These Things Matter To Me

If you’re a fan of RSS, you might know that OPML is a way to share a list of all your favorite feeds, without actually transferring the content of those feeds, saving them the hassle of manually subscribing to said feeds.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could do the same with our operating systems and applications (web or local)?  System administrators can already make profiles with a variety of configuration tools, but it’s not at all based on user behavior, it’s based on what the sysadmin thinks to plan for.

What if everyday computer users could share their favorite email setup, easily as they share a link? What if IT was social?

Last week I saw to glimpses into the future of what I’m just gonna call “Social IT.”  Sorry. New Word Alert. Social IT.

JOLICLOUD

First let;s take a look at Jolicloud. I haven’t used it yet, but the screenshot is pretty clear.  Your OS is social. I don’t mean it has a dashboard of view of other social apps. I mean information about the OS can be social.  Jolicloud’s “First look” preview showed an interesting screenshot where the user could see everything theirs friends installed, and even suggested that you could subscribe to info about any topic:

There was also a group feature which was not really screenshotted thoroughly, but one could envision subscribing to notifications about all apps relating to music or business intelligence when you don’t subscribe to a person who knows about that stuff.

FIREFOX PLUGIN COLLECTIONS

Next, let’s look at Mozilla’s Firefox Plugin Collections.

This does two things.  By installing a Collection, it saves you the hassle of downloading and installing each extension manually.  It also lets you browse by collector rather than plugin.  So if somebody had good taste about web developer tools, they might also be trustworthy about ad-blocking.  Firefox Collections is a great service, but the social part is a little under-designed for.  It was hard to just browse various users’ collections.  It also would be nice to have more cross-linking, like a list of everybody who likes or uses a certain collection. But the service just launched, and these shortcomings are just another way to perceive the huge potential.

UBUNTU PPA

Last I want to mention something that’s been here for a while.  It’s a little different from the services above in that the individual actually touches the software, rather than merely sharing their usage of it, but Ubuntu’s PPA is a great idea that lets individual contribute software that might otherwise be hidden from users.  It’s also meant to be used by advanced users (whereas I see the trend of Social IT to be something that all regular users will participate in.)

GUESS WHO’S NOT CRAZY

Before you think this vision of personal computing is just a crazy dream of a system administrator, there’s reason to believe “regular people” want to easily share infomation with their friends, family, and professional peers, saving them the hassle of manual tweaks and step-by-step instructions.

Earlier this week, I saw a provocative tweet from @turoczy, wishing he could share Tweetdeck setups more easily.

I see this configuration sharing happening not just with local apps, but even hosted apps.  Obviously applications that already store meta-data in a relatively portable format will have an advantage, but I don’t think this will be limited to open source software.

A bit of a break from sysadmin work, have been learning some affiliate stuff for some volunteering I’m doing.

Notes to self:

• Once you sign up for Amazon Associates, you get access to refferal links, astore creation, widgets, and developer tools.
• The management interface is a little ‘web 1.0′ (calendar days have giant drop down for every day of the month), but clear and well organized.
• Reports (not just earnings, but mere clicks) are delayed 24 hours, so if you’ve made a mistake/sent the wrong link, you may not notice for a bit. 
• Amazon’s kickback is not dynamic, but it is variable. If you only refer one item, it’s 4%, 9, 6%.
• Because reporting is so delayed, this link checker is pretty handy. It tells you the page your link goes to, and what ID is associated with it. A nice sanity check when you start getting paranoid.

Further thoughts about Amazon’s delayed reporting:

I don’t want to complain too much about this, because in general, Amazon’s setup was friendly enough for me to pick up pretty quickly. But it definitely sticks out in this era of near-realtime reporting.  We can watch our bit.ly click’s update in as they come in.  Even the blackbox Google Adsense reporting/Analytics, though delayed, is less than a full day behind.  I’m only a few days into this, so I may find an alternative way to get these results.

Though I’m a Linux a system administrator, I find myself interacting with Windows more often lately, usually because it touches the virtualization workflow in some environments I work with.  Lately I’ve been working on a bunch of Windows XP Professional hosts…. because they all run VMware Workstation 6.5, with Linux guests.

There are a couple of things about the installation I’m looking to script, so I’ve had to look up what: What’s a scripting language available on all Windows XP systems?

Answer: VBScript and Jscript  (Found out via this helpful  Stackoverflow.com post where somebody already asked this, so I didn’t have to.)

Windows does have another environment, Powershell, which looks great and quite Linux-like.  It can be installed on XP, but does not come stock.  It should come stock in Windows 7.

Upon boot, many virtual appliances automagically start services, log users in, or display helpful messages beyond what a normal OS would.
After all, a primary use-case of virtual appliances is to act more like an application than a full OS, and ideally would like the user to feel like they’re only interacting with an application.

One virtual appliance that I use is MindTouch’s open source Dekiwiki appliance (btw, I fully recommend Dekiwiki, my favorite wiki software at the moment.).

The DekiWiki appliance, upon boot, without any user interaction or required login, will display something like this:
This is extremely handy. No login to Linux necessary. Just go to any web browser on your network, and go.

How to recreate the magic in CentOS/Redhat/(probably) Fedora

I’m currently making two virtual appliances based on CentOS Linux (A clone of RedHat Enterprise Linux ). I pretty much copied DekiWiki’s rc.local, to identify and print out the current IP, whatever it may be, and direct the user to browse there, without having to login. This was partially successful. But after printing the URL and instruction to the user, the console tty was cleared prior to login prompt appeared, making it so all the helpful info was removed.

Where’d my helpful message go? It was cleared by mgetty.

I had no idea why this was working fine in the Debian-based DekiWiki appliance, and less so in my CentOS-based (Piwik, coming soon!) appliance. After a bit of side-by-side comparison, I noticed that Debian’s /etc/inittab calls up /sbin/getty, but CentOS (and Redhat)’s /etc/inittab calls up /sbin/mingetty. mingetty apparently clears the screen, and getty does not.

By adding the –noclear option to mingetty, CentOS will stop clearing the screen, and allow your custom boot message to live on.

Notes.

Here’s what to edit in /etc/inittab:

BEFORE

# Run gettys in standard runlevels
1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty1
2:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty2
3:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty3
4:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty4
5:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty5
6:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty6

AFTER

# Run gettys in standard runlevels
1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty –noclear tty1
2:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty –noclear tty2
3:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty –noclear tty3
4:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty –noclear tty4
5:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty –noclear tty5
6:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty –noclear tty6

Original rc.local that finds and prints IP in helpful message (thanks Mindtouch!):

IP=`ifconfig eth0 | grep “inet addr”|awk -F ‘ ‘ ‘{print $2}’ | awk -F ‘:’ ‘{print $2}’`
echo
echo -e “\033[1mTo access Deki Wiki, please launch a web browser and go to:”
echo
echo ” http://$IP”
echo -e “\033[0m”

exit 0

Most of the 311-so-far comments on the this post on the NBC-Universal/Newscorp we-don’t-need-YouTube collabo are extremely negative/disappointed about the lack of portability and accessibility of the Hulu content (many non-U.S. people wondering why the site is going out of its way to recreate a completely artificial international restriction on Internet stuff!)
Anyway, so it’s negative comment after negative comment, only to be interspersed by the occasional suspiciously positive but hollow atta-boy, something pointed out by commenter Chris Coleman:

Wow, this is so groundbreaking! I am truly thrilled by such great NBC original programming! Just FYI, it’s strikingly obvious which comments are planted by NBC. Don’t you have anything better for your interns to spend their time doing?

Here’s another good one:

Hmmm…. I can only watch these shows while chained to a browser, and in the country the shows air in anyway. Effectively, the only advantage is that I can watch the when I want. As long as I am in front of my computer at the time, and as long as I don’t mind a tiny window. Why is this better than recording the shows on a PVR and watching that whenever I want? On a bigger screen? With the ability to skip commercials? With my family? There appears to be no benefit to this whatsoever. If I can’t carry it away on an external device, it is actually a step backwards from the TV. The only benefit I can see is if I am overseas and want to keep up on shows. But of course that doesn’t work, does it.

And another:

By the time your shows are shown in Europe, I’ve already seen them through a torrent. Your business distribution model is dead. And now you’re trying to perpetuate this model online as well? This is a different world.

And so on.

Originally uploaded by ldandersen.

• What Would Steve Jobs Do? (just askin’. captured in Flickr, via Valleywag)
• newbie twitter guide (joining is easy, don’t let the guide complicate stuff. but it’s good at explaining some parts of twitter)
• Can Operating Systems tell if they’re running in a Virtual Machine?
• pizza party command-line script (-w for ham. duh.)
• Open Source CMS’s Drupal, Wordpress, and Joomla all have their own songs. I’m not here to judge.
• top Drupal gotchas
• how news aggregation site Techememe works

Our agreement with Microsoft is in no way an acknowledgment that Linux infringes upon any Microsoft intellectual property. To claim otherwise is to further sow fear, uncertainty and doubt, and does not offer a fair basis for competition. When we entered the patent cooperation agreement with Microsoft, Novell did not agree or admit that Linux or any other Novell offering violates Microsoft patents. We strongly object to the usage of our agreement to suggest that members of the Linux community owe Microsoft any remunerations.

Sometimes I get annoyed with Spam, but I’ve laughed out loud a couple of times recently.

I think they’re trying to make him look like Steve Jobs there. Even that little media player (that’s just there for show, there’s no real movie), is really Quicktime-y.

But anyway… shoe company Fleuvog is offering designers the opportunity to submit designs that will be public domain, and that they may manufacture. No, the designer won’t get paid. At first I thought they weren’t really feeling the open source vibe here, but the more I read it, the more open source it does seem. It’s not just open to designers who’d normally get paid for their work. It’s open to people who just don’t see the shoe they want to wear out there, and want somebody to make it.

Plenty of people have already submitted designs, which you can browse. And they even have a little page about “real” open source software.

TECHNORATI TAGS: fashion, fluevog, open source, crowdsourcing, public domain

From an osnews.com user:

Xen just hasn’t seen enough deployment out in the field yet, and getting it installed and set up is one really long and drawn out task.

Xen doesn’t yet have any decent management tools of any description like VMware which is essential in an enterprise product (many would rather just buy VMware for that alone), and performing tasks like adding and removing hardware on a virtual machine is still pretty unstable. They also seem to have a bugs list that never seems to get smaller:

http://bugzilla.xensource.com/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?query_format=spe…

Not to mention that Xensource isn’t the usual open source organisation people think of when they think of open source. They are a corporation that is, and has, burned up serious amounts of VC money (http://xensource.com/company/ – look at the VCs), taking on offices at $5,000 a month and making lots of truly ludicrous decisions like using the future Microsoft hypervisor.

Yer, yer. I know that Xensource is separate from the Xen community, but it’s silly to think that things like this aren’t having a detrimental effect on the software overall. Unfortunately, it seems that the venture capital fuelled soundbites about Xen being ready have been making their way to people who really should be able to see the forest for the trees:

http://www.novell.com/ctoblog/?p=19
(here he’s suggesting a Novell exec made a kind of irresponsible statement -ed)