IBM/Red Hat Leftovers

• Ken Hess (Red Hat): Cyber Week 2020: 13 ideas for what to buy the sysadmin in your life | Enable Sysadmin

  It's that special time of year when you can get great discounts on tech for your favorite sysadmin.

• [IBM Emeritus] Irving Wladawsky-Berger: Are There Limits to the Predictability of Elections?

  The elegant mathematical models of classical mechanics depict a world in which objects exhibit deterministic behaviors. These models make perfect predictions within the accuracy of their human-scale measurements. But, once you start dealing with atoms, molecules and exotic subatomic particles, you find yourself in a very different world, one with somewhat counter-intuitive behaviors governed by the laws of quantum mechanics. The orderly, predictable models of classical physics have now given way to wave functions, uncertainty principles, quantum tunneling and wave-particle dualities. But, the world of the very small is not the only one with non-deterministic behaviors. So are highly complex systems, especially those systems whose components and interrelationships are themselves quite complex. This is the case with social systems, which are based on individuals, groups, and institutions. It’s quite a challenge to make accurate predictions in such systems due to the the dynamic nature of human behaviors. Terms, like emergence, long tails, and butterfly effects - every bit as fanciful as quarks, charm and strangeness, - are part of the social systems lexicon. Which brings us to the 2020 US election. “The polls were wrong again, and much of America wants to know why,” wrote NY Times journalist David Leonhardt in a recent article. “This is a disaster for the polling industry and for media outlets and analysts that package and interpret the polls for public consumption, such as FiveThirtyEight, The New York Times’ Upshot, and The Economist’s election unit,” said David Graham in The Atlantic.

• [Red Hat] Why failure should be normalized and how to do it | Opensource.com

  All of your heroes have failures under their belts—from minor mistakes to major disasters. Nobody knows how to do everything automatically, and the process of learning is usually a messy one. So why is the perception that everyone but you knows what they’re doing so common? Why do we externalize our successes but internalize our failures? How does it make you feel when you struggle to learn something new, then see another person take their Jira card away and return at the end of the sprint with something fully fleshed out and working, gushing about it at the demo? Sure, you closed your card too, but it was really hard! There was a new algorithm, a new programming language, a new system all to be learned. How did she make it look so effortless? The truth is, she might have struggled with the same issues you did and wondered how you made it look so effortless! [...] It could be very easy to title this section "my mistakes" and then rattle off all the times I’ve made mistakes, but that doesn’t quite illustrate the point. I recognize these mistakes, but they’re also events that expanded the understanding of my craft. While I didn’t set out to intentionally do any of these things, I certainly learned from them. I have accidentally dropped (deleted) a customer’s database. It was lucky for everyone that it was a beta-phase database and no further harm was done. I learned a valuable lesson that day: be very watchful of what code is doing, and be careful about what environment you are working in. One day, while performing routine maintenance with an odd DNS setup, I accidentally broke the ability for customers to provide credit card information to the secure site. We had two "payments" DNS records that served to override a wildcard DNS record, and I assumed that the second "payments" record was still present. It wasn’t. And then the wildcard record took over, and the DNS started behaving like "payments" wasn’t special at all anymore. Of course, I had no idea this was happening at all—it wasn’t until my maintenance was over that I learned of the folly. Customers weren’t able to provide payment information for almost two hours! I learned my lesson, though: when there is something special about a particular configuration, be sure to make sure it stays special throughout its lifetime. When DNS gets involved, all kinds of things can break.

today's howtos

• What option to use for ping constantly until you stop it? - Linux Shout

  The Ping program is a widely used tool to check the accessibility of a computer network. All operating systems available till now have the ability to run the Ping command with various options to even continuously check the network resource or connection availability. However, if a firewall suppresses ping packets on the way from your computer to the host, it can falsely appear to be unreachable. To do this, it sends echo request packets to the host via ICMP. Using the time difference between this and the response (echo reply), it calculates the runtime. Ping was defined in RFC 1574.

• How to Cast Media from Ubuntu to Chromecast | FOSS Linux

  In this Ubuntu tutorial, we shall see ways to cast media from a Linux PC to a Chromecast device. We shall see command-line and GUI ways of casting the content.

• How do I view Nginx logs? – Linux Hint

  Logs are very important in a system to monitor the activities of an application as they provide you with useful debugging information and enable you to analyze all aspects of a web server. Like the other software applications, Nginx also maintains events like your web site visitors, encountered problems, and more to log files. The useful recorded information is used to take preemptive measures in order to deal with major serious discrepancies in the log events. In this article, we will elaborate on how to configure and view Nginx Logs in Ubuntu 20.04 system to monitor the application activities. There are two types of logs where recorded events in Nginx one is the access log, and the other is the error log. If you have already enabled these logs in the Nginx core configuration file then, you can find both types of logs in /var/log/nginx in all Linux distributions.

• How To Install PowerShell on CentOS 8 [Ed: Microsoft is just trying to turn GNU/Linux into its own thing, intended to serve Microsoft's bottom line and lock-in]

• OSINT Tools and Techniques – Linux Hint

  OSINT, or Open Source Intelligence, is the act of gathering data from distributed and freely accessible sources. OSINT tools are used to gather and correspond data from the Web. Data is accessible in different structures, including text design, documents, images, etc. The analysis and collection of information from the Internet or other publicly available sources is known as OSINT or Open Source Intelligence. This is a technique used by intelligence and security companies to gather information. This article provides a look at some of the most useful OSINT tools and techniques.

• How to Record Your Gnome Desktop in Ubuntu with built-in screen recorder – Linux Hint

  In the present era, the lives of the people have undergone a huge change from what it used to be a couple of years back. In the educational sector, books have fallen down the pecking order, and people now prefer watching videos explaining the concepts of their syllabus. A great example of this is YouTube, where videos on things like programming languages, economics, political science, and even geography are getting many viewers. The business sector has also gone through some innovation as now people can easily keep a record of important voice calls and conferences that might be needed for looking at the main highlights of the meeting. Even recording presentations and then sharing them with your clients or bosses have become the norm as this allows information to be passed from one to another in a much more efficient manner. All of these are just a few examples of why screen recorders are one of the most useful tools out there. Screen recorders can even be used for recording content that many people may find enjoyable, such as recording a game that might be on the rise in popularity or put up videos to explain any issues or problems that you might come across in your life, like checking to see how one can remove and adjust tires from a car. Hence, our discussion topic in this article is to look at how one can record their screens in Ubuntu using its default built-in screen recorder.

• Blender Animation Nodes – Linux Hint

  Blender animation nodes is a visual scripting system made for motion graphics in Blender. Animation nodes are an addon that is available for macOS, Linux, and Windows. There are a lot of things which you just can imagine to animate by hand because it is a very difficult task. Animation Nodes allows us to make complex animation in a less complex and tedious way. Animation Nodes add-ons can save you a lot of time and has several advantages over traditional keyframing technique. For instance, you can avoid managing many keyframes, and each node tree can be used for any objects; you don’t have to keyframe them every time.

• Blender Animation Loops – Linux Hint

  Blender is a powerful 3D creation tool. Blender holds all the attributes that a 3D artist needs. Sometimes a short movie tells a lot than an image. Making 3D scenes in Blender is great, but animating it is another level of mastering this program. So, it is essential to know about adding motion to 3D objects. Animation is an excellent way to connect and communicate with people; that’s why it is vital in the business world. Conveying a message through animation is considerably more appealing than images. Whether it is education or businesses, the film industry, or gaming, animation is being used everywhere.

Best Photo Editors for Linux

This article will cover a list of free and open-source image editors available for Linux. These applications feature basic tools for simple editing needs as well as advanced utilities for professional artists. GIMP If you are a regular Linux user, chances are that you must have heard about GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) or used it to edit images. It is considered to be one of the most comprehensive, free, and open source image editing software available not only on Linux, but also on other operating systems like Windows and macOS. While some users may prefer proprietary tools like Photoshop over it, GIMP itself is packed with tons of features and can do almost everything that Photoshop is capable of. You can see all major features of GIMP available at here and here. GIMP can be extended using plugins, some of them come with the official installation while others can be downloaded from third party websites. [...] RawTherapee RawTherapee is an open source image editing software specially designed for processing and handling “raw” images. You can also import and edit image files having other formats. RawTherapee features various utilities for processing raw images including color enhancement tools, compositing and masking utilities, pixel correction tools and HDR utilities.

5 Best Free and Open source NAS Software for Linux

In the 21^st century, huge innovations have been made in various sectors, particularly the technological region, which has completely changed the world’s dimensions. The strides at which new technology has been developed and improved upon from its predecessors would surely be something that our ancestors would marvel at. Humans have gone in a very short time from making stone arrows and straw huts to developing smartphones and automated robots, and these advancements are continuously growing without slowing down. However, this huge transition has also brought forward some adverse effects as our machines are now subjected to more cyber-attacks and security issues. Data is one of the most important factors in the world today, and it is exactly that which is the most vulnerable. Therefore, it is necessary to implement procedures that would help in keeping your data secure. One excellent way is to use NAS software, which helps in keeping backups of your data. This shall also be the topic of our discussion in this article, where we will be looking at the top 5 free and open-source NAS software available on Linux.