Linux and Open Source Resource

Recently I did a full re-install of one of my Ubuntu Intrepid 8.10 boxes to the new Ubuntu Junty 9.04. After installation, adobe flash was no longer working within mozilla for some sites.

After searching the internet for a solution, I was finally able to get flash working by following these instructions:

$ sudo apt-get remove –purge swfdec-mozilla mozilla-plugin-gnash flashplugin-nonfree adobe-flashplugin
$ sudo apt-get install adobe-flashplugin

Note: you’ll need to have the Canonical “partner” repository to get access to the adobe-flashplugin package.

From Ubuntu Forums

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Last summer I signed up for a developer account with 3Tera in their AppLogic Cloud environment to begin testing it as a a place to move our current managed hosting environment. During that same time, we met with Oracle to discuss licensing Oracle in the 3Tera AppLogic cloud. The guys we spoke with could only think in terms of physical cores for their licensing model.

At the end of the conversation, after an hour of extreme frustration, I issued them a very strongly worded challenge to go back to Oracle and figure out a licensing model for virtualization and the cloud or Oracle is going to be left in the dust.

Fast forward one year to the present and we are hearing that Oracle is making a play for Sun Microsystems and then another announcement for Virtual Iron. With Sun owning MySQL, that had me concerned as well as many others. When I then heard about Virtual Iron, built on open source Xen virtualization, I was again concerned.

But as I started thinking about the combination of these two companies within Oracle, the only conclusion I could draw is that they are going for their place in the Cloud market. Sun not only has the hardware, but they also have OpenSolaris which you will find often in the cloud. Additionally, Sun has some great storage offerings. And a good storage solution is critical in the cloud. Add Virtual Iron’s implementation of Xen virtualization to the recipe and Oracle is cooking up a potentially fantastic cloud dish.

Let’s wait and see what happens. If I’m right, I’ll be first in line to take the Oracle cloud for a test drive.

Later….

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This past weekend I went to the Urban Nights function in Downtown Dayton, Ohio. Local artists, musicians, restaurants and other vendors provide food, fun and entertainment throughout Downtown Dayton to celebrate all that Dayton has to offer. It is a very nice event which includes a lot of walking around with a map to get the most out of the event.

While walking down one of the streets in the Oregon District, I was approached by an elderly couple who were having difficulty locating one of the attractions listed on the Urban Nights map, a historical Oregon District home. So with my iPhone in hand, I quickly called up the Google Maps application, typed in the address and gave them walking directions from where we were standing thanks to the built-in GPS. They were very impressed and appreciative and it made my day. I can’t say it enough…I LOVE MY iPHONE!!!

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As always, during my one hour one way commute to work I was listening this morning to net@night with Amber MacArther. In this episode Leo and Amber interviewed Dina Kaplan of blip.tv. In case you are unfamiliar with blip.tv, they aspire to be “the HBO of the web”. blip.tv is available through boxee and I must confess that I haven’t really fully checked out their offerings. But it wasn’t the content of blip.tv that interested me about the interview.

I work in the .com world as a systems engineer. As we work to develop and release new products, I am always on the lookout for ways to leverage open source and other cutting edge technologies to improve our time to market and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for our products. One thing that Dina said in the interview really hit home for me. To paraphrase her comment, she said that blip.tv is always looking for ways to participate in the ecosystem of the internet. What I understood her to mean was that when it makes sense to partner with another technology service provider such as flikr or iTunes in order to realize the business objectives of blip.tv, they choose to do so as a participant in the ecosystem of the internet rather than reinventing already proven technologies.

Using open source software as a code repository to speed up time to market and TCO is not a new concept. But I’m finding that it is very new, and possibly a foreign concept, to consider ourselves as a part of the ecosystem of the internet and employ the use of internet services to augment our products.

As an example Square Space is rapidly becoming the platform for creating a blog site and if I’m interpreting the buzz correctly, it is flexible and scalable enough to consider for even more complex web site offerings. If you look back a few years, when a company wanted to launch a blog site, they might have set out to code the site from scratch. Move forward a few years and companies are probably more inclined to make use of WordPress or something similar, but hosted on their own hardware either in a local corporate data center or a managed hosting facility. But in keeping with Dina’s concept, forward thinking companies are beginning to recognize themselves as a part of the ecosystem of the internet and are farming these pieces of their internet presence off to a service such as Square Space. By doing so, not only can the company focus on the content rather than debugging custom code, this same company now no longer needs to focus on server resources and maintenance.

I’m imagining that business owners and executives view this concept as far too cutting edge, risky and foreign to the traditional way of doing business in the .com industry. It might even feel as if your own back yard is being opened to the entire community. But if you really evaluate the concept, it feels right. And more importantly, to be a good citizen of the ecosystem of the internet, the projects and products we offer and develop and excel at creating become the best choice for others to incorporate into their own business model. But not in the traditional closed source way that software products have been offered in the past. Leo Laporte and Randal Schwartz interviewed Simon Phipps of Sun Microsystems awhile back. He is their chief open source officer and had some very interesting insights into the future of software development that relate well to this concept. Again I am very loosely paraphrasing, but he essentially spoke about the need to open source or die as a business as we move toward the future. Open source is inevitable. The businesses that understand how the open source economic model works sooner rather than later will be better positioned for the future.

As a systems engineer I find this trend to be very exciting. But more importantly, businesses should be excited. I see this trend as the business equivalent of the universe expanding. The trend in technology shows an ever increasing desire to further specialize. A very short while ago data center businesses replaced the corporate data center. Then managed hosting replaced racking your own equipment in those off site data centers. Now we are witnessing the birth of the “cloud” where the concept of a server doesn’t even exist but is being replaced with virtualization technology. I encourage anyone who hasn’t yet examined the power of 3Tera AppLogic to do so. Even so, businesses are still to this day building out internal corporate data centers and haven’t even made the switch to off site data centers, much less managed hosting. And the thought of moving to the cloud is not even entertained.

So if the adoption of new data center concepts is slow to catch on in corporate America, then the adoption of open source as a business model and participating in the ecosystem of the internet are even harder concepts to gain adoption. Because I listen to some very excellent podcasts with very cutting edge guests, I suppose I am quite often not connected to the “real world” of mainstream, Midwestern information technology. I suppose I’m just excited about what the future holds for me as a systems engineer and I’m ready for the future now.

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• Check out the SXSW Web Awards Finalists #

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The last time I posted about my home setup, I spoke about Virtual Iron.

I went out and purchased a 4GB USB thumb drive and downloaded the Virtual Iron Standalone Edition and set up the USB drive to install.  And then it occured to me….Virtual Iron is great, but the server I was planning on installing on was the same server that I wanted to use for my media server and my asterisk server.  So unless I had another server lying around to display my media, this wasn’t going to work.

So I decided to reload my server with Ubuntu 8.10 (intrepid) and install boxee.  I then installed vmware server and set up my asterisk virtual machine with the saved vm from my previous server install and within a half hour or so my phone system was back up and running and I was playing with boxee.

So I have to tell you that I am LOVING boxee.  Even though this is alpha software and gets a bit flaky at times, it is still greatly enhancing my content consumption.  I had a few bumps getting it working, however.

After installation, I pointed boxee at my local USB attached hard drive where my media collection is stored.  I set up a source for my movies, music and pictures.  Once these were set up, I installed the boxee iPhone app and within a short time I was sitting in my recliner and browsing all that the stock installation along with my new local sources had to offer.  I found the TED talks content wonderful as well as the selections from Comedy Central.  If you read some of my other posts, you know I’m a fan of Diggnation and HAK5 from Revision 3.  So it was great to be able to sit and watch my favorite shows on the big screen instead of on my iPhone.

But the one thing I intially encountered with boxee was that the playback was EXTREMELY slow.  After a bit of googling and reading I discovered that the problem was with Pulse Audio.  Once I removed Pulse Audio and set the default sound sources to be alsa, all was good.  For instructions on how to do this check out [all variants] Ubuntu 8.10 (Ibex) Pulse Audio removal.

I must say that the most disappointing thing about boxee is not the fault of boxee.  I was thrilled when I saw the HULU selection amongst the choices.  But I was quickly disappointed to read that boxee is no longer allowed to show HULU content.  Now according to all I’ve read and heard, the true fault for this lies with NBC/Fox.  I can’t comprehend why NBC/Fox would make such an insane decision.  The time is coming when if you are not providing your content via a solution such as boxee, then people simply will not consume your content.  While I may be a bit ahead of the mainstream on this one, I am declaring here that I will no longer watch any form of media that I can’t consume via boxee.  I don’t want to switch between TV/Cable and boxee.  I don’t want to have to sit with my laptop to watch Brothers and Sisters, House, or Gray’s Anatomy.  Even if I wanted to sit in my recliner with my wireless keyboard and mouse and switch between boxee and a web browser, I don’t even have that option for the content available from the major over-the-air networks.  I use Ubuntu Linux and their players don’t work with this OS.  Now that alone is enough to make me boycott them.  But it wasn’t until I found out about the HULU/boxee decision that I made the full commitment to abandon all non-boxee content.

This decision has proven to be quite easy to adapt to and I highly recommend it.  The quality of content I’m watching now has greatly improved with such informative offerings as TED and MAKE.  In addition, with Warner Brothers available via boxee, I’ve gotten hooked on Pushing Daisies.  I used to see commercials for this show and after the cancellation of Dead Like Me, I thought it looked like a worthwhile offering.  It is a great show and one that I wouldn’t have watched were it not for boxee.  And I’m also viewing the commercials of course.  So now Warner Brothers is getting my business instead of NBC/Fox.  I hope the executives eventually get it.

Being the geek that I am, I did give the HULU hack from Jake Marsh. But I found it to be not quite as satisfying as consuming the content that is native to boxee. This is not the fault of the hack, of course.

So to bring this post to a conclusion, I highly recommend boxee and I highly recommend leaving NBC/Fox content alone until they realize that resistance is futile.

Until next time…

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To remove all blank lines from a file…

sed '/^$/d'

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Does a linux systems engineer have a life?

I’m up at 3am working. I was up from midnight to 1:30am working as well. I will get up at 6am to go to work for 10-12 hours. The rest of the time I’m monitoring system messages to make sure everything is working properly and responding to any issues that arise.

My family, when they can even remember what I look like, threatens to take my Apple iPhone away from me. All recent photos of me capture me staring at my Apple iPhone.

I’ve been doing this type of work for a very long time so I know this comes with the territory. I’m just curious to know what others in this field do to try and balance a home life with work. Is there a solution?

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So the first thing you’ll notice about my Apple iPhone journey is that having the iPhone hasn’t made me a consistent blogger. This really isn’t the fault of the iPhone, however.

Since I have an entire month to cover, the coverage will undoubtedly be wide rather than deep. But I will do my best not to disappoint.
Ubuntu-iPhone integration

When I last posted, I had left the task of the ubuntu-iphone integration for the next post so I will begin there. I installed the ipod-convenience and gtkpod packages onto Ubuntu. I am now able to issue the command iphone-mount and mount my iphone onto my ubuntu. Once this task is completed successfully, you will see a cute little ipod icon show up on your Ubuntu desktop. This screen shot shows the mounted iphone and the file browser window showing the contents of the iphone storage.

You do not need to have your iphone physically connected to your computer via the usb cable in order to mount it and browse the filesystem. Once it is mounted, you can drag and drop a file onto the iphone and while the file is copying, you can continue to use your iphone any way you see fit. You can walk around with it, as long as the you don’t walk outside of the WiFi connection area, and the file will continue to upload.

gtkpod is essentially the Ubuntu version if iTunes. My experience with using gtkpod was not what I had hoped. I’ve read online that the version 2.2 iTunes database was changed and this accounts for issues I experienced. It is possible that a newer release of gtkpod will resolve the issue. Basically, I can add content to my iPhone, but the update process which creates a usable playlist on the iPhone doesn’t seem to work. I’ve resolved this issue by installing an application called dTunes which is much more powerful and flexible than the default ipod application. I’m very happy to report that I have no lost functionality due to jailbreaking my iPhone and eliminating iTunes.

Additional Applications

Probably the most important reason to choose the iPhone over other similar technologies is the wealth of available applications for this platform.

I covered several applications in my previous posts. Since my last post, I have added a few more applications and I will cover some of the more useful ones now.

• SSH: This application has enabled me to fix numerous server-related issues quickly and easily. In general, operating systems such as Linux, which natively use SSH for administration as opposed to Windows, which uses RDP, are much easier, faster and more secure in general to remotely administer. Without the graphical overhead of RDP, this is especially true for remote administration via a cell phone. While I had an SSH client on my 8525, it was very unstable in comparison to the iPhone SSH application.
• Melodis Dialer: I spend a fair amount of time each week commuting to and from work. In order to use voice dialing capability on my 8525, I had to manually train each contact for voice dialing. Given the interface of the 8525, it was always a dangerous prospect to attempt to use the phone while driving if I had to manually dial the phone. With this application, it is extremely easy to initiate a phone call using my bluetooth headset and my voice.
• The Weather Channel: I have replaced the default weather application on my iPhone with this app provided by The Weather Channel. It provides the same weather coverage you get from the television station, including video, as well as Weather Service alerts. This provides me with valuable and accurate weather information needed for my daily commute.
• CopiercIN: One of the complaints heard about the iPhone is that it doesn’t have cut/copy/paste capability. This application closes that gap.
• TWIT.am: As I’ve already written in previous posts, listening to podcasts during my daily commute allows me to turn otherwise unproductive time into productive time where I can stay abreast of technology news, security information and new technology developments. This application allows me to listen to live TWIT broadcasts whenever I have a gap between new podcast releases.

Just for Fun

Just because a technology provides features which make me more productive doesn’t mean that it can’t also be fun. I’ve added a few additional applications to my iPhone that I would place in this category.

• Pandora: I can’t say enough good things about this application. It allows you to build a custom “radio” station based on artists and songs that you enjoy. I have found virtually no need to upload music to my iPhone since setting up and using this application. The more you listen and interact with this application, the better it learns your musical tastes and the better the station gets. In addition, if you hear a new song that you enjoy, it is a simple two-click operation to purchase the song from iTunes.
• Flixter: I love movies. During our holiday break I saw four movies in the theater. This application made it easy to check show listings and times while I was out and about running errands.
• WinterBoard: This application allows you to add themes to the iPhone to give it a more personal touch. Just like desktop themes and wallpaper for your computer, it doesn’t make you any more productive. But it does make spending time in front of your computer more enjoyable and gives you a vehicle for expressing yourself.

I have a few other applications installed on my iPhone, but I’ve covered the most noteworthy in these posts.

Conclusions

I created these posts as a way to capture in real-time my experience with using the iPhone as a tool for completing my daily job functions. While I had hoped to include more daily postings, time just didn’t permit. But I can tell you that my overall experience was extremely positive. In terms of productivity, there is really no comparison between the HTC 8525 and the iPhone. With the iPhone:

• I am able to easily RDP or SSH into the servers I manage and conduct maintenance and repair activities. While this was possible with the HTC, it was certainly much more difficult and prone to complications.
• I have not once had to reboot the iPhone due to OS issues. With the HTC, I had to reboot the phone often several times per day. On occasion, I had to completely remove the battery two or three times before I could get it to boot back up into a usable state.
• I am able to easily download and listen to a wealth of technology news and information relevant to my job which turns otherwise unproductive commute time into productive work time.
• Interacting with the iPhone is simply more enjoyable than interacting with the HTC. This may seem like a trivial benefit. I don’t believe it is.

Different people have different requirements for this type of tool and I can only provide information related to how this tool enhances my own ability to be productive. I can tell you that compared to the HTC 8525, I was actually able to work using the iPhone. While jailbreaking the iPhone provided me with additional options for productivity applications, I can see that for many users, this would not be a required step. Even so, it is not a difficult thing to accomplish.

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So I’m a little bit late getting to my Day Three update, but I don’t want anyone to miss out on the adventure so here it goes…

When I last put my phone to bed on Saturday night, I left a couple of tasks in the queue for Sunday. They were:

* Download useful applications
* Set up the Ubuntu-iPhone Sync

When you jailbreak an iPhone, you will find two new icons on your phone, Cydia and Installer. In addition to the amazing number of applications available to you through the Apple App Store, these additional icons are your gateway to an even larger repository of applications which extend the functionality of the iPhone.

Not wanting to overwhelm my iPhone on its first trip to the store, I chose a select few “must have” applications:

* OneTeam
o This application allows me to JABBER with my cohorts at work using Openfire.
* Mocha Remote Desktop
o As you know, I put down my HTC 8525 for the iPhone. Since my work involves ensure the uptime of the websites, I can’t afford to find myself in a situation where I am unable to access the servers and bring them back to life should something go awry. Using the Terminal Server Client on the 8525 is a painful experience in comparison to this application.
* PdaNet
o This application is also available for Windows Mobile and Palm phones but I must admit I never tried it on my 8525 so I can’t speak to how much better it might be on the iPhone. PdaNet allows you to wirelessly share the iPhone’s 3G/Edge network with your computer. It does not require any desktop application to be installed. You simply setup an ad-hoc network on your computer, join that network on your iPhone and you are ready to use your iPhone as a Wi-Fi router from your computer running Windows, Mac or Linux.
* Twitterific
o Can any of us live without Twitter

Now onto the truly useful productivity applications…

* AOL Radio
o I like to listen to Mix 94.1 out of Las Vegas, Nevada. Feel free to share your favorites
with me.
* Urbanspoon
o If you like to travel by car, as I do, then this is a “must have” application. As an owner of a local coffee shop/bakery, I understand the value of supporting local businesses. So when I travel, I prefer to find local restaurants as opposed to chains. This little app is very useful and fun to use. And since it is able to use GPS, it works very well when traveling.
* Google Earth…Mostly because it is cool.
* Sol Free, PAC-MAN lite, Frogger and Checkers….because all work and no play makes Darla way to dull to tolerate.
o If you are as old as I am, you’ll love PAC-MAN and Frogger

I’ll save the Ubuntu-iPhone sync conversation for my next installment.

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