my animals and other friends
I know there are newer versions coming, I know it is just a toy, my fingers are too fat to type comfortably on its small keyboard, but Asus' Eee PC is mega cool, and I couldn't resist.
Can this minature Linux device be used by non-technical users? It certainly can, and I intend to prove that shortly.
I've finally found time to look into the crashes that we've had with a "secondary" OpenLDAP installation. I'd reported that we were experiencing sporadic crashes (sometimes once a month, sometimes three times a day).
The first thing I did was to upgrade OpenLDAP to the newest version in the 2.3 branch (don't feel like going to 2.4 at this moment), so I installed 2.3.42, and quickly switched running processes, without anyone noticing.
It then occurred to me to really check which version of BDB slapd was using. (I had of course installed BDB from source, with Oracle's patches.)
Oh. 
fuser says the shared object is not the one I expected, which probably is the reason for the crashes.
I've restarted slapd with the correct shared library, and all is quiet. So far. 
A comment posted the other day made me consider writing up a bit on how I got started with LaTeX, so here goes.
When the idea of writing a book was born, I dreaded the thought of using a typical word processor to do the job; I've used MS-Word (in umpteen versions except the latest: I refuse to) and OpenOffice.org on larger documents before, and the programs suck. Both programs are good enough to write up a shopping list or an invitation to a booze-up on the weekend but little else. I had a publisher (that's the guy who made me start writing the book), and he recommended I do it in LaTeX. His main arguments being I could use Unix tools to "manage" the creation of the book (grep, sed, etc.), and write it with my favorite text editor. That was the argument that really got me.
I ordered two books: Leslie Lamport's LaTeX: a document preparation system (Lamport invented LaTeX, so that is the reference), and Frank Mittelbach's The LaTeX Companion, 2nd ed (an excellent and very thick book that shows you how to use LaTeX' packages with a trillion examples). There are plenty more books, so take your pick. Oh, and I recently read (and loved) LaTeX Hacks which, to my knowledge, doesn't exist in English. The books took a while to be delivered by the post office, so I started off with some online resources.
There is an incredible amount of good stuff on LaTeX, and here are a few I liked best: start off on the LaTeX project page of course, where they tell you (in just a few words), what LaTeX is all about. This bit is very important to understand: LaTeX is a document preparation system for high-quality typesetting. Read that short page five times, go grab a coffee and read it again, and then go to their documentation page.
WikiPedia's LaTeX article gives a bit more insight and some goodish links. The next bit is: don't get confused by all the maths stuff: many clever people use LaTeX for typesetting mathematic formulae; now, that doesn't interest me in the slightest, but unfortunately a lot of documentation focusses on that (it is after all one of the many powerful facets of TeX, the underlying system in LaTeX). Anyways, just forget about those (unless of course, you are a mathematician and want formulae).
A goodish document is Getting Started with LaTeX, by Wilkins, available as PDF and as LaTeX source (is that cool?). Very good, because it is geared towards how you get started with the tools, is Talbot's LaTeX for complete novices (PDF). WikiBooks has a book on LaTeX (PDF) that is also worth looking at. Cambridge University has a good list of introductions, some as PDF, others as PostScript, most in HTML, so you'll be ok with that. And, last but not least, the FAQ. If you're conversant in the German language, consider listening to a podcast on the use of LaTeX, available for download at Pofacs: it is a bit long-winded, and I didn't like it very much, but you might. A Germany site for LaTeX is Dante where you'll find further links and literature, including a list of books.
So, and then? Well, LaTeX exists for most, if not all, Linux distributions, so there is no problem getting the software. You'll also find it for Windows, Mac OS X and probably for your toaster as well (BTW, Mittelbach's Companion has a CD on it, with a TeX/LaTeX distribution on it, but I didn't further look at that, as I had all I required to start with).
I started with your typical Hello World type document: nice and easy, to get a feel for the tools, the debug output (which sucks) and all the intermediate files LaTeX gives you. The first thing I did was create a small Makefile (you can use a shell script to do the same) which cleaned up all the stuff, just so I could start-over if I wanted to. After getting the hang of things (which takes an hour or two), I sat back and read the books.
And the rest? Well, the rest is history, as they say. I am certainly not proficient in LaTeX, but I fully understand what it can be used for, and let me tell you: you can use it for any writing. The most important to remember is to structure your text and use macros. For everything. The rest is easy.
As soon as I've completed this project, I'll be re-structuring my office. With that will come using LaTeX for all correspondence (yep, you can also write letters with it; packages g-brief, dinbrief, etc), and I'll report on that in due course.
LaTeX is really, really worth looking into.
Scared? I can imagine: I was.
Then why not start off easy? LyX is a document processor with a GUI-frontend to a LaTeX back-end. It runs on Linux and Windows (Win32 and Cygwin), and is probably a good way to start easy, with a bit of GUI support. There is another project known as Kile, an integrated LaTeX environment, which runs on a number of platforms. I've glanced at LyX, and it really looks very good, but I can't say much about either of these programs. If you do try them, or if you have experience with either, I'd be interested in your opinion.
A number of good ideas have been submitted for my whatmon add-on to Mozilla's Firefox browser or the Thunderbird e-mail client, and some kind folk even donated code snippets, so I've released a new version 3.0.1. I've incremented the major version number to show that the add-on also works with the upcoming version 3 of Firefox.
As soon as Firefox 3 is released, I'll have to again bump the module's version; Mozilla expects of its developers to give it a maxVersion of 3.0pre, which I've done, before the browser is finally released.
Enjoy now or wait until it pops up on Mozilla's add-ons site.
Being faced with the task of thinking carefully about whether or not to deploy thin clients on a customer network, I read Linux Thin Client Networks by David Richards (Packt). The book is thin, in both respects of the word; on 150 pages, the author splashes us with product names, program names, and protocol names, in a "strange" order. But, first things first.
A short overview of thin clients and their types is followed by a cost analysis and a chapter called "The People Issues", in which the author attempts to show me how to set up an initial meeting to discuss implementation of thin clients. In "Implementing the Server", we learn on a few pages about the server portion of thin clients. In the shortest section on Authentication Methods I've ever seen in a book, Richards writes: "The simplest method is to just use passwords found on the server itself". Oh.
Next comes an utterly useless chapter called "Implementing the User Software", where Richards discusses a few programs (with page-filling screenshots) which work on thin clients. Wow. In the same chapter is a discussion of MySQL and other databases, but I failed to find the connection to Thin Clients.
The book's index is lacking: I looked up "VNC" (which is mentioned in the book) and it isn't listed. XDMCP is. Apropos XDMCP: as with most of the other topics, its technology isn't explained. What is explained is how you set up your own graphical login screen…
This is a book you will want to give your manager for his birthday to impress him (he won't read it anyway). Unless you are very experienced in Unix/Linux services and networking, this book will not teach you a "step-by-step implementation of your thin client network".
Every three or four years, depending on how a company writes off its hardware, you have machines to replace. Now, replacing a box with a few cables on it isn't hard: you rip the old cords out of the wall and throw the lot on the dump. After that, you place the new boxes in your data centre and plug in all the cords in their respective sockets.
But that isn't quite all there is to it, is it?
You then install a base operating system. If you are lucky, nothing much has changed and you load backup tapes (or whatever media you've used) and restore from that. If you aren't so lucky (as what happened to me), the machine you are replacing wasn't quite, shall we call it up to date?
In that case, it is more or less a start from scratch kind of operation. Software has changed, you decide to use a different IMAP server, the MTA configuration needs tweaking, Apache's authentication modules have changed (for the, it must be, trillionth and a half time), etc., etc., etc.
Oh, well, I'm all done.
Well: not quite. There is still half a load of utilities and stuff that need recompiling (new version of GCC, you know), but I should be getting there soon.
I hope.
Quite a nice catch: 68 Linux related Ebooks including a 570-page PDF book on Vim.
Have fun reading. Tests begin on Tuesday. 
