Tech

If you’re hoping to get sponsorship funds for your event, it’s better to ask early than to ask often. And even better to ask professionally… For larger companies ( i.e., the ones that actually do have a fair amount of cash for sponsorships) it is vitally important to ask early about sponsorships. Especially for events that are not yet established. Annual events like LinuxTag fall more easily into budget planning because you can establish a baseline for funding those events and plan year to year whether it’s worth attending and how much it actually costs. In addition to sponsorship, companies have to factor in travel, shipping, materials, etc. — the costs of participating in a conference are not limited to the funds that are put in for sponsorship. ...

One of the more humorous ad series today is the Geico “caveman” commercials, featuring a caveman complaining about the stereotype of something being “so easy a caveman could do it.” Since we don’t have to worry about offending cavemen (or cavewomen), companies can safely poke humor at that demographic group and not worry about alienating anyone. However, you might want to think twice about saying “it’s so easy your mom can do it.” ...

Mutt just happens to be one of the mail clients that sucks less. I’d been getting tired of Sylpheed lately, so I decided to try out several text mail clients and see how they fit my email volume. Part of the fruits of my labor is this tutorial on configuring Mutt’s behavior. If you’ve ever thought about running Mutt, but were put off by the amount of configuration required and the paucity of howto material online, the tutorial just might help. ...

Mutt is a great mail client, in large part because it is extremely customizable. You can tweak Mutt’s behavior and have it do tricks that are nearly impossible to do with other mail clients – but it can be a bit daunting to get started with. Let’s take Mutt on a short trip to mail client obedience school and see how easy it can be to make Mutt handle mail just the way you want it to.

Just reading Mark Shuttleworth’s response to Matt Zimmerman’s summation of the community’s expectations of the Ubuntu Dapper Drake 6.06 LTS release. One thing stuck out about Zimmerman’s comments, that’s the complaint that users still have to use the command line for some tasks. I know, the Holy Grail for a lot of users is to be able to pointy click their way through life, and that’s just a bar that Linux will be measured by no matter what, but I find it odd that so many users seem to have such a deep fear of text. Or is it the command line that they fear?

Okay, so I read on Slashdot (is a link really necessary?) that Microsoft has put up a program called FlexWiki under an Open Source license… a real OSI-approved license, not just some evil license that they’re calling Open Source. Well, you don’t see that every day, so I head over to the site to check it out. Now, if you’re not familiar with Wikis the concept is that (by default) anyone can edit them. Helps for all kinds of projects to allow open editing, and most Wiki software has version control built in so the community can roll back or remove changes that are detrimental. ...

This month, I’m going to wrap up discussion of network troubleshooting tools. So far, I’ve covered netstat, tcpdump, and ngrep and sniff. This month, I’ll discuss Ethereal, a tool for browsing network traffic interactively and analyzing network traffic. To put it more emphatically, Ethereal is the all-singing, all-dancing, packet-inspecting tool that all admins should have in their software toolboxes. Ethereal is capable of capturing packets for analysis or reading saved packet captures in a number of common formats. Ethereal support libpcap/tcpdump, Sun’s snoop/atmsnoop, LanAlyzer, MS Network Monitor, HPUX nettl, AIX iptrace, Cisco Secure IDS, and a number of others. (The full list can be found in the FAQ.) Ethereal supports more than 530 network protocols. You can also see supported protocols by selecting “Supported Protocols” from Ethereals Help menu. ...

This month, I’ll discuss cdargs, a tool that simplifies using the command line. cdargs is a handy little utility that provides browsing and bookmarks for cd. Installing and using cdargs I just recently dicovered cdargs, but it’s already proved to be a great application and big time-saver. It’s also easy to set up — just grab the source tarball and unpack it. Run configure ; make then su to root and run make install-strip. I’m using cdargs on SUSE 9.0, but it should compile just fine on most recent Linux distros. (I’m not sure about the portability for *BSDs or other Unixes.) ...

Change can be scary, especially for those who have grown accustomed to the status quo over a period of several years. And in the programming world, sweeping change is brewing. Perl 6 is a fairly ambitious redesign of both the Perl language and the Perl interpreter, so Perl 5 developers may be a bit nervous about the prospect of drastic changes, which NewsFactor explored in Part 1 of this story. But Allison Randal, one of the Perl 6 design team members, told NewsFactor that programmers have little to worry about. ...

Perl is somewhat unique among programming languages, largely because its inventor, Larry Wall, wanted his creation to resemble a natural language. For the most part, he has succeeded; Perl has evolved quite like a natural language since its inception in 1987, adapting to changing circumstances and a growing developer community. However, unlike with a natural language, Wall has always been the primary force behind Perl’s design and revisions. Now, Wall is taking another step closer to his ideal. Instead of trying to generate all the ideas for Perl 6 on his own, Wall asked the Perl community to submit Requests for Comment (RFCs) on suggestions for the language. As he said during one of his so-called “State of the Onion” speeches, “Perl 5 was my rewrite of Perl. I want Perl 6 to be the community’s rewrite of Perl….” ...