nixternal

…who do not need to own, look at, or attempt to use a computer.

My brother just called me from his job and had another guy there with a computer issue. It seems my brother can find the brightest people in the world, bright in a negative lumen’s type way. Anyways, this buddy of his buys a brand new laptop, actually the same laptop I have. Well, it comes with Windows Vista (of course mine had it, but never saw the light of day, didn’t even get one solid bootup with Windows), and it seems that Microsoft decided to finally recognize that the Unix world was one up with user/admin stuff. Now they have a superuser account instead of the old trusty administrator (of which a majority of users changed to sysadm or sysadmin because they thought it was more secure). Well it seems this guy created a password for the superuser account and even created a hint for it. He doesn’t remember doing so, so he says, but he has nonetheless forgot the password. OK, no problem, what is the hint? "haha". Little does he know that is really Vista laughing in his face.

After talking with the guy, who sounded either like Bill or Ted from their excellent adventures, I simply told him, "Just like breeding, computers are another thing you should leave alone.". Please God, make the Windows questions from family and friends go away.

Well Aaron decided he would Tag Me first in his game to build either a long blogroll or xml feed list, or maybe he wants to be #1 on Technorati I used Akregator from w/in Kontact so most of my feeds are the default ones which of course are mainly planets as well. However, I do track other people’s posts who are pretty darn good. With that being said, I have 2 blogs I enjoy from the Ubuntu Chicago Planet, one is a future Ubuntu member without a doubt and the other, well he could very easily become a member as well as he is a fresh face in the community right now. I am talking about Jim Campbell and Chad Sutton.

“Flourish - to grow luxuriantly, to thrive, to achieve success, to reach a height of development or influence.”

Flourish! will be held April 6^th and 7^th at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Some of the speakers include:

• Peter T. Brown - Free Software Foundation
• Chris DiBona - Google
• Angela Byron - Drupal
• Tom ‘Spot’ Callaway - Red Hat
• John Doppke - IBM
• Willy Farrell - IBM
• Paul McMahan - IBM
• John Quigley - Cleversafe
• Jason Rexilius

The venue includes a lot of great speakers as noted above as well as some intermingling time, a hack-a-thon, and a Battle of the Distros (so far Ubuntu vs. Linspire vs. Fedora/Red Hat). So if you are in the Chicagoland area these 2 days, stop on by and say hello. I will be hanging out with the Ubuntu Chicago and the Chicago GLUG crowds, as well as participating in the Battle of the Distros (I am throwing Kubuntu into that mix by the way).

In response to Aaron’s blog posts (Part 1, Part 2) about IRSSI and libnotify to send you a notification upon highlight, well it works great in Kubuntu as well.

As you will notice, I use a different icon, a customized Konversation icon, and I have also changed the color of the popup by setting the urgency as well. The following is the shell script I am using, which is pretty much the same as Aaron’s just modified to suit my taste.

#!/bin/sh

ssh user@server “: > .irssi/fnotify ; tail -f .irssi/fnotify ” |
sed -u ’s/[<@&]//g’ | while read heading message;
do /usr/bin/notify-send -u critical -i <location to icon>
-t 300000 — “${heading}” “${message}”;
done


Replace user@server with your username and server IP address. Also replace <location to icon> to the correct icon location that you want to use. An example would be /usr/share/icons/crystalsvg/48×48/apps/whatever.png.

OK, does everyone have the “Linux Persona” stuff, which has been one hell of a hot topic this week, out of their system? I am sorry, flame me and Microsoft all you want, but where in the hell is our Windows Persona? Bug #1 isn’t going to cut it, especially when people just add comments to it that do nothing but criticize it. Microsoft realizes our community, the Linux community, is a threat to their operations, and definitely their pockets. Well, we don’t have pockets to worry about so much, but our operations and our philosophy are definitely more important. So laugh at, taunt, or completely misunderstand the “Linux Persona” idea that Microsoft has put out, but step back and take a look in the mirror, and realize they just one-upped our community, maybe it is time for us to stop bitching at Microsoft ideas (which half the time are bs), and lets start making our own personas for Windows users, it is a brilliant idea to drive a marketing campaign!

Ozzy and Sharon Osborne recently announced that the 2007 Ozzfest in the United States will be…FREE!!!!

So all of you Chicago people who are planning on going, I have my passes and I will be in Tinley Park on August 10th. All day rock for free, and Ozzy is performing, it doesn’t get any sweeter! I am hoping that even though the event will be free, there will still be some big headlines. The one great thing about Ozzfest is that you get to hear and see bands that are unknown, and these are the bands that are usually the best. Man I cannot wait!