[Mon Jan 31 21:05:04 CST 2005]

Today, while reading an entry from Joey Hess in Planet Debian, I came across a little but marvelous application called hnb (the name stands for Hierarchical NoteBook). It is something I have been after for quite some time now. I have no Palm Pilot anymore, and software such as KOrganizer or Evolution is simply too large for me. I just need a simple, small text-based application to keep my own notes, todo lists, calendaring and contact information. That is all. In this case, the GUI just gets on the way. Something curses-based, or even command-based, is fine with me, especially since that would make it easier to run remotely. For a while now I have been mulling the idea of writing my own, but never found the time. Well, as soon as I read Joey's blog entry I downloaded it onto my Ubuntu system, gave it a whirle and... I absolutely love it! I miss a feature though: an alarm for my appointments. It is something JPilot does have and I find quite useful, especially since I tend to be too busy to remember my appointments. I will have to read the documentation a little bit further. Perhaps hnb does have the feature and I just missed it so far. In any case, since this is open source... it can always be added. One little problem with the design: it seems to save all the data into a single XML file. Chances are it will not scale well. {link to this story}

[Thu Jan 27 15:04:26 CST 2005]

If you use xterm a lot and connect to multiple UNIX and Linux environments, you sure must have experienced the dreaded problem where the backspace key does not work and spits out control characters to the terminal screen (usually, ^H). Well, today I came across this excellent article from a Desktop FreeBSD series where the author talks about terminal emulator settings, including lots of wise recommendations such as adding the following to your ~/.Xdefaults:

xterm.Translations: #override 
  BackSpace: string(0x7F)n
  Delete:    string("33[3~")n
  Home:      string("33[H")n
  End:       string("33[F")
*ttyModes: erase ^?

To a great extentn, the article is based on another much better document: Consistent BackSpace and Delete Configuration, by Anne Baretta. Both documents are well worth some time. {link to this story}

[Mon Jan 24 13:25:48 CST 2005]

Some time ago, Red Hat started publishing its Red Hat Magazine online. It is well worth a read every now and then, at least for all those who care about Red Hat technology. Today, they published an article covering the three key technologies that will be coming soon to Red Hat Enterprise Linux: D-BUS, HAL and Network Manager. Do not miss it. {link to this story}

[Thu Jan 20 11:54:15 CST 2005]

The guys at OSNews have started a new and interesting service: Galaxy OS puts together the blogs of several kernel hackers involved in the development of different OSes. Among other stories, today we can read Miguel de Icaza's comments about Novell's new hire and efforts to port Beagle and Evolution to Windows, Robert Love announcing the second edition of his Linux Kernel Development, and other assorted technical and personal musings from various peoples. {link to this story}

[Thu Jan 20 09:16:01 CST 2005]

RSS is one of those technologies that has gained in popularity in the last few years but still could be applied to many more uses and improve the way we do things. It happened with the Web itself. For example, RSS is the ideal solution to share information in small (and large) development groups, as well as between managers and sales centers. Why not use it to centralize sales figures from different offices and keep a single page up to date with information from all over the country? Actually, why not use it to spread internal company news, benefits information, processes updates and the like?. It seems to me as if there is enough room to write a few apps in there. In any case, what prompted all this is an article in NewsForge about building a command-line generator for RSS feeds that, among other things, includes a link to a recipe for publishing CVS commits to RSS. Again, there is plenty of room for creative uses of the technology, I think. {link to this story}

[Thu Jan 20 08:59:27 CST 2005]

OSNews recently carried an article about A Life in the Call Center that sums up pretty well what life in the technical support trenches is like. I have been involved in the tech support business pretty much since I first arrived to the USA about 10 years ago, and must say that what the author talks about either is already the reality in most support centers or it will become the reality sooner or later. Yes, I have known suppor centers that are run in a decent way and which are staffed by people with a tremendous amount of knowledge and experience, people who could perfectly be system administrators out there and actually have been system administrators in a "previous life" (well, as a matter of fact SGI's support team is the only one I have ever known that fits this description). Yet, sooner or later things go downhill and they start to ressemble what the author of that article in OSNews describes: a second thought, an annoying expense that subsequent cuts can prey on in order to boost the bottom line if one's boss is demanding that we reduce costs. As the author points out, it all starts with an excessive attention to the plain numbers. Hey, statistics do not lie, right? Yeah, sure. There are a thousand and two ways to massage the numbers and get the boss whichever results they want. In reality, it all boils down to a very simple choice: does management care about quality or quantity? They all like to say that they care about quality, but in all honesty they never seem to care about anything more than the quantity. After all, that is what guarantees "results" and, above all, their bonuses. Companies give bonuses to middle managers for achieving "results", and these are always measured in the form of statistics and numbers. The quality of the service and an overall improvement in the knowledge of the employees is simply not in the formula. So, who is surprised by the current state of affairs?. As I say, I still have to see a single support center that does not fall for this "the numbers are the only thing that matters" illness. It is about time to get out of the business and go somewhere else. {link to this story}

[Sun Jan 16 18:43:57 CST 2005]

Not everything is sunny in Apple-land these days. I read in VARBusiness that Steve Jobs' great idea to sell directly to customers using his own Apple stores is causing trouble with the faithful channel that stuck with the company throughout so many bad years, and that is cause of some concern. For the time being, I read there are some lawsuits and a website (TellOnApple.org) to spread the negative news about Jobs' strategy and the effect it is having on so many smaller firms that trusted him. Doing business these days is an art form that demands the ability to sell directly to customers without necessarily undermining the channel. It is no easy task, and one can hardly blame Jobs or other CEOs for committing mistakes while trying to square the circle. {link to this story}

[Sun Jan 16 18:35:32 CST 2005]

Robert Faletra writes a great article in Computer Reseller News about the importance of storage in the near future. As he explains,

There simply is no other product, set of products or technology that is as integral to the future sales of everything else in high-tech as storage. Forget about Windows. And Intel is just a chip company. Storage is what matters. This is as true in the enterprise market as it is in the midmarket as it is in the small-business market as it is in the consumer market.

The hottest product in the consumer space, bar none, is Apple's iPod. The iPod, of course, is nothing more than a portable server offering varying amounts of storage. The more storage you buy, the more songs and photographs you can carry around with you. Hewlett-Packard, which is very aggressively looking for growth in the consumer market with a slew of new products, has its eyes squarely on applications for storage in the home. These applications are being driven by people's desire to digitize music and video, store it on a central device, and then move it around to any room in the house as needed. When you move into the small-business and midtier-business markets, the need for storage is ever greater.

Hmmm. There should be enough room here for a local startup. That is for sure. Now, if only I could find some spare time and some extra money... {link to this story}

[Sun Jan 16 18:17:51 CST 2005]

ComputerWorld publishes an interview with Edward M. Hallowell, psychiatrist and renowed expert on attention deficit disorder who discusses the topic of brain overload that many of us in the IT field are exposed to on a daily basis. So, what is the difference between this brain overload and the better known Attention Deficit Disorder or ADD?

You start off the day looking at e-mail. One includes a crisis that you need to take care of. As you start to take care of it, your supervisor knocks on the door with another crisis. Just then, you get a call from home asking you to take care of three things. You bump into a colleague and she complains about how you treated her the day before, and there you go. You're dealing with more than the brain is equipped to handle. (...) It's like chronic stress: once you have it many days in a row, you do walk in with it, and you almost create it. In a funny way, you become addicted to it.

Sounds familiar? Thought so. So, is there any solution, any workaround at least? Hallowell has some recommendations to make.

Nobody can control their work environment. We're all subject to fate. But identify what you can control and focus on that, even if it's just the space on your desk. Instead of entertaining scenes of doom and gloom, which you can't control, engage the problem-solving part of your brain and solve a problem. Try to rebuke the primitive side that keeps jumping up with a fantasy of terror and fear and doom.

As for more down to earth, pracitcal suggestions, here are a few (I emphasized the ones that seem to work the best for me):

• Do whatever you need to —add background music, walk around— to work in a more focused way.
• Don't work on email until you've completed two or three more important tasks.
• Try to act on, file or toss every document you touch. Don't let papers accumulate.
• Keep a part of your work space or desk clear at all times.
• Each day, reserve some "think time" that's free from interruption.
• Before you leave work each day, create a short list of three to five items you will attend to the next day.

{link to this story}

[Sun Jan 16 18:12:41 CST 2005]

ComputerWorld publishes that the EU will be funding a few research projects to develop Linux project tools, with the objective of making open source technology easier to use in large IT environments. One of the tools that will be developed by the US $4.6 million venture is "a peer-to-peer application to help system builders install and integrate various Linux components and track their dependencies", which sounds quite interesting. {link to this story}

[Sat Jan 15 21:28:52 CST 2005]

Brian Proffitt, editor of LinuxToday, wrote a very interesting piece about Red Hat and the accusations of it using "proprietary" software levelled against them by Jonathan Schwartz quite recently. Using the fact that Oracle, for example, is customized to run on Red Hat's Linux enterprise distribution and not other distros, Proffitt argues that the practice itself cannot be considered "proprietary" but "there are some issues" about it nevertheless:

Okay, so what's the problem? After all, I can take the exact same RHEL source code, compile it, call it BPLinux, and run Oracle right on top of it, no sweat. This is also allowed under the GPL. In fact, someone has already done this in an excellent distro known as White Box Linux.

Ah, but remember —I said the problem Sun and others had was with the business practices, not the development, distribution, or licensing of Red Hat.

(...)

If I am a corporate executive and I want to run Oracle on Linux, am I going to (a) go with Red Hat, which costs more, or (b) White Box, which is just as good and is free? If I am serious about making sure my investment works in the long term, I'm going to go with (a). Why? Because along with the ISV arrangement that makes the code work all comfy-cozy, there is also a reciprocal support agreement. Which means that if my Oracle server breaks, I can call Oracle and they will fully support me until said server is fixed —if I am running Red Hat. If I am running White Box? Very likely not —even though it's the same code.

Which means, unless I have a treasure trove of Linux and Oracle gurus at my fingertips, going with White Box may be too risky from a business standpoint. Red Hat, then, has achieved what is effectively vendor lock-in with Oracle. If I want support and updates, I need to stick with a Linux that has ISV or similar support arrangements with the Linux distributor.

It is all fine and well up to this point. It definitely looks like a typical squabble between two major vendors who are competing for a piece of the market pie, as it indeed is the case. Schwartz is being quite disingenous when accusing Red Hat of being "proprietary", to be sure. The practices he is criticizing are, as a matter of fact, no different than the ones implemented by his own company. Still, as Proffitt points out, many in the open source community still feel uncomfortable about Red Hat, and I am not just talking about the dogmatic loonies here. There is indeed a reason to feel uncomfortable:

Then Red Hat announced its big push to get more developer involvement from the community this week and my mind was made up. Pushing for more community involvement is all well and good, until you realize that all of the innovation that goes into Fedora/RHEL will simply be folded into Red Hat's commercial model. Red Hat gains the benefits of the innovation, which will ultimately be shared with the other distributions under the GPL, but the other distros will still be kept locked out in the commercial sense.

If you are a developer who's only interested in making great code, then this may not bother you. But from a business standpoint, this seems a bit unfair.

This is precisely the message I was trying to send through to a good friend of mine while discussing a few years back why I was slowly taking the time to learn Debian GNU/Linux. No, I do not think Red Hat is behaving in an overtly unethical way or anything like that, and I certainly do not believe that they are betraying the open source community either. However, I would not really like the idea of becoming so closely involved with a community (the Fedora community) that is so clearly dominated by Red Hat's interests and where one is working mainly for the benefit of the commercial entity without getting much in exchange, especially when the alternatives (Slackware, Gentoo, Debian...) do exist. Yes, I know Red Hat still pays for the cost of the whole infrastructure behind Fedora and they also give back a lot of the technology to the community. Still, the work of those involved in the efforts to put together the distribution itself does benefit Red Hat, who builds on top of their work to come up with something more stable and polished, while we (and the developers themselves) just keep the scraps of a less polished and vastly more unstable distribution to play with. It is, in that sense, not so different from Microsoft's shared source initiative, where my contribution will still revert in my own benefit but only after Microsoft decides to include it in their product and I pay for the upgrade. Honest, I am not sure cooperating with Fedora is the right thing for the community to do, at least from a political perspective. {link to this story}

[Fri Jan 14 10:41:54 CST 2005]

The recent changes in the development model of the Linux kernel have created some degree of confusion (and complaints from certain quarters too). Unlike it used to happen in the past, there is no active development branch of the kernel right now, and all new development is therefore taking place in the supposedly stable 2.6 branch. Needless to say, while this provides a nice chance to be more responsive to users' (and vendors') feedback without having to wait a year or more for a new release, it is also introducing some instability in what is officially now a stable kernel. So, it is a nice surprise to see Andres Salomon announcing a new kernel tree (the "-as" tree) focused solely on security and bug fixes. Apparently, he started the project as a part of the efforts in the Debian community to stabilize things before the release of Sarge but realized along the way that other vendors out there may also be interested in the idea. It has definitely been welcomed by quite a few people out there. {link to this story}

[Fri Jan 14 10:00:00 CST 2005]

According to CNet News, Red Hat is attempting, yet again, to gain the support of the Linux community to further develop Fedora. The distribution is quite attractive, but it appears to be characterized by a chaotic development that has introduced quite a bit of flakiness in its latest revisions, or at least that has been my experience. Mind you, it is a very nice product, especially taking into account that it is free. Still, it just does not appear to be very consistent. It is in constant flux and decisions appear to be made rather arbitrarily. In any case, CNet lists the following changes that supposedly are "coming to Fedora" in order to change the current status quo:

• Red Hat has opened up the source code repository--governed by software called Concurrent Version System, or CVS--so outsiders can see the latest software that's in the works. Later, outsiders will be able to approve software submissions into CVS, Dekoenigsberg said.
• The company has also begun a project called Fedora Extras, through which others can maintain software packages that are outside the Fedora Core projects Red Hat is responsible for. Red Hat likely will lighten its own load by transferring some projects in Core to Extras, Dekoenigsberg said.
• Red Hat will hold its first-ever Fedora User and Developer Conference —FUDcon— at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Feb. 18 and 19, right after the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in Boston. The conference will be used to hash out issues such as who may commit code to CVS and what qualifications are necessary for packages to be accepted into Extras.
• In addition, the company is offering publicly accessible servers to automate the process of building Fedora Core and Extras software--and ensuring that components don't conflict with each other.

{link to this story}

[Thu Jan 13 09:25:38 CST 2005]

Just a couple of days ago, Apple announced its new Mac mini, and it has been the talk of the town ever since. It is, as far as I can tell, the first time Apple brings itself down (so to speak) to making an attractive piece of hardware at a low price, and there are many people out there very excited. For around US $500 you can get a tiny mini-computer with a 1.42 GHz G4 processor, a 40GB hard drive, 256 MB of memory, an ATI Radeon 9200 graphics chip with 32 MB dedicated DDR SDRAM, integrated ethernet, modem, CD-ROM burner, DVD-ROM reader, USB and firewire expansion... all in a 2-inch tall, 6.5-inch square anodized aluminum tiny little box that barely makes any noise. In other words, ideal for home users who do not need the latest of the latest in order to develop games or rewrite kernels. Of course, it runs on MacOS X. I am so sick of experiencing problems with my wife's Windows XP box that I would go out and buy one right now if I had the money. Sorry, Microsoft, but in spite of all these years you still have to finally come up with a kernel that truly understands how to handle multiuser environements, and even though XP is stable and I did not see a single dreaded blue screen of death in years, the reality is that it still crawls to a halt if one does not reformat and reinstall every year or so. I would rather have my wife run an Apple system that also allows me the flexibility to perform backups using my own scripts and even perform system administration remotely without a lot of hassle.

In the meantime, today I read that Apple is also shuffling the lower-end iPod market with a new iPod Mini that retails for US $90 and has 512 MB of storage. Not only is Apple innovating again since Steve Jobs returned to pilot the ship, but they are even starting to bring products out to market at very competitive prices. Heck, they are making the technology world exciting again!. {link to this story}

[Thu Jan 13 09:19:35 CST 2005]

The good guys who develop for GNOME continue giving us nice tools. Jorge O. Castro wrote an article on Working with Remote Resources published by The GNOME Journal where he tells us how to the GNOME VFS abstraction library to mount remote resources in a seemless (i.e., truly user-friendly) way. Apparently, they are already working on some command-line tools that will accomplish the same without a need to run the GUI. As I said somewhere else, GNOME is definitely getting better and better. These guys are doing an excellent job. {link to this story}

[Mon Jan 10 09:22:49 CST 2005]

Linux Magazine made public on their website a couple of articles with some information on how to maintain Fedora up to date using apt and yum. They are well worth a read if you dislike Red Hat's atrocius up2date tool. {link to this story}

[Fri Jan 7 11:04:34 CST 2005]

Christopher Blizzard, Red Hat maintainer of Mozilla packages, wrote in his blog about Red Hat's plans to open source the Netscape server code recently purchased from AOL.

Just a bit of background. The main items that were acquired, in case you weren't paying attention, were the former Netscape Directory Server and Certificate Server and a bunch of other odds and ends, including the Mail Server and the old Netscape Enterprise Server (NES was Netscape's web server. That isn't really obvious from the name.) The deal also came with a bunch of wonderful and motivated people to develop and support the software. (...)

So why spend this money on this software? The main reason is that it fills a huge hole in the software stack for Red Hat's product offerings. Think about it. One of the things that we, as software developers who care about whether or not we're using open source software, have been missing is a decent directory server. No offense meant to the openldap folks, but it's well known that openldap doesn't scale as well as it needs to and is missing some very basic functionality that competing proprietary directory servers include today. The Netscape Directory Server is fast. And is full-featured. It's already used in some very large deployments. The software in question has been under active development for the last few years, and is quite mature and enterprise-ready.

As for the general reaction many people are taking to Red Hat lately, he writes:

More and more often it seems that Red Hat is seen as the 400lb gorilla in the open source world. At least this is what I hear from people I talk to. We make people nervous. Personally, I worry about this perception. I've worked at Red Hat for a long time by Red Hat standards. I've watched us go from a company based on a business model selling t-shirts and mugs to one that makes a living adding tremendous value to the lives and business of our customers. And at the same time, we've managed to keep our core values intact. Those of you on the outside might not see it, but it's still there and we try to make sure that everyone who comes through our doors to work for us is implanted with that DNA.

We know that the perception of arrogance can make it nearly impossible to build an open source project that works. We'll need to get past that perception in order to make this project a success. Companies that open source software expecting "free help" to build their products within the narrow scope of vision as that company sees it aren't going to get it. In fact, they often get what they least expected. From where we sit, open source is a delicate balance of balancing business interests with the larger interests of the community. In order to build a successful project, you need to have a vibrant community that includes a variety of different viewpoints and users. The marketplace of ideas must be open for business. This means that Red Hat's developers must be seen as competent peers, not as undeserving despots. This project must be no different. Simply put: Don't be evil.

It is quite exciting to hear that Red Hat appears to have plans to open source the software they purchased from AOL. Both the Netscape Directory Server and their Enterprise Server are excellent products that should do nothing but boost the open source solutions as a true enterprise alternative out there. And, and usual, kudos go to Red Hat for maintaining the excellent level of decency they have kept in spite of becoming a large public company. It is no easy task. {link to this story}

[Fri Jan 7 08:45:30 CST 2005]

Yesterday, Microsoft released antispyware and malware removal tools. My wife downloaded it, ran it on her Windows XP system and found about 180 files and registry keys that had been touched by a various assortment of spyware applications. Reading the information about these programs, it turned out that (oh, surprise!) they were all related to Internet Explorer. I suppose they were installed back in the days before I could convince my wife to switch to Firefox. In any case, it does indeed tell us a lot about the overall security of Microsoft products. Yeah, yeah, the are prey to many attacks simply because Microsoft's products are very widespread. Whatever. All I care about (and my assumption is that it also applies to most companies) is that my wife's computer had lots of spyware and malware software that had been installed without her even knowing. There may very well be lots of reasons to explain why so many crackers out there pick on Microsoft, but I could not care any less. My worry is, simply, that our systems are not secure.

Anyways, what I find most interesting about the release of this product is that, once again, Microsoft is expanding to yet another software market and entering into direct competition with other companies in the industry. It is not clear yet whether these particular tools will remain free or Microsoft will charge for them sooner or later, but in the meantime they sure are giving some headaches to the likes of Norton and Symantec out there. All this while Microsoft's top executives talk about how open source is "threatening" the "software ecosystem" by pushing companies out of business with lower-cost solutions. Gotta love their double talk! {link to this story}

[Thu Jan 6 11:16:34 CST 2005]

O'Reilly Network publishes an interview with Andy Hertzfeld, of Apple and Eazel fame. He has just published Revolution in the Valley, the personal story of how the Macintosh got started, which should delight all the Mac fans out there. Incidentally, while reading the interview I found out about Folklore, the website where Hertzfeld has been collecting stories from the first Apple days. It makes for some fun reading. {link to this story}

[Thu Jan 6 09:18:42 CST 2005]

Gregory McGarry took the time to put together some benchmarks comparing NetBSD and FreeBSD. The result? Well, overall NetBSD has either closed the gap with FreeBSD or it has simply surpassed it. He measured things like system call overhead, context switch time, process creation time, memory-mapped file setup, socket creation, latency to bind an address to a socket, thread creation time for increasing load, thread context switch time, etc. Among other things, he writes the following in his conclusions:

The results clearly indicate that recent architectural decisions in the NetBSD operating system have closed the performance gap between NetBSD and FreeBSD. In fact, NetBSD has surpassed FreeBSD in performance in the areas investigated in this paper. Significant performance improvements are obviously visible in the thread implementation.

(...)

There are many other interesting developments in NetBSD 2.0 and FreeBSD 5.3 that deserve to be compared. Although NetBSD 2.0 has outperformed FreeBSD 5.3 in most of the benchmarks presented here, FreeBSD 5.3 has made significant developments with its symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) architecture, particularly in the area of scalability with fine-grained locking. NetBSD 2.0 continues to use a single lock to serialize access to kernel mode. Additionally, the performance of the thread implementation on multiprocessor systems, where thread concurrency can be achieved, would be worth investigating. Benchmarks for these areas are the objective of future research.

{link to this story}

[Wed Jan 5 13:35:10 CST 2005]

KernelTrap publishes yet another interview with Richard Stallman. As it is usually the case with RMS, his convictions are deeply seated and he manages to come across as a fanatic sometimes, but one has to admit the powerful consistency of his arguments.

People know that Linus Torvalds wrote his program Linux to have fun. And people know that Linus Torvalds did not say that it's wrong to stop users for sharing and changing the software they use. If they think that our system was started by him and primarily owes existence to him, they will tend to follow his philosophy, and that weakens our community.

It's an interesting anecdote to think that the whole operating system exists because an undergraduate thought that it was a fun project. But the real story is that this system exists because of people who were determined to fight for freedom and willing to work for years if that's what it took. That's a story that teaches people something worth learning.

When people forget that, they start drifting toward the practical but superficial values shared by the open source movement and Microsoft: the idea that the only thing that matters about your software is whether it gets your jobs done and what it costs.

By the way, he also provides some additional information on the long delayed GNU Hurd kernel.

The Hurd offers interesting, powerful capabilities. For instance, you can write your own filesystem, so you could implement any sort of behavior you want and package it as a file. It offers the possibility of implementing sandboxes, where you can run a program but have another program monitoring all its I/O to make sure it doesn't start writing in files it wasn't expected to. (...) These things may be doable with a kernel that doesn't have the Hurd's architecture, but with the Hurd it's trivial and the most natural thing in the world.

{link to this story}

[Wed Jan 5 13:19:41 CST 2005]

Microsoft just announced it is pulling the plug on Windows XP for the Itanium2 processor. It should not surprise many people, since Intel's Itanium2 appears to be concentrating most of its deployments in the mid- to high-end server market, especially in the high-performance sector. There is little room for a workstation OS there, especially after HP recently announced it was also dropping its Itanium workstations. So, who is to gain from all this? Evidently, AMD. Microsoft will continue developing and supporting its x86-64 OS, and Linux is also leaping forward in that platform. It looks as if Intel finally found a tough competitor in the chip business. {link to this story}

[Wed Jan 5 11:09:59 CST 2005]

Yesterday, I came across a fast an easy way to speed up your Firefox browser, gave it a try on my wife's Windows XP system and it appears to work. It is usually quite difficult to quantify this sort of performance improvements but it certainly does feel faster. In any case, all you need to do is type about:config in the location bar of your browser, and then change the following entries to "true":

network.http.pipelining
network.http.proxy.pipelining

Also, make sure you change network.http.pipelining.maxrequests to a higher number (I chose 20), and finally right-click somewhere, select New, then Integer, and create a new entry labeled nglayout.initialpaint.delay set to "0" (zero). {link to this story}

[Wed Jan 5 10:44:45 CST 2005]

In its attempt to get out of financial trouble, HP today announced new products for a digital home. It should be pretty clear by now that HP is desperately trying to diversify and break out of its traditional markets, desktop PCs and printers. It is anybody's guess whether it will work or not, but I have the feeling they are barely starting to try new things way too late. While Carly Fiorina and company were worried about their megamerger with Compaq, the world continued changing at a fast pace and was about to leave them behind. I still think HP definitely has plenty of room to maneuver, but tardiness has a price and I also have the feeling that it will now hurt more than it should have if they had tackled it on time. In any case, according to the article on CNet:

Joshi [executive vice president of HP's imaging and printing group] said HP's approach essentially divides the world into two types of digital consumers —those who want to keep the PC experience while accessing multimedia, and those who don't.

HP's new media hub will run the Linux operating system, offer high-definition television recording and an Ethernet connection to access media files such as photos, music and home video stored on a PC. The device will use a remote control rather than a keyboard, offering a simpler interface for consumers who don't want a full PC experience.

For PC aficionados, HP will release two new versions of its Digital Entertainment Center PC, which runs Microsoft's Windows XP Media Center Edition operating system.

{link to this story}

[Mon Jan 3 13:51:35 CST 2005]

Nobody can honestly say that he is too surprised about the news but the fact that apparently Microsoft already sold more units of Windows server than all flavors of UNIX combined has some historical significance. The article also mentions, oh surprise, that the likes of Solaris, AIX and HP-UX are been squeezed both by Windows and Linux at the same time. {link to this story}

[Sat Jan 1 15:58:41 CST 2005]

It never stops amazing me how many technology pundits out there appear to ignore anything that is not mainstream according to their own definition. They merrily go on telling us about Microsoft's supposed innovations even though the Redmonites are quite often doing little more than rediscovering what someone else invented decades before. This is the case of Dana Blankenhorn and Joe Brockmeier writing in ZDNet about the excellence of the new Microsoft command shell, especially when compared to the stalling in development of the GNU bash. In their turn, they base their opinions on an entry from Jon Udell's blog where he tells us about his first-hand experience with the Microsoft Shell (MSH). Now, the whole thing would be fairly inoffensive if it were not for the well known pattern we have seen before where Microsoft manages to launch a blitzkrieg marketing campaign announcing some supposedly new invention of theirs as the best thing since sliced bread, and lots and lots of people in the industry parrot the party line enough times to actually make everybody else believe that it was truly Microsoft that came up with it in the first place. Among other great features that characterize this new MSH product we have, according to Udell, a way to show "a raw process dump" to the screen by using the get-process command (in other words, the same as the ps command, which has been part of UNIX since the very beginning) and, hold onto your seats, a pipe that allows you to grab the output of one command and feed it into another one (Udell uses an example such as get-process | out-excel to automatically feed the process table information to an Excel spreadsheet, which is the very same thing you can get on Linux by typing ps auxw | gnumeric). It is simply ridiculous that here we have industry pundits touting a "new" invention coming out of Redmond that has been used since the early seventies. However, even more pathetic it is to reflect about the fact that if they keep repeating the same lie a thousand times most people will eventually believe it. In the meantime, we do nothing but to reinvent the wheel. Kudos to Microsoft. It sounds as if after more than thirty years they are finally close to getting a shell that can actually be used to do some real work. {link to this story}