The script

Stash it in /usr/lib/nagios/plugins of the Dirvish backup machine, naming it check_dirvish. This script assumes that your Dirvish vaults are in /mnt/backup, so tune it if that isn’t true in your case:

#!/bin/bash

for a in /mnt/backup/* ; do if [ -f ls -d "$a/"* 2> /dev/null | grep -v /dirvish | sort -g | tail -1/rsync_error ] ; then echo "CRITICAL: latest backup in vault $a failed" exit 2 else /bin/true fi done echo "OK: All backups OK"

The security setup

Create a nagios user on your Dirvish backup machine, and set up SSH passwordless authentication.

Now, if your Dirvish vaults are accessible only to root, set up sudo to allow Nagios to run this script as root:

nagios ALL = NOPASSWD: /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_dirvish

The Nagios setup

Finally, set Nagios up:

define command{
        command_name    ssh_dirvish_sudo
        command_line    /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_by_ssh -t 29 -H $HOSTADDRESS$ -C 'sudo /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_dirvish'
        }
define service{
        use                             generic-service
        host_name                       gabriela
        service_description             Backups
        check_command                   ssh_dirvish_sudo
        }

Of course, the sudo call is only needed if the Dirvish vaults are restricted for the nagios user.

These packages are built from the source code of the next release of Ubuntu, Hardy. They work flawlessly on my home machines (yes, plural). I built these packages myself for my usage:

• libpulse-browse0_0.9.8-1ubuntu3_i386.deb
• libpulse-mainloop-glib0_0.9.8-1ubuntu3_i386.deb
• libpulse0_0.9.8-1ubuntu3_i386.deb
• libpulsecore5_0.9.8-1ubuntu3_i386.deb
• pulseaudio-esound-compat_0.9.8-1ubuntu3_i386.deb
• pulseaudio-module-gconf_0.9.8-1ubuntu3_i386.deb
• pulseaudio-module-hal_0.9.8-1ubuntu3_i386.deb
• pulseaudio-module-lirc_0.9.8-1ubuntu3_i386.deb
• pulseaudio-module-x11_0.9.8-1ubuntu3_i386.deb
• pulseaudio-module-zeroconf_0.9.8-1ubuntu3_i386.deb
• pulseaudio-utils_0.9.8-1ubuntu3_i386.deb
• pulseaudio_0.9.8-1ubuntu3_i386.deb

Download them all in a folder, then just open a terminal window there and type:

sudo dpkg -i *deb

That should upgrade you to the latest PulseAudio. I was gonna write a tutorial, but then you would have had to download hundreds of megabytes of development packages.

The system in question that will deliver us from stupid is called (somewhat appropriately, would you say?) StupidFilter, and has been in development for a while now.

It consists of a rather dumb Bayesian system — the exact opposite of an expert system, which consists of brute-forcing a corpus of data and inferring useful information from the corpus without contextual understanding. In other words, it’s a giant, incredibly stupid but learning machine that is being trained to identify the stupid out of a quarter of a million wastes of time pulled straight out of (wait for it) YouTube itself!

How it works is rather simple. Given a large amount of comments ranked smart to stupid, it identifies the chance that a particular word is in a stupid comment. Example: if the word moran frequently appears in comments deemed stupid, then future comments with that word will be deemed stupid. Bayesian filtering was suggested first by Paul Graham in his now-famous essay A plan for spam, and (perhaps due to its dead-simple mathematical ruthlessness, perhaps because it works like a charm) is now in use for antispam systems in both mail servers and the Akismet blog commenting filter.

At the moment, there’s not much from the project to showcase, except for a damn hilarious stupid randomizer that will let you spend countless hours and inches of eyelashes at your computer, marveling at the utter inanity of regular YouTubers. It cracked the fuck me up — and it’s feature-complete, down to the customary big MOAR button!

Let’s hope they deliver a solution soon. I can’t wait to plug it into my blog and clean up comments en masse.

Turns out, zzuf is a fuzzer (okay, okay, I can hear you laughing at the anagram/pun in the name) — a tool that corrupts and feeds corrupt data into programs.

It “fuzzes” the input data — then you run your application and feed the corrupted data into it; if it hangs, you’ve found a robustness bug — in all likelihood a security issue — that you need to fix in the application.

I love the humor on zuff’s Web page!

Lulz potential — I’m starting to think I have spent too much time on the Internet!

The other ‘thing’ you can quickly spot is how much of a piece of shit is MPlayer in the stability department. To the MPlayer devs: guys, I’m infinitely thankful for what could be the greatest media player Linux as seen. It’s very fast. It plays nearly all types of media that exist. But it’s the flimsiest piece of crap ever built. I drag and drop a file onto MPlayer, it SEGVs. I sneeze, it SEGVs. Fix it, damnit!

And it’s surprisingly good. After a decade of using RPM-based distributions (first Red Hat 5.2, then Mandrake, then Red Hat 9, then Fedora), I’m now using a Debian-based distro.

And so, andrea (my previous Linux installation) is no longer. Gabriela (this KUbuntu deployment) took its place.

So what’s different?

Package management

Adept is used to install and remove packages. It’s dramatically faster than Smart and Yum, the two solutions I had been using in Fedora. It uses way less memory. Honest, it’s an order of magnitude faster.

Responsiveness and performance

Having my usual stack of applications open (tons of Konqueror windows, aKregator, Evolution, Valknut, KTorrent, KGet, gtk-gnutella, Amarok) is no longer a recipe for disaster. It runs smoothly. It doesn’t get memory-starved. Mind you, this computer has only 768 MB of RAM.

It certainly boots faster too (not that it matters, since I tend to go for weeks without rebooting).

Looks

The default KUbuntu theme is very elegant. It resembles Plastik, but better.

Software availability

All of the applications I had installed throughout the years are available for KUbuntu. Installing them took a couple of hours only, and absolutely no intervention during installation (except for the Flash player license agreement).

Hardware

All of my hardware is working now — including one network card that didn’t work before.

The network manager application is faster and easier to use than Fedora’s.

Configuration

The configuration center is complete. It’s more complete than Fedora’s, and it feels very well integrated in the operating system.

Power management

I couldn’t make hibernation work. The computer would hibernate alright; but, on boot, the hard disk light would stay on, and the grub prompt would hang for a fairly long time. I know for a fact that hibernating a computer cannot physically damage a hard disk, but shivers ran down my spine for quite long — especially considering I currently don’t have any backups, and I don’t want to lose my 80 GB, 15.000 track music collection I have painstakingly organized by hand.

Sudo!

Sudo make me a sandwich! After years of having to type su followed by a password, it’s refreshing only to have to prepend sudo and typing the password only once.

You should change too

There’s a reason why the Ubuntu family of Linux distributions is the most popular now. It’s simply superior.

Give it a try today. After the (admittedly) long download of the live CD, you can try it without touching your hard disk… then take the plunge and install it.

Hey, Diggers! Welcome. Apologies for the slowness that lasted two hours ago. I’ve enabled a series of temporary measures that will let the site perform better for the time being. If you want to know more, here’s the scoop, and a guide to weathering heavy traffic with WordPress.

What does Beryl do? For those of you who are only recently entering our marvelous free software world, Beryl is a window manager — it’s a program in charge of drawing window borders on your computer screen. Now, you’ll probably be saying to yourself Window borders? Isn’t that idiotic or a job for the operating system?. In Linux-land, it isn’t, because everything is modular.

As it turns out, being a window manager means Beryl is in the perfect position to exploit the latest technology, namely ubiquitous accelerated 3D rendering. Aside from drawing window borders (helped by its trusty companions Emerald, Heliodor and Aquamarine), Beryl also commands how windows are drawn on the screen. This lets Beryl implement fantastic animation effects.

If you don’t believe me, we’ve got proof: we shot a couple of videos for earlier articles, and we’ve got them right here:

• Beryl, window miniatures, transparent video vs. old PC,
• Beryl 0.2.0 on a low-end computer,
• Beryl magic: watching TV while installing software, and
• The coolness factor of Linux

But don’t click them just yet, because we’ve got something better. We have an exclusive interview with Quinn Storm, the lead developer of the Beryl project.

What did Quinn Storm tell us? Keep reading to find out!

Hi there, LinuxToday readership. Welcome. Let me steal ten seconds of your time and ask you to Digg this article. This site is undergoing a Digg traffic storm as I write this, and I’d love to see if it can handle two simultaneous storms. Thanks. Now, back to our regular programming…

One of the most hotly debated topics about the Internet today is, without a doubt, BitTorrent: the most popular peer-to-peer network protocol today. Why is it controversial? Because clients (applications) for BitTorrent file transfer proved to be first choice of people sharing and downloading movies and music from the Internet.

Today, it’s almost unimaginable not to own a BitTorrent client. And KDE users don’t need to resort to third-party clients, because there’s one BitTorrent client that fits snugly into their desktops: KTorrent.

Instead of exploring the trite angle of copyright infringement myself, this time I give you an interview with the men behind the program: Joris Guisson and Ivan Vasić. They’ve done an awesome job, so the least they deserve is public recognition — and we’re pleased to have them as guests today.

So, without further ado, the next page has the interview.

Imagine a conversation. A distributed one. Someone posts in his blog. You reply in the comments box of that blog. A couple of people respond to your comment: some in the same page, and some directly in their blogs (seamlessly tied into the original page through pingbacks).

How do you keep track of whoever responded to you afterwards?

If the answer to that question is by checking the Web site I commented on every so often, smack yourself in the head.

CoComment promises to do away with that. It’s a new Web service that keeps track of the conversations you’ve engaged in blogs and news sites.

How does it work? It’s practically like magic. On CoComment-enabled Web sites and blogs, a small, unobtrusive CoComment status bar attaches to the comment form on the Web page. Simply comment there, and CoComment will track that conversation. You just log in to CoComment to see a nimble, expandable, AJAX-powered overview of your conversations:

You can clearly see the conversations you’re currently involved into. These boxes expand as you click on them.

CoComment also works as a plugin in your browser. If you have it installed, you can automatically track all of your conversations, even if the Web site doesn’t support CoComment.

Evidently, social features are featured throughout the site. Just like last.fm’s neighbour functionality, you automatically get commenting neighbors. You can peek on others’ conversations, be them heated or cozy. You can easily get hypnotized by the service.

Give it a spin. Registration’s free, and the service is a real time saver. And, of course, it’s ideal for highly effective trolling.

Blogging. That’s what piqued my interest. As you know, blogging with WordPress is, let’s say, less than optimal. Composing a post in the integrated text editor is a pain if you have a low bandwidth connection (a market segment I fall squarely in).

So, when I read about a browser that could make my blogging blues go away, I had to try it. Flock promises a seamless blogging experience, and I was ready to test it.

So far, it has consistently delivered on the promise. I have published four posts on topics and articles that I wouldn’t even have blogged about yesterday, just because I would have dreaded to open the WordPress post editor otherwise. The built-in post editor is the only one I have managed to make work under Linux.

To aid you in your hunt for information, there’s a collapsible stripe at the bottom of the browser window. That stripe is used to collect snippets (blocks of text or images). It’s real simple to use: select what you want to collect, and drag it to the stripe bar. Presto! Instant access to clip art and selected quotes from Web sites, ready to be dragged and dropped onto the post editor. Did I mention that the snippets preserve their source formatting?

And, boy, Flock’s fast. So fast, in fact, that I have replaced my trusty Akregator newsreader with Flock. Because, honestly, just opening Akregator took a minute in my (sadly only) 768 MB of RAM. But Flock’s already open, and there’s a big News button on the main toolbar that illumnates discreetly when there are news… which is all the time in my case A man’s only got so much time to read 50 feeds!

An example screenshot of Flock. Note the resemblance to Firefox, and the streamlined controls on the main toolbar.

Oh, did I mention the Blog link that appears after each news item on the newsreader? When combined with pingbacks, I haven’t seen a more affordable method of creating an interblog conversation. I only wish Blogger would support pingbacks. Come on, guys, it’s 2007.

Flock’s been hyped (overhyped if you ask me) as the social browser. Nevertheless, it’s a grounded claim, since all shared bookmarks are automatically synchronized with my Del.icio.us account. Fantastic!

Of course, nothing new is devoid of issues. There are a few minor bugs — for example, the WYSIWYG blog editor does not generate perfect markup (OK, I’m anally perfectionist about my markup). The image uploader cannot upload to WordPress (and I’m told WordPress does have that capability in its interoperability protocol). I’m reporting the bugs I find one by one, but I can reassuredly state that they haven’t caused me any data loss. That’s much more than I can say about Microsoft Outlook.

If you’re not using Flock, you owe it to yourself to spare 5 minutes of your time exclusively to download and install it. If you loved Firefox, you’ll be thanking me afterwards.

Seen at YouTube.

Now, what kinds of applications do you envision? Imagine turbocharging the current state-of-the-art desktop technology, with this. What would you love to see?

I’ve always been a fan of Palm-based handhelds. They reign supreme as portable computers and personal life organizers. Modern models like the T|X and the LifeDrive even include wireless networking, media sharing abilities and the ability to go online through an infrared- or Bluetooth- enabled mobile phone.

I always carry these around. I’d hate to carry yet another device!

The reason I got myself a Palm T|X was simple: I needed a Palm device, and I wanted to use it for music too. But the bundled application and the storage were a disappointment. Only 90 MB of free memory. A fairly unusable music player (Pocket Tunes). Not the way to go… especially since I have in excess of 1000 favorite music tracks.

So, get an iPod. Right?

Could I make my Palm T|X edge out an iPod nano? Could I avoid buying yet another device to carry around at all time? The answer’s yes:

• Storage is not issue either: big cheap SD cards are readily available. I got myself a 4 GB card and a reader for $99.
• Headphones are cheap (OK, at least the cheap ones). I snagged a pair for $8.

But what about the interface?

As it currently stands, the iPod has the killer music playing user interface. The clickwheel is fantastic. Browsing for music is completely painless. Playlist management… fabulous. The user interface is even gorgeous. Pocket Tunes got nothing on the iPod.

it’s an iPod? No, it’s mOcean! Excuse the poor picture quality.

I needed an iPod clone.

And I found one. mOcean! It’s advertised as ideal for Treos, but I didn’t care, as long as it worked on my Palm. And sure as hell, it did.

Of course, the process of setting it up is more involved than opening the box of an iPod. It involves double-clicking one file on the computer and connecting the Palm via USB. I say it’s simple enough for me.

mOcean’s got everything. It has the clickwheel (touch-sensitive, drawn on the Palm screen, and it clicks). It has the same menu organization and buttons, so iPod users are right at home. And it’s personalizable. I set a nice custom background and color scheme right after installing the application.

The matrix

Here’s a matrix that compares an iPod nano with a Palm T|X and accessories to match the iPod’s capabilities. You decide which one wins under your scenario; my personal verdict for the winner is in red:

Gotchas and advantages

As it currently stands, there are a few gotchas:

• There’s a 2-second delay between turning the Palm on, and actually being able to play music. Apparently, it’s got to do with the Palm’s SD card hot-plugging functionality.
• If the device is turned off and on, attempting to browse the collection after that will incur in a 10-second delay.
• There’s no ‘Hold’ function. That’s because Treos (the native playground of mOcean) already include a separate Hold button. I’m talking to mOcean’s manufacturers to get this solved ASAP.
• Battery life! Since there are no extended life batteries for the Palm T|X, I’m going to solve this by getting myself a docking station for my car (where I spend most of my time out).

But there are a few advantages:

• I don’t need my Palm to copy tracks onto the device or to give tracks to a friend. I just use the USB thumb SD card reader for that. The tracks are not hidden and they’re not DRM-restricted.
• If I’m browsing long list of songs, I can handwrite the first few letters of what I’m looking for, and mOcean jumps right to the first matching track.
• I can share music, photos and videos! No one can tell me what I can or cannot do with my music (hey, Zune developers, are you listening or still scheming to screw us consumers?). If a friend wants a song he liked, I can wire it to his cellphone or laptop in seconds. If I liked a song a friend has, I can easily copy it to my device. If I take a picture using my phone, I can instantly display it on the Palm’s large screen.
• Real network connectivity: I’m using WiFile to browse FTP and Windows shares, so copying files is easier than ever.

I suppose the looks of the devices is debatable. Personally, I find the T|X sexier than the iPod. Sure, it’s bigger, but in my case I have no option: I need it for what I do.

As far as storage capacity goes… 4 GB is enough for my favorite music. I don’t need to carry around 80 GB. But I could, just as easily, because cheap SDIO mobile hard disks are available. If I really need more storage capacity, though, I think I’ll just resort to more SD cards. They fit right into my wallet, no issues at all.

The conclusions

It played out really well. Instead of spending $200 plus international shipping for an iPod nano, I spent $140 for Palm accessories. You probably won’t need to do what I did if all you wanted to do was listen to music sometimes. But if you’re a serious music fan, you’re into sharing, and you want the explosion of features on the T|X, you’ll do what I did.

As a return for my efforts, I have an extremely functional handheld computer which allows me the richest of media experiences. The Palm T|X always attracts curious glances from friendly people. I can browse the Internet. I can share files with my friends at all times. I can listen to music anywhere. I bet this is the music industry executive’s worst dreams come true.

And I’ve saved myself one device to carry around.

The answer’s no. I took the time to produce a small showcase of what modern Linux is capable of. This is, honestly, my typical (non-work) computing session, in 90 seconds. The cool Linux things you’re about to see will leave you drooling:

And here’s the link to the better-quality version (DivX codec needed to view).

What’s on the video

This video showcases a demo of my typical computing session (really!). The video makes my computer looks fast; it’s not (see below). It’s actually “fast-forwarded” because the computer can’t capture 10 frames per second. However, even with all apps open simultaneously, it’s perfectly usable.

The sidebar on the video illustrates what’s being showcased at each moment:

• Window management and effects are provided by Beryl.
• The Matrix effect is simply the GLMatrix screensaver that comes with Linux xscreensaver, colorkeyed in real time onto the screen with xwinwrap.
• The applications are:
  • Amarok: the best music player ever
  • KDissert: a fabulous dissertation writer and mind mapper
  • Akregator: I’ve never had to go to a single Web site to read news again
  • The universal sidebar in KDE
  • Konqueror, in Web browser mode
  • Kopete: my favorite multi-system chat application
  • KTorrent: how else did you think I get all the music on my library?
  • MPlayer: it’s playing snips from an episode of Prison Break
  • KSysGuard: it lets me keep an eye on Rudd-O.com’s health at all times
  • xvidcap: it makes a cameo appearance during the first seconds of the video

The artwork on the top of the cube was created with Inkscape.

And the music is a short edit I made of The world is mine (F*** me I’m famous remix) by David Guetta, available in the album RTL 2 I love house, disc 1. I used Ardour to produce this edit.

The making of The coolness factor of Linux

All in all, this video took about 4 hours to make, including the time to install and set the required software up. Here’s the step-by-step lowdown:

1. Used xvidcap to record the video at 10 frames per second into an MPEG file.
2. Used Kino to find out a suitable end frame for the video. That way I can encode only from the start to a certain frame.
3. Used mencoder to scale and encode the MPEG movie into a DivX AVI file. This is the command line: mencoder -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=1000:mbd=2:v4mv:autoaspect test-0000.mpeg -o youtube.avi -frames 950 -vf scale=320:240
4. Used Ardour to create a mini-mix of The world is mine, for the audio track.
5. Used mencoder to encode the audio and copy the DivX file into the final DivX video. This is the command line: mencoder youtube.avi -audiofile track.mp3 -oac mp3lame -ovc copy -o final.avi
6. Uploaded the final video to YouTube.
7. Uploaded the final video to my Web site.
8. Wrote this post.

All done with Free Software. Free as in beer, Free as in freedom. Most remarkably, all software was installed using packages specifically done for Fedora Core… this proves useful applications are available to install by point-and-click. And I hate compiling from source.

Some software used here is patent-encumbered. This doesn’t apply to my country, though.

The hardware powering this video

Nothing special, really. If anything, it’s very old. It couldn’t even capture 10 frames per second in real-time! Thus, the video is kind of “fast”. Here are the specs:

• a GeForce 2 MX. Beryl runs slowly because of it. It also runs slowly because I told it to run only at 10 FPS.
• 768 MB of RAM. The system swapped heavily because of all the loaded applications.
• a lowly 3-year-old Athlon XP 1.5 GHz

¡Y Juan Xavier sí que sabe poner en marcha una idea cuando le toca! Sin desmerecer la idea, hay que reconocer que el timing es preciso. Una vez más, una creación suya (pixer.us) estuvo en la portada de los sitios de noticias y conocimiento colectivo más visitados de Internet.

Congrats, man. It’s an honor to share ideas with you. Have a great day!

(Si pixer.us está un poco lento, pues tengan paciencia y visítenlo más tarde. Estar en la portada de digg.com es cosa seria, y mata a cualquier sitio Web por el volumen de visitas.)

Why automation?

If you’re running a single Web site or blog, it makes little sense to automate tasks, since 99% of your maintenance tasks will be ad-hoc. But that’s not my case.

I run three Web sites, two of them WordPress-based. In my scenario, WordPress upgrades and enhancements come in pairs. My sites demand an assortment of more than 100 plugins and themes, so those need to be upgraded as well.

I also sell a customized WordPress package, called Turbocharged. Remember the 100 plugins and themes? Well, every so often I do a new release of Turbocharged, which is almost exactly what powers my Web sites.

As you may have guessed, releasing such a huge package is is a time-consuming process! Combined with upgrading my own sites to the latest edition of Turbocharged, it often takes the better part of a day. And doing it manually is not an option, especially since my Web assets are expected to grow in the future.

Ideally, I’d like upgrades and enhancements to:

• be a 10-second process I can run on my Web server: saving a day, even if it’s just to squander it in drinks and clubbing with my buddies, is worthwhile. Less time spent in operations, more time for creativity and long-term progress.
• take advantage of my already-existing Subversion repositories: that way, I can make quick fixes on my Web server, and have the changes transparently imported into my development computer, and the other way around. Turbocharged customers also benefit from this, because I run a bleeding edge Turbocharged copy on each of my sites.
• be error-proof: if something fails, I want to know why it failed. If a file changes, I’d like to know when, in what way and why. I simply can’t take any downtime.

Can this be done? The answer is yes. I know it because I just invested six hours to make it happen.

And you can do it too. Be forewarned: this guide requires learning about new software.