This post is here more so I don't lose track of this extremely detailed tutorial on how to deal with iOS 7 devices under Linux, especially Fedora.

(Because friends don't let friends use iTunes)

If you're not following blogging and RSS pioneer Dave Winer, you should be.

Here are some recent, important (yet short) Dave Winer posts on blogging and social media's evisceration of it:

• Why blog?

A blog post has lasting value. A tweet stream is more ephemeral, it can evaporate almost instantly.

• Why are people bored with blogging?

The blogging tools developers aren't giving the users anything new and/or interesting to do. ... Since when does a software category survive without introducing new stuff every so often?

• Facebook != the web

Okay so people who used to blog now prefer to post their observations on Facebook for the immediate interaction of it. I know what they mean now that I've been using Facebook for a few months. Hearing the likes and the comments is a kind of Pavlovian reward. It's true, I know the feeling.

• Why people like Facebook

People like Facebook because when they post something there, they get responses from people they care about.

I use Red Hat's OpenShift, and I'd like to use it more. I'm aiming to get the hang of all the different moving parts: the web interface, the rhc command-line interface, getting in with SFTP, git ...

I still maintain that PaaS (platform as a service) solutions like OpenShift need to be as easy to manage as shared hosting, which you can deal with via FTP and which doesn't need a special command-line utility.

I'm not saying that everything shouldn't be configurable for full-on developers. But there should be a simpler way to run cloud/networked applications. And yes, I recognize that we still do have shared web hosting, which can be pretty darn easy.

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Read this: The Fall of Perl, the Web's Most Promising Language, by Conor Myhrvold

brian d foy says, "The Fall of Perl" would more suitably be titled "The Rise of Python"

If you see a link to this post on Twitter an hour after my last Tweet, my IFTTT-Buffer timed blog RSS-to-social setup is working.

Sure it's better to script everything locally, and I bet that piping RSS to social media at regular intervals is more than scriptable, I started using Buffer a week or so ago to spread out my Twitter posts in the event that I do a bunch of them at once.

Mind you, this hasn't yet happened. But it could. And I'm testing the service for my day job.

For my personal sites, I've been using dlvr.it to automatically feed blog RSS to Twitter (and occasionally Facebook). But while dlvr.it theoretically CAN dribble out posts at timed intervals with it's new (to me) "Q" feature, use of RSS with Q requires a paid subscript to dlvr.it. Again, for the day job this is something we might consider (if anybody but me was a dlvr.it fan), but I'm not that crazy about the paid options.

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I spent quite a bit of time running Google Chrome/Chromium on both Windows and Linux, but between feeling uncomfortable giving away so much data to Google (when logged in on Chrome) and how well Firefox performs on Linux (which is very well from what I can see), I now use Firefox about 99 percent of the time in Fedora 20.

But on my Windows 7 work machine, which is a more powerful (quad-core AMD to my laptop's dual-core, with 8 GB of RAM to the laptop's 4 GB), I flip it, using Chrome about 99 percent of the time.

So I've been switching it up to see how I might like using more Chrome in Linux and more Firefox in Windows.

I'll keep it short. There's nothing about Chrome on my laptop in Fedora 20 that makes me want to use it. It's no faster and no more stable. And SELinux doesn't much like it (and I get warnings).

I spent the whole day yesterday in Windows 7 on my big box running Firefox (version 27 on both machines for the record) for everything. It was measurably slower, and I had a few periods of non-responsiveness, especially with my customary 15-20 open tabs.

This means I'll be sticking with Firefox on my Linux-running laptop (and for my personal use, where I'm not so crazy about Google spying and Chrome on my workplace desktop, where I'm already using Google Apps and am not doing any personal business (and could care less if Google knows about my web use as it relates).

So I'm working on a blog that I moved from Movable Type to WordPress in early 2012 but haven't touched since.

There were about 8,000 spam comments that weren't marked by the system as spam from 2009-11.

That's a lot of spam, and I remember now how hard it was to keep up with at the time.

I haven't had time to listen back to the recording yet, but I just spent some time with Karsten Wade of Red Hat, the onetime Fedora Community Gardener who's now tending to the community around CentOS, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux-derived distribution that is now a whole lot closer to Red Hat that it has ever been before.

That last statement is a bit of a cheat because until the announcement this January of the new relationship between CentOS and RHEL, they were deliberately not very close at all.

I still have to "process" the interview (in my own mind, that is), but I get the feeling that Red Hat's involvement with CentOS -- which includes employing a number of developers who have been volunteering their time until now, adding some open governance to the project as well as providing infrastructure support -- will only be positives for the distribution that people have turned to when they want an enterprise-level operating system without the Red Hat subscription that goes along with it.

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I'm at SCALE 12x at the Los Angeles Airport Hilton hotel on Saturday, Feb. 22, 2014, and so far I've roamed the show floor, which seems a whole lot bigger than the last time I attended SCALE, which was probably in 2009.

The floor is thick with people, and there's a lot going on at the booths.

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