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2555 discussions

Book Apart order
by Trevor Cordes 25 May '15

25 May '15

I'm going to make an order for some (print) books from publisher A Book Apart (USA-based) and wondering if anyone wants to go in on the order with me. If I can get 3-5 more books in the order I can save more money (bigger discount) plus split the shipping/brokerage over more books. Win/win if someone else wanted one of these books in print. A Book Apart just joined O'Reilly for Safari/ebooks (but not print) and they seem to produce excellent products. They seem heavily slanted towards web design (i.e. less programming) yet look interesting/useful enough for a typical do-it-all web site programmer. Their schtick is to make books that are short and concise (100-150 pages usually). If I can reach the 10 book mark it's roughly $13.75(ca$) a print book (normally $18us), plus shipping (should be only a few bucks a book), plus USPS/CP duties/taxes (should be under $2 a book). So I'm guessing $17.50-ish a book (just a guess). You pay actual costs divided by the book count, no markup. Here's their catalog, with good writeups and a sample chapter for each: http://abookapart.com/products/ The ones that look most useful to me are Web Typography and Respnosible Web Design. It's extremely odd, but almost none of these books show up on Amazon/Indigo. I guess they are a really new company trying to break into the mainstream. (I'm in no way affiliated with them.) Reply to this email (click reply to sender only) if interested, leave the subject line intact. Thanks!

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pdf printer issues
by Trevor Cordes 19 May '15

19 May '15

I'm trying to print a 2-page tax-form-like file to a (fairly) modern Lexmark E360 printer, using modern CUPS on Linux. If I print it from evince or xournal PDF viewers, it prints some of page one, then prints a printer error (probably a PS error) on page 2. If I print it from lpr on the command line, it prints out fine! The GUI viewers have no problems printing out other PDFs from what I've tested so far. This setup has no problems printing emails from Thunderbird nor documents from oowriter. This is the first issue I've run into since setting it up a year ago. What could the GUI viewers be doing differently compared to lpr? They both are using cups, after all. Should I try more GUI viewers? I need a working GUI option since the user is not command line savvy. I already checked I had the newest firmware for the printer. I can't recall how I originally got the CUPS driver for it, but I can probably check that for newness as well. Thanks!

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Re: [RndTbl] $29 dedicated server?
by Paul Sierks 15 May '15

15 May '15

Cheaper / crazier yet... Kimsufi.com & soyoustart.com Regards, Paul Trevor Cordes <trevor(a)tecnopolis.ca> wrote: >https://www.serverpronto.com/accounts/cart2.php?gid=1&pid=446 > >How are these guys doing $29/mo "dedicated server"? What's the catch? >They say it's a Xeon 3040 1.9GHz, so that's older/slower, but say I don't >need speed. RAM 2G is anemic but doable if I don't need much RAM. >Doesn't say ECC or not, so that's one possible catch (but usually >Xeon==ECC). No RAID, that sucks, maybe it can be added as a cheap >upgrade? Network looks very good. > >Anyhow, that's 10-20X less than Rackspace wants for ded server. How are >they doing this? Is there some VM or blade-ish thing going on here? Is >it really a 1U box (or possibly even smaller form) somewhere just for me? >_______________________________________________ >Roundtable mailing list >Roundtable(a)muug.mb.ca >http://www.muug.mb.ca/mailman/listinfo/roundtable

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$29 dedicated server?
by Trevor Cordes 15 May '15

15 May '15

https://www.serverpronto.com/accounts/cart2.php?gid=1&pid=446 How are these guys doing $29/mo "dedicated server"? What's the catch? They say it's a Xeon 3040 1.9GHz, so that's older/slower, but say I don't need speed. RAM 2G is anemic but doable if I don't need much RAM. Doesn't say ECC or not, so that's one possible catch (but usually Xeon==ECC). No RAID, that sucks, maybe it can be added as a cheap upgrade? Network looks very good. Anyhow, that's 10-20X less than Rackspace wants for ded server. How are they doing this? Is there some VM or blade-ish thing going on here? Is it really a 1U box (or possibly even smaller form) somewhere just for me?

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another systemd gotcha
by Adam Thompson 15 May '15

15 May '15

sooo... don't remove /bin/plymouth (say, by uninstalling the "plymouth" package) and still expect your system to boot. Oh yeah, there's no warning when you removed the plymouth package a week or two ago. And there's nothing on screen to indicate what the problem might be, you *must* have a root password set (sorry, Debian and Ubuntu users who didn't do that) in order to log into safe mode, run "journalctl -xb" and see the error where being unable to execute /bin/plymouth is a FATAL error. Yup, this systemd thing sure makes booting my systems a lot faster... *&^%$#@! (And if anyone noticed that the new MUUG mirror server was down for a while tonight, systemd is the culprit. It also doesn't like filesystems that take more than a few seconds to mount and/or fsck. Which would not include a 40TB XFS LVM volume. *&^%$#@! again.) -- -Adam Thompson athompso(a)athompso.net +1 (204) 291-7950 - cell +1 (204) 489-6515 - fax

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GoAccess
by Gilbert E. Detillieux 13 May '15

13 May '15

Wyatt, Thanks for your mini-presentation on GoAccess last night. I found the program useful enough that I've now installed it on the various EL6 systems on which I maintain a web server. I also decided to install it on both the old and the new MUUG servers. (There was a Debian package available for it too.) The EPEL5 repository didn't have it, so I grabbed the source RPM from EPEL6, and with 2 trivial changes to the .spec file, I was able to build a binary for EL5. Since it's tiny, I've attached the patch, in case it's useful to any of you still running EL5. -- Gilbert E. Detillieux E-mail: <gedetil(a)muug.mb.ca> Manitoba UNIX User Group Web: http://www.muug.mb.ca/ PO Box 130 St-Boniface Phone: (204)474-8161 Winnipeg MB CANADA R2H 3B4 Fax: (204)474-7609

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RHEL/CentOS 7 rpm -e
by Trevor Cordes 13 May '15

13 May '15

To follow on Gilbert's RHEL7 firewalld, chrony, etc, questions. I also, on every new Fedora box (except basic single-user laptops, etc), ditch NetworkManager, and change MTA back to sendmail. That last one is tricky as the supported way is a bit weird (but easy when you know the trick): alternatives --config mta Make sure you have sendmail rpm's installed first. After you switch to sendmail you can rpm -e the postfix stuff. Yes, my boxes are all pretty much Redhat 9.0 (*pre-RHEL*!!!) plus systemd. Just the way I like it! The things that are supposed to make our lives "simpler" or "better" just get in the way, slow me down, introduce new bugs, make me learn a whole new set of quirks, and force me to forget the old. All pain, and no gain. Change for change's sake. Windows anyone?

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email catchalls for spam tracking
by Trevor Cordes 13 May '15

13 May '15

As per discussion at the meeting tonight, here's all you need to have sendmail have a "catchall" email account so you can, on a whim, create unique email addresses for places you give your email address out to. #cat /etc/mail/virtusertable ... trevor(a)tecnopolis.ca trevor ... @tecnopolis.ca trevor So you must list all your normal local users manually as per the trevor@ line (not sure if there's an easier way to do this), and the last line says match any user I didn't already specify. You'll also need in your sendmail.mc: FEATURE(`virtusertable',`hash -o /etc/mail/virtusertable.db')dnl No other work required. No work required each time you give out a new address. Everything just goes into the normal inbox (trevor). Now when you start seeing 100 emails a month going into your spam inbox to hydrowhyareyouspammingme(a)tecnopolis.ca when you only ever gave that email out to hydro, you'll know something is fishy, and you know who to blame. As we said at the meeting, you almost certainly want to use with these ideas: greylisting bayesian filtering Using the above techniques I get less than 3 spams a week showing up in my inbox, even though I get at least 5k spams a week. I get roughly 3 non-spams a week "false positive" into my "low probability spam" box. I get maybe 3 non-spams a *year* into my "high probability spam" box. Unlike some people, my main goal isn't to never see spam, it's to never have a false positive dropped irretrievably by something outside (or even inside) of my control. Of course, my ~10 year strong .hammiedb spambayes "learned" ruleset file (binary, berkley db) is up to 326MB. A significant chunk of that has to page in on every email reception. I don't use them, but it might also help some people to use: spamassassin RBL's

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strangest request
by Trevor Cordes 06 May '15

06 May '15

>From O'Reilly's (geez that looks weird) support web site: http://support.oreilly.com/oreilly/topics/can-i-list-my-erotic-fiction-eboo… Says I: Huh?

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O'Reilly special deal
by Trevor Cordes 06 May '15

06 May '15

For those not on the O'Reilly mailing lists, I thought I'd pass this on: This is the best deal I've seen them do in months: 60% off ebooks/videos if you spend >$100. 50% otherwise. On all titles. They never go above 50% off, so this is a good deal. (Doesn't apply to print books.) Expires May 7, 2014 at 7AM CST http://post.oreilly.com/form/oreilly/viewhtml/9z1z7tocsqjqn45ju82c9k0sfe57h… If the URL doesn't work, their home page has a banner (as of right now).

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