Slashtard: News for the Special

BARcamp Chicago 2008 August 13, 2008

So BARcamp Chicago is coming up this weekend and you better not miss it.  This is THE Chicago tech event of the summer and this year will be even better than last year.  Like every year we have a broad range of topics that will be talked about by the event attendees and we will be also offering live music and other social events in the evenings. Below are the vitals for the event:

What: BARcamp Chicago 2008

When: Saturday, August 16th @ 12:00 pm until Sunday, August 17th @ 8:00 pm

Where: 1240 W. Harrison St, Chicago IL 60607

Linux World Expo Day 1 and 2 August 6, 2008

So day 1 was mainly about setup of the booth which went fairly smoothly, except for trying to figure out how to hang the back banner.  We had 3 KPCs at our booth since Canonical only had room for one KPC and Fedora used both of their supplied KPCs.  After we got the booth setup, Ken, Nick and I meet up with Stef for a meal since she was in the area for a training seminar.

Day 2 started off with some last minute finalizations of the booth.  We were able to get everything setup before the crowd started to arrive.  We were positioned right behind the Fusion IO booth with have a bucking hard drive.  It was like a mechanical bull except shaped like a hard drive.  This helped us out by getting foot traffic whenever they were doing the bucking hard drive.  We had a lot of good traffic to the booth.  I meet some new people along with other people I have meet before at other Linux conferences.  After the expo ended for the day we went and grabed something to eat and then tried to attend the Linux  Foundation party, however when we rang the buzzer for the venue no one answered.  After that we when to the Postgress party, which was cool.  I meet a couple of new faces and some people I have met before.  After that we went to another after party, where we ran into Jono Bacon and we ended up spending the evening hanging out with him and talking about upstream GNOME, rPath, Foresight and Ubuntu.  So far, the first day of Linux World was very much worth the trip.

Pitchfork 2008 Recap July 24, 2008

So I finally have recouped from Pitchfork and got all my pictures uploaded to flickr.  Now all that is left is to post my recap for my own memory and to help others discover new bands.

Day 1

Friday of Pitchfork had the main acts playing one of their successful albums from start to end.  This is a really interesting concept that usually isn’t seen in this day and age of radio single after radio single.  Mission of Burma started on the festival by playing Vs.  I haven’t heard many Mission of Burma tracks before Pitchfork but they sure did impress me with their performance.  Next up was Sebadoh performing Bubble and Scrape.  I really didn’t care for this part of the night and was really just looking forward to the next act.  Closing the night was Public Enemy, yes the one and only Public Enemy.  They performed their legendary album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.  This performance was amazing.  Chuck D and Flavor Flav were on the top of their game.  A couple times during the set the crowd started to turn on Flav and his antics but he quickly got the crowd back on his side.

Day 2

I was really looking forward to mainly 2 bands on Saturday, Dizzee Rascal and No Age and the rest of the day was to check out bands I was super familiar with.  Saturday started off with Boban i Marko Markovic Orkestar on the Balance stage.  Boban is a horn and drum band with plenty of energy.  It was a great way to start off the day.  After this I headed to the C stage to check out Titus Andronicus which was another high energy act to start off the morning.  After this act I went to see Jay Reatard a band from Memphis which raised the energy bar even higher.  They powered through their set with only saying the track title between tracks.  After Jay Reatard finished their set Caribou started on the stage next door and I caught a few tracks before heading over to Icy Demons.  Icy Demons are a local band from Chicago.  It is really hard to classify their style of music, it is kind of like dance-rock with a mix of r&b and hip-hop.  I left this set early so I could get a good spot for the first act I really wanted to see this whole day Dizzee Rascal.  Dizzee Rascal is a UK grim rapper out of London.  He started off by saying “Fuck that Folk Shit” in regards to the Fleet Foxes who were finishing up on the stage next door.  As soon as he got into his first track the crowd erupted.  The next band I caught after Dizzee was !!! which I really wish I didn’t spend my time watching.  For some reason I just couldn’t get into their style of dance-rock beats.  The next act gets my “Holy Shit How Have I Not Been Following This Band Forever” Award and it is The Hold Steady.  They put on a total killer set and had the crowd with them the whole time.  Next I headed over to the Balance stage to watch Atlas Sound.  The last time he performed he had a backup band but this time it was just Bradford Cox with a guitar, mixer, digital tracks and a mic and it was great.  After he finished I made sure to make my way as close as I could for the next act No Age.  No Age is a noise punk band out of LA.  They put everything into their set closing out the Balance stage on Saturday.  The drummer was going so hard that they had to add extra weight to his drum set.  The drummer also got my respect when a fan started crowd surfing and the guards started yanking on the kid, he stopped in the middle of the song and told the guards to leave the kids alone.  Ending the set they performed a cover with Abe Vigoda and by the end of the song half of the stage was crowd surfing.  I was able to catch about 15 minutes of Animal Collective after the No Age set.  Animal Collective had the sizzle but very little steak, where as No Age had little sizzle but a 72oz steak.

Day 3

Sunday started off with Mahjongg but they had to wait until 1pm so the Church across the street could let out.  Mahjongg is another local Chicago band that cross many different genres of music but are great performers.  After this I went to go get a good spot for Boris, a rock/metal band from Japan.  Boris was amazing!  Their drummer started the set off with his massive gong behind the drum kit.  The lead singer and bassist had a double necked guitar with one being a bass and the other a guitar.  Their set was cut short due to the amps not having enough power for Boris to play some of their tracks.  They kept blowing the amps when trying to play the track.  Since the balance stage started late and Boris finished early, I was able to catch the entire set of HEALTH.  They are another noise punk band, but they have little emphasis on lyrics.  They have a device which even acts as a guitar pedal hooked up to the mic for distortion on the vocals.  After HEALTH, King Kahn and the Shrines performed and this my friends was an amazing set.  I highly recommend seeing them the next time they are in your town.  They give off a very modern funny James Brown style performance.  The next set I caught was Ghostface Killah & Raekwon which was an epic experience.  They both are great rappers and at the same time amazing hype men.  Anytime the crowd dropped in energy they got them right back into the set.  They even started just having the dj spin beats until the crowd erupted and then would perform that track.  After this I went to catch Spiritualized which was probably the most disappointing performance of the event.  After this I went back to the Balance stage so I could catch Cut Copy closing out the Balance stage.  However, they announced that Cut Copy was running late since they just got to the airport.  When they announced this Brandford from Atlas Sound, King Kahn lead singer and Tony from the Chicago based Ponys started coming out with instruments.  They said they were going to have a jam session and probably half the crowd left.  This was a horrible mistake as this jam session was a great once in a lifetime experience.  Also after about 30 minutes, Cut Copy arrived from the airport and performed a shortened set.  However short the set was the energy and crowd were amazing the whole way through.

Bands I Will Check Out Again

No Age

Atlas Sound

Dizzee Rascal

Jay Reatard

Icy Demons

The Hold Steady

Boris

Mahjongg

HEALTH

King Kahn and The Shrines

Cut Copy

Bands I Wont See Again

Caribou

Sebadoh

Animal Collective

Elf Power

!!!

Foresight Lite: Same Great Taste But Half the Fat July 23, 2008

I am pleased to announce the we now offer a single cd version of Foresight, aka Foresight Lite.  Currently it is only available in 32bit due to some more fat needing to be trimmed from the 64bit version.  Foresight Lite doesn’t include Open Office and is only available in English to keep the size down.  You can install the Lite version and then move to the standard Foresight version by running the following in a terminal.

sudo conary update group-gnome-dist

Please allow sometime for this to complete as this will be installing a lot of packages and language files.

On another note, after a long break the a new foresight newsletter has been released.

Reminder: Foresight Tag line Contest Deadline Friday July 10, 2008

I just wanted to remind all interested parties that your chance to win a wicked Foresight t-shirt is narrowing.  The deadline for the Foresight tag line contest is Friday July 11th, 2008 by 12am(CDT)/6am(UTC) .  Please email all tag line submissions to myself (specialkevin_AT_foresightlinux.org).  The winning tag line will be chosen by myself and the Foresight Council of Users.  I would really like to thank everyone that has submitted a tag line so far and to all of you who have yet to submit a tag line, what are you waiting for.  I wish all participants the best of luck.

Handle More Than 20 Windows In irssi Easily July 8, 2008

Since it seems my primary means of communication for social, support and project work ends up being IRC I can be very picky about how I operate in my IRC Client.  My client of choice is irssi+Screen.  I use this since it allows me to leave a persistent connection in IRC open, as long as my server is up.  Recently I have been having more than 20 windows open due to various irc channels and priv msgs but that was becoming a pain to navigate when I would go past the alt-o keybinding.  So what was my solution: map the rest of my keyboard to specific windows.  The only downside to this is that I lost some keyboard commands: alt-p, alt-a, alt-n to name a few.  However, I hardly use those key combinations so it wasn’t a loss for me.  I found this solution from Jess and Aaron Toponce’s blog post. If you want to accomplish the same thing in your irssi usage just copy and paste the following into irssi.

/bind meta-1 change_window 1
/bind meta-2 change_window 2
/bind meta-3 change_window 3
/bind meta-4 change_window 4
/bind meta-5 change_window 5
/bind meta-6 change_window 6
/bind meta-7 change_window 7
/bind meta-8 change_window 8
/bind meta-9 change_window 9
/bind meta-0 change_window 10
/bind meta-q change_window 11
/bind meta-w change_window 12
/bind meta-e change_window 13
/bind meta-r change_window 14
/bind meta-t change_window 15
/bind meta-y change_window 16
/bind meta-u change_window 17
/bind meta-i change_window 18
/bind meta-o change_window 19
/bind meta-p change_window 20
/bind meta-a change_window 21
/bind meta-s change_window 22
/bind meta-d change_window 23
/bind meta-f change_window 24
/bind meta-g change_window 25
/bind meta-h change_window 26
/bind meta-j change_window 27
/bind meta-k change_window 28
/bind meta-l change_window 29
/bind meta-\; change_window 30
/bind meta-z change_window 31
/bind meta-x change_window 32
/bind meta-c change_window 33
/bind meta-v change_window 34
/bind meta-b change_window 35
/bind meta-n change_window 36
/bind meta-m change_window 37
/bind meta-, change_window 38
/bind meta-. change_window 39
/bind meta-/ change_window 40

Python for Sys Admins Talk July 7, 2008

So this past weekend I gave a talk on Python for Sys Admins to the Chicago Linux User Group.  This talk wasn’t meant to teach people python yet show them some modules that help in creating scripts and command line applications.  I included modules that I find myself using in a majority of my scripting/application writting on the job.  I covered some aspects of subprocess, optparse, ConfigParser, and logging.  You can get and archive of the slides, in S5 form, along with some python code examples here.  The code samples I included are very simple and meant to just so how to actually use some of the functionaly of the modules.  All of the code samples were ran with python 2.4 under linux.t  If you have any questions or find a typo just say so in the comments.

Anybody Going to BARcamp Madison?

Since BARcamp Chicago go pushed back to August 15th-17th that leaves July 26-27th open and that just so happens to be when BARcamp Madison will be occuring.  I am wondering if anybody else from Chicago is planning on going and would be interested in car pooling or taking the bus/train there as a group.  If I do make it up to BARcamp Madison all attendees better be ready for some bright Foresight shirt action and possibly to listen to a superb talk on Foresight by yours truely.

Python for System Administrators Presentation July 2, 2008

Dear LazyWeb,

I will be giving a presentation on using Python for System Administrators at the Chicago Linux User Group on Saturday (July 5th) and I was wondering what topics people would like to see included in such a presentation.  I plan to talk about subprocess, optparse, configparser but not quite sure what else people would like to hear about.  So people of the vast internet, please tell me what you would like to see in a presentation about using python for system administration.

Coding Advice/Suggestions Needed July 1, 2008

Dear Lazyweb,

I am working on this Python application that remotely checks if a machine needs to be updated and then returns the results.  What I am wondering is what is the best way to execute commands on the remote clients, right now various linux distributions?  I was thinking to run the commands via ssh.  This would require ssh keys added to the remote machine and a user that is able to run privileged commands (apt, yum, conary, etc).  The other idea I had was to have a daemon on the client computers that would listen for triggers to run the commands and then return the results.  What I am asking the lazy web is what is the preferred or standard (if any) method for executing remote commands via python?