Billboard has an article out with some dirt on ACL. REM is the confirmed headliner for the final night and the band list includes:

Liz Phair, Ben Harper, Jack Johnson, String Cheese Incident, Patty Griffin, Alejandro Escovedo, Al Green, Leftover Salmon, Topaz, the Derailers, Richard Buckner, the Gourds, Robert Randolph, Ween, G. Love & Special Sauce, Spoon, Galactic, O.A.R., Gomez, Doyle Bramhall, Ian Moore, Asleep At The Wheel, Los Lobos, Lucinda Williams, Rosanne Cash, Mavis Staples, Pat Green

Pollstar also has some more info on who's playing on what day including more names that aren't on the list above (Soulive). The official line-up will be announced June 12th, but in the meantime pre-sale tix go on sale on May 3rd direct from the ACL website. This year the festivities take place September 19-21st.

DKMS version 0.27.05 is available here.

* Added "mktarball" and "ldtarball". This is for using DKMS within systems management purposes. Instead of having to rebuild modules on every system within your environment, you can now just build the modules on one system and utilize these actions to transport the built modules to your other systems. mktarball makes a tarball for the specified module/module version. This tarball includes the driver source and the built modules for each kernel. Then, ldtarball can be used to load the tarball on any other DKMS tree. This leaves the drivers in the "built" state and then `dkms install` can be used to install the modules in the /lib/modules tree.

* Added the --force option to be used in conjunction with ldtarball. With ldtarball, if it finds module/versions in your tree already, it normally will not overwrite them with the tarball. This can be overrided with the --force option.

* Changed the dkms.conf option of NEEDED_FOR_BOOT to REMAKE_INITRD. It functions just the same and has the same exact behavior. REMAKE_INITRD is just a more intuitive name.

* Added the dkms.conf option of MODULE_CONF_ALIAS_TYPE. This is to handle deficiencies in DKMS's editing of /etc/modules.conf. Rather than having to specify some static line to be added to modules.conf such as "alias scsi_hostadapter99 qla2200_6x", you now should just specify MODULE_CONF_ALIAS_TYPE="scsi_hostadapter". During install, DKMS will then figure out if modules.conf has a reference in it already for your module, and if it doesn't, it will add as the last alias type number (eg. if you have 4 other scsi_hostadapter devices, it will be set as scsi_hostadapter5). Other common ALIAS_TYPEs include "eth" and "sound-slot-".

* When removing modules, alias references in /etc/modules.conf will now remain if the find command can find other instances of that module name within the /lib/modules tree for that kernel. If no other drivers exist, the alias will be removed.

* The DKMS spec file now installs from the tarball instead of just the SOURCEs

Doug Gilbert posted this message on the linux scsi mailing list today. He was playing with devlabel on RH9 with 2.5.68 and devlabel was causing chaos. ...and its not my fault. He issued a patch to the kernel to improve its error handling.

With the fiscal hardships facing state governments today, the NYTimes is reporting on the imperilment of health coverage for the poor.

"Many state officials are pleading for federal help as they face an array of painful trade-offs, often pitting the needs of impoverished elderly people for prescription drugs and long-term care against those of low-income families seeking basic health coverage."

Where are the precepts of "compassionate conservatism" when they are finally called upon? Here we are living in a renewed time of angst where new and emboldened threats have put financial strain on every piece of government from local through federal levels. Yet, at the same time we are pushing through massive federal tax cuts when it seems the state governments couldn't be in any more dire need for this money. Its a classic chicken and the egg problem where Bushies would tell you that you need to stimulate the ecomony through tax cuts in order resurrect state budgets and thus, their programs. The failure in this logic are the interim effects on people and their livelihood. It can be used again and again how September 11th changed everything, but when will this administration stop ducking the added weight this has placed on states, their budgets and their priorities?

And to that end, what percentage of the current economic uncertainty is driven through the fiscal crisises felt by every single state in the union? If all politics is local, then why isn't this angle be explored? I bet moderate republicans are palpably worried about how this might play out in the next election. I know George Voinovich must be.

Mr. Voinovich, why don't you stop being French and Join President Bush's Fight To Cut Taxes and Fix The Economy?

Only when so many of our fair use rights are being attacked, could such an obvious court ruling make me happy. Thankfully we haven't completely fallen off the deep end. Yet.

While working with some guys in the UK, I found out that VMware can allow you to access your Storage Area Network through their virtual machine. A pretty cool idea. So now you can trick your mainframe into using Linux for SAN accessibility. Here's their white paper.

This morning was sweet. I hit all 4 green lights on Parmer between Riata and MoPac. Nobody was on the road and I guess the stars were aligned or something because hitting all those lights is a pretty rare occurence. Of course, with all that open road and nothing to stop me, i was doing just about 80...

Get onto Mopac and am almost to Wells Branch when I see the cop on his motorcycle with his lights on. Did you know that reckless driving is a class B misdemeanor and is an arrestable offense? But, sir, I was just late for work. No, I didn't realise you had to do 115 to catch up with me.

My first Texas ticket. 75 in a 55. doh!

Should have known something was aligned to get all those green lights in a row. At least texas has great laws on getting tickets expunged. Anybody have the best suggestion for the defensive driving class?

Devlabel 0.36.06 is available here.

* Added sector start point to the UUID of non-partition specific UUIDs. So, for things like swap partitions, now part of the UUID is its start sector on its disk. This means that all UUIDs that devlabel uses are now absolutely unique and so devlabel should be able to handle all interdisk renaming events regardless of the UUID type. Note that if you start moving your partitions around with parted or something similar, devlabel won't like this. The start sectors are not added to the ends of partition uuids.

* A lot of code cleanup because of all unique UUIDs. I got rid of all the code that had to do determing partitions when using disk ids, etc, etc. Much nicer now.

* Got rid of the --partnum option for when adding by UUID (the -u option). This is no longer necessary because of the changes.

* Thanks to David Balazic (david dot balazic at uni-mb dot si) for the sector start idea.

I won't bother promoting Andrew Orlowski's rant about "googlewashing" by linking to it, but the gist of his argument is that blogging gives inordinant amount of power to bloggers in influencing the results that google returns. While his rant was dumb, he is actually onto something.

I just was looking through my web logs to see the referrers, and after doing a bit more digging, it appears my website is the second returned link when doing a google search for "jamband communities". This is because my music page uses those words and because my blog and representive linux work get interlinked throughout the net. Thus, google gives more credence to the words on my site.

If I know I shouldn't be the second result, then google should too. Oddly, this very blog entry may bump my pagerank further. Looks like google's got some perfecting to do.

Devlabel 0.35.21 is available here.

* Added multipath support. Previously, if attempting to add a symlink to a device which was part of a multipath set, devlabel would not allow this because multiple devices returned the same UUID. Now, this can be avoided by adding symlinks with the --multipath option. This will instruct devlabel to create multiple symlinks named YourSymlinkName_multipath# each pointing to a different path that is part of the multipath set. These symlinks can then be used in /etc/raidtab to create a working multipath device which will not succumb to any device renaming problems. Hence, if /dev/sdd1 and /dev/sde1 were multiple paths to the same device, they can now be referenced as /dev/foo_multipath0 and /dev/foo_multipath1 so even if they became /dev/sdb1 and /dev/sdc1 internally, your multipath device would still get created properly from /etc/raidtab since you used the symlink names and not the actual device names.

* Cleaned up how status was returned. It now shows the permissions and ownerships of the underlying device instead of the symlink. As well, raw device status now is of the same format as symlink status.

* Created a make_link function used by add and restart to remove duplication of code

* Devlabel now greps by word boundary instead of looking for a trailing whitespace character (thanks to Todd Martin: todd dot martin at acm dot org)

* I replaced all references of grep -m with equivalent head -1 pipes to accomodate older versions of grep.

* Added coreutils to the requirements of the RPM spec file as readlink is located in coreutils.

* Other minor bug fixes and enhancements.

Usually, I don't just lift links from mega-bloggers (slashdot, boingboing, etc) unless I've got some spin to add to it. In this case, I do so only because I've got a clever title to go with it. See more about how creationists may be exploiting Amazon so it recommends creationist books to people. Originally found on boingboing.

Back home in Cincinnati for the weekend. Must have skyline chili. Living in texas, you hear a lot of that texas superiority attitude, but there's no chili like skyline for me. I've even heard a couple who've had skyline before saying "you call that chili". But thats right, i do, and its good. So good that they're sending it to the crew of the USS Nimitz in Iraq. Yes, that's right, its so beloved that this is how Cincinnati school children support our troops.

"What do you mean you put the chili on top of spaghetti?" And if I had more time, I'd be stopping at the Montgomery Inn, too. There'd be quite an uprising in Texas if they knew how good those ribs were.

Some more good info from this comment to a previous blog entry of mine. Austin's newest venue has got its website up. Mostly, the site is currently devoted to the 4th of July picnic (now confirmed: Neil Young), but check it out nonetheless. I've also heard rumors of Beck in attendance.

Also on their website is this link to buy tickets for the two day event. Seems they can't decide whether to put a roof on the pavillion ... I say it's time for a glass ceiling.

I can only hope that General Clark does choose to seek the Democratic nomination for president. Otherwise, we're doomed to 4 more years of Bush. Though, this stunning bit of journalism at CNN claims that "the chances of the Democratic Party nominating a retired general with no political experience are slim at best, given the liberal leanings of the party's rank-and-file". Utter hogwash!

With 4 years to lick our collective wounds over the consequences of going "ideal" and voting Nader (yeah yeah, it's Gore's fault he lost), I think CNN is quite off the mark. Clark is the only electable democrat, we all know it and we all would love to unseat Bush.

Of course, someone should tell the Repubs as they're already licking their chops (scroll down) at the prospect of Jeb in '08. I think someone forgot to tell them that Bush's are renowned one-termers. Or, at least they will be.

I hope. Go to DraftWesleyClark.com and send a letter to the former general convincing him to run.

I must say, I'm one fine writer of Chinese prose. Well, not really. The pdf looks cooler.

Devlabel 0.30.08 is available here.

* Added --uid, --gid, and --perms which are usable during an add command.

If these options are specified, when the symlink is made it applies these permissions to the underlying device avoiding any security hazards in the event of a device name change. So, if you have a partition /dev/sdd6 which is readable and writable by everyone on a system and a partition /dev/sde6 which is only readable by root, if /dev/sdd goes down and /dev/sde becomes /dev/sdd, the correct permissions of /dev/sde6 will be applied to /dev/sdd6 to ensure that there are no unauthorized accesses.

My only personal experience with a music venue with onsite camping is Deer Creek in Indiana. Renowned for being a great place to see a show, it looks like Austin is in store for something pretty similar. Though, like all venues in the U.S., Deer Creek has since been renamed the Verizon Wireless Music Center-- just like venues in San Antonio, Virginia Beach, Kansas City, Charlotte and Los Angeles. Happily, from this write-up it doesn't sound like Austin's new venue will meet the same fate.

As you can tell from the date on the write-up (9/02) this isn't news, but I thought I'd share anyway. It refers to the venue as Big Sky, but I think this has since been renamed Two River Canyon Amphitheater. In fact, it looks like this years July 4th picnic with Willie and the Dead will be its inaugural event. From what I hear, the amphitheater won't be 100% ready, but I hope its start is inidicative of its future. With what they have in mind, it sure sounds like they're starting with the right ideas:

* Out in the hill country with what looks like a great view of Texas greenery
* On site camping and RV park to "attract the two and three day festivals"
* Large stage to "attract major festivals"
* Vaulted pavillion roof so the lawn doesn't get an obstructed view
* Room for 25,000
* Less than 2 acres of concrete total in entire construction
* Project manager is the guy behind the Gorge Ampitheater in Washington
* Hot tubs
* No "six dollar beers and bad food"
* Secondary stage, BMX track, an equestrian center and a rodeo arena
* 3 waterfalls and a lake

Let's just hope this isn't all too ambitious. Sounds great.

Update: I found this link on the Austin American Statesman.

I've added DKMS to freshmeat.

The project can be located here.

A day for the history books. Most of Baghdad falls, and Iraqi's cheer their freedom as Saddam's regime crumbles. But from the land where a falling statue is liberty to the one with the Statue of Liberty, today perversely shows that the fight for freedom is never over.

Just today, it was reported members of the GOP are maneuvering to make the Patriot Act permanent (link), a judged tossed out a case challenging the DMCA wherein it was ruled that reverse engineering web filtering software to determine what sites it blocked is not within fair use rights (link), and that phone companies moved to block regulations enabling our right to retain the same phone number regardless of which phone company we switch to (link).

The devil, it seems, is in the details. Perhaps today the Iraqi's start down the long path to reach these "last mile" issues. Of course these things can only be called last mile within the context here, but having been struck seeing the commercial for the pet medicine delivery service in between the scenes of overjoyed Iraqis on CNN, one can only marvel at the incongruities of life on earth.

Interestingly, I got an email today from Austin Chase, the president of BlogTV.com. It seems, while searching daypop, they came across this entry where I mention that someone should put together a TV news program based on blogging. It appears they are pursuing just the same.

In the meantime, their website doesn't have much going on for it for now (check back in May), though it does refer people to blogchalking.com which appears to be an effort to add geographical relavence to blogs. Austin also mentioned a soon to be announced promotion that blogtv will be doing in conjunction with BlogShares and perhaps blogtv's intention to create an easy to use online blogging system for the masses. This is all well and good and I think there is much untapped potential in utilizing blogging on a grand scale, but I want my BlogTV! I wish them all the best, but until I can see my TV news utilizing blogging, they could just as well call themselves blogoverse.com. Oh wait, I own that.

Of course nothing happens overnight. You got that Mr. Orlowski?

Could taking Baghdad really have been this easy? It seems doubtful. Really, I just wanted to post an entry with the title above. That's all.

"I believe that in a couple of years, Linux and Dell will be the dominant computing combination in the enterprise," Ellison said.

Read the article.

I like my job.

Devlabel has magically appeared on Freshmeat. It can be found here. Thanks freshmeat.

The NYtimes catches Rumsfeld in a heated press conference yesterday.

Dax Kelson wrote up a really nice review of Red Hat 9 here. He included a nice write-up of devlabel.

Oh yeah, and the review got slashdotted.