As I’ve mentioned on the show already, I’ve recently moved all the various Outlaw assets from Dan’s cPanel hosting to a brand new Linode VPS of my own. We are now running on the server version of Ubuntu Hardy and so far I’m really pleased with it. We are getting about 40 hits a minute on the box now and it’s holding up pretty decent for that. The server is based in Texas which in addition to being a very fitting location for us outlaw types should speed up access for our American listener base.

As already requested by some members of our community, I will write a longer article on the process of setting up the server with detailed examples once the machine has been banged on a bit more and can be considered reasonably reliable.

Just a quick note to point you to an article I just wrote up for the site on how to get Spore running in Linux with a patched and custom-compiled version of Wine. If been enjoying this game quite a lot lately and wanted to share my method for getting it to work on a penguin powered machine. It was a bit of hacking to figure it all out (especially for a compile-n00b like me) but the resulting howto should be easy enough to follow. I hope this helps a few people. We will also talk about this on Episode 54 of the show which should be released in the next few days.

I realise I haven’t posted here for a while, not since LugRadio Live that is. One of the reasons for this is the fact that I’m moving to a new place at the end of the month. I have also been very busy at work, trying to earn some extra money for some new furniture etc. The only personal free time I have left basically goes into research for and production of the show right now. Dan’s been very kindly helping out with editing the last few shows, but all this doesn’t leave me much time to do any other things nonetheless.

This has, some time ago, led me to the conclusion that I need to streamline my online presence a bit — I’m spread way too thin, so to say. I have therefore decided to close my personal blog since I don’t write much there anymore and am primarily using “micro-blogging” services like identi.ca these days anyway. Those are simply a way more time-efficent way to update people on what I’m up too. It’s also very liberating to write in these condensed 140-character blobs somehow. So, if you want to know what I’m doing right now, check out my identi.ca stream. There is also Dan’s presence and a general Linux Outlaws account where I post updates about the show’s production and aggregate Dan’s and my stream. Speaking of identi.ca, we have just recorded our second interview for the show, this time with identi.ca mastermind Evan Prodromou — it turned out really well, I think. Expect a release tomorrow. I am also working on setting up our own Laconica server so stay tuned for that as well.

In other news, we recently reached episode 50 as you might be aware. I have created a few torrents with all episodes up to #50 and some extra stuff to celebrate this, so check them out and seed the stuff if possible. I am also currently spec’ing out a project (I think I mentioned it once or twice in passing on the show) that will eventually play a big role in the re-organisation of this site, so please understand that I’m aware of the issues with the podcast feeds and the archive as far as access to older episodes is concerned and I am aiming to fix that in conjunction with the re-org.

As you can see, the show is continuing to go places and I expect to have more time for it again once I’ve moved into my new home. We are currently hovering at ca. 3,000 downloads per episode per week (mp3 and Ogg combined) and I am hoping we can increase this by further promoting the show and introducing some more interesting, new elements like the interviews. As always, please leave comments on any of this in the forums. I really hope you are continuing to enjoy the show and I’m looking forward to many, many more episodes and many, many new listeners. You’ll see more of me once I’ve settled into the new place. Until then, keep listening and stay free!

I am currently in the process of packing up my stuff for my flight to Liverpool tomorrow. This is quite exciting, not only because I don’t particularly like flying (I am constantly fighting the urge to shout “I ain’t getting on no plane, fool!”), but also because I will meet Dan in person for the first time after over a year of only communicating via email, IM and VoIP. Dan and I will attend LugRadio Live UK 2008 together and hopefully record a “live” show there. We will also try to pick up as many interviews as we can over the weekend.

If you are planning to visit Lug Radio Live, please feel free to meet up with us and attend the recording of show #48 if we can pull it off. We are looking forward to meeting all of you there!

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.