Today I realized my web site had been serving an empty HTML document for the last 2 days on every HTTP request no matter what the path was. When I initially noticed the issue, I was a bit worried, but, after taking a closer look at the Apache error log, I found out about a…
More and more I realize that there is a misconception about free software. Many people tend to believe that free software actually means software that should not cost any money. They somehow find natural and fair the fact that some people may work voluntarily in order to produce software, which the rest can use to…
It’s been a long time since the last time I checked the available software for managing long running processes. Software in this particular area has evolved and, after some research and testing on a virtual machine, I tried to install supervisord in a CentOS 5.6 box. Unfortunately, no RPM package exists for the latest 3.X…
The fact that the developers of two projects with common goals decided to get along together is news in the Free Software world. What we usually hear are the announcements of new forks. I was very glad to read that the developers of two projects, ntfs-3g and ntfsprogs, which are open source tools that can…
I just discovered the Read-It-Later addon for the Firefox browser. This is one of the most fantastic plugins I’ve seen in a while. From what I see, there have been about 4 million downloads already. This means I am too late, but as they say “better late than never“! This extension makes it possible to…
I recently read that the Free Software Foundation has given the Award for Projects of Social Benefit to the TOR Project. Congratulations! There are indeed some cases that the TOR network can be extremely useful to the societies. On the other hand, the fact that an organization like the FSF gives this award to the…
It’s been a long time since I last checked the market for WLAN routers. Although I don’t intend buying one right now, I think staying up to date with the latest advancements in the technology used in these devices is a good idea, because I might need to buy one in the near future. And…
Red Hat used to release its kernel SRPM package including a tarball of the vanilla kernel sources and a set of custom patches. This made it possible to rebuild the kernel with or without patches or with a custom selection of patches. It seems that things have changed and Red Hat now releases the Red…
This post tries to investigate whether creating forks of software, that has been released under the terms of the Apache license, on Bitbucket or Github using a name identical to the name of the original project or a name that contains the name of the original project violates the Apache license or not. Whenever I…
I feel that the long awaited CentOS 6 will be out soon. This is a very important release for all the things I am involved with and have to do with computers. CentOS 5 was perfect, but I had to maintain several custom builds of RPMs, mainly rebuilds of Fedora RPMs plus some private builds,…