Archive for December, 2006
Wednesday, December 20th, 2006
Project Looking Glass Releases v1.0
I used Project Looking Glass a few years ago (boy was it unstable…) but it looks like they’ve made it to a stable v1.0 and I can’t wait to try it on my OpenSuse desktop. This is a Sun project that was open sourced way back although I don’t believe it picked up much community development interest. Seeing a 1.0 release shows Sun has chugged along with it though and I think that’s a good thing for Java.
I know GoMonkey has been using it for this cool, futuristic 3D Wii like control system. Looking Glass is a cool, fresh look at interfaces. It’s different from XGL/AIGLX b/c those make the environment 3D with a 2D desktop/windows, but looking glass makes the desktop itself (windows, backgrounds) all 3D. It’s a different perspective – so with Looking Glass you can post notes on the back of your window, your application switcher is 3D, and you can get Mac OS X Tiger / Vista type effects.
I won’t say it’s the best desktop environment out there for everyone, but it definitely has some unique characteristics other environments could adopt. In the grand scheme of things, all these innovations are Microsoft innovations anyway right so I’m sure some folks up in the Northwest have some reason to say why LG is just a clone of Vista ;-) (I hope you know that was a joke)
Anyway, check it out if you have some time over the holiday. It appears Ubuntu is their distro of choice (shocking, I know).
Monday, December 18th, 2006
Movie Downloads for PSP Users: Potentially Cool
Interesting rumors about movie downloads for the PSP.
I’m always skeptical of these plans b/c 1) they always seem to involve obnoxious DRM policies, and 2) b/c why would I buy a limited version for a specific HW device when I can buy a DVD and push the media to any device I want (although admittedly not per license agreement).
Monday, December 18th, 2006
Creative open sourcing (some) sound card drivers
Interesting news back in May that I must have missed…
May 18, 2006 — Creative plans to make proprietary (closed source) drivers available for the X-Fi series of sound cards in the second quarter of 2007. These drivers will have full support for ALSA (playback, recording, mixer, MIDI, synthesis) and OpenAL 1.1 (with EAX effects).
Monday, December 18th, 2006
You Witness News: DIY Photo Journalism is Easy
I found news of this new photojournalism channel very exciting. The basic pitch is that with everyone having digital cameras and now video recorders stuffed into their everyday consumer devices, why not pay them for their coverage of events they are at. Instead of having a journalist canvassing (paid) every square inch of every city for the latest “shot”, why not pay everyday Joe and Janes for the pictures they capture (and for cheaper)?
The problem I think they’re trying to solve is twofold: 1) news is global, yet local and it’s hard to scale the current, traditional model and 2) with digital dissemination, rights to digital content gets more difficult and with many royalty structures expensive…
So the answer seems to be You Witness News from Yahoo! News. Whether it works or not as a business model is certainly TBD, but wouldn’t it be cool if the picture you snapped of the elephant that broke out of the zoo and ran down Main St. landed on a Yahoo! or Reuters article covered around the globe? And you’d get paid for it….? I think this is a very innovative idea. I’m sure there are many photojournalists who would disagree. I think the hardest challenge Yahoo! will have is educating people this exists. I’ve seen them posting it in various photo sites, but even then it’s hard to hit the masses.
Monday, December 18th, 2006
Adobe Launches Photoshop CS3 Beta… sadly no Linux version
Sadly Linux is not a platform yet for Adobe and Photoshop. However, via Adobe labs you can get your hands on their latest CS3 beta here. The new features being introduced are listed here. A couple that I find enticing are: 1) Automatic layer alignment and blending (if it really works), 2) Multiple, adjustable angle planes for wrapping images around planes and 3) for Mac users, native Intel performance (and for Windows users, native Vista … well performance support…)
I’d really like to see a Linux version.
Monday, December 18th, 2006
Time Magazine Person of the Year: You (and me I guess)
Interesting reflection on the growing popularity of user-generated content.
El Reg coverage of the news available here with the usual reg twist.
Monday, December 18th, 2006
OraFAQ.com runs on MySQL??
Interesting factoid I picked up here.. which pointed me here and which pointed to the proof point here. (didn’t even take 6 degrees of separation)
Apparently the Oracle FAQ site orafaq.com actually runs on MySQL – not Oracle. That seemed very odd at first, but then it makes sense in the context of the cost of an Oracle commercial license. I’m surprised Oracle has not given them a license “at a large discount”…
Friday, December 15th, 2006
SystemTap and kdump get press
Nice to see these projects get some deserved attention:
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39285165,00.htm?user_rating=1
Friday, December 15th, 2006
El Reg interview with Mark Anders (Flash, ASP.Net fame)
You all may find this interesting as well. I haven’t tried out Flex Builder yet… will need to find a demo somewhere.
http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2006/12/15/mark_anders_flash/
There’s a ringing endorsement for Eclipse built into this too:
Microsoft isn’t doing that [cross platform support] with Windows Forms and Rotor is just nothing – because I knew how it was built. That was kind of surprising. Even if I liked .NET more than I liked Java and even if I thought there were some better features in .NET, and I liked C# as a language – if you’re building a tool .NET has nothing for you. And the problem is not the syntax of the classes or the performance or that it gives me a nice Windows native UI. It’s just Eclipse is an incredible framework for building tools.
Friday, December 15th, 2006
How is Google Patents search different from the USPTO search?
If you’ve ever used the USPTO’s website to perform a patent search you have probably found it’s a real pain. Most lawyers don’t use it either – they pay other services providers to do the patent search for them. That’s why I was so excited when I heard Google was launching a Patent Search (Google Patents: http://www.google.com/patents) product and visions of simplified searches filled my head. It’s free of course, doesn’t yet appear to be sponsored by ads, and it’s fast. Plus, you are not limited to searching by fields – you can run a wide open query across all fields (nice) and if you want to go granular with various in field searches, that option is there too.
The cool thing about this is it makes patent searches much easier for non-lawyers and in my view is very good for developers or project leads in the community. It’s still a Google ‘beta’ but I think this one has some long term potential.
Thursday, December 14th, 2006
Red Hat’s Pinchev: Customers not afraid of Microsoft and calls out Oracle’s “cheaper pricing”
I tend to agree…. this is a pretty candid Pinchev interview and worth a read.
http://news.com.com/Red+Hat+Customers+are+not+afraid+of+Microsoft/2100-7344_3-6143516.html
Couple of interesting quotes:
One thing Larry (Ellison, Oracle chief executive) says on stage, another in reality. It’s half our list price without volume discounts and it’s just vanilla support. With Oracle, there’s one 24-7 support, the same subscription for all your environment. You are buying support you don’t need. We discuss with customers different service levels for dedicated parts of their infrastructure.
There were 18 security breaches in 2005 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Ninety percent were fixed within one hour. You will not see that at Microsoft.
Thursday, December 14th, 2006
You start to feel old when….
you realize you have used most of the Top 25 Killer Apps of All Time.
I would have included GW BASIC… but oh well. It’s been some time since someone has mentioned dBase II, Aldus PageMaker, and WordStar (I didn’t know that went back to ‘78… I used it in the late 80’s).
Firefox made it – cool. IE 1.0 as a killer app, I’d have to respectfully disagree – that was one of the Top 25 worst apps of all time. I’m surprised Linux didn’t make the list… hmmm… maybe there’s a hidden 26th?
Thursday, December 14th, 2006
Xen livecd: Xenoppix
Ever wanted to try using Xen virtualization but didn’t have time to wipe out a system or work through swapping out kernels? Try a Xen livecd like Xenoppix.
Thursday, December 14th, 2006
Required Reading: Q&A with Jerry Rosenthal from OIN
In the first part of this, Pamela Jones gives her view – if you want to skip that part, fine – at least jump down to the Q&A section and read Jerry’s responses.
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20061213031455474
I do agree with Pamela on the ‘top quote’:
There are a number of organizations that collect IP portfolios in order to make them available to be shared by all. We are also here to take the actions that might be required, against businesses or organizations that look to use IP to harm the Linux environment.
Unlike operating systems owned by individual companies like Sun, Microsoft or Apple – there is no one company that owns the majority of the IP related to Linux. This, to a certain extent, made companies that leveraged Linux vulnerable to a business or organization with a willingness to sue, based on perceived or potential patent infringements. In addition to a number of other initiatives taken on by leading Linux vendors, we were created to deflect opportunistic or even malicious attacks on Linux.
Thursday, December 14th, 2006
Linux Contributors Mark Year-End with Major Serviceability Improvements
Actually a cool press release to read. If you haven’t heard of or used kdump or SystemTap, they are very powerful tools to add to your arsenal. With the new features, we have a consistent, reliable dump facility and even greater performance analysis tools.
The list of contributors (think of them as investors) is impressive as well: Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, IBM, Intel, NEC, Novell, NTT, Red Hat, and VA Linux.
http://www.osdl.org/newsroom/press_releases/2006/2006_dec_13_beaverton.html
The kdump enhancements are expected to improve the ability to reliably and quickly create crash dumps that can be analyzed offline, while new SystemTap features will improve debugging and performance analysis of production systems. These tool enhancements will decrease system down time, boosting efficiency in IT departments.
”Improvements likes these really are a result of the kernel development community’s focus and commitment,” said Andrew Morton, Linux kernel maintainer. ”kdump is especially significant since it represents the first crash dump tool accepted into the mainline kernel and we expect it to be really valuable for the kernel development team, permitting us to gather detailed information regarding kernel bugs from our worldwide testing team.”
Although system crashes are rare in large production systems, when one occurs it is critical that a crash dump is created reliably and that it can be debugged after the fact. The new Linux kernel kdump enhancements provide administrators with much higher reliability than previous crash dump tools by using a different methodology (which has been endorsed by kernel maintainers) than previous crash dump tools.
The SystemTap improvements give IT managers, system administrators and developers the ability to debug a running system in a real-time environment. With the latest improvements, SystemTap’s features have surpassed similar tools by adding the capability to debug production systems without performance degradation or recompiling. Other new features include easy to understand rich scripting language, safety built in for production systems, and system level performance analysis and debugging.
The improvements are the result of a community effort facilitated by OSDL with contributions from Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, IBM, Intel, NEC, Novell, NTT, Red Hat, and VA Linux.
”By continuing to drive technology innovation into the Linux kernel, the open community is making it the world’s fastest growing operating system,” said Kathy Bennett, director of IBM’s Linux Technology Center, home to some 600 IBM engineers working in 40 locations worldwide, of whom more than 300 work full-time making Linux better. ”With today’s improvements to Kdump and System Tap, Linux customers can look forward to enjoying enterprise level serviceability, world class performance and greater efficiency than ever before.”
”The inclusion of kdump and systemtap in SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 further enhances the capability to deliver support for mission-critical data center environments,” said Holger Dyroff, Novell vice president of Linux product management. ”Thanks to the community for this work.”
”NTT considers Kdump to be a major milestone in Linux serviceability, which by fulfilling the growing demand for a reliable kernel crash dumping mechanism will further boost the presence of Linux in the enterprise,” said Masayuki Hatanaka, General Manager of the NTT Open Source Software Center. ”Being an active member of Kdump’s development community through NTT Data and NTT Data Intellilink has been a very rewarding experience that will only reinforce our commitment to open source in general and Linux in particular.”
”The Linux and open source market is evolving at a rapid pace but one thing will never change – the power of collaboration and community to constantly improve technology,” said Ron Pettit, initiative manager at OSDL. ”Because of the efforts of many individuals and companies from the Linux development community, users will gain important improvements to serviceability tools as they enter a new year.”
Wednesday, December 13th, 2006
IBM Launches OmniFind Yahoo! Edition – what is that you ask? Well, let me tell you.
I recall a post by Stephen O’Grady on IBM’s “Information Server” launch when he suggested that yes, it’s a great idea, but there was potential for the same type of solution in SMB companies if packaged right – IBM was positioning the launch at much larger customer sets. Well today, IBM launched something that is packaged for SMBs (and dept. enterprises) to provide company-wide search services on an intranet: IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition. (what a mouthful…) It’s targeted at search rather than an information server, but if you look at OmniFind Enterprise I think you will see this is a similar approach and packaging as was suggested for the info server – squarely targeted at every SMB on the planet (even has local dictionary files) with a great technology that benefits any sized company.
With OmniFind, a customer can index and then offer all employees search capabilities for files and internal websites. Point it to your intranet site or your file server and away it goes. It’s very easy to setup (I just set it up on my home server running OpenSuse in about 5 mins). It’s also based on the open source Apache Lucene project which is very cool. It’s like having your very own Google appliance…. BUT IT’S FREE (”no license charge” as IBMers say…). No joke – just pay for support if you need it otherwise it’s yours for free (limited to 500K documents though – not an issue for many SMBs). Here’s how easy it is to setup on your network…
Setup:
1) Download the setup file (preferably the Linux one… ok, just my preference)
2) Open a terminal and login as root or sudo the following:
# chmod +x setuplinux_i586.bin
# ./setuplinux_i586.bin
3) The InstallShield Wizard will start, in the setup GUI, accept the license to continue.
4) Choose the install dir or acccept the default (/opt/ibm/OmniFindYahooEdition). Same for the port (make sure you open up iptables/firewall as well)
5) Let it install and click Finish. It will automatically start the server and launch a web browser for the web based interface located at http://localhost/admin/
6) Create the username and set the password for the server. (you can’t change the admin username later… don’t know why, but my guess is greater security)
7) Once it logs in, start telling it where to search – I added http://www.michaeldolan.com for instance and it crawled my entire website – every blog post. You can also point it to a local file system (or remote file system mounted locally). So I added my external storage volume located at /datastore. I found it funny that Lotus Word Pro documents are included in the file formats indexable… whaaat.. Word Pro died years ago…? Anyway, it indexes all of your OpenOffice 1.0 and ODF files, PDFs … and yes, it does index your Microsoft Word files too (not via some obscure 3rd party plug-in either.
As I continue to play with this technology I will try to post cool things that can be done with it. There seems to be an extensive REST and XML API to do even greater customization but I haven’t tried that yet. I will say this, there’s no reason not to at least try this out. I wish I had this much control over Google Desktop…
Anyway, I now have the capability to search my blog, other websites, and my data storage volume on my home intranet – I’m probably too excited by this…
BTW, if you need your resources back, you can stop it from crawling but clicking the “stop crawling” button. It’s very easy.
Wednesday, December 13th, 2006
Interesting dynamics when you have a Unix AND Linux strategy
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2006/12/13/gcg_unix_2006/
Another fine article from Ashlee Vance. I liked this quote in particular:
HP managed to grab the “keeps its promises” crown – which is either a curse or a blessing depending on how you view Itanic.
I think Ashlee has more fun writing these things than someone should have with their job…
Tuesday, December 12th, 2006
First look at Firefox 3.0
I found this quite interesting – a great overview of the new additions / changes with Firefox 3.0.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061212-8409.html
Tuesday, December 12th, 2006
Code v2.0 Launches
I saw that Code v2.0 was just released over at Lawrence Lessig’s blog. Parts of the new version of the book were wiki developed – and the entire book is available online for free – or in print. The book is also licensed under CC Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license – meaning you can create your very own derivative work and re-distribute it… this has some very interesting implications.
I just ordered mine from Amazon – print copies are only $12 (and easier to read).
Sunday, December 10th, 2006
Something to try out… bbPress (from your friends at WordPress)
bbPress is a forum server app (like WordPress for blogs) from the guys over at Automattic. This is the same platform they use for the WordPress support forum. I’ve never been much of a fan of the forum over there… but maybe this will evolve into something better. It’s still relatively new, and I’m sure there are probably bugs.. but I love the five development principles they follow.
Has anyone tried this out? Send me an email if you’ve used it… I may try running it locally tomorrow and see how it works.
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