Archive - 2010
October 6th
Wordless Wednesday
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 10/06/2010 - 07:45
October 5th
Random Observations About the CT U.S. Senate Debate #ctsen #snark
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 10/05/2010 - 08:32Last night, I attended the Monday Night Rumble organized by the Mertens for U.S. Senate campaign. Many of my friends from Social Web Week and other social media activities in Connecticut were there and some helped organize the event. I’ve been offering suggestions to them about using social media to promote civic engagement and it seemed like the Monday Night Rumble would be a good way to watch the debate.
At various points during the debate, they would mute the television projected on a large screen in the back of the upper room of Anna Liffey’s in New Haven. Mertens would provide his answers to the questions that McMahon and Blumenthal had been asked. As a general rule, they seemed much more intelligent than the responses coming across the television.
There was also a screen up in the corner of the room showing a twitter feed of the #ctsen hashtag. Unfortunately, the font was too small on the screen for me to easily see from where I was sitting. Instead, I checked tweets on my cellphone.
The best tweet of the evening went to Helen Ubinas:
Um. What with Linda McMahon's heavy breathing before every question? Half expect her to say, "Dick. I am your mother." #ctsen#debate
Paul Bass’ live blogging the debate also particularly stands out.
State Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield also provided some great tweeting of the debate. His tweets included:
That death penalty question hit me in the gut #ctdem
Gary has been a leading voice for doing away with the death penalty. Sitting in Anna Liffey’s, a block away from where Steven Hayes is being tried, John Mertens differed from both Blumenthal and McMahon on the death penalty. They both support it, Mertens gave a good explanation of why he does not support it.
At the end, Gary said,
Ah screw it...neither candidate decisively beat the other so stop saying one or the other put the smackdown #ctsen
Just about every debate ends with the most fervent supporters of each candidate saying their candidate won the debate. I tend to agree with Gary. Neither candidate on the stage in Hartford decisively beat the other, but the debate did include more than just two sides. McMahon also talked about issues as being two sided. I tweeted:
McMahon wants bipartisan discussion about #hcr. I guess she doesn't want unaffiliated voters in the discussion or supporting her. #ctsen
Several friends in different minor parties retweeted this.
Warren Mosler, the other too often overlooked U.S. Senate candidate who will be on the ballot in Connecticut this November also attended the Monday Night rumble. After the debate, he was given a chance to respond to both John and to the major party candidates. There was a serious discussion about the issues, in which various members of the audience also participated.
The Mertens campaign plans to have continued debate parties like this as long as all the candidates are not allowed to participate. All in all, the Monday Rumble demonstrated that people who believe Attorney General Blumenthal has a serious opponent in this race are wrong. Actually, he has two serious opponents, John Mertens and Warren Mosler.
Back home, I stumbled across the article in the Hartford Courant announcing that Jeff Levine’s position as Senior Vice President of Content at The Hartford Courant and Fox CT has been eliminated.
One can only surmise that CT1 Media is now being a little more upfront about doing away with any valuable content. It fits with the way they ran the debate. Perhaps this is in preparation for the paper and television station to be sold to WWE.
My recommendation to Mr. Levine? Start taking steroids and perhaps you can become an independent contractor to that small business in Stamford that is creating ‘jobs’.
QuePublishing Joins PodcampCT Sponsors
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 10/05/2010 - 06:03QuePublishing, “providing practical advice on computers and technology” has become a sponsor of PodcampCT. They are contributing several books that will be given away to lucky PodcampCT attendees.
This list includes:
- Social Media Marketing: Strategies for Engaging in Facebook, Twitter & Other Social Media
- Facebook Marketing: Designing Your Next Marketing Campaign, 2nd Edition
- Facebook for Grown-Ups
- Sams Teach Yourself Tumblr
- Sams Teach Yourself Twitter
- USING WordPress
- Blogging to Drive Business
- 2011 Social Media Directory: The Ultimate Guide to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn Resources
- USING LinkedIn
- All A Twitter
- It's Your World, So Change It: Using the Power of the Internet to Create Social Change
As I spoke with a representative of Que Publishing, I suggested asking PodcampCT attendees if they have read any of these books, or other Que Publishing books that would be of interest to other PodcampCT attendees and they are very interested in the feedback.
Have you read any of these books? Any other Que Publishing books about social media? Which ones did you like best? Why? Were there any that you didn’t like? What was wrong with them?
One of the things that I really like about Podcamps are that they are discussions, were everyone’s opinion is valued, and not simply presentations. Already, I am getting into some great discussions about Podcamp. Hopefully, we can get into some good discussions here about books Podcampers would like, and most importantly, I hope everyone signs up for PodcampCT before it is too late.
October 4th
Music Monday - Steve Andrews Beyond from Within
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 10/04/2010 - 10:28If I had more time and money, I would fly out to Pittsburgh and try to spend some time getting to know Steve Andrews of Beyond from Within. It seems like there is an interesting story to figure out. His father was a carpenter and his mother, a housewife. It wasn’t a musical family, but somehow, music caught Steve’s interest. Was it at church? Various reviews talk about how he started off writing Christian Rock, how he conducts a church choir and how he is a vocalist with a Greek Orthodox chant choir.
Others have written about how he enjoys opera and going to the Duquesne University Orchestra. They note how he is a drafter for an engineering firm and a big sports fan.
His bio on his Electronic Press Kit (EPK) on Sonicbids starts off by talking about another key influence, The Doors. If you listen to his music, you can clearly hear the influence.
He submitted his music for review back in May, one of the first people to submit their EPKs to me. He has sent me frequent emails about his music and a copy of his CD. It seems like he has a burning desire to be heard, like many of us, I suppose.
I thought about Steve as I went to see William and the Tradesmen. William was a struggling thirty-one year old New York musician trying to be a British punk rocker. In the show, William sends out lots of desperate messages trying to get someone to listen. Unlike William, it sounds like Steve has a good job, and there is something more in his desire to be heard.
Yet I wonder, what is it like, hanging out with Steve next to the water cooler at work? Do the people in the choirs he’s involved with know about his desire to channel Jim Morrison? How about the buddies he hangs out with when watching a football game? What is it that makes Steve Andrews tick?
The name of his one person band perhaps gives a hint, “Beyond from Within”. Is there something beyond what is within each of us? Is there something greater that calls us to more than our daily working life and the football game at the end of the week? Can we get in touch with it?
It’s hard to tell. Steve’s website doesn’t have a calendar of events he’s playing at. There is a link to iTunes where you can buy some of his music, and a few scattered reviews, but that seems to be about it.
Maybe I don’t have Steve’s story right at all, but it seems to me that he is a great example of the unrecognized talents and passions that are hidden within people that we walk past in our daily lives. Listen to Steve’s music. Listen to your own music, and keep your ears and eyes up for something bubbling up from beyond from within around you.
October 3rd
Upgrades to Ubuntu Lucid Lynx
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 10/03/2010 - 17:54Slowly, more and more of my computers are running Linux and recently, I’ve been upgrading a few of them to the latest version called Lucid Lynx.
My adventures started on an old IBM Thinkpad R51 that I have. It is a pretty beat up old laptop that stopped running Windows years ago. So, I installed Linux and it has run fairly well for me, with the exception that it often got the dreaded “Aw, Snap!” message. For a long time it happened rarely enough that I could still use Chromium with minor annoyances. However, recently, it started getting worse and worse until it got to the point that every time I tried to open a page with Chromium, I got an “Aw, Snap!” message.
So, I started the upgrade. Unfortunately, at various points, the upgrade got interrupted. Eventually, it succeeded enough so that I could get to a command prompt and connect with a Ethernet connection. By running various combinations of apt-get upgrade -f and dpkg --configure -a, eventually it got to a point where it would boot all the way.
When I finally got the box running, the nautilus file manager looped and started bring up window after window. The only thing I could do was shut down. I tried various things, like removing and reinstalling nautilus, and finally ended up with the session manager not working. Whenever I tried to login, I would get a black screen and get taken back to the session manager. So, I logged in with a command prompt and installed xubuntu-desktop. I like that session manager better and now the old machine is up and running fine, with the exception that Chromium remains unusable. Instead of nautilus, I’m using thunar as my file manager which is part of the xubuntu project. For more information on different session managers for Ubuntu, check out Install Alternative Desktop Managers in Ubuntu
With that completed, I figured it was time to upgrade the office server. It was already running xubuntu. This upgrade went much more smoothly with a few different considerations. First, it was running an even older version of Ubuntu, Jaunty Jackalope. Also, I had all kinds of interesting packages I had added to the server.
First, I upgraded from Jaunty Jackalope to Karmic Koala. This upgrade, while slow, went smoothly somewhat smoothly. Most of the packages I had been running continued to run fine, although I did have some problems with Samba which I figured I’d come back to.
The next upgrade I did was from Karmic Koala to Lucid Lynx. This upgrade presented more difficulties. During the upgrade process, it asked if I wanted to keep various configuration files and change them. As a general rule, I keep them, because I’ve made a lot of tweaks. Unfortunately, the comparison between the files during the upgrade process isn’t always clear, and there isn’t, as far as I know, the ability to change a configuration file to take a little from both files.
That is what I really needed during the upgrade of MySQL. I had been running MySql 5.0, and upgrading to Lucid Lynx upgraded MySql to 5.1. During the updates, AppArmour hung. Ultimately, I killed it and took the messages about having a damaged configuration. I ran dpkg --configure -a, to try and repair it, and again AppArmour hung.
By searching around, I found that the MySql 5.1 gags if you have skip-bdb in the /etc/mysql/my.cnf file. I commented out that line, and restarted the configuration. At this point MySql started up nicely and AppArmour had no problem. The key take-away: comment out the skip-bdb line in your my.cnf file before upgrading to MySql 5.1, either directly, or as part of a Lucid Lynx update.
Another problem that I ran into was with Samba. I don’t know how old the version of Samba was that I was running, but my smb.conf file was only nine lines long, describing the workgroup, netbios name, and the share. The suggested configuration file is now about 300 lines long, although over the majority of those lines are comments. Took the sample configuration file, tweaked it a bit to be similar to my old file and restarted Samba. Unfortunately, I still had problems mounting my shared directories to a Windows box.
It was all a problem in authentication. For some reason, one of the upgrades made screwed up the smbpasswd file. I was hoping that with comments about pam and unix password sync would mean that I could simply use my unix password. However, for some reason the passwords did not sync, so I used the smbpasswd command to set the Samba password. At this point, my directory shares started working as well.
I haven’t fully tested my configuration, but everything that I use on the normal day to day operations of the office server is working fine. In fact, both machines seem to be working much more quickly. Now, I need to decide when to update my daughter’s laptop, as well as a fifteen year old Windows NT server, and ultimately, production servers that I support running Hardy Heron.
Anyone else have any stories about upgrading various Linux boxes?
