Archive for Linux

Fixing Subversion branch and trunk directories

August 3, 2009 Reluctant Computers, Internet, Linux, Technology, Uncategorized

subversionThe other day, at work, we came across a bad situation with Subversion (a version control system).  We had created a secondary repository for a common library (YUI) of code that we want to use in multiple other repositories.  YUI doesn’t provide a subversion repository, so we had to create one “in-house.”

I’m sure nobody else has done this (wink, wink), but we spaced off creating the typical trunk, branches and tags directories.  I think we assumed that we would never really need them.  But of course, there’s always a reason for following best practices.  We got to a point where one of our branches needed the old version of YUI (2.6.0) and the new branch needed the current YUI branch (2.7.0).  This didn’t work because of our lack of trunk/branches directory.  Here’s the steps I took to rectify the situation:

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LinuxMCE — the new Media Center PC

March 31, 2007 Reluctant Entertainment, Linux, Movies, Technology, Ubuntu

I stumbled across LinuxMCE, a free competitor to Windows Media Center Edition. LinuxMCE does what WinMCE does except it does much, much more. The features included in LinuxMCE go well beyond the simple Media Center PC.

Media Hub

WinMCE has the ability to catalog and organize your media, which means music, photos and videos/DVDs on the computer on which it is installed. But LinuxMCE has the ability to automatically search your network to find all the multimedia on all the computers in your network. Although I’m sure that means you will need to share your media files on windows computers or setup NFS on your other Linux/Unix machines, that’s a trivial thing to do.

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A new desktop environment… Mozilla

March 26, 2007 Reluctant Business, Computers, Internet, Linux, New Technology, Technology, Web Development

Almost everyone has heard of Mozilla. The Mozilla organization is the descendant of Netscape and is the producer of Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. One of the little known technologies behind the Mozilla products is called XUL (pronounced zool). XUL is a scripting language (and interpreter) that provides all the user interface for Firefox and Thunderbird. It’s very powerful and several stand-alone applications have been built with it.

So recently, some Mozilla developers tossed around the idea of creating a new desktop environment built on the XUL technology. This would not only compete with Gnome and KDE, but also with Windows, Mac OSX and many of the other platforms. Because the heart of the Mozilla technologies has been ported to all kinds of different platforms, this new desktop could potentially run on many of the diverse kernels (the software that connects all other software applications with the hardware — the heart of an operating system).

This would be amazing! The Mozilla Desktop (has a nice ring to it) would provide a universal interface to many different platforms. Regardless of the underlying technology, the user experience would be the same. And XUL could handle all the intricacies of the diverse platforms. Windows users could more easily switch to Linux or Max OSX (or Solaris for that matter) without having to relearn an interface.

Of course, there are all kinds of issues that would need to be worked out in order for this to really work, but it’s the best start to a centralized user interface that we’ve ever seen.

So what do you think? For you tech guys, do you think this is feasible? And for you non-techies, is this something you would like?

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Novell parody commercials

March 25, 2007 Reluctant Internet, Linux, Technology

So almost everyone has seen the set of Apple commercials portraying a hip and friendly guy named Mac and a stuffy, geeky and very business oriented guy named Windows. Novell recently produced a few commercials adding a third individual. She is called Linux!

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From SuSE Linux to Ubuntu

December 18, 2006 Reluctant Linux, SUSE Linux, Technology, Ubuntu

One of my coworkers is a huge Ubuntu fan. He tried SuSE for a while, but eventually went back to Ubuntu. He had a lot of success with some of the problems I was having with SuSE. Specifically, it was Evolution connecting to Exchange (as I have previously discussed).

So I decided to try it out at home. I had an old machine that I had re-built with some upgrades and just hadn’t gotten everything put together properly. So I decided that it was going to be my Ubuntu test machine because I really didn’t need it to fully function.

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Greylisting — one more tool in the arsenal against SPAM

December 17, 2006 Reluctant Internet, Linux, New Technology

I ran across the following link the other day and was very interested.
Postfix and Postgrey: A proactive approach to spam filtering

For those not familiar with Postfix, it’s an MTA (Mail Transfer Agent). Basically, a mail server. It’s the server application that stores, accepts and sends emails to different mail servers. So Postfix is usually our first line of defense against SPAM. A few postfix plugins already help with spam but still many get through because spammers consistently change their techniques.

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Celestia (for Linux/Win32/MacOSX)

September 28, 2006 Reluctant Family, Linux, Science, Technology

To make sure you all don’t start thinking this is a BYU only blog, I figured I would post about something else.
I ran across a very cool application the other day. It’s classified under “Edutainment.” That amazing class of applications that are both entertaining and educational.

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Microsoft : The open killer

May 27, 2006 Reluctant Business, Computers, Internet, Linux, New Technology, Rant

iTWire – Microsoft strengthens Windows lock-in with JPEG rival

When I saw the above article, I became a little frustrated. As I continued to read, I became just plain ole’ furious. Why do they continue to do this? Don’t they realize that platform lock-in is a bad thing? They started their business off the opposite way. And the openness of the PC is what has brought about the PC revolution and in turn the Internet revolution.

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Oracle to buy Novell?

May 1, 2006 Reluctant Computers, LDS Life, Linux, Work

I’m not quite sure how I feel about this.

That would make two of my former employers swallowed up by Oracle (PeopleSoft and Novell). At first glance, I didn’t like the thought of Larry Ellison having any type of influence in Happy Valley. But as I considered this more and more, I realized that it might be a really good move for Novell employees.

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