Tux crashed

The car carrying Tux the penguin crashed in turn 1 yesterday at the Indianapolis 500 on lap 37. The driver was injured and taken to the hospital.

It was not a waste of money for Linux. There was significant media coverage of the fact that Tux was featured on a car. This news release from Tux500.com has some good comments in it as well as some details about the media coverage garnered for Linux.

I am sorry that the car crashed and the driver was injured. But it seems to have been a successful event for Tux. Since he was placed 31 out of 33 cars, there was not much thinking that he would win. Just being there was an honor.

Tux is racing in the Indianapolis 500

Tux the penguin is on the nose of an Indianapolis 500 car. Tux the Penguin at IndianapolisTux is the mascot for the computer operating system Linux. As a Linux user, I am very thrilled to see this. Unfortunately it did not come to my attention until this morning. It is too late to promote for donations.

The original goal of the guys at Tux500 was to raise $350,000, enough to fully sponsor a car in the race. Instead, they were able to pull together $18,300 and got a nice prominent spot on the nosecone of the Chastain Motorsports’ No. 77 car.

News.com has some nice photos you can see of the car and logo.

At their website you can also see a nice video that the Tux500 crew put together about the event. I just wished I knew about it sooner so that I could have helped with the promotion. Maybe they will do it again next year.

Here is their news release from yesterday afternoon.

The End of a Campaign, the Beginning of a Movement

Saturday, May 26 2007 @ 10:20 AM MDT
Contributed by: bob
Views: 677

At Noon EDT, the Tux 500 campaign came to an end. The final donation came in, the final piece of merchandise was purchased. We have tallied all of the donations, and what was earned from t-shirts, mugs, bumper stickers, and the like. The final amount raised by the Tux500 project is….

* drumroll *

$18,308.90!

Thank you to everyone in the Linux community that made this happen! Tux is going to look sweet tomorrow on the nosecone of the #77 Chastain Motorsport’s car, as Roberto Moreno guides him (yes, a guided penguin missle!) around the speedway at speeds of 220 mph!

One very interesting thing to note is that over the last few days, on our statistics page, a new distro has been jumping up the charts. Due to the effort of fans of the Linux From Scratch project, it is now the #2 distro in terms of contributions! An additional thanks to you, for the final push over $18000!

Next week, we’ll talk about the project, and where we go from here. Today and tomorrow, we’ll bask in what we all have accomplished… what this community has done is truly historic. And I believe this is only the beginning!

Don’t miss the race tomorrow… it starts at 1pm EDT (UTC-4) and pre-race coverage begins 1 hour before the race in most markets. Enjoy this people… we’ve all earned it!

GO TUX!

VPN or SSH?

I know this won’t make any sense to many of my readers, but I found out something utterly cool tonight.

I am getting ready to head out on a trip and am taking my trusty dusty notebook computer. The one I use every 4 months when I go on a trip. This is an old 750 MHz machine with a 12″screen. Definitely not the desktop replacement most people are looking for. I also end up putting on a new distribution of Linux just about every time I take it out just so I have something new to play with.

Tonight I was chatting with one of the members of the Pensacola Linux Users Group about getting ready for my trip. I told him I could not go to bed because I felt like there was something I was missing to be ready. One of the biggest things is that I really need access to a few of my files this week, but I did not want to just copy all my documents to the notebook, nor did I want to pick and choose the 100 most important files that I may not need at all.

I asked him if I could set up a VPN in 30 minutes or less. He seemed hopeful that it might be possible. I think he is an optimist. I told him what it was I wanted to accomplish and said I could do it with SSH and SCP if I could just get a VPN set up. He then said I simply needed to do some port forwarding in my router and have the traffic sent to the box I wanted to touch internally.

I did not realize it was so simple. So here is how it works if you would like to do the same. I won’t go into the details of each step. I will assume you have about the same amount of knowledge that I have in this and that, like me, you simply need someone to help you connect the dots. Therefore, I am not writing this for my parents sake.

This assumes also that you have SSH working internally. Port forward port 22 in your router to the internal machine you want to go to. Know your external IP address and then just ssh into the external IP like you normally would an internal IP to get to the machine you want. You can get you external IP given to you by visiting www.ipchicken.com. So you would do: ssh username@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx. That is, the username on the computer you are SSH’ing into. Then the xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is the external IP address of your home network which you got from www.ipchicken.com. You will be prompted for your username’s password. You might also be told that the SSH keys are new and asked if you are sure you want to take that step.

SCP works the same as normal. Just substitute the external IP address for the home network and you are in.

For me, I prefer a GUI solution. So I am using gFTP on the notebook. Then I connect to port 22 with my username/password combo. Then change the protocol to SSH2. ¡Viola! I am connected and can browse my home folder’s file structure. I can then pull anything over that I want, or put anything on the machine at home.

That simple. Whod’ve thought?

Now I can go to bed.

Steve Jobs’ thoughts on DRM

I have not shared my thoughts on DRM (Digital Rights Management) here, but suffice it to say, I think it is not a very effective way to accomplish the goal. If you don’t know what DRM is, basically it is the reason you cannot play music that you buy from the iTunes Music Store on an MP3 player that is not an iPod. Or the reason you cannot play music that you buy at (almost) any other online music store on an iPod.

Today Apple published an article by Steve Jobs telling what he thinks needs to be done with the DRM system. If you take time to read the article, realize that this is all very self-serving to Apple. This is not proposed by him because he loves you and me, it is so that we will love Apple more. But more importantly, so that all the countries that are suing Apple for limiting their DRM technology to iPods and iTunes will back off. That said though, this is very good for us as consumers as well. So, yes, he is proposing this for the purpose of not loosing billions of dollars in law suits and potentially having to lock out certain countries from using iTunes, but the side benefit, if it flies, is that you will be able to play your iTunes purchased music on many other devices.

I have owned an iPod for nearly 2 years. I have bought 2 songs off of iTunes and will probably purchase about that many over the next 2 years if things stay the same as they are now. Those 2 songs I bought will never be able to legally play on my Linux machine (which is my primary computer). I also cannot play them on my iRiver MP3 player. But if things change to a model where Apple drops DRM completely (which, by the way, Jobs said he would do in a heart beat, but is limited by the recording industry, this is not his choice), I would consider buying many more songs through the iTunes Music Store, or other on-line music stores.

As it is, I am limiting my purchases from on-line stores to Magnatune. They have a lot of music that I like, but not a lot of music I don’t like. So if your musical tastes are not what mine are, you may not find much there. Magnatune allows you to purchase music for a price you specify (as little as $5 per CD), then share that download with your friends for no extra cost. They actually encourage you to do so. They understand that you are more likely to purchase music if you get a chance to hear it first. They are their own recording label (of sorts), therefore do not have all the big names. But what they do have is top notch. It is not a bunch of independent artists who cannot get signed with anyone else because they stink. They really have good stuff.

Anyway, back to the point of the post. Check out the article. I got the tip off about this article from Podcasting News where they give a good summary of the article if you would rather read a short breakdown of it. I actually have not read the whole Jobs’ article since I got so excited about it that I had to post this. But as soon as I upload this I will digest the article.

Update:
I have read the article now. Wow! While there will be detractors from this idea that Jobs has, I think it holds some validity. He posits (a little incorrectly) that only 10% of the world’s music is sold with DRM and that 90% is distributed DRM free, and furthermore is easily pirateable; therefore, keeping DRM in on-line music store purchases is not necessary. Where he is a little wrong is that the 10% number comes from just music sold through iTunes. But, at most, legal on-line purchases certainly make up less than 25% of the total music purchased.

Very good article. I hope this gets picked up and starts some wheels turning. It really is worth the read if you remotely care. (Mom, that does not include you. You can skip this one.)

How to Podcast

At the request of the president of the Pensacola Linux Users Group (P’cola LUG) I wrote an article yesterday on the basics of podcasting. It is nothing too deep or complicated, but since I put the work into it, I wanted to get more mileage out of it. Therefore I am linking to it from here.

It is kinda long, so you might want to bring a cup of coffee along for the ride.

I used to write a lot of longer articles for the group. We are finishing up our 6th year as a LUG. When we first started there were so few with any Linux knowledge that I would do a writeup on every new thing I learned. Now the group has quite a large number of intelligent members that I feel like the newbie in the room. So I have not been writing as many articles for the group like I used to.

Here is an excerpt:

While I titled this How to Podcast from Linux, it really is not Linux specific. The only real software that you need that will be running on your local system is Audacity which is available for Linux, Mac and Windows. Everything else can be done through the web browser.

What makes a Podcast?
File types
The files can be just about any file type/format you want. For audio podcasts these are usually .mp3 or .ogg. For video podcasting there are several formats to chose from. I am not sure which is the most common since I don’t do a video podcast.

You can read the rest at the P’cola LUG forum.

Don’t forget to check out my podcast at: www.missionarytalks.com