Brandon’s Blog

Well its been a while since my last post and since I’ve celebrated my 29th Birthday on December 19th, Spent a wonderfull Christmas with my family ( pictures for both here ), and getting ready to ring 2008 ! Sitting here thinking about what I want to accomplish in 2008 I only have a few easy to reach goals IMHO :

• Make it to 4 Linux confrences this year ( Penguicon, Ubuntu Developers Summit [ 1 of 2 ], SCALE, and Ubuntu Live )
• Give atleaste 1 talk at a OpenSource Confrence, and run 1 Local “Package Jam” here in Kansas City
• Quit Smoking Cigarettes
• Decide between a eeepc or Mac Book for my next “mobile” machine
• Upgrade all my systems to use FL/OSS friendly vendors like Dell,Intel,Apple etc. ( I’m not talking 100% ideal companies, but ones that atleaste show some effort )
• Keep and install of Ubuntu GNOME arround alongside my Main Kubuntu KDE ( I’m still a kde guy through and through, but its good to see the “other side” from time to time )
• Blog and Post Photos ( to flickr ) more Regularly

Also on a side note this year I’ve introduced all my imediate family members to Ubuntu and they all continue to use it ( Wife, Stepfather, Brother, and Mother ) instead of XP or Vista, My “support” phone calls have basicly dissapeared.

And with that, I wish every one a safe and Happy 2008… May this be the year of the Linux Des… ahh nevermind, yall enjoy the holiday.

First of all a GIANT thank you to all who made this possible. It was hugely a success.

Today the parts arrived to piece my system back together , I’m typing this post on it as we speak. This means I’ll be able to get alot more done in a sane amount of time, in fact kdebindings-kde4 is calling my name tonight ( was far too large to compile before ).

For those of you interested in the new system specs here they are:

• AMD Athlon 64 x2 Dual-Core 4600+ Processor
• 4GB ( 2x 2GB ) DDR2 667 RAM
• 80GB SATA2 3G/s HDD
• MSI K9N6GM Motherboard with nForce Chipset and onboard Nvidia 6100 GPU
• Lots of USB 2.0 ports and all the other standard ports

Time to get all my disk configurations and such upto-date :)
Everyone have a Happy and Safe Holiday Season !

Well the last few days I have updated many things in a lot of different areas, the most noticeable right away is I have updated my website theme, I’m still not 100% happy with it, link colors are a bit off and such but its “good enough” to go live, if your reading this via an RSS feed go check out my main page and drop me some feedback. ( if your really interested in the theme and want it for your own website you can grab it at http://www.imbrandon.com/misc/human_0.5.tar.gz
I’ve released it under GPLv2 , its not perfect but its exactly what I’m running as of this writing. )

The next thing is I changed ISP from Comcast Cable ( ugh ) to Yahoo! Branded AT&T 6M/768k DSL, not only is this faster and cheaper than my old connection, it has the nice side effect of giving me a flickr Pro account free* ( *included in the connection price somehow I’m sure ), that brings us to the next change …

I’ve started using my flickr pro account and am loving it, with things like the fuse filesystem FlickrFS and kFlickr makes using flickr easy and painless. Along with that there is this awesome GPL wordpress plugin FAlbum that lets me integrate my Flickr sets into a photoalbum on wordpress very simply and looks great too. Visit my new web album here http://www.imbrandon.com/images/ ( I’ve uploaded just over 100 photos to get it started, I still need to tag and sort most of them )

And last but not least on top of my Ubuntu Core Developer Status, I’ve finally got in contact with a “full-time” sponsor for my contributions in Debian, this will make my application for NM alot smoother with an Advocate ( when I get around to filling out the NM form, LOL ), wish me luck.

Looks like Microsoft Researches new website InkblotPasswords[.com] , aimed at helping users come up with hard to crack passwords ( while at the same time saving them in a database ) is powered by Debian and Python :)

From Netcraft :
Apache/1.3.34 (Debian) mod_python/2.7.11 Python/2.4.4c0 mod_ssl/2.8.25 OpenSSL/0.9.8c

Why oh why did openssl097 get uploaded UNPATCHED when there were known security issues with this version, with the fix even linked to in the bug?

This software was removed from Gutsy for a reason, if its going to be added back it should ATLEASTE be patched, as it stands right now anyone who installs vmware-server via Canonical’s Partner Repository is remote exploitable and it was known prior to the upload, is this a case of $$ from VMware means more than security? I’m sorry but this is simply not acceptable from Canonical as far as I’m concerned. It isnt a case where VMware is distributing it, its us, or atleaste Canonical distributing it to STABLE releases.

At this point a patch to fix the issue will simply not be enough, I want to know why this happened. And whats going to be done to ensure the Distribution I spend many hours for volunteering isnt going to allow this to happen again.

I Love Ubuntu and hate to see things like this happen, lets ensure they dont.

/* annoyed */