anything with the data except show it verbatim, and it has ads. The deprecation was especially poignant for LQ, since we used it as an alternative search method to supplement our normal search functionality (which uses FULLTEXT). We'll either need to drop the alternative search, or move it to something like the Yahoo! REST API. 2007 may prove to be an interesting year for Google. They remain technically superior, but they may find they're not able to do some of the things they do (giving no idea of what the revenue share on AdSense is comes to mind, but so do other things) once they are no longer the darling. Being able to ignore the Street and move in whatever direction they wanted has been a core strength of Google in my mind. That ability may be coming to an end though. Kudos to Matt Cutts (a Google employee) for speaking on the issue openly and transparently. That's what's needed right now. Goggle has been very good at responding to criticism in the past. Hopefully that trend will continue.
–jeremy
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Filed under Google, LinuxQuestions.org, Main Page

New Site Section – LQ Screenshots

December 30, 2006 Leave a comment

Just in time for the new year, I'm proud to announce that we have added a new section to LQ. LQ Screenshots offers a visual overview for a large number of Linux distributions. This allows you to get a basic feel for a distro before trying it out. The site is fully functional, but the look does need to be updated to bring it in line with the rest of the LQ network. We do have some additional functionality in mind, and one of the first moves will be some integration with LQ ISO. As always, we're looking for your feedback. I'd like to thank Chris for not only working with me to get this on LQ, but for building a great service.
–jeremy

Filed under Linux, LinuxQuestions.org, Main Page, Open Source

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