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First off, apologies for this post’s title.  It had to be done, though.  On Monday, LiveJournal was sold to a Russian company.  When I first read about it, one eyebrow raised slightly, but I didn’t think much of it.  Then I started noticing comments coming in from my friends and colleagues talking about how they felt about it.

A former coworker of mine, icon, who was born in Russia, expressed his concern about the purchase.  He casts doubts on Russia’s privacy laws and a Russian company’s concern in adhering to what laws there are.  I was expecting him to speak up on this issue, and am glad to have his input.  Luis Villa also throws in his thoughts, as well as the thoughts of a former coworker of his.  Luis knows his way around law, free speech, and free software, so I was also looking forward to hearing what he thought.

My take on it is that we can’t be certain to trust LiveJournal with our private information any longer, nor can we safely consider them reputable librarians of our thoughts and ideas that we’re sharing with the world through blogs.  I have a handful of friends who are deep into LJ, but I think if there’s a good time to move your stuff off to another site, it’s now.  Six Apart — the company who previously owned LiveJournal — also owns both Vox and TypePad, which provide similar user experiences to LJ but are still held by an American company.  There’s also Google‘s very popular Blogger, which is where Icon’s moved to, and I think Google’s as trustworthy as any other company at the moment.  I personally run the open-source WordPress software hosted on a server that I share, but I understand that’s beyond many people’s technical skills, for whom I recommend WordPress.com, run by the company under whose stewardship the similarly named software currently rests.

All of those options are, so far as I’m aware, either entirely free (as in $0) or free for a certain basic level of service.  If you know otherwise, or if you have any other ideas, please leave comments.  Your personal data, as well as your thoughts, are too important to leave in the hands of someone you can’t trust.

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I don’t usually just post links, but these are too great to not share.

The Nerd Handbook

This explains so much about me and “my people” that it borders on the uncanny. Everyone who is dating, has ever dated, or is planning on dating a nerd/geek needs to read this.

Installing MySQL on Ubuntu

A sarcastic response to a post by Dan Benjamin about how to install the MySQL database on Mac OS X. It still floors me when Mac people talk about how great it is that you can install software by hand, from source. We got over that years and years ago in the Linux world, FreeBSD’s Ports has been a solid solution for many years as well, and they’re even getting past it in Solaris. Mac OS X has MacPorts and lots of people use it, but there’s still a great deal of software-management-by-hand done in that world.

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A friend of mine asked about the benefits of software RAID versus hardware RAID in Linux, and I proceeded to voice my support for the former. It was then brought up that online resizing was one of her concerns, and I set about to figure out how to do just that. These instructions were crafted in a CentOS 5 virtual machine, and come with no warranty or guarantee of any sort; I put them here on the off chance that they might help someone.

1. First, I started by adding four additional SCSI drives to my CentOS 5 virtual machine. I then booted the VM up, and partitioned the disks, creating one partition that encompassed the entire drive and setting its type to “fd”:

   for i in a b c d ; do echo "; ; fd ;" | sfdisk /dev/sd$i ; done
   

2. Then I created the new RAID5 array with four devices, none of which should be kept as spares:

   mdadm --create /dev/md0 --spare-devices=0 --level=5 --raid-devices=4 /dev/sd{a,b,c,d}1
   

3. Third, create a physical volume for LVM to use:

   pvcreate /dev/md0
   

4. After that, I made a volume group:

   vgcreate vg0 /dev/md0
   

5. Then I made a logical volume in that group using all free physical extents:

   lvcreate --extents=100%VG --name=storage vg0
   

6. Sixth, slap a file system on that guy:

   mke2fs -j /dev/vg0/storage
   

7. Mount it, put some data on it, and enjoy.

After you’ve been using the array for a while (or, after it’s finished resyncing if you’re just following along at home), you add some new drives to the machine that you want to add to the array. I shut my VM down, added some additional virtual disks to it, and powered it back up; your steps would presumably be somewhat similar. After the system came back up, I added the new drives like so.

1. Partition them as with the other drives in the set:

   for i in e f ; do sfdisk -d /dev/sda | sfdisk /dev/sd$i ; done
   

2. Add them to the RAID array:

   mdadm --add /dev/md0 /dev/sd{e,f}1
   

3. Expand the array to encompass all the disks (note that this will probably take a while, so you might want to do it overnight):

   mdadm --grow --raid-devices=6 /dev/md0
   

4. Expand the LVM physical volume to include the new space:

   pvresize /dev/md0
   

5. Then expand the logical volume as well:

   lvresize --extents=100%VG /dev/vg0/storage
   

6. Finally, grow the file system:

   resize2fs /dev/vg0/storage
   

With the exception of powering down to add the new drives, nothing had to be brought offline, and if your storage controller supports the hot-adding of devices then you may not even have to that (though the scope of doing so is beyond this tutorial, since I don’t have ready access to such hardware).

Hope that helps, and please let me know if you see any inconsistencies or run into any problems!

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I’m going to be pushing a software project I’ve been working on out into the open source world sometime in the near future, so I’ve been considering what I want to use to keep track of the software’s development. I initially started by creating a RubyForge project for it, because the tool is written in Ruby and that’s just what you do with Ruby projects, but I’ve also been thinking about Trac and Launchpad.

To help in this decision-making process, I’ve crafted a table.

RubyForge is great, and there’s a lot to be said for hosting this project somewhere other than Duke or on my sluggish TextDrive shared hosting account. But I’d like some sort of site content management beyond just SFTP to the site and manage static HTML files in a document root. There’s an optional wiki, but it’s UseMod… bleh. It would also be nice to have integrated mailing lists.

I think Trac has the best feature set overall, and is used by many high-profile and highly respected projects, so I can be reasonably certain that it’ll do what I need. The only major drawback is that I’d have to maintain it on a server myself, though this does have some benefits in the customization department. I’m not worried about its lack of mailing list management, either; I could always use GoogleGroups, or simply install Mailman or set up a Sympa virtual host in Duke’s Sympa site.

I’m not even sure why I’m considering Launchpad, to be honest, other than due to my positive experiences with it as an Ubuntu Linux user. It doesn’t really seem to offer any of the features I’m after other than being hosted and managed by someone else, and it doesn’t even directly integrate with the VCS software I’ve been using and which works well with the IDE I’ve been rather enjoying. That doesn’t exactly make it sound like a winner to me, for this project.

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Tom Tromey had a Silly desktop idea for the GNOME desktop project — create a small interpreter that can load freedesktop.org desktop entry specification files, and then make those filese executable, so one can just execute the .desktop file to load the appropriate app.

I read this and thought, “Huh, that is a good idea,” and began implementing it in my head, in Python. I might throw something together this weekend. Or, I might not. Either way, you’ve been warned.