I know, I owe apologies. I tried to re-record the segment while in Geneva, but little did I know that the hotel was downtown, where the Euro Football 2008 fans were driving around honking horns when their teams won, as well as being two blocks from Hopitaux Universitaires de Geneve (Geneva University Hospital). For as calm as the Swiss are, there are ambulances running all the time.

I got back on the 14th, and was fighting jetlag the entire week. Last weekend, the kids came over to celebrate my birthday,  and this week have been in SAP training. So I will get that segment re-recorded as soon as possible, and get it out.

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A long time in coming, however, I have all my content collected and most of it recorded. I had a bout of jetlag last week, having jumped forward in time by 6 hours. I recorded last week, but part of the content was irrecoverable. I will re-record tomorrow night after changing hotels. I thank my loyal fans for hanging in there.

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I spent most of the weekend getting my keys regenerated. On the downside, it took most of the weekend, but on the plus side, tons of content for the podcast. I took the tinfoil had approach.

In essence, any keys or certs that were either compromised or unknown status and were created between Sep 2006 and May 2008 were deleted and recreated. In the immortal words of Ripley in Aliens, “I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.”

I will give a step-by-step of the process that I used to update in episode 1, which should be out this week.

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Episode 1 is in production. I apologize for the delays, but in addition to the new job, computer upgrades, and what not, I just spent 18 hours vacuuming the water out of my basement from the series of storms.

In any case, I will make a real effort to release the episode this week.

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For all that are wondering, I am in pre-production on episode 1. I will hopefully be able to sit down and do some recording this week. Its been very busy on the new job, plus I need to put the upgraded recording machine through her paces. I will hopefully be able to get two episodes cranked out before I have to leave for Geneva.

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The feeds appear to be fixed. Thanks to LinuxChic as well as TechMonkey from the AlternaGeek podcast , we were able to get things straightened out. Several things appeared to be wrong, including problems after our recent WordPress upgrade, typos (the story of my life) and a couple of other problems.

But, it should be back on track and I can start working on episode 1.

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Well, yesterday, I left my old job. I was on vacation all this week (except for having to go to my exit interview yesterday), so I started my new job on Wednesday. The new job looks to be perfectly suited to me.

That said, I spent some quality time in audacity last night, doing the post production work. It is complete and I have done the listen through. I am converting to ogg and mp3 and will be doing the rss tags. It should be up there this weekend.

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Well, I guess my feet are firmly in the fire for the podcast. Dave Yates from the LottaLinuxLinks Podcast interviewed me today. We had a good chat, Dave is a great guy who does a terrific podcast, and I thank him for having me on.

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I found a workaround for Audacity to allow me to use it. The problem was that once started, it would not play back (or presumably record) audio. It would give errors such as

Expression ‘ret’ failed in ’src/hostapi/alsa/pa_linux_alsa.c’, line: 1034
Expression ‘AlsaOpen( hostApi, parameters, streamDir, &pcm )’ failed in ’src/hostapi/alsa/pa_linux_alsa.c’, line: 1066

I tried every combination of input and output devices available, and none worked. Hitting google, I found that killing jackd was the workaround, because jack and audacity apparently don’t play together nicely. This is on a Debian/sid system with audacity 1.3.4-1.2, in case anyone is having similar problems.

I have the theme completed, and will probably start recording in the next day or two. I had hoped to have the first episode out by the end of March, but now it looks like the first week or so of April. I have a lot on my plate right now, including a job change.

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Jimmy pointed out that it has been over a week since I made a post. Sorry about that…I have been (in the universal podcaster’s chorus) incredibly busy. I got defiant rebuilt, though it is still having issues (it locked up on me last night for apparently absolutely no reason other than age).

The other problem I am having is with audacity. This is apparently a common problem among Debian and Ubuntu users. I am running sid, which ships with the audacity-1.3.4-1.2 package, and for the life of me, I can’t get it to make sounds. Most of the output settings cause an error about not being able to connect with ALSA, but if I go to OSS and select /dev/dsp1, it seems to play, but no sound. I think it could be perhaps a problem with jack.

So I am looking for a solution to this problem, as well as looking at other packages. Including qtractor, which GitarMan from the LLL IRC channel turned me on to yesterday.

I’ll get this thing off the ground, even if I have to get out and push!

I have also been playing with network monitors. I have a couple of vmware machines that I am using for NMS testing. I have thus far played with Zenoss, OpenNMS, and am currently installing Pandora FMS. I have the server and [web] console installed, and am working on some issues I have with the agent, for instance, it wants to run as root and have a passwordless ssh key on each client to communicate with the server, so I am modifying the agent to run as a non-privileged user (e.g. pandora), since most of the checks don’t require root privs to work.

I do like one thing about Pandora. There are no binaries. Everything is written in Perl or Bash. The same team also wrote a security auditing tool called Babel, and I am going to be playing with that as well once Pandora is all set up. I may package both for Debian (and possibly Ubuntu).

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