Back Online After TOS Violation due to Malware Issue

For the last day or two, this blog was taken down again, this time due to a terms of service violation. I could not for the life of me think of what I might have written or done here to account for that. Today, I looked into it, and found that although this blog had been restored after the malware attack, the malware itself had not been removed. After removing a lot of third-party code, I found out that the issue lay in my Archives page, where the third-party code allowing the "Archives" widget to be displayed as a separate page had been infected with malware. I'm starting to be a little more wary of how Google handles things now, and while I do intend to stay with Blogger for the foreseeable future, I'm not counting a move entirely out.

Back Online After Malware Issue

You may have noticed that this blog was inaccessible for the last 2.5 weeks. That's because it, along with a whole bunch of other blogs on Blogger, was apparently hit by malware (though I don't know whether that really happened or if it was a false flag). Anyway, this blog is back online, and I intend to get back to writing in this space as I had originally planned. In the meantime, I'm going to be carefully backing up all the data here.

In Protest of SOPA/PIPA: Das U-Blackout

There are a lot of sites that are blacking out on Wednesday, 2012 January 18 to protest SOPA and PIPA together. I know this site doesn't get that much traffic except when I post OS & related reviews and they get on sites like LXer, but I feel like I couldn't have it on my conscience to not show solidarity in this move. Therefore, I will try to take everything on this site offline tomorrow except for this post. I wanted to post something tomorrow, but it [the rest of this sentence has been removed as per SOPA].
Toodle-oo! And just remember, this will become the norm if those bills get passed. This won't affect just small-time sites like mine, but big ones too. If you don't like that, contact your elected representatives and tell them what you think. Even if the only effect is that a staffer adds another tally to the box saying "SOPA [or PIPA]: opposed", that's fine. Do it!

Featured Comments: Week of 2011 July 31

There were a few posts that got a handful of comments, so I'll try to repost a few from each.

Review: CentOS 6.0

Reader MIchael J King had a clarification countering one of my gripes: "The Live DVD of CentOS 6 has the special effects you were craving plus many many more applications including kde ones. On my Thinkpad T61 it runs perfectly and is very stable with support to 2016 and beyond."
An anonymous commenter supported my conclusion: "Except for a few nits, CentOS6 and Scientific Linux 6 should be identical. They have been in my testing (for server use). Why anyone would choose CentOS over SL after the repeated delays in updates (for both versions 5 and 6) in the last couple of years is a complete mystery to me. Scientific Linux is also free, is updated more frequently, and is supported by CERN and Fermi National Lab. No contest."
Reader Troy Dawson, who it seems is also a Scientific Linux developer, had this clarification for one of my assertions: "I hate to say bad things about your friend, but he's wrong about SL 'reverse-engineer'ing the RHEL packages. Unless a package has to be changed for branding reasons, we make no change whatsoever to our RHEL's source rpm's. We don't even unpack them. I should know, I'm the person who does it."
Another anonymous commenter countered some of the above conclusions: "CentOS has better hardware support than Scientific Linux. On my desktop computer, CentOS has sound but SL does not, because my sound chip is unsupported by Red Hat. Incidentally, it is incorrect to say RHEL is only a server distro: if you go to their products listing, you'll find separate listings for the server and desktop versions."

Movie Review: The Adjustment Bureau

Reader Mechatotoro (whose blog you should all read — it has lots of honest, funny, and insightful reviews, able to look at Linux from the perspectives of both the layperson and the expert) said, "Mmm. I'm not into movies myself, but you comparison of the movie being a combination of the Matrix and a romantic comedy stirs my curiosity."

Das U-Blog Turns 2!

Commenter Jussi said, "Congratulations! I have had a link to your blog for some time.http://tietsikka.blogspot.com/"

Thanks to all those who commented on this past week's posts. I had originally intended to review KDE 4.7, but there were a few things that made that not happen: I wanted to review it in ArchBang, but for some reason ArchBang refused to start in any graphics mode other than VESA, so I didn't think it was worth doing a review; furthermore, it seems like the improvements to KDE 4.7 are more technical than visible to the end-user, so I decided against doing a full review. This coming week, I may have another review out, but I can't guarantee anything. I'm sure I'll have something to write about though. Anyway, if you like what I write, please continue subscribing and commenting!

Das U-Blog Turns 2!

Wow. It has been two years since I started this blog! I started it at my internship at NIST (where I'm working again this summer, though I feel like what I'm doing now is far more interesting that what I did then, and that's why I started the blog anyway) on a particularly boring day after seeing that one of my friends had started a blog too. Initially, I focused a lot on politics (aside from a few posts here and there about happenings in my own personal life), because I thought it would be cool and interesting, and only posted marginally about science or technology. After about 2 months, I became a bit more focused on writing about Linux and other technology-related stuff, as well as stuff that sites like TechDirt cover. But really, it wasn't until August of last year when I started to really get serious about Linux distribution reviews, and that's also when (1) this blog went from getting virtually no traffic to quite a bit of traffic and (2) my writing style became essentially what it has remained since then. I've looked back and some of the older posts and laughed at (1) how naive I was (specifically regarding a couple of my politics-related posts), (2) how bad a writer I was (relatively), and (3) how shallow I was when reviewing Linux distributions.

(2010) 0 in July, 544 in August, >20000 in September

Here's a graph of how my blog's statistics have changed over time:
As you can see, it wasn't until 2010 August/September when this site started getting lots of page views, because that's when I started submitting my stories to Linux Today (and later LXer), and those later got featured on sites like Tuxmachines (and later DistroWatch, if they were reviews). That's also when the comments went up from 1 or 2 every few weeks to at least 5-10 every post or so. That was exciting for me to see.

I want to thank everyone who has read and commented on these posts. 99.9% of the time, your comments are greatly appreciated. I also want to thank those who are "fans" of this blog's Facebook page, follow the associated Twitter feed and retweet posts, have subscribed via RSS and/or email, and have shared these posts in other ways as well. It has been a lot of fun doing this for 2 years now, and I look forward to doing this for the foreseeable future as well! Happy reading!

This Blog's Template

An anonymous reader had asked for the template used in this blog. First I'm going to list out the basics from Template Designer. (All colors are given using their 6-digit hexadecimal code.) Follow the jump to see the full template.
The base template used is the "Simple" Blogger template (provided by Blogger). There is no background image.
The body layout has a main area and a sidebar split into two smaller sidebars a bit down the page. The blog is 1000 pixels wide, and the right sidebar is 320 pixels wide.
The font used throughout the blog is Droid Sans, which can be added to a blog through Google's Font API. The size is 14 point, and the color is 333333.
The outer background color is 222222, while the main background is FFF5E5. All link colors (link, visited, and outer) are 66B5FF, as are the blog title and description colors. The blog title uses the Droid Sans font at 55 point.
The tabs also use the Droid Sans font at 14 point, and the selected and unselected colors are both 333333. The selected tab background color is EEEEEE, while the unselected tab background color is FFF5E5.
The post title size is 25 point. (The font is still Droid Sans.)
The date header color is 999999, while its background is transparent.
The post footer has text color 333333, while its background and shadow colors are both FFF5E5.
The gadget font is Droid Sans at 15 point. The title color is 333333, while the alternate color is 999999.
The image background and border colors are both FFF5E5, while the caption text color is 333333.
The separator line and tabs border colors are both FFF5E5.
I have not added any custom CSS to override styles settings.
Follow the jump to see the full template.

Why I'm Sticking with Blogger

This semester, I'm taking a class on web design. The name itself is misleading, as this class is also a humanities ("HASS-H", in MIT parlance) and communication-intensive ("CI-H") class; therefore, the emphasis is more on working together as a team and writing high-quality proposals and reports, and the professor expects that each group have at least one member proficient in web design. Neither myself nor my group members are proficient enough in web design to be able to build a dynamic website from (essentially) scratch, and all of us want to get this project done ASAP. To that end, we found that a student group at MIT really needs a new website, as the current website is a few years old and isn't even complete. To quicken and ease the creation of the site, I initially suggested that we use WordPress, due to its extensibility and its professional-looking sites; plus, one of the members of my group is good enough with programming that learning PHP (a near-requirement for WordPress) wouldn't take too long. However, as I later discovered, downloading and editing the PHP files is cumbersome, and we would have to pay if we wanted to host it on our own domain (!) or edit the CSS pages (!!). Wow. I think it's bad that WordPress isn't more up-front about what exactly will require payments. Naturally, we searched for alternatives. Then, I realized that Blogger would be a great tool to create a website and can be made to look just as professional as WordPress sites.
Blogger makes editing a site's theme as easy as pie; with WordPress, one must know PHP. In Blogger (as far as I know), it is free to change domains; with WordPress, one must pay. The story is similar for CSS. That's why we've settled with Blogger for our site. It's friendly towards newbies and non-technical types (like myself), and it's easier to customize (at least on the surface). Hence, I'm glad I went with Blogger for starting this blog.
Of course, these things weren't on my mind over a year ago; it's just that I had a Google account and was commenting on a few Blogger blogs, so I figured the easiest way to create a blog would be through Blogger. I'm sticking with what I know works for me.

200th Post: Preview: ArchBang 2010.09 "apeiro"

Happy 200th post Das U-Blog! I hope you readers have enjoyed reading these posts as much as I have enjoyed writing them! And, as always, if you have not already done so, please take a moment to click any one of the various subscription buttons to get updated on new Das U-Blog posts as they come out (either by email or in your favorite RSS/Atom reader)

Main Screen

1. This is not a typographical error.
2. This is not "CrunchBang ('#!')".
3. THIS. IS. ARCHBANG! [insert dramatic music here]

Of course, the real story is slightly more nuanced (did I use that word right?) than that. ArchBang, while not a badly-spelled version of #!, is actually inspired by (but not derived) from #!; it aims to be to Arch Linux what #! is to Debian (and was to Ubuntu before version 10 "Statler"). That's right: ArchBang is an Openbox derivative of Arch Linux. I was actually looking for other reviews of Linux Mint "Debian" when I found this article whose comments section linked to an article on #! and ArchBang. Naturally, I was intrigued upon seeing Arch's response to #!, so I went ahead and downloaded the ISO image to try it. Please do note that to better reflect this distribution's advertised capabilities as a solution for old computers, I have decreased VirtualBox's RAM allocation for this distribution to 192 MB (keeping video memory at 12 MB). Technically, the minimum requirements are 128 MB of RAM, but I think 192 MB is a reasonable stand-in for an old computer these days. Follow the jump to see how it fares in these harsher conditions.

How I Multiplied Subscribers and Page Views in 2 Weeks

Blogger Page View Statistics

I can't claim to speak for all bloggers when I say what I'm going to say. Whatever "advice" (if that's what it is) I give will probably be applicable only to bloggers who write about Linux/free culture/open source topics, as that's what I mostly write about (with the occasional diversion, like this post).
I would like to start this post (well, it isn't technically the very beginning anymore) by thanking Linux Today for posting some of my articles (mainly Linux distribution reviews); I would not have so many comments (which I hugely value and would love to see even more of) and subscribers if it wasn't for Linux Today accepting my submission of the KDE distribution comparison test. Since then, I've been able to get a couple more articles on Linux Today's home page, for which I am equally (if not more) grateful.
Well, there's one way to do it: submit your articles to Linux Today, as you will not regret it (and your article will most likely be accepted; furthermore, once you get your foot in the door and the article is positively received by the community, your future articles are more likely than the previous ones to get accepted).
I also want to thank TuxMachines for picking up on a couple of my review posts, as this has also hugely contributed to the traffic seen on this site; I didn't even send in the submission links, so I am hugely grateful for readers and editors of TuxMachines finding my reviews. In addition, I want to thank TechDirt for accepting my story on Microsoft's shutdown patent.
I have also created a Facebook page (and a "Like" widget for this site) and a Twitter account for this blog. If you are on these social networks, please do take a moment to either "Like" this site on Facebook or follow it on Twitter. While the Facebook page's notes application isn't working quite right (I'll try to fix it soon), I update the Twitter page with posts as they are published. That said, these are relatively new additions, so I don't think they really impacted the statistics.

Statcounter Page View Statistics

The Blogger statistics show that until August 29 or so, I was getting around 30 page views a day. It's not bad, but it could certainly be better. My comparison test was posted on September 1. That was when the page views went way up. I went from 35 page views on August 28-ish to 3500 page views on September 2. The Statcounter statistics tell a similar story: I went from about 27 page views on August 30 to 2700 page views on September 3, and now I'm averaging around 400 page views or so every day. I went from about 1000 page views total then to 10000 page views now, which is an increase of a full order of magnitude.
Subscribers are much harder to retain, as most people who visit blogs do not stay long to look around at other content besides what they've just looked out (which is why I am really thankful for the readers of this blog who do just that). That said, Feedburner's statistics on subscribers does show a tripling of my subscriber level; where before I was averaging 5 subscribers every day, now I'm averaging around 15 (and there was one day when I peaked at 39).
So, to recap: if you write about free software and related news and reviews, do not hesitate to submit posts to sites like Linux Today, TuxMachines, and TechDirt. Also, please do take the time (as I have) to list your blog on Technorati, BlogCatalog, and other blog catalog sites. These will all certainly contribute to higher traffic and more subscribers.
Dear readers, thank you all very, very much!

Das U-Blog Turns 1!

It has been exactly a year since I started this blog! Yay!
To all readers of this blog, thank you so much for reading these posts (and even occasionally commenting on them too). I hugely appreciate the time you have spent reading these posts.
So this post is for you, the readers. And I have a question for you: is there anything else you want me to write about? Please let me know in the comments section.
Thank you!