We had another live airing of the Free Software Round Table last Saturday night.  One of the big news items in the Linux world was that Ubuntu had released the 7.10 version of their distribution, which is code named Gutsy Gibbon.  I had been running the previous version of Ubuntu on my laptop and decided that it would be kind of fun to upgrade to the next version while we were on the air.  So, the first thing we did at the beginning of the show was talk about Gutsy and then I started upgrading.  It had to download 1.1GB of updates (which took about an hour) and then it started installing the updates (which would have taken about 2 hours).  However, after 1 hour of upgrading we were about to finish the show and head home.  So, I restarted my machine right in the middle of the update.  It rebooted, but a slew of things were broken.  It’s a little embarrassing to be live on a Linux radio show while you ‘brick‘ your Linux laptop.  However, last night I was able to run ‘dpkg –configure -a’ to finish installing the packages that it had half installed, and then run ‘aptitude dist-upgrade’ to finish the rest of the installation.  The system is now up and running just fine.  Besides the bricking incident the radio show went really well.  I don’t think we’ll be doing another 2 hour show anytime soon, but the hour that we actually had content prepared for went really well.

I just updated my blog to wordpress 2.3.  It seems like I only post to my blog when wordpress has a release.  So, instead of complaining that I don’t post to my blog enough, complain that wordpress doesn’t have new releases often enough.

I set up IPv6 connectivity for my home network last week.  So, you can now ping6 me here: 2001:470:1f06:33::2 as well as a few other internal IPv6 addresses.  This was a wonderfully interesting, albeit mostly pointless, exercise.  Well, it’s not fair to call it pointless.  I did learn a whole lot about IPv6 and I can now connect directly to machines on my network.  But, other than that it really doesn’t do much.  Oh, I can now see the swimming turtle over at www.kame.net.

I’ve been working on some new code at work that will really help us put the squash on web based proxy sites.  The web based proxies make it way too easy for people to get around a filter.  Blocking access to these proxies is a really big problem for the entire industry.  They go up and down so fast that the traditional host name evaluation just doesn’t work.  So, we’ll throw in a little automated discovery mumbo-jumbo and some distributed data acquisition gobbledy-gook and we’ll be good to go.

I also recently released some code at work that should seriously cut down on the bandwidth that we use when upgrading our categorized list of host names.  The way we updated the list in the past always bothered me but I didn’t have the time to devote to fixing it nor a clear picture of how the entire process should work.  When a little bit of time cleared up I did some research and came up with a plan.  With the new code the download size, on average, will drop from over 100MB a week per customer to under 3MB per customer.  Oh, and the whole thing will work better and be more exact as a result.  You’ve got to love when there are basically no drawbacks to a change.

My boss recently (like just today) built a new computer for himself and his family.  His video card has more memory on it than any of my computers have in system ram.  Yeah – it’s that kind of computer and it is awesome.  He really decked it out – from the giant copper heatsink to the hard drive with a window, it is bad-ass.  Now all he needs is some neon lights … and maybe a set of spinners.

Speaking of spinners, Public Enemy kicks ass and I’ll stand behind it.  Oh, Radiohead kicks ass too.  They just released an album called In Rainbows that is only available online at www.inrainbows.com where you can name your own price.

Last thing I promise – by the time anyone reads this the 7.10 release of Ubuntu will have been released.  I’ve been running the beta for a few weeks and I highly recommend it to … basically everyone.  Download Ubuntu, don’t be a sucker.