Most of the computers in our house run Kubuntu Gutsy Gibbon 7.10. This is of course the KDE desktop version of the popular and capable Ubuntu distro.

Today, Kopete, the multiprotocol instant messaging client stopped working. It would not even launch. When I rebooted, KDE's login did not complete either.

It was stuck at "Initializing system services ..." for several seconds, then the login would display again.

Video driver

Initially, I thought that this problem had to do with the video card, after seeing this in the /var/log/kdm.log:

A client who over grew the capacity of their Dual Opteron server planned on moving their site to a 2X Quad Xeon machine.

One of the things we use on the server is Munin for resource utilization and statistics. It is a server side tool that can monitor CPU, Memory, network, Apache, MySQL and much more. It has a web based interface that generates graphs from RRD Tool files.

The quote says it all:

... an open-source (i.e. free) content management system that’s flexible and feature-packed. Over the last couple of years or so, it’s taken off as the go-to platform to run websites that require a lot of community and content management features. From personal blogs and brochure sites, to fully-featured social networking sites, portals, news sites, and e-commerce websites, Drupal has proven itself as the most robust platform currently available in the content management system market.

Yahoo has an article on how apostrophes and other non-English punctuation in people's names cause a lot of trouble, specially when computers are involved.

It can stop you from voting, destroy your dental appointments, make
it difficult to rent a car or book a flight, even interfere with your
college exams.

The Site in a Day competition by Full Code Press, was held in August 2007. Team Australia chose Drupal, while the New Zealanders chose custom coding.

In the aftermath, SitePoint's blogs had an interesting discussion. 

Arun Sarin, CEO of Vodafone, the largest cell phone provider in the world, is urging handset makers to cut down the number of operating systems they use.

He wants the 30 to 40 to go down to 3-5. Fewer operating systems would ease the job of developers, who would
only have to design software to work in several different iterations.

He praised Apple for raising the bar for the user interface.

In open source software communities, choice is often touted as a good thing.

While I agree with this in principle, I do not think that it
is always the case.

When choice is bad: Expense, confusion, low adoption

If choice results in confusing the adopters, increasing the
cost for developers, and fragmenting the market, resulting in less adoption, then it is not a good
thing.

Courtsey of Robin Monks, here is the Elmer Fudd press release for Drupal 6.0.

That dewty double cwossing wabbit ... ha ha haa'. 

This release is really feature rich, and has lots of improvements in many areas.

Here is an impressive list of features.

With February not even half gone, the Greater Toronto Area has received 70 centimeters of snow, 3 times the normal for that period.

Yesterday we had a major snow storm that dumped 20 cm of snow. Not the first one that does that. Several other storms have done the same earlier.