I want to thank Campbell Barton and the guys from the Blender Institute’s Project Peach for sending Dan and me each a copy of their wonderful movie Big Buck Bunny which will be released online today.

I received my DVD this week and have watched it about a dozen times since. Simply put, this thing rocks! The artistic quality in the design, rendering and the score is amazing. It looks like something from Pixar and the story is on par with that as well. I literally laughed through the whole film when I first saw it (no spoilers here, but you gotta watch through the credits — there’s a very funny little twist at the end). One thing I especially love is the fact that the two DVDs are packed choc full with material: There’s HD versions of the film, the soundtrack, scripts, all the models and tutorials how to use them in Blender and much more. Since everything is licensed under Creative Commons, you are basically free the use all the stuff from the movie to play around with yourself. It’s amazing!

You can get the movie via torrents and directly from the Blender site, but please consider buying the DVDs to support these guys. They have definitely earned it and with all the content you get on the DVDs, it’s worth it as well! The only slight gripe I have about all of this is that the movie is only 10 minutes long. I really hope the guys are considering to expand on these wonderful characters in the future. I am really thankful to them for bringing us this brilliant creation and for the immense service they did to Free Software by doing it.

Note: Stay tuned for our full review in episode 41 of the show.

Dan and I recorded episode 37 of the show yesterday — and then discovered that we had lost Dan’s side of the recording. Stupid me also forgot to get the analog backup going as well, so we lost it all. This is especially a shame since it seemed to be a really funny recording and I was pretty happy with how the episode turned out. Ah well… Back to the drawing board, I guess. We’ll have a second try at this later in the afternoon.

I mean it is pretty amazing that we made it as far as episode 37 of the show at all. As I am sure I have mentioned before, we never expected to get this far when we started doing the show (not with more than maybe twenty people listening anyway, that is). We may be a bit slow as far as lead time is concerned — our gap between recording and releasing seemed to have become a bit hefty lately (entirely my fault) — but I hope you can forgive us that since I’m rather a bit late and have good content and audio quality than releasing crap. This show shouldn’t be your premiere source of Linux news anyway; it’s conceived as more of an in-depth roundup of the week’s stories with a few interesting opinions (ie. rants) thrown in to spice things up. As far as I see it, as long as we don’t burn out and the show stays interesting for you, I’m fine.

Anyhow, we’ll try another recording later today — maybe we can pretend to be all informed and prepared for once, having read all the stuff already. Well, don’t get your hopes up. But I’m sure it’ll be funny nonetheless. Expect lots of in-jokes at the failed first recording attempt… I guess this stuff just happens. One just has to move on, try to learn from the mistakes made and don’t look back too much. Beer usually helps with this…

The latest, greatest version of Ubuntu, 8.04 “Hardy Heron”, will be released later today. I just published our special episode on this topic. I hope we are not overwhealming you with all these shows… Starting next week, episodes will be released on our semi-regular schedule again, I hope. Of course, if you want to complain, there’s always the forums. Speaking of the forums, they seem to be coming along quite well which is great!

Dan and I both have been running the Hardy release candidate and betas respectively and do recommend to upgrade — if you want the details, listen to the above mentioned episode. Pat from the Linux Link Tech Show also seems to love it. With all the hard work that’s gone into making Hardy as great as it is, I want to congratulate the Ubuntu dev team on another great release. You guys rock!

And now, everyone head over to the Ubuntu site and download it once it’s officially released. Let’s make their servers steam!

Well, as you might have noticed, the server went down once more. Sorry again for any inconvenience the latest outage might have caused. This time it wasn’t my fault. Our server exceeded another limit, in this case its memory allowance. Dan actually had to upgrade us to a business plan. Seems like we were not only pushing considerable bandwith, but there is also quite a bit of load on the server. As you can see from the graphs, our downloads as well as the feed subscriptions are constantly increasing. At this rate we are gonna need dedicated hardware pretty soon…

Don’t get me wrong, I think this is great. When we started this little project, I would have never dreamed of even getting 1,000 downloads per week and we have well exceeded that by now. This whole thing is really amazing and the support we are getting from you on a day-to-day basis makes it well worth it. As for the server, we’ll get something worked out. I just hope we can avoid further downtime from now on. Doing the show is mad fun and I won’t let any silly technical difficulties stop us. As Dan said on the forums, these seem to be minor growing pains that will just make us stronger in the long run. Just like the real outlaws we are, we won’t give up without a last stance! Just bear with us here…

Yes, yes, yes… I realise the site was down for most of today. I am really sorry for any inconvenience that this might have caused. We had to roll back from last nights backup and sadly have lost some forum posts and some registrations along the way. This also meant that the Ogg feed was unavailable for quite some time.

It all started with the fact that our site exceeded our self-imposed bandwith limit for Dan’s server yesterday evening. This caused a first downtime. We increased the limit and decided to move our Ogg files (which were being hosted here on this server) to Libsyn as we already did with the mp3 files quite some time ago. Because of that, I decided to upgrade this site to Drupal 6 to take advantage of the new views code in that version which would’ve come in handy to generate the new Ogg feed. I also customised a new theme to go along with this and went ahead to implement all that this morning. Sadly my upgrade didn’t go so well: My personal shipment of Drupal fail arrived and wiped out the whole public directory for the site. Luckily Dan had his cpanel handy and was able to rescue me in the nick of time.

After the backup was restored, I created the new views in the old way and backported the theme I had created. I also tweaked the forum theme a bit to complement this. I then moved the first Ogg files over to Libsyn and redirected the feed accordingly. The Ogg feed should be fully funtional once again. This new setup doubles our bandwith costs but I saw that coming anyway. I am really glad that you all are listening to the show and the minimal Libsyn fees are a small price to pay to continue this amazing journey full of fun! If you enjoy the show as much as we do, you might want to consider pitching in and donating a small amount to our tip jar (in the right sidebar) — I don’t want to pressure anybody to do anything though and this is of course entirely up to you. As I said, the fun of doing this is well worth it in any case. If you still have problems with anything on the site, please leave a message in the forums and I’ll fix it as fast as I can. Hope y’all enjoy the new look!

I just wanted to drop you all a quick line and appologise for the late releases lately. It was entirely my fault since I was madly busy at work, and also at home to some extend, lately. Things should be back to normal from now on though and I really hope to get back into a more speedily release schedule from episode 30 on. To be fair, I had alluded to stuff like this happening when we started out. I am of the opinion that it’s more important to keep the show going in general than to kill myself trying to release every single episode exactly on time. Here we are, over half a year after we started out and I think it’s pretty amazing that we are still going strong, to be honest. I would never have thought it possible to get more than a thousand people listening, but we have far exceeded my expectations. We don’t intend to stop now, but I’m very conscious of trying not to burn myself or Dan out. We could’ve never gotten this far without you, the listeners, though and we are very, very thankful for your continued support and the fact that you keep listening. Please forgive us for minor inconsistencies in our release schedule, though. We try to keep the show as you’ve come to love it and we are doing our best to stay on schedule. Thanks again for all your support. Keep listening!

P.S.: As you might have noticed, we have recently changed how we handle listener feedback in the show. Since this has proven slightly controversial, I have started a poll in the forums to help us decide what to do with the feedback from now on. You can make your voice heard during the whole next seven days — after that Dan and I will decide how we’ll handle it in future shows. Please head over there and cast your vote.

As I’ve mentioned on the show before, I will be attending CeBIT, the world’s biggest technology tradeshow, which takes place in Hannover March 4 - 9. They were so kind to provide me with a press pass for the whole show and I’m looking to get some Linux and F/OSS related interviews as well as a “live” report or two from the show floor recorded. I’ll be there at least two whole days, so if you are looking to attend CeBIT and want to meet up or if you have any suggestions for stuff you want us to cover, please contact me or post in the forums.

We will most likely include these segments in episode 27 as Dan will edit 26 while I’m at the show (if everything works according to plan) so stay tuned for that.

I wanted to appologise to all of you who might’ve waited for the coverage of the recent SCaLE that we announced we might do. Unfortunately, we kind of lost contact with our correspondent down there who had a quite busy time and some family-related problems on top of that. I’m pretty sure he went to the expo but just couldn’t get around to do something for the show — which we totally understand and I hope all of you listeners are with me there. If anyone attended SCaLE and you want to tell us about your experience, please write us an email or jump on the forums and do so!

I am definitely going to cover CeBIT (which is the biggest IT trade show in the world) for the show this year, so stay tuned for that!

As I mentioned on the podcast, my test order of Linux Outlaws merchandise recently arrived and it looks great. I have uploaded some photos of it for you to check out because I know that it’s always better to see stuff like that on “real” photographs (ie. not from the manufacturer’s site). Both the apparel and the mugs are amazing quality and look very professional. Some more photos that Aussie listener Mick graciously provided can be seen in his Flickr stream.

I also have to say that Cafépress’ customer support is amazing. When I told them my order hadn’t arrived yet they send another one free of charge and said I could keep the original. Dan has also made similarly positive experiences with them. Bottom line: I am very happy with this stuff and can totally recommend it. If you want to get your hands on some cool Linux Outlaws swag, head over to our merchandise store and knock yourself out. Remember: $2 from every article sold go towards bandwith and upkeep costs of the podcast, so it’s a great way to help us out and get something for yourself in return.

As I have mentioned on the show, I recently published a review of my new laptop on my blog and just wanted to let you all know. I am actually running Debian lenny/sid on it right now and have moved the whole production environment over to it so everything should be much more reliable now. I love this machine! What a wonderful Linux laptop…