Notes from the Metaverse, the WordPress edition

Sorry for the light posting of late. Will have much to report soon. Meanwhile, I want to call everyone’s attention to special chances to participate in the openSUSE community.

First, whether you’re new to (or even just curious about) openSUSE or have been “having a lot of fun” for a decade, you can join in YaST Smash Friday. This is an effort to clean up the SUSE bug database related to the openSUSE system administration tool, YaST.

As Zonker Brockmeier says:

Join us on #openSUSE-Factory from 09:00 to 18:00 CEST. We’ll be
going through the Bugzilla and reviewing YaST bugs to see which bugs
are still valid, gathering information about existing bugs, and
generally paring down the bug count to help developers focus on the
most crucial problems.

Anyone can participate — you don’t have to be a developer or power user to join in, just point your browser at the openSUSE Bugzilla,
log in (be sure to create an account if you don’t have one already) and
start searching for bugs against YaST. Help verify bugs that are in
Bugzilla, and help close bugs that have already been fixed.

If you have a lot of time to help, you can install an old version of openSUSE and confirm the existence of bugs in the old version. If not, see if you can reproduce them in your current version. Even if you can’t do it today, it’s always bug smashing season.

Now if you have a little more experience with openSUSE, a call went out this week for more helpers on the #openSUSE IRC channel. This is one place where people can go for real-time help with openSUSE problems. Although I’m still getting used to IRC, I’m trying to monitor the channel a little more in Konversation (which conveniently starts the channel by default).

So let’s all try to help each other, and openSUSE generally!

It’s a little late to be announcing this, but there are a few more hours (at least in the US and points west) in the very first Document Freedom Day. I only heard about this a few days ago, but I like the idea and hope it spreads.

Document Freedom Day follows in the footsteps of Software Freedom Day, and stands for “grassroots action for promotion of Free Document Formats and Open Standards in general,” according to the original announcement.

As my small contribution, I have finally completed a task that’s been festering on my to-do list for something like forever. From this point forward, Notes from the Metaverse appears under a Creative Commons noncommercial-attribution license (see the logo to the right here). What this means is that you can take these words of mine and use them in any way you like, so long as you don’t make money off my work, and quote me properly.

I owe a lot to the open-source community, and recognize that this small token represents a commitment to giving back to that community.

A lot of you have been visiting here looking for information on the Drupal web content management system. This is exciting, and I hope to deliver more Drupal-oriented content here in the coming months.

Longtime Linux users should recognize the name Phil Hughes. He founded Linux Journal in 1994 and shepherded the magazine through many lean years, on the road to making it the most important Linux magazine there is. He’s now living in Nicaragua, and building a Geek Ranch. After a fling with webgen, Hughes opted for Drupal for the Geek Ranch website. He explains his reasoning, and offers his (rather simple) process for building the site in this article:

Back to Drupal

Key quote:

After a few days of playing, I am sure I have made the right decision. I found a theme I liked and tweaked it a bit. I added a few more modules and, in general, set up the basic structure of the site. One thing that makes Drupal suitable for something other than a traditional CMS is the ability to set the start page. In addition, the books are a plus as well.

I hope to be sharing a similar story soon. Stay tuned!

Saturday morning is a great day for updating your system. You don’t have corporate systems dominating the servers, and new releases (and the subsequent server hammering) rarely come out on the weekends. It could just be an illusion, but I’ve just always found it just a tad speedier. This weekend, there is a bunch of new things to play with:

• openSUSE 11 Alpha 2 has been out for a little while, but there’s a twist on it this week. You can now get Live CDs (FTP link).
• Firefox 3 Beta 3 is also on the Mozilla servers (and openSUSE Build Service).
• Drupal 6.0 came out last week.
• KDE 4.0.1 continues to make progress toward a truly usable and very fancy desktop.

It also looks like progress is on the horizon for my once-favorite mail client, Mozilla Thunderbird. Here’s one guy who looks forward to hearing more from Mozilla Messaging.

And just for fun, the annual SXSW Showcasing Artists torrent is ready for 2008 (download link).

One tip on updating in openSUSE 10.3: Online Update really only gets you bug fixes for your installed applications. If you’re interested in keeping up with  the latest and greatest versions of your software, go to YaST Software Management. When the Search screen opens, go to the Package menu. Go to All Packages. You’ll see a pair of Update choices: “if newer version available” or “unconditionally.” Usually you’ll want to just get the newer version. YaST will then tell you how many packages will be updated, which can number in the hundreds, but don’t panic. You’ll get to review the list of updates, and deselect any packages you don’t want to update now. Click Accept, and the normal download/install process begins.

Happy updating!

Maybe I’m being a bit of a nag, but this will be the last time: You have approximately 24 hours from the time of this posting (that is, by the end of February 14) to vote for your favorites in the Linux Journal 2008 Readers’ Choice Survey.

As in all elections, please vote your conscience, but consider voting for openSUSE Linux Unleashed in Question 34.

Many thanks for your consideration.

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After some three months of fruitless effort, I can finally POP email to a computer again!

As you may know, AT&T (my DSL provider,  formerly SBC, formerly Ameritech, formerly AT&T) has a content deal with Yahoo! (soon to be…???…but that’s another issue to be dealt with later) to provide mail services and a home page. I’ve had few gripes with the service, either on AT&T’s or Yahoo’s side. It pretty much works, except when my wife’s connection gets flaky from time to time. We reboot the 2Wire router, and the problem usually goes away.

This began to change last summer. Condensing this story is a little difficult, but I’ll try. As a technical book author, I attempt to keep up with an ungodly number of very active support mailing lists. “Attempt” being the key word here–I can get 500+ emails per day on a fairly regular basis. Shortly after Yahoo announced that it would store unlimited amounts of mail on its servers, I took up the challenge: I went on vacation for 10 days, and didn’t turn off the message flow. When I returned, I set my mail client to leave copies of mail on the server indefinitely.

Everything performed without a hitch until around mid-November, when suddenly mail wouldn’t POP into my client with a Mail Drop Busy error. I could still read WebMail without a problem, but that was harder to deal with than my well-organized client. But every time I tried to pull mail into the client, I’d get the error message and messages in the WebMail Inbox would disappear. There were variations on this theme, but the result was always the same. The good thing was: if I ran a search of my Inbox, I could find stuff that had disappeared, so I knew it was all there, but occasionally hard to deal with.

I had a few days off at the end of December, and thought I could resolve the problem with a call to AT&T tech support. I was quickly routed to the 2nd tier support queue (Tip: Unless you have a very basic problem, don’t ever try using their support chat system. If the issue isn’t on their list, they’ll send you right over to phone support). While occasionally the support rep really wasn’t listening carefully to my explanations of my own troubleshooting, for the most part they were really helpful. At least once, someone was able to reproduce the problem, and another time someone took a screen shot of my Inbox with contradictory listings of how many unread messages were in there. None of them had solutions that actually solved the problem.

Once, I thought if I tried moving messages into another folder, perhaps that might help. Unfortunately, because of all the banner ads now cluttering the WebMail interface, moving large chunks of mail proved to be extremely difficult with errors aplenty. But I was on the right track.

I let the problem go until this weekend, when another opportunity to spend large amounts of quality time on the phone presented itself. I tried again. I explained the issue one more time to my new friend Mohammad–who had an answer! Mohammad was able to tell me that keeping several thousand messages in the Inbox was a bad thing, as I had suspected. The difference was he did something: He moved all 40,000+ messages into an OLD MAIL folder, and I could POP again!

So the lesson learned: In Yahoo Mail’s case, Unlimited only means Unlimited in the sense that you can store things there indefinitely — but you definitely want to move mail out of the Inbox after awhile.

Bottom line: I still have access to all those old mail messages on the server (and they’re searchable), and so far everything POPs like normal. Life is good! I almost wish AT&T would bail out Yahoo! …but that’s another can o’ worms, I’m sure.

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The Writers Guild has achieved a settlement with TV and movie producers! Details (including a link to a PDF summary of the agreement) here:

United Hollywood: Letter From The Presidents With Deal Summary

Be sure to read the comments too. It will give you a sense of the WGA membership’s mood. The strike does not end unless the rank-and-file writers say it’s over.

It’s been a long, hard fight for justice for these folks. If the members of the WGA feel this is the best contract they can get (as their leaders believe), I’ll cheer their return to work. If they choose to continue battling for a still better deal, I’ll mourn the passing of the TV season, but continue to stand behind them. As they say, it’s about “Solidarity Forever.”

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Just a little reminder to vote in the Linux Journal 2008 Readers’ Choice Survey. You have until February 14, but perhaps you can cast a ballot while you’re waiting for the Super Bowl (or Super Tuesday or Mardi Gras/Carnival, depending on your location and inclinations) to start.

There are quite a few categories in which you can vote, but as previously noted, openSUSE Linux Unleashed is up for Favorite Linux Book of 2007. If the book has been helpful, or you just like the guy who wrote it, please consider scrolling down to #34 and checking the appropriate box.

Many thanks to those who have already voted! More thanks to those who will vote!

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You have no idea how honored and excited I am that openSUSE Linux Unleashed is on the Linux Journal 2008 Readers’ Choice Survey ballot for “Favorite Linux Book.”

There are some great titles on the list, but I’m quite proud of this edition of Unleashed. My goal is to be helpful to a broad range of  Linux users, and I like to think I succeeded this time.

So now I have a favor to ask: Sometime between now and Valentine’s Day (February 14, 2008), please visit the link above and tell LJ all about your favorite Linux things. The “Favorite Book” question is all the way down to #34, but you don’t necessarily have to answer in every category. Only one vote per person, please!! But tell all your friends too. Thanks!

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Here’s another look at DrupalCamp Wisconsin from Larry Garfield’s GarfieldTech blog. He seems to have had as much fun as I did.

As befits someone of his standing in the community, he spent most of his time in the Advanced track, so if you’ve read my notes, you’ll get a more complete experience reading his comments.

Now to tackle my own Drupal site. It has suddenly become much closer to reality after this weekend.

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