For those of you who haven't been keeping up with the last ten years of technology, or still use dial-up, digital media copyright battles are all the rave these days. Before the good ole' times of P2P software like Limewire, Kazaa, and Napster, or even more recently the BitTorrent scene, the worst news that could be found regarding Internet court sessions were some college students posting copyrighted material without permission and the occasional porn battle.  With the RIAA's sudden interest in every ten year old kid with an mp3 player, copyright investigations have gotten out of control, and now even touching digital media that "might or night not" have restricted copyright protection might just land you a hefty $300,000 fine.

Fortunately, a modern digital world has spawned a modern way of looking at these ancient laws:  Creative Commons. Initially conceived as a way to allow artists and small businesses to reserve rights on their material, yet still give freedom to those that would like to remix, re-post, or reuse it in their own way, CC quickly grew promoting the "Some Rights Reserved" way of thinking. Web authors and emerging musicians alike are able to freely use this new rights system without the oppressive nature of archaic copyright law.

Regardless of the picture of the left, this article doesn't actually discuss the Thief Series, but I thought it would be an appropriate lead in considering the topic, and the fact that Thief 1 and Thief 2 were amazing works for their time. Thief 3 on the other hand is a rant for another article. Damn you Warren Spector! Anyways... recently at the office personal items started disappearing from locked offices. Mostly the thefts involved small change out of jars with coffee money, and in one instance someone's reserved twelve year old whiskey mysteriously was low, so no one ever put much thought into it, until an Ipod disappeared right off of a desk.

To make things worse, the Ipod was actually slipped out of the case which was still there, and the USB cable was just hanging. Immediately, the staff began to question who it could have possibly been, and we quickly realized that the only people with keys are our immediate group of employees and the cleaning staff. Since our group has worked together for a good deal of time, most bets were on the cleaning crew, so some investigating was done. Luckily, the Ipod had been mounted to a Fedora workstation, so we actually had a record of when it happened: 4:50 in the morning. To back this up further, we had records of the electronic doors being opened only five minutes before.

I'm not sure what the motivation is behind the sudden trend for bands to totally change musical styles mid-career, but Goldfrapp's Seventh Tree is a shining example. Following up on two purely amazing electronica albums, Goldfrapp's newest release fails to even make it into the genre. From start to finish, the album cruises along in a sleepy snooze inducing light atmosphere with very few shining moments. Unlike previous albums that were nicely peppered with awesome thumping beats and beautifully crafted atmosphere, Seventh Tree never gets off the ground. I find myself waiting and waiting and, yep, more waiting, and then suddenly the album is over.

Early on in the recording process the band did in fact warn us that they were trying something very different for a change, but why does that always have to equal slow quaint music? Lately I've been seeing this trend a lot in the metal world, but I was very disappointed to see it happen with this great band as well. Having been a big fan of Black Cherry and Supernature, I was extremely pumped to see what they had in store... until I actually listened to it. Despite what I've read on multiple professional review sites, the album in no way sounds to me like a good direction for the band.

Considering I spent a good amount of time fighting through the Drupal learning curve while setting up digitalruin.net, I thought it would be nice to share some of the tips and tricks that can be used, especially when running a Linux server. These days it seems like most of the quick and easy fixes for Linux server issues can be found on small blogs and mailing list archives after a quick Google search. Please do note though that these topics will be strictly *NIX related (RedHat specific). I don't claim to know much about Windows servers, and honestly I don't plan on running one anytime soon. ;-)

Installation Choices

One word: package. This might seem like common sense to a lot of full time techs out there, but you'd be surprised how many occasional Linux users install from source. Whether you're running Debian, RedHat, Solaris, or any number of other distro's, don't skimp in the beginning; always install from a package, or build one if you can't find a suitable mirror. Personally, I always use Dag Wieers when I can. If you are an RPM user, his repo has a great selection of third-party apps that are already built and essential in my opinion. If the package you are looking for is not quite up to date, build it yourself! All it takes is a .spec file, a source ball, and a little bit of patience.

If you're planning on installing Linux kernel 2.6.25.4 or newer with SATA, beware. This past Friday I decided to upgrade my departmental workstations from Fedora 8 to 9 with preupgrade, and the process itself went extremely smooth compared to the three hours I spent trying to get the latest kernel update to boot. Fedora just released 2.6.25.4-10.fc8 this week, so as part of the upgrade I first made sure that FC8 was completely patched. Upon rebooting a found that once the kernel loaded after the bios my drive suddenly disappeared:

Unable to access resume device (LABEL=SWAP-sda2)
mount: could not find file system '/dev/root'
setuproot: moving /dev failed: No such file or directory
setuproot: error mounting /proc: No such file or directory
setuproot: error mounting /sys: No such file or directory
switchroot: mount failed: No such file or directory

Of course my first response was, "Freaking awesome!" Which I'm sure is a sentiment that would be shared by all. Subsequent posts to the Fedora mailing list and IRC chat room came up with nothing useful. Actually, that's not exactly true. One user responded with, "Why not just user your old kernel?" That has to be one of my favorite responses of all time. Another great response was, "Might not be related, but that kernel doesn't seem to be available yet, I just tried updating." Of course! That has to be it. For some reason my locally maintained yum mirror must have magically time traveled into the future and grabbed an unrelease kernel, or maybe it mugged the Fedora dev's for it. Either way, he needs to get hooked up to a better mirror.