Hello once again. I trust everyone has had a nice Christmas? I thought I’d provide a quick update to wrap up the year on this blog as well…

I just released the last episode for the year on Tuesday — we had a lot of fun with this one, recording special sound effects and all. I even drove over a road bump very fast in my Twingo to make it authentic! So that wraps up the podcast itself for 2009, but a few other things have developed that I wanted to talk about on here as well. First off, you might have noticed the Sixgun Productions bumper at the beginning of the show and in the file tags. The site itself explains what we have in mind with this pretty well, so I’ll leave it at that, suffice it to say that we are looking to put Linux Outlaws on a much more solid foundation for the future. Do not despair, we aren’t looking to sell out or have suddenly developed delusions of grandeur like some other podcasters, we are simply trying to make sure that the production of the show can be sustainable for us in the long run so that we can deliver many, many more episodes to you. In the same vein, you will notice the adverts on the main page. This is an experiment to see if we can generate a revenue stream for the show. Both Dan and myself will most likely undergo some changes in our lives in 2010 and this will hopefully help to keep us afloat. I’ve personally never had ads on any of my sites and I’m curious to see how this shapes up. As always, we welcome any comments and feedback in general on this via the usual channels. We have also talked about supporting the show via ads in the content itself a few times, but so far nothing has transpired. No matter what happens, we have quite firmly agreed on never having more than one ad on the show itself. I have seen first hand what more than that will do to a show like TWiT and I don’t want to go down that path. Again, if you have any comments on all of this, please leave them here on the blog or send us an email.

Anyway, the Linux Outlaws wish you all the best for 2010 and the new decade! Here’s to many, many more shows in the new year. I am going to leave you with our Libsyn download stats for the year (as of this morning) and as you can see, the show is really going places. We hope to improve on that even more in the new year!

Libsyn Download Stats for 2009

You might have wondered why our website got redirected to my personal page beginning Sunday afternoon (CEST) and lasting until Monday morning. To make it short: Fab had another server admin fail. While trying to make our server more secure, I must have messed up Apache’s subdomain redirection somewhere which caused it to route all requests for linuxoutlaws.com to lamerk.org which is located on the same server. I did test the new configuration and could see nothing wrong with it so I happily proceeded to have a BBQ with some friends out in the sun, leaving my iPhone, and with it all connections to the virtual world, at home. I also busted my ankle that night, but that’s a whole ‘nother story…

Something must have happened on the server after I left because shortly after I had tested the setup and went outside, people began having problems with the site. I have no clue as to what changed, maybe I just didn’t test everything correctly in my hurry to get out into the sun. In any case, the site and with it the RSS feeds were offline. If you were using gPodder as your podcast client, you might have experienced something else: In a weird twist, gPodder decided to put some “Tiger Records” stuff in our feeds and tried to subsequently download 600+ MB of files. Apparently this is a “feature” of the program; if it does not find one of your subscribed RSS feeds on the provided URL, it crawls that site and all embedded links looking for something that looks like RSS with rich media enclosures. If it finds anything, it helpfully uses that as the new podcast feed. Quite a handy feature that means you can just pop linuxoutlaws.com in the new subscription field and get one of our feeds auto-magically but it also messed with my brain royally when I woke up Monday morning (slightly hangovered) and started gPodder to check if some new podcasts were out for me to listen to. As it were, the “spam” in our feed made me believe our server had been hacked. The fact that nobody, including Dan, hadn’t been able to reach me until then just complicated matters.

Long story short: I have checked the server thoroughly (just in case) and am quite confident that we have not been hacked but that everything was due to me being an idiot. I have also since repaired the subdomain problem and all of the site (including the forums) should be in 100% working order again. If you are using gPodder (a fantastic podcatcher, by the way) and you still have weird stuff in our feed, please re-subscribe and everything should be cleared up. You can also manually remove the non-LO entries from the list. I am really sorry for any inconvenience or frustration this might have caused and I am also very thankful to the great people in our forums, #linuxoutlaws on Freenode and our identi.ca group for their help in figuring this out. Also thanks to everyone who emailed telling us the site was broke, we got a lot of those as well.

And so we prove once again that the life of an outlaw is everything, but it ain’t boring…

As you are probably aware of, I had set up a Laconica instance for the podcast community quite some time ago. I was very ethusiastic about Laconica when I first heard about it and I still think it is a great idea and a very important Free Software project. I have, however, decided to shut down our instance of it at linuxoutlaws.net over the next week.

After debating this for quite some time and soliciting opinions on the forums, Dan and I have come to the conclusion that it is too much work to maintain the installation compared to the amount of use it gets. Don’t get me wrong, Laconica is great, but the administration and maintenance features are still very rudimentary — it is only in version 0.7.x after all. If this was the only site I had to maintain, I’d keep it up, but as it stands now this is taking a lot of time away from doing the podcast and dealing with the main site and the forums. On top of that, Dan has always primarily used identi.ca anyway and I have consolidated my microblogging presence over at that site as well. If you do not want to use identi.ca, there are quite a few other Laconica instances out there (naturally, all of them give you a lot more Freedom than, say, Twitter), so it is not like the federated model is at stake here.

In case anyone wants to get hold of their user data, please email me and I will be happy to send you an SQL dump of the public data straight from the database. I really hope you understand my reasoning for doing this. As you might have guessed, I feel really uncomfortable about shutting down the service, but at the moment I see no other alternative and I think it will be better for the podcast and our community in the long run. As I have said, I am still supporting Evan and the project 100% and I will keep a close eye on its development. It was a lot of fun playing around with the software I just think it doesn’t make much sense for us to keep the service running at the moment.

Tonight, shortly after 02:00 CET, a process on our server stalled out the CPU and shot down the machine. I only noticed it this afternoon via text message from Dan, who was alerted by some helpful souls on identi.ca. I promptly rebooted the server, but I am sorry to have only realised the problem that late. I was pretty busy at work and never even thought about checking my servers all day. I appologise wholeheartedly for any inconvenience this might have caused, especially with the delivery of the podcast files.

It seems like something went wrong with our Laconica installation (which is also hosted on the machine in question) shortly before the server died, or so my log files would indicate. At least the latest errors are from that process. I will investigate this issue further and keep you posted. It seems like Laconica both caused this issue and kind of helped to solve it at the same time. How very Zen.

Welcome to the completely revamped Linux Outlaws Blog! This is the first step (well, first-and-a-half really) in my plans to slowly redesign the whole site based on my Podjango project. The theme you see here will form the foundation of the new look, which means a redesign of the forums and linuxoutlaws.net will follow later in the year. I hope you like it, I may still tweak it here and there and feedback is always welcome, as you know.

But the blog has not only been redesigned, I also moved all the content over to a fresh WordPress installation. I have always loved WordPress, but boy is the new admin interface in 2.7 slick! It is my hope that this move will increase usability for Dan and me in an effort to rejuvenate this blog since it has been a bit quieter lately than I’d liked.

I hope you enjoy the new look as much as I do. I am looking forward to a fresh new Linux Outlaws in 2009 with many cool things yet to come!

As I have alluded to before, I have for some time been working on my own publishing system for podcasters written in Django. Recently, I have been contacted by Bradley Kuhn who has written the beginnings of a similar system (also using Django) for the SFLC podcast (which Dan produces). Since I am not very far along with my system and Bradley is looking for someone to clean up his codebase and maintain it, we have decided to merge our efforts. The project has been tentatively titled “Podjango” and Bradley has set up a bzr repository and Trac instance for us. We also created #podjango on irc.freenode.net and most development discussions will probably happen there, so join us if you are interested.

In the longrun, I am looking to replace the main part of this site with the new system, but that may be a while. First I need to brush up my Python skills and wade through this code. I’ll keep you all posted…

As I had  announced some time ago on the forums, the Linux Outlaws community now has their very own Laconica microblogging server. Seeing that most of the bugs are ironed out and the new theme is installed, I also wanted to officially announce it here. If you head over to linuxoutlaws.net, you can create an account and start posting messages. You can also subscribe to contacts on identi.ca or other Laconica-powered microblogging servers and those contacts can subscribe to your account on linuxoutlaws.net. A Twitter bridge is in the works. Pretty nifty, huh?

Wow, I’ve just realised that this blog turned one year old today. That means it has been over one year ago that I had the idea for the show and the one year anniversary of the podcast is coming up as well. Amazing!

Here’s to many, many more years to come!