Via the Sports Economist, found a link to this article in the Wall Street Journal about the high demand for World Cup tickets for the USA [subscribers only]. I can't read the article, but its safe to assume its a mainstream journalist just catching wind of the difficulties those of us who want to follow our team to Germany encountered, what, 2 months ago? I'm not sure why he ends his post with a dig at MLS.

[Now, if MLS could find a way to bring a credible product to club soccer, we might really have something to cheer about.]{.rss:item}

What is a "credible product" to club soccer?\ \ In my opinion, MLS has made great strides in the quality of the clubs they have. The number of owners is going up, it's been a good proving ground for your talen (Bobby Convey, Demarcus Beasley, Clint Dempsey, Landon Donovan), and its getting stadiums built for its clubs.\ \ You could argue that single-entity (the format used by practically every new sports league recently), multiple team ownership (AEG is divesting itself of teams), and the lack of a single table (umm, yeah our country spans a whole continent...) as somehow degrading the quality of the clubs but I think these arguments are specious. \ \ The low salary cap and the small rosters, which limit a teams effectiveness in international competion and ability to deal with injuries, do more to hurt a club. I think MLS realizes this and are eager to fix them while staying viable and aiming for profitability.

A revelation hopefully more artists and creative professionals will come to is neatly summed up in this post from Powazek. We'll only see more of them come to the same conclusions as they learn to fully harness the distribution models provided by the Internet. Singers, Writers, Artists and all no longer need middlemen to market and sell their works around the world. I almost feel sorry to the MPAA representative sent to SXSW but then I remember who she works for.\

And that's really the problem, isn't it? There are these industries of middlemen - RIAA, MPAA - that claim to "protect artists" but what they're really protecting is themselves. Artists (and I include myself in that word) need to rise up and tell these people to go get stuffed. We can decide when a mashup is perfectly fine with us. We can decide to embrace file traders to build awareness of our work. We don't need you anymore. You're just holding us back.

Bizarre. My self-signed SSL certificate I use to access my email using IMAP over SLL expired last week. The real significance is that we've been on this server for one year now. Compared to how painful working on the old Redhat 7.2 install we had back then, working with a Debian system has been a breeze.

So, I figured I'd just generate a new certificate, the instructions are readily googleable and I'd be playing a little Warcraft in no time. But no, after following the instructions Cyrus's imap server wouldn't start up. Eventually I figured out it was complaining about a missing lib related to the net-snmp package. A year ago, Cyrus 2.2 wasn't in Debian testing yet, but it is now so it ended up being time to upgrade to the official packages.

The install was easy as usual, except for some disconcerting messages about my Cyrus databases needing an upgrade from DBD 3.2 to 4.2. To get the upgrade tool I installed the db4.2-utils package and ran the databases through the utility. I had my fingers crossed, with the spectre of data loss looming nearby (although I do have nightly backups that in theory I can recover from). The conversion worked well to, and all my email is in its place.

Feeling invincible, at this point I decided it was time to upgrade the kernel from the old stock 2.4 kernel to a newer 2.6 linux kernel. The only real reason is that I'd read Mysql performs noticeably better on the 2.6 kernels. Can you tell a difference? As far as I can tell, nothing is massively broken. If you notice anything odd though, please let me know!