I gave a talk on the OLPC XO and sugar. Main point is that sugar is now available on Ubuntu/Debian/Fedora after my talk William talked to the group about bidding for the open source developers conference (OSDC) to take place in Newcastle.

Sugar on Toshiba and XO

Useful links:

• Talk Slides
• OLPC Website
• OLPC Australia
• Getting Access to a XO in Australia
• Australian Deployment of the XO
• Sugar Labs

Stuff on OSDC

• OSDC website
• Newcastle Lug wiki

I did struggle at the end of the meeting to explain to a linux newbie that he doesn’t really want to install a program from source… as he told me linux isn’t as easy as they say it is… I also no nothing about Mandrivia. We also discussed the Linux.conf.au inner circle and that too many of the LCA talks are repeats!

This morning i got a phone call on my home line from some old man wanting help with his ubuntu install, well more to the point is that he wanted to format ubuntu and start again.  After asking a couple of questions about what he wanted,  I told to format the drive and do a fix MBR in windows is probably abit more complex than he wants, and since he was dual booting that he should just continue to launch windows instead.

His orginal problem was he couldn’t get on the internet at the time, It didn’t click at the time when he said he was with optus that the reason he couldn’t get on the net is the weird way that optus modems are setup.

After talking to him for a while i finally got around to asking how he got my number because it was becoming more clear i didn’t know the guy.

Apparently he found my ubuntu wiki page https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Gabz and assume I could help him looked up my phone number in the address book since my last name isn’t very common my home (parents house) is the only listed number.

So this was the first time i’ve been rung by a 85 year old man wanting to know how to fix ubuntu. It was an odd experiance.

If how it all ended, was well I got over the slightly weird feeling told him to keep ubuntu there, since he mentioned he lived in Toronto (NSW) we exchanged email address and I sent him the link to Westlakes Linux Learners

Anyone else recieved random phone calls asking for linux help ???

This leads to the 2nd part of why you upgrade wordpress SPAM…

WordPress is a target there a millions of wordpress blogs out there and the are 1000 of spam bots exploiting them, Since my blog isn’t the most popular it hasn’t really been a problem, i’ve dealt with spam by hand.

So in the past couple of weeks wordpress spam has gotten loose on me. On the planet site i admin. http://planet.newcastlelug.org/ David M Williams Managed to attract not comment spam but RSS feed injection spam, because the planet syndicates the RSS feeds suddenly half way through his post we have links and casinos advertisement. So quickly check it was only his blog affected sent an email off to david.. he wasn’t real impressed. and I delete the cached file of his blog once he’d done some cleaning up of spam to remove the spam from the planet site.

So while wordpress maybe be a great blogging tool you really do need to keep it up to date like this week has shown me. I’ve noticed David upgrade his site also to 2.3.3 so hopefully we will remain spam free for awhile. I might wait to see if there are any security loopholes in 2.5 before i do that upgrade through.

Edit: since i upgraded wordpress i went looking for a new theme.. that supported tags.. etc. what do you think of my kde 4 style wordpress theme ?

Gabz