gundy dot org

I shortened the page load times on the Utah Open Source Planet by bringing the number of posts down from 60 to 40.

OK, so that’s a little dramatic, but still, my blog’s google placement for certain keywords has suffered sorely and it troubles me.

It all started with comment spam. I installed a spam eating plug-in to keep the flood from pouring over my blog, and it worked well - too well. At first, I was delighted to see that my INBOX was no longer filled with emails alerting me to the fact that posts needed moderating. After a while, it seems that they tapered off all together. “Great!” I thought, “This thing must really be learning what spam looks like.”

After some time, I googled “AGI” and noticed my site wasn’t in the result list. I thought that was odd as the keyword “AGI” had always included my blog in the top 10 or so (this is just a guess as my vanity googling was never very formal). I thought my page rank must have gone down, so I checked…

“Ahhh! Blank pages everywhere!”

Somehow the plug-in had jacked the WP “loop” and the result was blank pages - lots of them. For some reason, the problem didn’t manifest itself until sometime after installing the plug-in.

I’m no PHP hacker, but I did my best to follow the code. I was never able to figure out what was happening; I suppose if I knew more about WordPress, I could’ve figured it out as the PHP was fairly easy to follow. I didn’t want to dive into WP more then I already had (I’m going to replace it with a homespun Django blog anyway), so I decided to just update it to the latest WP version and see if that would fix it. It did.

Now, I find that google has nearly dropped my blog off the face of the earth. Check the search results…

Gundy 1st — 6th
Gabe Gunderson 1st — 340th
Gunderson ~15th — 392nd
Gabriel ~35th — 931st
Gabe ~35th — 871st
AGI ~10th — 291st
Asterisk C# 1st — 313th

The traffic graph seems to back it up:

Anyway, If I’m not in your blogroll, you can add me to it and help stop this search engine injustice! Or, if you need less lofty motivation, you can just do it to throw a dog a bone!

P.S. I’m now using Akismet to fight spam (on the recommendation of others).

“Bang the gong!”

That’s what they say at DirectPointe when a big deal goes down. BTW, there really is a gong in the entry to the corporate offices. I’ve included a picture for the curious…

(I’ve been too busy to blog about joining DirectPointe - that will come soon. The thing to know is that we’re a service based company and that we’ve chosen to base our latest and greatest offering (SOS) on an Open Source stack. This was a good fit for me as I was working on a similar project before meeting and joining DirectPointe. I get to work with all the Open Source projects that I enjoy: Samba, Rsync, Squid, Xen, Apache and the countless others that make up the landscape. More on this later…)

Anyway, the big deal around here is that we’ve partnered with Google to integrate the Small Office Solution with Google Apps. It’s pretty cool stuff. We use Google’s “Extensibility APIs” to synchronize users and credentials between the local domain and Google’s hosted services. So basically, what happens is that you hit “Ctl+Alt+Del” on your windows box, the password is updated on the domain controller and then it syncs it with Google. Read about it on Google’s site here and here.

This should be a fun! Congratulations to the many people here at DirectPointe and Google for making it happen.

A year ago, I gave wordpress a spin and started sharing with the world some of the many things that interest me. This tends to be stuff about Open Source/Free software. The cool thing about Open Source software is that it seems to have universal appeal. This map shows typical geographic locations of my site’s visitors.

Anyway, it’s fun to think that as I sleep, there are people in Asia or Europe browsing the web server that warms the space under my stairs. :)

Two things about this site are bound to change this year. One, I’ll be writing my own blogging system (in Django). Two, I’ll be working on making the information here more helpful to those who visit. It won’t be a big deal; I’ll just be making an effort to think about what the reader may need to know, giving better links, invite questions, etc.

Here’s to a great new year!

I’m happy to learn that Asterisk 1.4 is out.

While working on some Xen stuff, I’ve found that a drawing is about the easiest way to document some things.

I’m going to be doing some drawings of custom Xen networks, but until then, here are a few drawings of default Xen networks to serve as a point of reference.

This first one just shows how a non-Xen networking setup might look. The white box is just a label. Not much to see :)

Now, we’ll look at what starting xend does to our network. Later on, I’ll try to blog about the scripts that make this change and how they work. If you boot into your Xen kernel in and haven’t done anything with Xen yet, this is what your setup looks like (well, maybe).

If you bring up a guest OS (DomU), this is what your networking will look like. This set-up is suitable for most Xen installs.

More to come…

Update: Changed the X in vifX.Y to match the domain ID. Good eye Lamont.

Christer Edwards pointed me to the best bug report I’ve ever seen:

Microsoft has a majority market share in the new desktop PC marketplace.
This is a bug, which Ubuntu is designed to fix

Microsoft has a majority market share | Non-free software is holding back innovation in the IT industry, restricting access to IT to a small part of the world’s population and limiting the ability of software developers to reach their full potential, globally. This bug is widely evident in the PC industry.

Steps to repeat:
1. Visit a local PC store.
What happens:
2. Observe that a majority of PC’s for sale have non-free software pre-installed
3. Observe very few PC’s with Ubuntu and free software pre-installed

What should happen:
1. A majority of the PC’s for sale should include only free software like Ubuntu
2. Ubuntu should be marketed in a way such that its amazing features and benefits would be apparent and known by all.
3. The system shall become more and more user friendly as time passes.

Good work Ubuntu! Now, get that bug closed; it’s a blocker!

This should lead to some interesting search results. If so, I’ll share what I’ve learned 5 or 6 weeks from now.

• basketball coach
• championship
• conference
• dawson
• defense
• final four
• finals
• friars
• game
• head coach
• houston
• jeff van gundy
• mcquaid jesuit high school
• nazareth college
• nba
• nba broadcasts
• new york knicks
• playoff
• points
• providence
• rochester
• rochester new york
• rockets
• rutgers
• seasons
• turner sports

It’s kinda like setting a trap. Analytics - that’s some fun stuff :)

You know, now that Novell has stopped developing Hula, Google should adopt it. A successful Hula would be a kick in the teeth to Microsoft and a great way to gain favor with the Open Source crowd. A few months of effort to get to Hula to a “1.0″, and Google would get all the love. Google, you know you want to.

I’ve been checking out rPath and Conary. I know rPath has ties to Red Hat, but let’s forget that for now. The technology is very, very cool. From what I can tell, it has serious advantages over rpm and yum|apt|up2date combo.

Besides local package management, it makes it easy to fork the distro. Why would anyone want that?! Well, people don’t really want to fork anything, they just want a few things that aren’t currently offered, so they take the distro they know (often RHEL or Debian) and start making changes. Usually it’s more work then they can keep up with and things fall apart. If they do “make it” the deltas get bigger and bigger until any benefit that comes from the fork is lost.

What if distros encouraged a community of hackers around their base distro? As long as they don’t steal customers, don’t burden the Upstream Providers (UP) with support and offer clean patches, wouldn’t that be welcome? Isn’t it a complement of sorts to be forked? And, what if the UP made it so easy to keep in sync that small projects could actually thrive and stick around long enough to give something back to the UP? At the very least, more and more people would learn how to run a system that’s like the UP, and those skills would port if they ever switched to the UP’s distro. I’m thinking more then just SRPMS, I’m thinking a Conary based distro and repos.

So really, we’re not talking about a “hostile fork” in the classic sense. We are talking about a “loving spoon.” It seems to me that once the sweetness that is Conary becomes more and more common place (and I believe it will), there will be great value in being the distro that people choose as the root of their distro. That sounds like a good fit for Fedora Core, or even better, RHEL or Debian. One would think that Red Hat and Debian would want to preempt each other with such a move.

As it stands, rPath is nicely positioned to lead out in this space. Currently their interests are focused on appliances, but what about general purpose distros? That can’t be that far behind. I for one, will be looking at rPath to use as a base for one of my projects. Plus, the guys over at rPath are super helpful. I wish them the best (if Red Hat and Debian sit on their hands in this regard, it looks like rPath just might get it).

Anyone see where I’m going with this? Does anyone agree? Anyone think I’m nuts?

I leave you with a bit this fitting 1966 classic by the LOVIN’ SPOONFUL:

Hot town, summer in the city
Back of my neck getting dirty and gritty
Been down, isn’t it a pity
Doesn’t seem to be a shadow in the city

All around, people looking half dead
Walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head…