” The uprisings in Rome’s Hispanic provinces oblige the year’s consuls to take office earlier than the traditional date of 15 March, a change that becomes permanent. Some suggest that, as a consequence, 1 January becomes the first day of the Roman year.”

The new year is a good time to “Refit and Re-organize”, and that is just what I will be doing this month.

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.

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.

I’ve been a consumer of dedicated server services since 2003 and was with xlhost 2 1/2 years, moving away from a dedicated wasn’t easy. xlhost has good hardware and a fast network. Never once did my server go down and 11-12mb was common. The same could not be said of my previous dedicated provider. The price was also excellent.

Shared hosting! Limited control and resources the order of the day, but you can’t beat the price. The fact is a dedicated server was (almost) always overkill for my needs. Horsepower and bandwidth I never fully utilized or had the a real need for. This new home should be a better fit for my needs and although I’ve never been a fan of server GUI tools it does make configuration and administration quick and easy.

I originally planned to make the move on the 20th but keep dragging until I finally started the process on the 30th (the last minute ). Overall the transition went smoother than I expected it would. I had everything configured with DB and site files uploaded in about 30 -45 minutes. The DNS started to work within an hour and had propagated completely after 24 hours.

It’s been 5 days now and so far so good. It is to early to speak regarding the quality of service, time will tell with that. One of the things I like is the “control panel”, it’s nice, doesn’t lack for features and is easy to use. Here’s to hoping I don’t move again unless it’s back to a dedicated server .

2-1 U.S. Dragoon Regiment

Courage and Faith!

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.

Using Fonts Packaging and How To Create An RPM package Fedora wiki pages as a guide I grabbed the files, packaged it and posted it on bugzilla for review. While I was on Pablo’s site I saw another font called Bola, I grabbed it, packaged and submitted it for review as well. Little did I know that Mairin was planning Bola as her next font of the week =).

A big thanks goes out to Pablo for creating and licensing the font SIL Open Font License (OFL) and Mairin for her blog posts highlighting these fonts.

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.

The first is, I can’t run F8 forever, no matter how well it runs currently, and it does run well. With the EOL (end of life) about 3 months away, now seemed as good a time as any to start looking ahead.
Second, F9 is finally mature enough that I can confidently deploy it, knowing it’s going to do what I need in a daily OS.
And lastly, none of this will likely matter, in 2 1/2 to 3 months F10 will be released and the cycle can start anew.

I can say everything is working quite well so far, and I don’t see any major problems ahead, though again it may not matter.

A firm suggestion to anyone thinking of installing F9, download the community re-spin, it will save you a lot of headache. A re-spin is a repackaging of the release with the latest updates available at the time of the re-spin. I found that many things are broken “out of the box” in the originally released installion media making updates almost a 1GB of downloading for me. The re-spin although weighing in at 3.6 gigs, is worth the time to download.

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.

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.

I think I did much better the first time than the second but oh well. I am sure I sound like an idiot, however I had a great time doing it and would be a part of his podcast again if he ever asks. Given my performance, I don’t see a big future in that. Still all and all it was great fun.

A big thanks to David of inviting me.