theAdmin.orgGrowing a simple software business

Yesterday I spent about five hours at the LinuxWorld in San Francisco and had a blast. It was refreshing to see so many commercial companies devoted and supporting Linux in the applications. I found a lot of the booths could be classified into one of four groups:

1. Large ‘Enterprise’ Software Companies - Think Novell or IBM; these were the big boys of the expo who were showing off ‘Enterprise’ software.
2. Server Management and Hardware - These companies were all about managing your 100-10,000 unit data center with some easy to use tools (and some really powerful and pretty ones also). Also there was a lot of vendors touting 10gigabit network equipment, I would be happy with 1gigabit myself.
3. Smaller focused companies - These were trying to take a niche of the Linux IT market, and I felt they were more than happy to give presentations and information to anyone who had an interest
4. .ORG - The best of the best, the Open Source or non-profits of the Expo. Surprisingly there was only about 23 booths for these, but they included some of the best FLOSS has; Ubuntu, Debian, EFF, FSF, and maybe other brand name .ORGs.

Also as an aside I bought my first Linux CD, a PPC Debian Etch Net-install for my Mac Mini. I just don’t feel Ubuntu is giving me everything I want and I really wanted to support the Debian group and all of their hard work. I can’t wait until next year, when LinuxWorld comes back around.

Eric Davis

I just got back in from the LinuxWorld in San Francisco and it was a blast. I will try yo post more details about it tomarrow but I found I got over 20 pounds of “stuff”.

Linux rocks!

Eric Davis

I have just setup my emacs to use planner.el as my organization. After playing around with it for two days, I have my ‘one text file’ of next actions moved over to it. I really like the way it works, where your ‘projects’ are automatically updated based off a change you make in a context or a day. The only complaint that I have is that is is now a bit harder for me to find a task (i.e. “Do I have a task about catching up on my podcasts and where is it?”). I could always resort to using grep but the incremental highlighting search in Emacs just got so easy (C-s).

Here is a screenshot of my todo list as of right now just before I go to bed; there is actually two buffers, the top is some keybinding I am learning and the lower is an actual ‘day’ page for today.

• Priorities are in Red/Green/Blue and called ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’. Since I am using GTD I decided to use them to sort my tasks between Work and Home (‘B’ is Home ‘C’ is work)
• Each item that is the light blue and underline is a WikiLink to another page, for example the ComputerHome links to my ‘Computer at Home’ context and PerfectSoftware links to my project.
• Each new page/day get the list of links at the bottom which go to each of my contexts. This is setup as a template in my .emacs file.

Once I run this a bit longer I will try to post my configuration for it, right now it is a bunch of snippet code I found online.

Eric Davis

It is now the first Monday after I spent a weekend learning Lisp from Practical Common Lisp and I am in awe. I don’t know if it is me but I just feel like I ‘like’ lisp, it is so simple (although I don’t know most of the functions that are being called). The Slime environment is amazing, I can’t wait to set mine up on adelie here (along with remote access via ssh :p).

I think the thing I like most about Lisp is that the syntax is just simple; I mean there are lists, atoms, functions, and macros. That is about it. I really feel that I can keep more of it in my head at one time, even more so than Ruby.

I am also in the process of moving my mail server back to home. I will still run smtp and a simple setup on the virtual host but I am going to use fetchmail to store it all on my local RAID server. I think I already have it setup so I can tunnel in via ssh and access imap on it, I am just getting a fresh rsync of my Maildir before I fully move over (over 121,000 messages).

I even had some time to hack out a simple script to open the ssh tunnel for me and also tail my fetchmail logfile. There is some awk in there to try and figure out if I am at home, at work, or somewhere else.

#!/bin/bash
FULLLOC=`ifconfig eth0 | awk '/inet addr/ {print substr($2,6,15)}'`
THIRDLOC=`ifconfig eth0 | awk '/inet addr/ {print substr($2,6,9)}'`

# Check if home aka 192.168.1.0 network
if [ "$THIRDLOC" = "192.168.1" ]; then
    echo "(=>) Connecting to localserver via HOME network..."
    ssh localserver -L 2020:localhost:143 tail -f -n 20 var/fetchmail.log
elif [ "$THIRDLOC" = "192.168.0" ]; then
    echo "(=>) Connecting to homeserver via WORK network..."
    ssh homeserver -L 2020:localhost:143 'tail -f -n 20 var/fetchmail.log'
else
    echo "(XX) Where the hell are you?"
    echo $FULLLOC
fi

I have started to use the service by LibraryThing to keep track of my book lists. It is free and a really nice service but I was afraid of something happening to my data so I quickly hacked up a script to grab a backup of my entire library. This script will grab the frame that holds all of the main data of my library (in printable view). It also outputs to a file based off the current date so if you run it in a cronjob it will not overwrite the old backup (something I learned from my delicous backups). Enjoy and share!

#!/bin/bash
# Backup Library thing to a text file
curl "http://www.librarything.com//catalog_bottom.php?printable=1&view=edavis10&shelf=printable" \ 
-o "/home/eric/doc/L/Library Thing/backup`date +%Y-%m-%d`.html"

Eric Davis