[Sat Jan 31 10:13:51 CST 2015]

Wired publishes an article arguing that nobody knows what an iPad is good for anymore:

In 2010, the year the iPad debuted, Steve Jobs famously compared tablets to PCs using the analogy of cars and trucks. Trucks were essential when we were all farmers, Jobs said, but as we moved to cities and the suburbs surrounding them, nimbler vehicles became more practical. Innovations like automatic transmission and power steering made cars even more attractive. PCs and Macs, Jobs said, were going to be like trucks. They’d stick around, they just wouldn’t be for everyone. Eventually, tablets would take over.

Jobs might’ve been right about PCs, but he got the analogy wrong. Smartphones are cars. Today, tablets are looking a little more like mini-vans, or motorcycles.

Basically, they argue that the tablet computers are being squeezed from both ends: one the one hand, today's smartphones are far more capable and have a larger screen; on the other, laptops are getting lighter and lighter, and also have a longer battery life. In those circumstances, why bother with a tablet at all?

The thing is that I still use mine fairly often. What do I use it for? To videoconference with my parents, watch videos, spend a few more minutes learning Portuguese with Duolingo or to read ebooks and longer texts. Other than that, yes, it's true that most other activities I do them either on the laptop or the smartphone. Anything that requires more processing power usually goes to the laptop. That includes not only work, but also writing any text, programming or doing any sort of editing, even if it's on a picture. However, plenty of email, daily tools (calendars, todo, messaging, reminders, money management...), as well as casual browsing and reading of short texts is done on the smartphone. So, I can see the point, but the thing is that I still find the tablet useful for certain activities. Perhaps it's a market that won't grow a lot in the next few years, and I definitely think that schools chose the wrong gadget when they distributed tablets among their students instead of another device that makes them take a more active stance, but I don't think they are going away any time soon. They fill a useful niche, I think. {link to this entry}

[Sun Jan 25 17:20:59 CST 2015]

Although I think live kernel patching has been around in big enterprise operating systems, such as Solaris, I think it's quite exciting that it now looks as if it will come to Linux pretty soon. Actually, it's already here, although it's not very stable, feature-complete or comprehensive yet. As far as I know, it's not available for Windows or Mac OS yet.

As it tends to be the case in the open source world, there are multiple competing implementations vying for your attention. Chances are that only one or two of them will end up succeeding and becoming the mainstream solution. First of all, we have ksplice, an open source extension the Linux kernel that allows patches to be applied without downtime. It was purchased by Oracle back in July 2011 and, as as it could be expected, right after being bought it was announced that it would stop supporting anything other than Oracle Linux. We also have kGraft, developed by SUSE, as well as kpatch, developed by Red Hat. These other two were submitted for inclusion into the Linux kernel mainline. So, sooner or later, chances are that one, the other, or a combination of both will become the officially sanctioned implementation. In the meantime, they are still being actively developed and, don't fool yourself, are not very stable yet. As a matter of fact, neither technology makes it possible to apply all patches released as bug or security fixes, as far as I know. They are just a step in the right directin. If you want to learn a bit more about them, here is an interview with Voijtech Pavlik, Director of SUSE Labs, on kGraft and a RHEL Blog entry on kpatch. {link to this entry}

[Fri Jan 23 09:27:51 CST 2015]

Here is another one that has been pestering me when attempting to update the packages installed on my Debian laptop:

The following packages have been kept back:
  google-musicmanager-beta google-talkplugin icedove iceowl-extension

In this case, it is a bunch of packages that are kept back. I still haven't bothered to check what's the deal with the Google packages, but the problems with Icedove and its extension can be solved by running the following command as root:

# apt-get dist-upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  calendar-timezones
The following packages have been kept back:
  google-musicmanager-beta google-talkplugin
The following packages will be upgraded:
  icedove iceowl-extension
2 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 2 not upgraded.
Need to get 31.8 MB of archives.
After this operation, 37.7 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y
(...)

Notice, though, that running apt-get dist-upgrade could potentially wreck things on a stable system. Always review the information the command will display telling you what it will do. In this case, it's quite harmless. So, now all that bothers me is those two other Google packages. It's no big deal. Just a bit annoying. {link to this entry}

[Fri Jan 23 09:08:26 CST 2015]

Here is an issue that has been bothering me on my laptop running Debian Wheezy for a while now when trying to install the latest updates. It started quite recently.

(...)
Fetched 1,022 kB in 2s (387 kB/s)
Reading package lists... Done
W: A error occurred during the signature verification. The repository is
not updated and the previous index files will be used. GPG error:
ftp://ftp.deb-multimedia.org wheezy Release: The following signatures
couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY
5C808C2B65558117

W: Failed to fetch ftp://ftp.deb-multimedia.org/dists/wheezy/Release

W: Some index files failed to download. They have been ignored, or old
ones used instead.

The problem here is that the Debian Multimedia repository added a new key about a week ago. The solution is as simple as running this:

# apt-get install deb-multimedia-keyring

# apt-get update

{link to this entry}