Club Linux Coffs Harbour

Sudoku is a puzzle game consisting of a grid partially filled with numbers. The presence of a number in a particular square may tell you that in some other squares certain numbers cannot be placed, or that in some other squares certain numbers must be placed. You can then deduce how to fill all the squares on the grid.

The Debian package management system may tell you that if a particular software package is to be installed on your system, certain other software packages cannot be installed on the same system, or that other packages are required to be installed on your system.

Obvious next step - if you're insane - work out how to express a Sudoku puzzle as a set of Debian packages, and let the package management system solve the puzzle for you.

We have submitted a team for Software Freedom Day 2008. Its going to be low key this year...not too taxing. We will obtain some Ubuntu CDs plus the Ubuntu Educational add-on to send out to secondary schools throughout the region. It will also be accompanied with other resources that can be used in the class room.

If you would like to get involve please contact me at paul[at]coffswifi[dot]net

For those who have been missing professional free-software-friendly hardware and support for home users (business users have OzEtek) since David Chapman and OpenPC Labs left town, your long wait is finally over! I have just discovered that Computerland has been selling systems pre-loaded with Ubuntu for some months now. I'm told the response so far has been underwhelming, so tell all your friends: If you're in the market for a new computer, support a long-established local vendor who is making an effort to do the right thing by their customers through selling systems that respect their freedom.

I never get blasé about stuff like this. It always gives me the warm fuzzies.

Day one: I find what I think is a bug in a Drupal module I'm using on a web site, and find someone else reported the issue they day before.

Day two: I investigate the issue further and find it's a trivial problem and well within my capacity to fix.

Day three: The fix is accepted by the module maintainer, and integrated into the code in the Drupal version control system.

Day Four : My Drupal site tells me that an updated version of the module is available, containing the bug fix. Not just me, but everybody else in the world who is using the same module gets the benefit of the few minutes work I put into fixing the problem for my site.

Contrast this with proprietary software: You know there's probably a bug somewhere, but it's illegal and probably technically impossible to investigate further. You report the bug, hoping that the company that owns the copyright on the product (or the company from whom they have licensed the component containing the bug) feels that paying someone to fix it will be in the interests of their shareholders. You cross your fingers and patiently wait for the next Service Pack, or Patch Tuesday. In all likelihood the problem isn't fixed, but for your troubles the update includes a bunch of antifeatures that you never asked for, making the software even less useful.

Help! Help! I have purchased a HPC5280 printer and cannot get the following. A Scan program for scan to computer, a Disc Labeler Program. I asked at the retail outlet and was assured that it would work with Linux, and it does as a printer but that is all.

I'm in shock. I've just heard from Slashdot that the LugRadio podcast is soon to be no more. I've been a sufferer of LugRadio Syndrome - inappropriate giggling fits in public places - since series one, and while I can't say I've ever aquired any useful technical information from the programme, it did once render me breathless and weeping with mirth while in a doctor's waiting room, which I think got me in to see the doctor sooner than I otherwise would have. I've also learned that the proper response to, for instance, Novell announcing an exciting new product is to exclaim "Beard!", or "My chin!", and that you shouldn't give the actor who plays Harold Bishop in Neighbours a hard time about his weight, because he (allegedly) has a blisteringly funny riposte.

I haven't enjoyed a podcast so much since the Slashdot guys did Geeks in Space (of course it wasn't called podcasting back then, and we had to listen to it by piping the output of NCSA Mosaic to an eight-track cassette recorder via a SCART connector). I'm not sure what I'm going to do without LugRadio. The Rissington Podcast is amusing and geeky, but the presenters are, it must be said, Mac users, so there's a bit of a cultural divide to get over. FLOSS Weekly has some great interviews from time to time, but there's even more of a culture problem there (American). Can anybody suggest some others?

Somebody's just asked via email whether there is a GNU/Linux users' group in the Grafton area. I'm sure I've met GNU/Linux users from Grafton from time to time, but my memory is failing me. Anybody know of a group, or just a person or two?

Jost recieved this via email:

My name is Donovan Craig, I'm a founder of Go4 Multimedia . We've recently re-located our business to Bellingen and have an office here on Hyde St.

At the moment we have a Linux Administrator/PHP developer position vailable (which we're hoping to become full time for the right person).

The following strengths are required:

- Linux shell experience (ie: bash)
- Some development experience ie: one of perl/PHP/Java - Understanding of protocols such as POP3, SSH, SMTP etc.
- Previous experience managing hosting environments is an advantage.

Decent web hosting at a price is difficult. There's no shortage of competition on price, but the 'decent' bit seems quite a bit harder.

Low priced hosting is shared hosting. That means you get, typically, a share of an Apache server, usually with quite a few other people, maybe hundreds.

Someone's done a really nice home usability test on Ubuntu 8.04, using his girlfriend as the experiment. Apart from the good old-fashioned flame-bait value of this, I'm finding usability studies increasingly fascinating. From my own experience, it's remarkably common to find features that seem an obvious good idea from one point of view can be intimidatingly bewildering from another (and often I'm the bewildered one).

For example, I have one website that allows anonymous users to post content, although for obvious reasons each post has to be approved by an administrator. When content is submitted, the user is redirected to the site's front page, and gets a message in a little box with a different background colour to the rest of the page, telling them that their post is awaiting approval. Clear enough, you may think. However I got some feedback today from a user saying that the site is broken, because every time they try to post anything, all they get is an error message. You might say that the user should at least stop to read the message, but on the other hand something is wrong from a usability point of view if a message telling the user that everything is working perfectly fine looks at first glance like an error message. Usability is hard.