BIOS LEVEL

Morning session was awesome. Keynote was great, Max Spevack of Red Hat/Fedora gave an informational talk on the community.

Afterwards, the chief evangelist of Neuros demonstrated the Neuros OSD. Then, two GNOME guys gave an overview of new features in Gnome 2.20.

The trip in was easy–Columbus traffic didn’t get us down.

More to come later when I’ve got a faster, more reliable connection. The hotel’s wired network was out of IPs, and we’re having problems finding a decent wireless network with a decent pipe.

I’ll be attending Ohio Linuxfest this weekend. I’ll be taking pictures and posting a review/synopsis of the event throughout the weekend on the BIOS_LEVEL blog and at my blog, The Flow of Consciousness. Next week, I’ll combine the posts for an article at BIOS_LEVEL. Dave Grega, a Pittco regular, will be speaking on usability during the event, so I’m excited to hear what he’s researched.

We’ve now published three reviews. From BIOS_LEVEL’s front page, you can read our reviews on Crucial’s Ballistix Tracer RAM, Thermaltake’s Soprano DX, and the Ratpadz XT. I’m very pleased that we’ve been able to review three products in our first month of being open. We’ve also kept up with posting 2-3 news articles a day as well. There is always something new on the homepage from day to day, but more external links than original content.

This will change. We’ve got some downtime before more products arive, so we’re writing a few articles based around Linux. Some may deal with software, while others with hardware, or a mix of both. Sufficient to say, I think the content will be quite original and hopefully popular. We need to find more Linux-related sites to advertise with. To aid in this, we’re also going to have to do a lot more advertising than what we’ve done so far. We need to reach out to other Linux-related sites to advertise our reviews and articles. We have high hopes and aspirations, so I can only hope we’re able to meet them.

As a side note, BIOS_LEVEL is now in the top ten for the Google search term “Linux Advocacy”. Might be time to update some of the SEO in the meta tags. Aaaaaaaaaaand, we’ve got to get a new theme for this blog. This one is just too thin.

BIOS_LEVEL just published it’s first product review, the Ratpadz XT mousepad. I’m pretty excited. I finished writing it at 4:30AM, and sent out a few e-mails to other review sites to get some linkage for today. It’s time to try to drive some traffic and give the site a bit of a stress test.

I’ve got another review already in the works, as I previewed a week or so ago in the previous post. But we’re still waiting on more products to arrive in the mail!

As we near our opening, we realized we almost overlooked an important aspect on our website: an RSS feed. This blog has it’s own feed, but the BIOS_LEVEL main page has no feed of its own. While I was looking over this, many important questions arose:

1. How many items should we display?
2. Should we include articles and news, or a separate feed for each?
3. Should we allow links and images in the feed?

Luckily, it didn’t take long to decide on what to and what not to include. The final product gathers the latest product reviews and news feed. It orders them in time of posting, so everything is always up to date. This is not only great for us, but also for the sites that we feature in our news feed.

The only issue I ran in to was the merging of several database tables into one. Rather than query to MySQL database twice: once for reviews, and once for news, I chose to make a single query using the UNION term. It merges two queries that have an equal number of columns into a single table, where I can sort the entries as I please. The final product looked like something as below. Slightly complicated to read, but oh so fantastic in usage!

$query = "SELECT title,shortdesc,'a' AS type,UNIX_TIMESTAMP(id) FROM articles LIMIT 3 UNION SELECT t.topic_title AS title,p.post_text AS shortdesc,'n' AS type,t.topic_id AS id FROM phpbb_topics t,phpbb_posts_text p,phpbb_users u WHERE t.forum_id = 10 AND u.user_id = t.topic_poster AND t.topic_first_post_id = p.post_id LIMIT 7";

Oh, and you can’t subscribe to it yet. We’re putting it under feedburner in the morning.

We’ve all had our hands full the past two weeks, as most of us are staff with Pittco, which just held it’s 8th event this past weekend. Those of us who aren’t staff with Pittco were also there. As a result, progress was a little hampered, but we’ve still sent out quite a bit of e-mails looking for products to review. We’ve got a few in, so this is just a small preview of what’s to come in the next week or two.

Finally, our content management system is nearing completion. Don’t ask me what took so long, but between vacation and a slightly-renewed interest in Unreal Tournament 2004, there was a nice long delay in there. Now, however, I’m happy to report that I’m back to working on the site on a regular (nightly) basis.

Surprisingly, we’ve got a few products coming our way in the mail. I can’t tell you what they are yet, but maybe I’ll post some pictures of the shipping boxes to give you an idea when they come in. Stick around and tell your friends, BIOS_LEVEL is officially opening its doors in a few weeks.

BIOS_LEVEL’s main page is currently down until we make the forums more secure. Since we use phpBB’s login system, our homepage is disabled when the board is disabled. I’ll take a look at this in a day or two, I should be able to add in an if statement checking to see if the board disabled or not. If it’s disabled, then it simply disables the session management within PHP. Problem solved, maybe?

Until we’re back up, why not check out my new server case, Colin’s adventure of installing City of Heroes on Linux, or Zack’s new lolnamil.

Well its summer break at Drexel. That means I get a week of no clases. For thoes of you out of the loop Drexel has 4 quarters where you do co-op for two quarters then classes for two… Still have to find a co-op for fall. Drexel is a 5 year program and a rather good program at that, but some times I wish I could be a normal college student like Obsidian and have the summer off. -sigh-

As a distraction from classes I created a level pack for frozen-bubble. Frozen bubble is a fun game that is like bust-a-move or puzzle-bobble. It comes default with most installations of linux. The multiplayer is very fun. The level pack can be found here. To install it on linux systems create a folder in your home directory called .fblevels and put it in there.

Enjoy!

I suppose we’re not the only ones interested in replacing our cell phones and landlines with a single phone. Nick Randolph’s got a few great articles comparing the differences between the different services offered by Skype (SkypeOut, SkypeIn, Skype Voucher), and more of the hurdles that Nick (our NicK) may not have addressed in his evaluation. Of course, we’re all patiently waiting for Nick’s (our Nick) final conclusion on the matter.