Patrick’s weblog, featuring posts dating back to 2002 on topics including technology, open source, networking, and various technical adventures.
My servers have run OpenBSD since sometime in 1998. I still have a few really ancient official CD sets laying around for OpenBSD 2.3 (May 1998), 2.5 (May 1999), and 2.7 (June 2000). My name can be found on the OpenBSD Donations page, and I…
This is a followup to my original article on Open Source Screencasting with VNC in GNOME from a few days ago. Since then, I’ve been on a bit of an adventure learning about Flex, ActionScript, and finding out ways that I can manage to hack…
Academics end up giving lots of presentations. Talks about results, proposals, progress, department functions. PowerPoint and projectors are nearly ubiquitous. A trend that’s becoming even more common is to have meetings where a portion of the group is at a remote location – such is…
This year my family finally decided to stop trying to shop for everyone and instead just draw names to see who is giving presents to whom. In the past I’ve been at such name drawing events and they always seem to have issues, such as…
Ubuntu has been incredibly successful in large part thanks to its ease of use and great packaging. However, one thing they don’t teach you is how to force your GNOME session to export environment variables to processes. When a process is launched from a terminal,…
Today I gave a talk to WPLUG on MythTV. I think it ended up going pretty well and it was quite well attended. Most people seemed interested in seeing what they could do with scavenging some computers and trying to get started with MythTV on…
Most modern packaged based operating systems have a facility for easily allowing remote systems to pull down updates. In the Windows world this is primarily used for distributing bug fixes and security patches through the Windows Update system, although major service packs may introduce new…
Yesterday in my post about things to love in Ubunty Gutsy, I talked a little bit about how great it was to have Xrandr 1.2 finally available on my Laptop. There’s a little graphical utility to setup the screens under Xrandr 1.2 called grandr. However,…
The newest releast of Ubuntu, codenamed Gutsy Gibbon, is less than a month away. In preparation for manning the GNOME booth at Ohio LinuxFest, I recently upgraded my laptop to the latest development release of Ubuntu Gutsy. This newest release features GNOME 2.20, kernel 2.6.22,…
The recent demise of Zap2it labs and the subsuquent creation of Schedules Direct was a pretty remarkable change in the MythTV community. The community now has an almost official blessing from a TV Guide service to continue, a pretty big event for most open source…