The results of the “Just for Fun” Poll  linux.com community have just been released.  You may be wondering what some of those weird names actually mean, so here goes a short guide for those, like myself, who are not up to date with it all.

Best new Kernel Feature

1. Btrfs: is a new copy on write filesystem for Linux aimed at implementing advanced features while focusing on fault tolerance, repair and easy administration. Initially developed by Oracle, Btrfs is licensed under the GPL and open for contribution from anyone.

   Linux has a wealth of filesystems to choose from, but we are facing a number of challenges with scaling to the large storage subsystems that are becoming common in today’s data centers. Filesystems need to scale in their ability to address and manage large storage, and also in their ability to detect, repair and tolerate errors in the data stored on disk. [extracted from https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page ]

2. Dynamic Tracing: Dynamic event tracing is one of the newest feature on perf/ftrace. This allows users to dynamically add/remove additional trace-events with various arguments in the kernel. This feature consists of kprobe-based event tracer and ‘perf-probe’ user-space command which helps users to find probe points easily from source code by analyzing kernel debuginfo.  Extracted from http://events.linuxfoundation.org/lfcs2010/tracing
   
3. LogFS: is a Linux log-structured and scalable flash filesystem, intended for use on large devices of flash memory. It is written by Jörn Engel and in part sponsored by the CE Linux Forum. [extracted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LogFS ]
4. Ceph Filesystem: Ceph is a distributed network file system designed to provide excellent performance, reliability, and scalability. [ extracted from http://ceph.newdream.net/about/ ]

Favourite IT Operation Tools

1. Nagios: a powerful monitoring system that enables organizations to identify and resolve IT infrastructure problems before they affect critical business processes. http://www.nagios.org/about/overview
2. Snort: A free lightweight network intrusion detection system. http://www.snort.org
3. Bacula: an Open Source network backup and restore solution. http://www.bacula.org
4. OpenNMS: a network management application platform. http://www.opennms.org/about/
5. Zenoss: an open-source network monitoring and server monitoring product. http://www.zenoss.com/product/network-monitoring
6. Munin: a networked resource monitoring tool that can help analyze resource trends and “what just happened to kill our performance?” problems. It is designed to be very plug and play. A default installation provides a lot of graphs with almost no work. http://munin-monitoring.org/

Favourite Browser

1. Firefox (75%)
2. Chrome
3. Opera
4. Konqueror
5. Epiphany

Favourite Open Source Project

1. Apache: The world’s most popular Web Server. Most of the web runs on it. http://httpd.apache.org/ABOUT_APACHE.html
2. OpenOffice: A multi-platform and multilingual office suite and an open-source project. Compatible with all other major office suites. http://www.openoffice.org/
3. MySQL: MySQL is the world’s most popular open source database software, with
   over 100 million copies of its software downloaded or distributed
   throughout it’s history. With its superior speed, reliability, and ease
   of use, MySQL has become the preferred choice for Web, Web 2.0. http://www.mysql.com/about/
4. MeeGo: an open source, Linux project which brings together the Moblin
   project, headed up by Intel, and Maemo, by Nokia, into a single open
   source activity. http://meego.com/about
5. XBMC: an award-winning free and open source (GPL) software media player and entertainment hub for digital media. http://xbmc.org/about/
6. WordPress: WordPress started as just a blogging systems, but has evolved to be used as full content management system. http://wordpress.org/about/
7. StatusNet: StatusNet is the open source microblogging platform that helps you share and connect in real-time within your own domain. http://status.net/
8. Hadoop: The Apache Hadoop project develops open-source software for reliable, scalable, distributed computing. http://hadoop.apache.org/
9. Drizzle: Drizzle is a community-driven project based on the popular MySQL DBMS
   that is focused on MySQL’s original goals of ease-of-use, reliability
   and performance. http://drizzle.org/

Best Linux Success Story

1. Overall enterprise Linux adoption
2. Android market presence
3. Red Hat Earnings
4. MeeGo Merger

Hall of shame: Biggest industry Disappointment

1. Playstation ditches Linux
2. Adobe v Apple Stand-off
3. Bilski Decision

Technorati Tags: Apache, Bacula, browser, btrfs, Ceph, drizzle, Dynamic Tracing, hadoop, Just For Fun Poll, Linux, LinuxCon, LogFS, Meego, Munin, MySQL, Nagios, OpenOffice, Playstation ditches linux, Snort, statusnet, WordPress, xbmc, Zenoss

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WordPress and WordPress-MU have given me the HTTP error in the various installations I have performed and each time there’s a different cause. This post is nothing more than a personal notation for future reference but I hope it’s helpful to someone.

Error: when trying to upload media using the WordPress Flash uploader it get the message HTTP Error

Disclaimer: before messing with your .htaccess file, make sure you have a backup copy of it in case it causes a 500 Server configuration error. If this happens just replace the .htaccess file with the back up version. Check your code for any mistakes and try again.

Possible causes:

• mod_security – basically all Apache servers will have it turned on, so you may need to turn it off for the async-upload.php file using .htaccess. The newer versions of WP have added this code already, but in case you mess up your htaccess file, here it is.  Just add the following lines to the bottom of your .htaccess file in the root folder of your WP or WP-MU installation. 

• Access Denied Error 403/ Permission issue – another typical problem. Make sure that the upload folder is writeable by the server, you can set the permission to 754 and it should work fine. In WordPress the upload folder sits under /wp-content/  in WP-MU it sits under /blogs.dir/”blog number”/files  (default site blog number is 1 and the other blogs are numbered in ascending order of creation)

• PHP Upload limit – check you PHP.ini settings for the settings upload_max_filesize and post_max_size. You can change these directly in your PHP.ini if you have access to it or you can change it by adding a php.ini file to you root directory with the following code. The default is normally 2M but you can change it to anything at your own risk, you should not need more then 8M.)

• Authentication Failed Error 401- I checked my server log and noticed that WordPress was trying to access the 401.shtml error template every time I got the HTTP error during a media upload attempt. This normally occours if you are using password protection for the WordPress root folder or the folder where your uploads should reside. You should disable the password protection on the folder i norder for the uploader to work.

Hope it helps. Please leave your contributions and bug reports so others can benefit from it.

Technorati Tags: .htaccess, Apache mod_security, HTTP Error, php.ini, swfupload, WordPress, WordPress-MU

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Any webmaster and marketer will know how important it is to keep track of their website ranking, keyword positioning, visits, ROI and so on…  There are a lot of interesting tools out there to help us. 

• Google Analytics – Visitor tracking, keyword positioning, goal setting, demographics and more…
• http://www.alexa.com – web traffic metrics, top sites lists, site demographics, hot urls, and more… 
• Google Webmaster Tools – detailed reports about your pages’ visibility on Google
• Yahoo Site Explorer – detailed reports about your pages’ visibility on Yahoo
• Bling Webmaster Center – detailed reports about your pages’ visibility on Bling (former LiveSearch)
• Keyword Spy – Research and track keywords in 3 search engines and 30+ countries.
• KPMRS – website rank monitoring services on various search engines
  for multiple keywords.
• XML-Sitemaps – Generate sitemaps online. Up to 500 urls Free.
• WP Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog.

These are just a few tools I use the most, please share yours.

Technorati Tags: Analytics, Bing, Google, Keyword lookup, KPMRS, ROI, Search, SEO, Site Explorer, Sitemaps, Visitor tracking, webmaster tools, WordPress, Yahoo

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Offline Blogging Tools let you comfortably write and effortlessly publish new entries to your blog.  I personally like the easy to use Scribefire, a Firefox addon, but there are many others our there.  Here is a shortlist…

Scribefire

Platform: Windows, Mac, Linux

This is an addon for Firefox so you need to be using Firefox (clearly)

BlogDesk

Platform: Windows

BlogDesk is totaly free of charge and optimized for the blog systems WordPress, MovableType, Drupal, Serendipity and ExpressionEngine.

BlogGTK

Platform: Linux

BloGTK is a weblog client that allows you to post to your weblog from GNOME without the need for a separate browser window. BloGTK allows you to connect with many weblog systems such as Blogger, Movable Type, WordPress, and more.

Windows Live Writer (by Microsoft)

Platform: Windows

WLW is a desktop application for publishing to blogs and works with almost any blog provider in the world including Windows Live Spaces, Blogger, WordPress and more.

Qumana

Platform: Mac, Windows

Great for bloggers on the move. Qumana features include easy text formatting and image insertion, simple Technorati tagging, advertising insertion with Q Ads and more.

Technorati Tags: Blog, BlogDesk, BloGTK, Drupal, ExpressionEngine, Linux, Mac, MovableType, Qumana, Scribfire, Serendipity, Windows, Windows Live Writer, WordPress

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Optimise your WordPress blog or site for search with a couple of plugins and the web tools provided by Google, Yahoo and LiveSearch. The All in One SEO Pack plugin for WordPress will let you manipulate the specific SEO content of your blog like page title, meta data and description. Defaults can be set in the admin area of the plugin on your dashboard and specific settings can be tweaked as you create or edit a post.

The other important plugin is the Google XML Sitemap Generator, which creates a nice sitemap for you. After installing this plugin you need to create the sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz files in the root folder of your blog and change their permissions CHMOD  666. The easiest is to right-click on the files in your FTP client and change permissions under properties, 666 stands for Read and Write permission for Owner / Group / Others.  For more information see the README.txt included with the plugin. 

After installation go to the Admin area of the plugin on your Dashboard (Settings>>XML-Sitemap) and if the sitemap has not been generated yet click on the link Generate sitemap.

Search Engine Webmaster tools. (there are links to them on the XML-Sitemap admin)

1. Google webmaster tools – add your site and sitemap url, Google requires that you add a verification to your site either by adding some code to your home page or by uploading a html file to your root folder.
2. Yahoo Explorer – add you site url and upload a verification file to your root folder.
3. LiveSearch Webmaster Center – add you site url and upload a verification file to your root folder.
4. Google Analytics – create a profile for your site, doesn’t influence ranking but is  a great stats provider.
5. Google adsense, Scribefire QuickAds and TextLink – You can use these to place pay-per-click ads on your site (also does not influence rankings)

Constantly check these webmaster tools for stats on your site as they will tell you the errors you need to fix to make sure your site gets good search rankings with them.  By doing all this you have covered the basics and have a site that could rank well with search engines. There’s although a lot more to Search Optimization, a good source of information is the book  SEO Search Engine Optimization with PHP

Technorati Tags: Google, Live Search, Marketing, Search, SEO, Sitemap, WordPress, Yahoo

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