September 2014 archive

Sep 02

Can You Please Help The Ottawa Linux Symposium?

Ols logoIf you have ever used the Linux operating system, could you please help out the Ottawa Linux Symposium (OLS)? For many years OLS has been one of the key events that has helped bring together people from all across the Linux community, and the connections made at OLS have helped to make the Linux operating system that much more powerful and useful. But… as organizer Andrew Hutton recounts on the OLS Indiegogo page, the event has fallen in a bit of a financial crunch and it is now not clear if there will be an OLS in 2015… or ever again.

Could you spare $10? $25? or even $50 or $100? (Or more?)

If so, please help fund OLS on the IndieGogo page!

I first attended OLS back in the early 2000s when I was living right there in Ottawa and working for first a startup called e-smith and then subsequently Mitel Networks. In looking at my list of presentations I can see that I spoke there several times… and the topics I covered take me back to a much different time:

  • 2004 OLS – Tutorial: Introduction to OpenPGP, GnuPG and the Web of Trust
  • 2002 OLS – Tutorial – Single Source Publishing Using DocBook XML
  • 2001 OLS – Maximizing Your Use of CVS

I still remember OLS as the incredibly passionate place where people connected…. and where I made so many connections and learned an amazing amount about Linux.

If OLS was ever important to you… or if Linux has been important to you… please consider donating to help the OLS organization get out of its financial hole and get moving ahead in future years. Organizer Andrew Hutton has poured his heart and soul – and personal money – into making OLS the incredible event it has been… now it would be great if we all can help him! Please consider donating!

Here are a few other viewpoints on the importance of OLS:

Please do donate if you can! THANK YOU!

Sep 02

50% Off All O’Reilly Ebooks Through Sept 9, 2014

Ora back to tech school 2014 sale

Want to buy “Migrating Applications to IPv6” at 50% off? (in ebook form) Or any of 8,000 other ebooks and videos?

The folks at O’Reilly are having a “Back to (Tech) School Sale” that is in effect until 5:00pm U.S. Pacific Daylight Time on September 9, 2014. All you need to do is use the discount code “B2S4″ when you are checking out.

I would STRONGLY encourage you to buy my book directly through O’Reilly when you can because you get:

  • DRM-free – you can put it on as many devices as you want, and it’s yours.
  • As many formats as you want – EPUB, Mobi, PDF, whatever…
  • Notification of (free) updates – whenever I post updates to the book, you will be notified.

It’s definitely worth it… I’m buying my tech ebooks directly from O’Reilly whenever I can now, simply because of these three points!

Thank you for considering the purchase of this book – and please do let me know if you have any suggestions or feedback to help make it better. The entire point of the book was to help application developers be able to make their application work over IPv6… so I want to hear from you about how this book can help!

Sep 01

FIR #771 – 9/1/14 – For Immediate Release

Shel's solo today; Quick News: Google ends Authorship, LinkedIn pages as company websites, Ditto scans for brands in shared photos, organic search beats social media for driving traffic, Facebook lets user search old posts, ALSA tries to trademark Ice Bucket Challenge; Ragan promo; News That Fits: US congressman slams employee communication effort, there's a growing demand for communication skills, Media Monitoring Minute from CustomScoop, Dan York's Tech Report, listener comments, the last week on the FIR Podcast Network, Igloo Software promo, social media and the spiral of silence; music from Trigger Hippy; and more.