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frugal technology, simple living and guerrilla large-appliance repair

Regular blog here, 'microblog' there

Many of my traditional blog post live on this site, but a great majority of my social-style posts can be found on my much-busier microbloging site at updates.passthejoe.net. It's busier because my BlogPoster "microblogging" script generates short, Twitter-style posts from the Linux or Windows (or anywhere you can run Ruby with too many Gems) command line, uploads them to the web server and send them out on my Twitter and Mastodon feeds.

I used to post to this blog via scripts and Unix/Linux utilities (curl and Unison) that helped me mirror the files locally and on the server. Since this site recently moved hosts, none of that is set up. I'm just using SFTP and SSH to write posts and manage the site.

Disqus comments are not live just yet because I'm not sure about what I'm going to do for the domain on this site. I'll probably restore the old domain at first just to have some continuity, but for now I like using the "free" domain from this site's new host, NearlyFreeSpeech.net.

Tue, 24 May 2011

Mozilla.debian.net is back

Now that the transition to the new Alioth server is complete, The Debian Mozilla Team's http://mozilla.debian.net site is back, as is the repository. I know because I got an Icedove update this morning.

Added to the choices of newer Mozilla appsat http://mozilla.debian.net are versions 5.0, Aurora and Beta of Iceweasel (aka Firefox). So you can get even closer to the bleeding edge of Firefox development on your Squeeze, Wheezy or Sid system.

Mon, 23 May 2011

Why mozilla.debian.net is down

Those Debian users (including myself) who use the Debian Mozilla Team APT archive at http://mozilla.debian.net for newer versions of Iceweasel and Icedove (aka Firefox and Thunderbird) may have noticed that the archive has been down for at least three (if not more) days.

While this is not exactly comforting to users, the reason, via Mike Hommey’s site (originally from the Debian User Forum) and according to the Debian Infrastructure Announce mailing list is a comprehensive upgrade to the Alioth server:

Dear Debian developers, contributors and visitors,
This is a reminder that some of the Alioth admins are gathered this week-end to work on alioth.debian.org. One of the goals of the sprint is to upgrade Alioth in every way we can find: kernel, Debian release, FusionForge software, hardware, and so on. This will very probably result in temporary downtime of the service, especially during the move. We should be done by late afternoon (UK time) on Sunday, May 22nd. We apologize for the inconvenience, which we hope will be compensated by a noticeable increase in performance. Roland.

Roland Mas

Sat, 07 May 2011

The 2.6.38 Linux kernel comes to Debian squeeze-backports

The wait is over. There are now new kernels in squeeze-backports. There’s also Liquorix, which is what I’m using now.

Wed, 04 May 2011

My new blog - powered by Ode

Welcome to my new blog. It looks a lot like the Ode home page because I'm using Ode to run the site.

And I happen to like the default theme, called Logic.

There's a bit of work to do when it comes to adopting a new platform and customizing it, so this Ode blog should look less like http://ode-is-simple.com in time.

I hope to have many different kinds of content here, and possibly different styles/themes for each category, all without a fancy blogging CMS, reams of PHP code, a database and all that goes with that.

Let's see how it goes.