So, old hudge was kicking up a helluva fuss about setxattr errors this morning.

I was getting the following errors, over and over and over again in my syslog file.

hudge kernel: post_create: setxattr failed, rc=28 (dev=sda1 ino=8339458)

In fact, I got so many of these errors that they filled up my root partition. The full disk caused mysql to stop working altogether and the corruption of a couple of tables in my wordpress database. Question is, with SELinux disabled on my box, why would I get 50GB worth of setxattr errors?

I was talking to the infamous bumper the other night about how OS X is killing the open source desktop movement. Gnome and KDE seem to have lost their appeal to a lot of the moderate Penguinistas. A lot of these people are using OS X hotness now. Apple has been doing a bang-up job innovating on the desktop for the past 5 years while my Gnome Desktop still looks like a third rate clone of Windows 95. I’ve used recent versions of KDE too, and it fairs no better. Xgl is a step in the right direction, however, it still is fairly alpha right now.

I think the Mac might not be just killing the Open Source desktops, but the OSS movement itself. I don’t care very much about compiling stuff and trying to make it work on a Linux desktop anymore because everything that I could possibly want to use on Linux already works on OS X. So, I don’t spend time evangelizing Linux on involution.com. I’m too busy having a blast on my Powerbook much like an 8-year-old mesmerized by a large tank of colorful plastic balls. OS X comes in the back door because “IT’S BSD,” but way prettier. After that, you’re not coding Gnome widgets anymore. You’re sitting down with a latte, posting pictures to Flickr and using the word “cognoscenti” on Livejournal.

The problem has only gotten worse since I started using NetNewsWire. This fiendish little Mac program allows me to keep track of thousands of RSS feeds at once. I’ll be eating breakfast hitting next over and over again like a crack addict taking hits from the Macpipe. I’m starting to understand why Donald Knuth totally gave up email in the 90s. He could see the writing on the wall for how distracting this big old party can be. He could have never imagined Email+RSS+Livejournal+Flickr+IRC on a Mac (+ Starbucks in RL). I blame him for all of this in a lot of ways. Him and bumper.

* This post is ridiculously old, I typed it up months ago, but never posted it. I quit IRC and Starbucks thrice since writing this.

Xgl is what the Lunix world has needed for a long time… A snappy desktop that has all kinds of Appleriffic effects bungled in. I tried out Xgl via the infinitely excellent Kororaa Live CD demo. The effects are fluid. The interface is snappier than OS X. I almost want to dump a bunch of time into making this work on the latest Ubuntu on my Thinkpad. Unfortunately, my Intel gigabit network card wasn’t recognized. So, I couldn’t produce a screen shot from the Live CD environment. Despite this, I was really blown away by the Xgl desktop on Koraraa. Highly recommended.

I just finished my Rails on RHEL Wiki Page. You can view it here.

Rsync is a great tool that allows you to trade network bandwidth for CPU bandwidth. It’s great for keeping a mirrored directory current on a remote system. I’m currently using it to mirror involution.com two different machines in two different states to minimize the chances that I lose any of my hard work.

This is the command that I use for the backup:

rsync -ave ssh --include .htaccess  /var/www/html/ tony@backupsite1:www/

rsync -ave ssh --include .htaccess  /var/www/html/ tony@backupsite2:www/

Linucon, the combination Linux and Science Fiction Expo, kicks off today at 3:00 PM in the Austin, TX Ambassador Hotel. Eric S. Raymond and John Quarterman will be speaking, and, if that’s not enough, we’ll be making batches ice cream using Liquid Nitrogen. See the schedule for a full list of talks, events, and times.

My Fedora Core 1 machine at work had been up for 501 days. The kernel uptime counter rolled at 497 days, but trogdor happily ran for four more glorious days. The machine started acting very strangely this morning, so I rebooted it for the first time in nearly a year-and-a-half. The first person to mention that FreeBSD doesn’t have this problem gets a 24-Karat gold boot to the head.

Back before I knew better, I used Outlook for my email needs. I had about three years worth of the Outlook dbx files sitting around on a long forgotten backup mountpoint. I managed to find a wonderful tool called oe2mbx that converted those propreitary dbx files back into Berkeley Mailbox files. You can download the source code here:

• http://ftp.sslug.dk/oe2mbx-1.21.tar.gz

I had previously used a tool called out2unix which only ran Windows and relied on the full version of Outlook being installed from the Microsoft Office CD. Oe2mbx runs with no dependencies on RHEL4 just fine despite the fact that it hasn’t been updated since 2000.