Abode released a patch yesterday to address security vulnerabilities for the flash player. You can read the security bulletin here . Adobe categorizes these as critical issues and recommends affected users update their installations to the newest versions. All platforms are affected.

If you are a 64 bit Linux user you can download the update from Adobe here. I am a firefox user so upgrading was simply to download the libflashplayer-10.0.42.34.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz , unpack it move the libflashplayer.so to ~/.mozilla/plugins/ overwrite if necessary and restart firefox if running. Update complete.

After procrastinating for a couples months now I have gone ahead with my plan to move the site. Actually, I moved all my sites from a dedicated server to shared hosting. It wasn’t a quality of service issue that forced the change, xlhost.com is an excellent dedicated provider and I’d use them again.

The main reason for the change is fiscal, 80% to 90% reduction in costs for my on-line presence. The big trade off’s are control, resources, and bandwidth, however there are some benefits. No responsibility for the servers administration is a big one.
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Salute the to brothers and sisters that have served and are now serving.

2-1 U.S. Dragoon Regiment

Courage and Faith!

I’ve wanted to learn the process of Fedora packaging for a while now, however I couldn’t find anything not already packaged that I use or want to use. Thanks to Mairin Duffy of the Fedora art team and her weekly blog posts called ‘Unpackaged Open Font of the Week’ , I now had something to package. These posts highlight nice open fonts that are in need of a packager.

The font of the week was Tiza. A bold, chalky slab-serif font inspired by the lovely slab-serif Giza. It supports many diacritics in addition to the basic Latin set of characters. The font was created by Pablo Caro of NuevoStudio.
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My main system is finally running Fedora 9 (referred to as F9 from here on), admittedly I thought this day might not come. I normally switch to the latest Fedora version within a month of its release, which has been the case since Fedora(Core)4, the first version I used as a desktop OS. This wasn’t possible for me with F9 for a number of reasons.

At release, F9 was unusable (for my needs), and even a month later, it was still to under developed to deploy as my regular desktop OS. I think it’s fair to say F9 is the first “alpha” release since FC1, and a step backwards when measured against previous versions. With such a negative view of F9, one might ask why am I running it now? The answer has multiple parts.
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I set a project for myself last week to find a light weight distribution that best fit my old, limited on resources IBM T30 Laptop. I have been using #!crunchbang Linux on it for about 90 days, and find it to be an excellent distribution. A lucky find I thank The Linux Outlaws podcast for bringing to my attention.

After a week of trying a number of distributions I think I have found it. Debian Linux (Lenny) with the LX Desktop Environment on top of the Openbox window manager.

I’ll be talking about my adventure all this week. For now I leave you with obligatory screenshot.

I should have posted this on Monday, but somehow it slipped until now.

Thanks to the kind invitation from David of linuxcrazy.com and the LinuxCrazy Podcast, I was pleased to be a part of his latest podcast episode, which you can find it here.

There was no planning before hand other than the day and time to get together for the recording. As such, it was completely off the cuff, and in my case it shows. I did my best and just followed along with David. Due to some technical difficulties that were not discovered until we’d completed the the episode. We had to record the episode twice.
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Recently, this question was posed by monsterb of linuxcranks.info to the Linux community. He is obviously not the first to ask this question, while writing this, I was listening to the Linux Outlaws podcast where they discuss a very long thread on their forums asking this very question. I think it is an interesting question, and decided to answer it here in a blog post, and ask you the reader, how did you discover Linux?

My story starts similarly to many others I think, in that I discovered Linux through a friend who gave me a Red Hat CD. Where my story deviates is unlike most people, I know the exact day that I began my Linux journey.
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I was watching a screencast at Linux Crazy ( Podcast 51) the other day where comprookie2000 gave a tour of his home network using a graphic. I have wanted a graphic depicting the topology of my home network for my site but never got around to figuring out how to make one. Watching the screencast got me interested again.

Looking at David’s (comprookie2000) graphic made me feel for the guy. It is rare I find someone will less artist talent than myself. No no disrespect but wow is it bad. 44.9k file size for a 400×225 pixel image? Ouchie for the people that visit his site with limited bandwidth. In all fairness, I was not able to reduce it much with my limited skills using the “.png” file type. While no fan of “.gif”, it will reduce this image by 50%.
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