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Right-wing American Family Association (AFA) are boycotting McDonalds of their ‘gay agenda’. They’re pissed because McD’s Vice President of Communications Richard Ellis’s is serving on the Board of Directors of the National Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce (NGLCC). Sounds like the end of the world to me, lets get their word on the matter:

What the boycott of McDonald’s IS about? It is about McDonald’s, as a corporation, refusing to remain neutral in the culture wars. McDonald’s has chosen not to remain neutral but to give the full weight of their corporation to promoting the homosexual agenda, including homosexual marriage.

Oh boy, then the AFA President Donald Wildmon says that it’s strange because “…it’s the family that McDonald’s appeals to — children’s playland, you know, all the little toys, all of that. And they are promoting a lifestyle that would utterly destroy the traditional family.”  Guess I need to tell the gay parents that I know that their great job they’re doing raising their kids is DESTROYING the traditional family.  Welcome to a time that isn’t the 1950s folks!  Credit to McD’s for keeping it real with their rebuttal, “…We treat our employees and our customers with respect and dignity, regardless of their ethnicity, religious beliefs, sexual orientation or other factors. We support our employees’ personal involvement in organizations of their choice.” Allowing people to choose how to live their lives?  What a great concept.  Of course there’s always two sides to the story, and the comments on the boycottmcdonalds site are a fun way to get a feel for the ‘other side’ in all their outspoken glory…I’ll post some snippets below…

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If you run a Linux desktop you need to be using conky.  It compiles all those shiny gadget you see on other desktops eating system RAM, down to what you need; information on what your system is doing.  So try it out, install conky, and then drop this into your home directory as .conkyrc - then run conky.  The file is pretty self explanatory, enjoy!

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Does anyone have any CDN experience they’d like to share?  At my gig we need to move about 80-100GB of files to another provider, because we’re serving up ~8.5GB/day, and it’s killing our internal bandwidth. (yes, we’re going to segment this soon) We’ve considered things as basic as GoDaddy, but at 6.99$/month that has to just be file hosting, not a CDN right?  A package for that amount of data at Cachefly looks like it’d be around 99$/month.  Other things like Amazon’s S3 are being priced out, but what about Akami, Level3, etc.  Any advice, guidance appreciated, we’ll likely go with the easiest way for now, but come next year we’ll need a real strategy for a global content system, be it a CDN or a distributed filesystem spread across clusters. (aw yeah, that’s the stuff…)

I’ve gotten my pictures online from my San Francisco trip.  The city was everything I always hoped it would be, and I really loved it there.  I had the opportunity to meet with diverse people that all intersect with various aspects of my job (now being refered to as my career).  From The Moore Foundation (the most amazing workspace I’ve ever seen) that provide us grant money to do our research to other non-profits partners like Internet Archive, The Smithsonian, Califonia Academy of Science, Public Library of Science to some of the folks that run the servers and dream up new ideas at Flickr (they use MySQL shards, Squid and memcached all over the architecture to navigate all that data - so I’m on the right path!)  The best part was meeting more people like me who are learning how to deal with and distribute all of this life data that just increases daily, the fact that I’m using my skills that I learnt by doing things like…running this blog, to do things on such a global level is an honor.  And fun, lots of fun!

Over the past few days I’ve become quite the fan of Blitzen Trapper from Portland, Oregon. A single on Subpop’s 20 year anniversary CD (which I got in a goodie bag on Record Store Day BTW) led me to this track, which turns out to be NOT indicative of their style. I’m giving their recent release a run now, and it reminds me at times of another Portland band, Menonema which is good. This track is more acoustic, but I love the Elliot Smith sounding vocals and the dreamy, story like lyrics - it’s a winner.

So while I realize this won’t be of interest to the majority of people out there, to me it’s very cool (something I would even blog about!)  So I’m in San Francisco last week meeting with developers and programmers from a variety of backgrounds; web 2.0 start-ups, .com verterans, non-profit and academic folk alike.  We’re all sitting around a conference table, each one with a laptop, so you can see what’s coming, here’s the breakdown: 11 laptops, 4 running Apple’s OSX, 4 running Linux (Debian, Ubuntu, Mandriva) and only 3 running Windows XP!  Again, it was a certain subset of folks, so I know that ratio won’t hold up most places, even this year’s DefCon in Las Vegas, but at that meeting things just clicked.  I even talked to some of the Devs running Linux and we have the same feelings about OSX, it’s great, but it’s just not as open or free as Linux is; at some point someone is making the call on how you’re going to use the software and, for us, it just ‘didn’t fit’ right.  Anyway, seeing that many like minded folks was very cool, I’ve not worked with people like that in the past, so to have this opportunity is a dream.

UPDATE: months after confusing Iran and Iraq, (multiple - times), M.c.Cain continues to try to upstage Bush’s famous canon of mis-spoken quotes by stating that Putin is President of Germany.

Say what you want about Barack Obama’s ‘change’ message, just know if you go with J.o.hn M.c.Cain you’re saying yes to four more years of Bush style politics.  While he’s still hawking that ‘maverick’ tag, don’t believe the hype, instead, let’s look at some statements by the senator.  Recently M.c.Cain perked my interest when he came out in favor of FISA, warrantless wiretapping/eavesdropping and executive power.  Funny thing is, he had the exact opposite opinion on these topics when he was asked in December 2007!

On Wednesday, I documented J.o.hn M.c.Cain’s complete reversal of views — in the last six months alone — on FISA, warrantless eavesdropping and executive power. M.c.Cain’s diametrically opposite views were contained in a questionnaire M.c.Cain completed for The Boston Globe last December (wherein he rejected many of the Bush/Cheney theories of presidential omnipotence and warrantless eavesdropping) and then a statement M.c.Cain issued this week to National Review (wherein he embraced those same theories in order to persuade the Right that he approves of and would continue Bush’s lawless surveillance policies).

Another source states more of what transcribed at the National Review:

A top adviser to Senator J.o.hn M.c.Cain says Mr. M.c.Cain believes that President Bush’s program of wiretapping without warrants was lawful, a position that appears to bring him into closer alignment with the sweeping theories of executive authority pushed by the Bush administration legal team.

In a letter posted online by National Review this week, the adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, said Mr. M.c.Cain believed that the Constitution gave Mr. Bush the power to authorize the National Security Agency to monitor Americans’ international phone calls and e-mail without warrants, despite a 1978 federal statute that required court oversight of surveillance…

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To understand how importance net neutrality is you need to watch the following video.  Think about the freedom that the Internet allows you, now think about how you are limited to certain ‘packages’ when you pay for cable or satellite access to watch TV. This is exactly how the corporate behemoths want to make your choices for the Internet. It makes sense, they’re not stupid, they see the opportunity to make money, and making your freedom into the proverbial carrot and stick makes perfect sense…for them.

Their title for the video is 2012: The Year The Internet Ends.  Learn more, and how you can spread the word, at I Power.  Thanks.

If you’re like me, you’ve messed up your xorg.conf before and wanted to start over with the default that you know dpkg-reconfigure can set it to.  Because of this I’m posting here because I’ve needed it multiple times in the past and have tired of looking it up!  To automatically reconfigure Xorg in Debian or Ubuntu issue the following:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg

Then logout/login or restart X via contrl-alt-backspace.  As one who tweaks things a bit more than he should, this has saved me a few times now. Props go to a poster on this page.