[Fri Feb 24 08:15:16 CST 2006]

I checked my Inbox first thing this morning, and was pretty glad to read the following email from Greg groggy Lehey:

Ten years ago today, on 24 February 1996, I submitted for publication the final version of the first ever book on FreeBSD, "Installing and Using FreeBSD". It was later renamed to "The Complete FreeBSD". I have always retained full rights to the book, and for today I've decided to release it for download under the Creative Commons license. See more at http://www.lemis.com/grog/Documentation/CFBSD/. Greg

If you have been using FreeBSD for a while, you will appreciate this move. The Complete FreeBSD is one of the classics for the users of that operating system. {link to this story}

[Wed Feb 22 15:22:49 CST 2006]

The good guys who are working for the GNOME project are doing, I think, an excellent job in spite of the criticisms one hears every now and then. Some people complain about the desktop environment being "a hog", but I still run it on old Pentium II systems with no more than 256MB of RAM and can do my work just fine. Other people think it is too constraining, at least in the sense that it aims for simplicity and does not offer as many configuration choices as KDE. To those other people, I can only say that it all depends on personal preference, and simplicity is actually a virtue, or at least to me it is indeed a virtue, especially when it comes to software. I find GNOME to be simple enough so that I do not feel overwhelmed by the exaggerate amount of buttons, preferences, menues and choices that one can find on any KDE desktop, and yet if I wish to customize it I can still get the plumbing tools and edit files at will. So, to me, it sounds like a truly non-existing problem. In any case, I came across a lootk at GNOME 2.14 yesterday that left me quite surprised at the maturity level of the project as a whole. When not so long ago people were complaining about the instability of their desktop environment and most objective analysts called it a desktop "for hobbyists", GNOME has been quickly becoming a serious contender for the enterprise desktop in the last few years, I think. This latest release includes not only the much needed performance improvements to the memory allocation system and the GNOME Terminal but also new features such as Pessulus, a lockdown editor that should prove very useful in corporate environments; Sabayon, a tool that allows administrators to quickly create user profiles using templates; new searching capabilities and an interesting Deskbar applet that gives users the capability to execute programs, open bookmarks, use search engines, do live Google or Yahoo searches directly from the desktop bar. All in all, the new GNOME appears to be a pretty decent piece of software. {link to this story}

[Wed Feb 22 14:44:06 CST 2006]

Some humor is always welcome. NetworkWorld has posted a couple of pictures showing the world's largest Windows error message from New York's Times Square. I know, it could happen to anyone. Still, it is sort of humorous. I especially like the "Please, tell Microsoft about this problem" message.

{link to this story}

[Wed Feb 15 08:58:34 CST 2006]

While reading a story about how the fdounder of Gentoo, Daniel Robbins, recently quitted Micrososft I came across one of those comments that makes you smile:

Robbins told ZDNET UK in an e-mail Monday that he decided to leave because he was not able to use all his technical skills in his role.

"I didn't make the decision to leave Microsoft due to concerns about the company as a whole —Microsoft has just had a string of very successful product launches and I anticipate that it will continue to enjoy great success", he said.

Hehehee. I am not sure we need Daniel Robbins' wisdom to learn that Microsoft "will continue to enjoy great success". Certain things are just a given, at least for a while. Still, it made me chuckle this morning, which is always a good thing. {link to this story}

[Sat Feb 11 18:32:38 CST 2006]

eWeek published an impassioned defense of the toll-free Internet that is well worth some consideration.

In recent months, all three remaining baby bells —Verizon, BellSouth and AT&T-SBC— have made noise about charging additional fees to network-traffic-generating businesses such as Google and Apple, claiming that their profitable bandwidth-intensive applications are free riders on the telecommunications carriers' networks.

While the phone companies say they don't propose to block specific applications altogether, as serice provider Madison River Communications attempted to do in blocking Vonage VOIP (voice over IP) traffic through its network last year, they are pushing to scrap the application- and provider-neutral Internet we know in favor of a multitiered version in which providers would be required to pay premium prices for the privilege of furnishing popular services.

A moev toward a toll-road model would be bad for the Internet and bad for the quickly expanding ranks of individuals and businesses that depend on it. The broadband Internet, like the Interstate Highway System, is infrastructure that's vital to our nation's interests.

(...)

One of the strengths of the Internet is that the intelligence it contains is situated on the periphery: The network is charged merely with delivering the bits, without unseen hands choosing which packets to prioritize or regulate.

We need the content neutrality that has long been the Internet's hallmark, whether broadband providers embrace it on their own or whether legislative actions is required to ensure it.

The example of the Interstate Highway System is quite appropriate here, since by now the Internet has become way too central to our technology-centered lifestyle (and, let us be honest, to our economies) to be able to afford a toll-road model. Every now and then we hear the proponents of an unfettered market cry foul when this or that government talks about taxing online sales, but it seems clear to me that the impact of the baby bells' proposed charge of additional fees to network-generating businesses would be considerably worse. While understanding the cost of maintaining this infrastructure, there should be little doubt in anyone's mind that we just cannot afford to go to a toll-road model. Is it time that the governments get involved and either take over the global network infrastructure or at the very least subsidize it? After all, that is what we do with roads, airports and railways and nobody thinks that amount to setting up a Communist regime. {link to this story}

[Sat Feb 11 17:52:54 CST 2006]

If you liked the Mac mini and thought it was the coolest thing since sliced bread, you may want to check out the AOpen miniPC, a similar idea (actually, to be honest, it is the very same thing, and it even looks the same!) applied to PC Land. Now, I am not sure the price is right though. Sure, the thing is sleek, looks nice in the living room, it is easy to hide behind something and it does not make much noise, but it still costs US $1,200 when these days it is quite easy to buy a white box for a few hundred bucks. {link to this story}

[Sat Feb 11 17:45:05 CST 2006]

Remember that a few weeks back I wrote about the possibility of taking the concept of mobile computing to new heights by carrying your own OS together with the apps and personal files with you at all times using one of those thumb drives? (Of course not! Who gives a damn about what I write in these pages anyways?) Well, I recently came across a SimpleTech SimpleDrive mini 1-inch external USB drive with a whopping 4 GB of storage that sells for US $99. {link to this story}

[Sat Feb 11 17:26:54 CST 2006]

My wife recently had a need for a larger drive on her dual CPU Apple G4, purchased one online and, after a while fiddling with it, noticed that the operating system would only recognize 128 GB even though this was a 250 GB internal ATA drive. Now, I am not that familiar with Apple and the PowerPC technologies, but it certainly seemed weird that the operating system would not recognize the full size of the drive, especially taking into account that this is a modern OS after all. In the end, it turned out she needed an expansion PCI card in order to make it work properly. So, she went out, bought one, and tried to install it, rendering the system unbootable in the process when she launched the System Disk utility and chose to boot from the Apple MacOS 9 the next time the system powered up (it is a long story, but the gist of if is that the manufacturer of the expansion PCI card had included a manual recommending to do precisely this in order to install the drivers... the problem being that we never had MacOS 9 installed on our system and pretending that all users out there will have done so is, of course, a stupid assumption to make by a manufacturer, but I digress). So, here we are, unable to boot the OS from our system disk, and we cannot find the MacOS X installation CD anywhere. So, I decided to burn a copy of the Ubuntu 5.10 Live CD for PowerPC and boot from it to save a few files onto an external USB drive. Well, I must say I was quite impressed by the way Ubuntu worked. Performance was slow, of course (we were running off a CD, after all), but I managed to do all I needed to do easily enough. I plugged the external USB drive, at which point Ubuntu automatically opened up a Nautilus window with the contents of the drive and all I had to do was drag and drop all the files while I browsed around the Web reading some news. As I said, I was quite impressed. Kudos to the folks working on the Ubuntu PowerPC port. By the way, I must say the following day not only did my wife managed to boot from the installation CD after she found it in an Apple keyboard box next to the computer, but she managed to repair the problem and get the expansion PCI card and the new drive to work after searching around for some documentation in Google. Kudos to my lovely geeky wife too! :) {link to this story}

[Sat Feb 11 17:21:19 CST 2006]

If you use Rhythmbox, you may have run into a familiar problem: the default installation does not include many choices of Internet radio stations, to put it mildly. So, every now and then people, post questions in the web forums or send an email to the mailing lists asking for more links. If you are one of those, simply point your favorite browser to Shoutcast.com, right-click on the Tune In button of any of the radio stations you see, and enter the URL in your Rhytmbox using the New Internet Radio Station dialog under the Music menu (you can also bring it up by using the Ctrl+i hotkey combination). {link to this story}

[Sat Feb 11 09:52:15 CST 2006]

eWeek recently published a story about how eTrade switched its infrastructure from Sun to Linux, leading to savings of up to US $13 million annually, better performance and more flexibility to adapt to today's dynamic business environment. In other words, nothing surprising there. Nothing that we did not know before. Still, it is something that for whatever reason needs to be told and retold, explained and re-explained, before people understand it. I suppose large commercial firms (such as Sun) hire expensive marketing departments for a reason, and chief among those reasons is to spread a good dose of fear and uncertainty about competitive products among potential customers. Here is what eTrade learnt:

Tests showed that the Linux box could handle about 180 users at a time, compared with 300 to 400 users on one of eTrade's Sun 4500 servers. Performance on the Linux box dropped sharply when there were more than about 180 users, but, before that point, the Linux box performed faster than the Sun server.

After the Linux box's price was factored in, eTrade had itself a new computing platform.

"I demonstrated this on Halloween 2001, and it was pretty simple", said Thompson [Lee Thompson is eTrade's vice president of architecture]. "These Sun 4500s were costing about a quarter of a million dollars apiece, and we could run 300 to 400 users on them. And here's this little box that cost us about $4,000. It was running faster, but you could only run 180 people on it. Josh Levine, the CIO at the time, said, 'Well, then we just need to get two, for $8,000. Do it —put a box in production'. So, it was a fairly short meeting".

With this mandate, eTrade's architecture department got back to work, putting the new stack through a series of tests. In December 2001, it put the Linux box into production, alongside the rows of Sun 4500s that sat behind eTrade's load balancers. "Here's this little $4,000 box, playing, literally, with the big boys of computing and doing very, very well", said Thompson. "Everybody was pretty floored by this —a lot of the systems engineers who do our production operation were all going over to the box and couldn't believe how well this little machine was doing".

The next step was to switch from Sun's development tools to the opensource ones, replacing the Sun Studio compilers with GCC, among other things. The use of Java on many of their applications make the move easier than expected, actually. It is precisely this trend that we can find behind the crisis affecting companies like Cray, SGI or Sun, while both IBM and HP appear to be adapting rather well. I know. It is nothing new, but I thought the story was quite telling, especially since we are talking about a business that needs the highest possible level of reliability and performance, after all. {link to this story}