“TPN would like to advise that we are doing some important server maintenance on from Dec 31 - Jan 2 and our comments system will be down during that period. Regular access to podcasts and blog posts should not be affected during this time. Thanks for your patience!”

So there :)

My Kyocera 7135 finally died. It was getting more and more clunky as the days went by and at the end the speaker cracked and it was useless so I ended up with a new one. Merry Christmas to me :)

Happy holidays all!

We’re done. See you in 2006.

Complicated, eh?

Seriously, I had hoped to get one more show out over the next few weeks which was going to be a chat with John Buckman of Magnatune but that didn’t pan out (not John’s fault - he’s been very accomodating).

I don’t know what the hell I was thinking but between having house guests, a new puppy, and the general chaos that the holidays bring, I don’t have a chance in hell of getting an hour alone, never mind finding a quiet hour in which to record.

It blows me away how nobody on the planet that I know in real life has a clue what podcasting is. You can tell them over and over that you need to record and they nod wisely and then go turn up the stereo. I tell ya, podcasting has a really, really, really long way to go before you can find 2 people on the street that have heard of it.

But I digress…

Rather then getting more and more frustrated, we’ve said screw it - this is podcasting, not a commercial venture. Why beat the hell out of ourselves for free? The show would suck anyhow if we did it because I’m so cranky, so it’s better just left alone.

Kelly and I wish all of you a good holiday season and we’ll be back bright and early in the new year.

Don’t pet the sweaty penguins!

Wow, was I wrong. I have received so many comments, emails, and even one audio file (thanks Adam!) containing recommendations. Interestingly enough, every recommendation was the same: stay away from the iRivers and buy an Iaudio. Every one.

So I will.

I just wanted to thank everyone who sent me their recommendation. You guys saved me from spending $300 on something that wouldn’t do what I want.

So - thanks!

There’s something wilfully solitary about writing a book alone in the GNU/Linux community, so I’m not going to do it that way. We’re all going to write it together. I know that’s not a completely novel idea but it feels better than writing it alone in the middle of such a great community. Therefore, I will be posting it as I write it on my wiki for everyone to contribute to.

The working title of the book is Freecasting. Wikipedia has no entry for that, so, I consider it wide open.

Everything you need to know about how we’re doing this, where to hang out, what to do, etc can be found on my wiki at the link below. To start things off, I’ve posted my first attempt at the table of contents. Someone told me once that books should start with a table of contents. Sounds good to me…So go - modify it, add to it, make it better.

The finished version will be available in many formats, but one will be free and online.

Link to the Freecasting project.

Well, he called the Gnome Project’s mentality ‘a disease’ today and urged people to move to KDE.

That’s gotta hurt…

Here’s the Usenet posting link.

But, at the end of the day, this is a GNU/Linux show and not a pop radio station and I’m aware that I might be the only person out there that wants me to do this. So, the question is, how do you guys feel about me playing a song at the end of the show each week? Is that too much? Is that bringing my own agenda to the show? Or is that cool?

Let me know…

It came up again today in the show forums and there was some good (albeit only two-way) discussion about it.

I’m going to post an entry on this topic tomorrow on New Linux User to get people talking about it. I’m not going to try to contain the conversation in any one place. Feel free to comment here, on the show forums, and on New Linux User. I’ll try to participate in all conversations.

I’ll post the link to the entry when I’ve written it.

Edit: Here’s the link!

To that end, I’ve moved them to my own domain embedded within my personal site. I’ve made the ‘Comment on shows’ forum open to anonymous posts, but that’s it. To post in any of the other forums, you’ll ave to re-register, which sucks I know, but hey…I’m trying…

The old forums will stay active as read-only so the information there is available, but no new stuff can be posted.

Here’s the link to the new forums.

I’ve only got the MP3’s on the list at the moment, I’ll be doing the OGGs later.

Here’s the link.

In the meantime, the next best thing to my list is to click on the ‘podcast’ category on the right-side menu. That will show you all the posts in the podcast category which will make it easier to weedle through them to find the one you want.

We talked for over an hour, but I’m going to try to shorten that up to 45 minutes. I don’t think I’ll be successful, but I’ll try :)

Show should be up sometime late this weekend!

This day has great meaning to me.

Please take the time to thank a Veteran today.

You’ve heard all the blah-blah before about ‘this survey will help us serve you better’, so I won’t bore you with that. I will say, though, that the results of this survey could really help us with financers and advertisers which really does mean more money to throw at the the server and bandwidth areas.

If you wouldn’t mind taking 2 minutes to fill it out, we’d appreciate it. Here’s the link.

Thanks!

Who knew some penguins had blue heads? I sure didn’t. Please send your suggestions in to Kelly (kellypenguingirl at gmail) for names. It’s so sad to have a penguin with no name…

Here’s the accompanying letter (click on it to make it readable) :)

Now all we need is a name for him. Got a suggestion? Email Kelly Penguin Girl at kellypenguingirl at gmail with your suggestions!

I think this is a first - a GNU/Linux podcast with its own real, live penguin mascot. Thanks to all that contributed!

ZDnet is reporting a Linux virus this morning. Since there are so few Linux virii out there in the wild, I immediately get suspicious when I hear of one. I investigated this virus and here are my thoughts on it:

First off, while everyone is indeed calling this a Linux virus, I must disagree.

The vulnerabilities that this virus attacks actually belong to three scripts, not the OS itself. Therefore, I really wouldn’t call this a Linux virus. That’s like calling a vulnerability in MS Word or Windows Skype a Windows virus. That’s just not correct.

As McAfee states:

This worm spreads by exploiting web servers hosting vulnerable PHP/CGI scripts.

It’s the scripts, not the OS.

I think people are calling it a Linux virus because these three scripts primarily run on Linux machines, however I’m pretty sure the AW stats plugin is a Wordpress plugin will therefore run on IIS if the Wordpress installation it is plugged into is running on IIS. That’s just speculation on my part, though.

There are many things inherent in GNU/Linux that make it very difficult for a virus to function which is the main reason why there’s virtually no GNU/Linux viruses out there. However, as the OS gains popularity, more people are going to start focussing on it and I expect we’ll see more viruses pop up. They won’t be nearly as destructive as Windows virii though.

You might remember show #17 with Mark Rais where we discussed GNU/Linux virii and security.

We played with the idea of just posting show #23 late (like on Tuesday or something), but Kelly’s and my schedules are so tight that doing that would likely put us into a cycle that we wouldn’t be able to get out of. In all likelihood the only way we would be able to get out of it is to miss a future show anyway.

Please accept our apologies, but look at the bright side. This was going to be show #23 for the 23rd week. BUT, remember that we did a show #11.5? That means that this was actually show #24 and therefore we’ve already posted show #23 and are therefore not late or missing a show.

Right?

Riiiiight….

Stay tuned for more details!

Hey Jon - if they wanted to get the files manually, couldn’t they have just… like… scrolled down?

We’re not sure why this just started happening, but apparently it’s not just this show.

They’re on it and hopefully you’ll see those shows pop up in your podcatcher shortly.

If you want them now and don’t want to go rooting through the blog for them, I maintain a quick and dirty list of the shows on my wiki, here.

Waiting for pics, certificates, and whatever else is coming our way. Thanks once again to everyone who contributed to saving this little guy (whoever he is…).

I’ll keep you posted!

I’m not going to post it here because it’s not really helpful to new users, but I thought I’d mention it in case anyone is interested in my thoughts. I think it’s important to keep a positive vibe going on when (trying!) to teach people new things and sometimes I come across people who tend to teach by showing how bad the alternative is. I don’t think that’s all that productive.

Here’s the link if anyone’s interested.

I’ve been playing with Fluxbox this weekend and it’s pretty neat. It’s totally alien, but pretty neat.

There’s some serious hand bombing of configuration files required to get things working just the way you want them, but the trade off is some serious speed.

I’m not ready to use it full time yet because it’s taking a long time to figure out all the niggly little things I need to figure out to get productive, but I can see a day when I might switch to Fluxbox permanently.

I’ll be running a few entries over a New Linux User to point out the sticky things that I’ve learned in the hopes that it will help someone out.

If you don’t have Fluxbox installed (take a look at your login screen’s ’sessions’ menu), then you can probably apt-get it or yum install it. Failing that, you can get it here.

Sorry about the delay in getting back to you I was away from my office last week. It’s great to hear that you want to adopt your very own Little Penguin for listeners. To answer your question I can definitely send all correspondence to yourself, but addressed to “The GNU/Linux User Show Listeners’. Once I receive your sign up I will make sure that it happens.

Looks like things are rolling! Stay tuned for more details and thanks again to everyone who donated to keep this little guy/girl/couple safe!

I posted a note in the show forums about the state of our servers right now. It’s disappointing, but after putting up with the downtime during the recent server upgrades, we’re not getting the performance we had hoped.

The TPN sites are getting hit hard because…well, hell because our shows rock! and we’ve gone to a round-robin load balancing arrangement. Unfortunately it appears that one of our servers isn’t playing so nicely. This means that every now and again (perhaps as much as 50% of the time with a round robin system) you’ll get a Wordpress ‘database connection error’ page. When and if that happens, try refreshing a few times - the page will eventually come up.

Please be extra careful when posting comments. Copy them to your clipboard before attempting to submit. Then if they go missing at least you can attempt to repost without retyping the whole thing.

Better yet, use the show forums (link on the right side of the main page) to post comments until the servers are acting nicely again. The show forums are completely separate from the show blog so they’re behaving well.

Sorry about this guys - everyone’s killing themselves trying to fix this.

Jon

PS - on a lighter note we should hear about our Penguin on Monday!

Hello,
I am currently out of the office and will return on Monday the 24th of October. For urgent enquires please contact the Marketing Department on (03) 5951 2800 otherwise I will attend to your enquiry on my return.

Kind Regards,
Courtney Wood

I’m disappointed, but I guess that’s OK. I’ve decided that this isn’t an ‘urgent enquiry’, therefore we just have to wait 10 days or so for Courtney to come back and then we’ll be in business. I would just go ahead and fill in the donation form right off the foundation’s website, but I want to make sure that certificates, letters, and whatever else that is to be sent to us will be addressed to ‘The GNU/Linux User Show Listeners’ rather than addressed to me.

So…now we wait. The good news is that it’s going into summer in Australia so our little penguin isn’t freezing without its new house.

As of 10:30 this morning (MST) you guys have raised enough money to adopt a penguin for a year from The Penguin Foundation.

Thank you all so much for your generosity. I’ll be posting more information shortly. I have to get things organized to get the money down there!

Thanks again!

Jon and Kelly!

Looky the shiny ROKR banner. No touchy…just look.

Mick and Cameron have landed our first network-wide advertiser and they did it with a freaking BANG! No small-time mom and pop advertisers for us. TPN has signed a three-month sponsorship deal with freakin’ Motorola!

I feel pretty proud that the long (it seemed) wait is over. I’ve known about this deal for a while now and I’m sure that Mick and Cam have known long before me. It’s very exciting to be recognized as a network for the quality work we produce. TPN has some seriously talented people producing shows for them and since we’re not all independents there’s some quality and scheduling guidelines we have to adhere to. It’s those requirements that make us stand out from some of the other groups out there and allowed us to snag such a high-profile sponsor.

Listen to me ‘allowed us’ - like I had anything to do with it.

Anyhow, this is an exciting time for me, for The Podcast Network, for the podcasting field in general and, I hope, Motorola!

Stay tuned for show #20 which will feature the first set of Motorola ads. I’ve heard them and holy crap are they funny!

We’re so close, I’d love to see us make it. Remember, the donations are being collected by Fundable which means:

1. It’s on the up and up, and
2. Everyone gets their money back if we don’t reach our target by November 11th.

Here’s the link to more information. Thanks!

INFO

During show #18 Kelly Penguin Girl and I were bantering about The Penguin Foundation. The Penguin Foundation is one of these wildlife groups that runs a sanctuary. In this particular case, the sanctuary is located in Australia and is for…yup…penguins

It seemed like a no-brainer. How cool would it be for a GNU/Linux show to adopt a penguin? For $75 (Aussie), they will build a penguin nesting box that will enhance the safety of a ‘penguin couple’ and improve their long term chance of breeding. This reads like a Penguin Shaggin’ Wagon to me, and I’m OK with donating money for that!

I’ve set up a page on my personal blog with all the information and links so you can make a decision if you want to help raise the money or not. Check it out here.

I’m hoping to get the show notes done tomorrow and post the show, but it actually might be as late as Wednesday. I know this is crappy timing after the delay in show #18 due to server upgrades, but I’m doing the best I can.

Thanks for understanding, and hang tight…it’ll be up as soon as I can put it there.

A member of the Calgary Linux User’s Group (who wishes to remain anonymous) has donated a whole schwack-load of hardware to the cause. I think I have enough stuff now to build the test machine and it’s going to be better than the original plan.

Hopefully I’ll have some time tomorrow to build it.

I think it’s a good idea for me to put an RPM based distro using Gnome on it. I’ve been using Debian based distros with KDE for a while now and I’m starting to forget how to do things the other way.

Any requests for the first distro I put on?

Of course this news caught me when I was the farthest away from Show #18’s MP3 and OGG that I could be, so I can’t put it up right now.

Show #18 is a talk with the ini inimiti inimitabul all around good guy, Aaron Seigo of the KDE project.

Hang tight - it’ll be up within 12 hours!

Stay tuned for some really exciting news next week as we kick this thing back into gear, and I know that all of our excellent hosts along with Cam and myself hope that you have enjoyed the great podcasts that we have been providing for your listening pleasure since February 2005…the ride has just started folks.

:)
Mick Stanic
Co-Founder, The Podcast Network

She probably thought I wouldn’t catch her little jab at me in her episode number 7, but thanks to loyal GNU/Linux listener John - Tyme was caught!

See Tyme? That’s what MS will never get. The sense of community we open-sourcers and free-software people have.

Now…what the hell was John doing listening to the MS show….?