Well I finally got there, after a bout of illness causing me to postpone the talk, I finally delivered it last night.

The equipment performed flawlessly, thankfully.. After my asterisk talk you’d think I’d learn to turn off DNS lookups in SSH though.

The only downside was that when I ran through the talk I was installing packages so was actually tight on time, didn’t think about the fact they were already installed so I finished a good 20 mins early. Would have given me time to talk about something I really wanted to include, GlusterFS.

So this coming Monday will be the 2 year anniversary of the Rossendale Linux User Group, not too shabby really. Not marking the occasion or anything but I’m going to be running a talk/demo on virtualisation under Linux. Seems to be the pet project I’ve worked on the most so have a fairly polished setup to talk about. But why make it easy on myself? I normally use CentOS for server builds but just for a change, as it seems to be the way I’m heading, I decided to give Ubuntu a shot.

Here’s my two pence worth in the argument against government driven “adult” filtering on the internet I’ve sent a copy to the consultation team via the open rights group and also to my local MP.

I am raising my concerns about the proposal for network filtering of adult content and default blocking.

I believe that filtering should be an opt in feature offered by ISP’s, this feature should have a vetting process and be request driven using open standards and lists viewable by the userbase.

So I’m forever raving about how good Linux is to the guys at work, it seems that over the last 18 months or so my rants have been getting louder/stronger. Well it seems that its starting to work. I’ve been showing off my shiny Gnome3 desktop to them over the last year or so, and although impressed it still wasn’t Windows 7, or more importantly was no good for playing games. I’ve shown them games playing under Wine before now, but I dunno, something just didn’t click.

So I was working on a script a while ago to backup all my email on my Linux box. I put together a fairly simple bash script to delve into home directories and pick out the Maildir and back it up. Great!

DRIVE="/dev/sdb1" HOME="/home/" LIST="/tmp/backlist_$$.txt" # mount $DRIVE /backup set $(date) for DIR in `find /home/ -name “Maildir” -print`; do NAME=`echo $DIR|awk -F\/ {’ print $3 ‘}` tar vcfz “/backup/Mail/mail_full_${NAME}_$6-$2-$3.tgz” $DIR umount /backup

What are my current favourite podcasts?

1. Mysterious Universe - Brilliant podcast covering pretty much every aspect of the paranormal, but not overly serious and no signs of any tin foil hats!
2. Linux Outlaws - Superbly fun podcast, covering the latest news in the Linux, Open source and free software world with the (more than) occasional rant from Fab.
3. Ubuntu UK Podcast - Another easy going Linux (Ubuntu centric) podcast, good bunch of presenters, covers the latest news in the Ubuntu world.
4. Little Atoms - A very interesting podcast, each cast is an interview with highly intelligent folks, mainly science based but not always.
5. TDTRS - The Dick Turpin Roadshow, another Linux/Free software based podcast but very entertaining.
6. BBC Click - Technology focussed podcast from the BBC, fairly low tech level but interesting nonetheless.
7. Rathole Radio - Music based podcast, not mainstream music but collected from around the web. Creative commons music features highly in this cast, presented by Dan who is also from Linux Outlaws(2).
8. Little Atoms Road Trip - Spin off from the Little Atoms (4) podcast, featuring interviews Neil Denney recorded during a road trip through the US.
9. Corsten’s Countdown - Trance DJ Ferry Corstens weekly podcast showcasing his radio show with a top 3 based on web voting from the previous week.
10. A State of Trance - as above (9) but with Armin van Buuren

I do listen to a few others but these seem to take precedence. Numbers 1 and 2 are pretty much joint first, but depends on  my mood. I will always push them both to the top of the playlist when they are downloaded.