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I’m in the process of changing servers at my current host, and the last website I had to do was this one. Over the course of last weekend, I decided to finish it, and did a mysqldump of my WordPress database, in addition to updating to the latest version to avoid a security flaw. I about had a heart attack when I saw my database (not gzipped) was 3.3 gigabytes. Sure, I’ve been blogging for 5 years (more on that later this month), but 3.3GB? My wife explained to me how it was possible, but I was still a bit stunned.

I’ve had a database plugin, WP-DBManager, installed for some time to automate my database backup. It adds a Database tab to your WordPress admin panel. In addition to backing up your database, it can optimize, repair or drop tables. The default page it pulls up is a list of all tables in your database, with columns showing records, data usage, index usage, and overhead.

Sure enough, an old plugin I haven’t used in a long time, EZ Scrobbler for managing my Last.fm feed, had it’s cache table in the database taking up 2.9GB. I used WP-DBManager’s tab to empty the table, and my database is down to a more manageable 300 MB. I’m glad I now use Last.fm’s widget to show recent tracks played.

I just wish I had remembered to check that before I spent 10 hours this weekend watching 3 gigs transfer over the ‘net.

Best of Bootie 2007

It’s time for my annual post telling you to go download the Best of Bootie. The 2007 compilation features 21 of the year’s best mashups from the usual suspects such as A + D, Party Ben and more.

My favorites this year (so far, after 3 listens):

    1. The Illuminoids with Donita Sparks – Pretend We’re Alala (L7 vs. CSS) – Los Angeles
    1. team9 – Britney – Dead Or Alive? (Britney Spears vs. Dead Or Alive vs. Daft Punk) – Perth, Australia
    1. Divide & Kreate – Illiterate City (Jackson 5 vs. Guns N’ Roses) – Sweden

Give it a try – it’s one of the few ways I actually here pop music these days. More at Boing Boing.

A Look Back at 2007

One of my New Year’s Resolutions this year was to get more involved with GNOME and / or Ubuntu when the year started. Having used Ubuntu since it was first released, and Linux and GNOME specifically since 1999, I really wanted to give something back. After being utterly confused on where to even start with Ubuntu due to the number of volunteers and convoluted processes, I decided to start with GNOME.

I started the year strong, volunteering to help GNOME with the website revamp, including writing a few pages of content for the revamp, and editing a few more. (The new site still isn’t out so not sure if they’ll be using it or not).

I also volunteered to create a GNOME Live CD in January, and after a week or two of researching, was introduced to Ken VanDine who had also offered to help. Turns out Ken is the lead developer of Foresight Linux, and using the Conary and rPath tools, it was easy for him to create not just a Live CD, but other images including VMWare and QEMU as well.

In talking to Ken, and looking for more information on Foresight, I started hanging out in Foresight’s IRC channel on Freenode, and was impressed with the community, their communication and willingness to help others. See the June Foresight Newsletter for more.

And that began my journey in to Foresight. I installed Foresight shortly after, and just started helping out, first by answering questions in IRC (even when they were the wrong answer), and then really diving in, writing the monthly newsletter and then working on documentation. First developing the userguide on the wiki, and then teaching myself docbook and writing and publishing the userguide in Docbook to be included in Foresight.

Additionally with Foresight, I’m trying to help as a project manager, including keeping tabs on the different workstreams and communication within the group. I’ve been testing the first alpha of Foresight released in early November, and last but not least, continue to work on being a bugmaster and triage issues and tasks in JIRA.

I’m also happy with getting the Twin Cities Linux Usergroup meetings back off the ground after a two year hiatus, even though I haven’t had time to help out in the last few months in planning or organizing meetings.

The resolution I didn’t get to was creating my first podcast. I’ve had the songs picked out, but Jokosher didn’t work exactly as I hoped (as Audacity isn’t in our repos). I also wasn’t happy with my microphone quality. I’ll have to work on this one for next year.

Overall, a great year, and I’m very happy in being able to give back and help out, and looking to do more in 2008!

Foresight Newsletter #9

The last Foresight Newsletter of 2007 is out! This one I’m especially proud of, as I spent some time going back through the wiki, older newsletters and chatting with a few folks about all of of Foresight’s accomplishments this past year.

You’ll also get a look at X-Chat, a GNOME IRC Client, contributed by Eric Lake aka etank, updates on the next alpha, and documentation updates for deveopers.

You can subsribe to the newsletter in your favorite feed reader here, and don’t forget to Digg it!

Foresight 2.0 Bittorrent Client: Deluge

One of the criticisms Foresight 1.x and 2.0 have been dinged for is lack of a good bittorrent client included in the official repositories.

Yesterday Antonio (aka doniphon) officially committed Deluge to the Foresight 2.0 (still alpha!) repository. I am happy to report after a night of testing, it works wonderfully! Thank you Antonio!

Get it: sudo conary update deluge

pscott has maintained Deluge in his personal repository for 1.x (due to some Boost issues, I believe), which has also worked well for Foresight 1.x. (Thanks pscott!) If you’re using Foresight 1.4.2, you can install it via:

<br /> sudo conary update deluge=asylum.rpath.org@fl:1

Enjoy!