Archive for April, 2008
Wednesday, April 30th, 2008
How did US Presidential Candidate Vote in Congress on IT
Very interesting article over at eWeek. There’s all kinds of “quirks” in the details for any of these comparisons, but it’s an interesting overview nonetheless.
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008
Shameless Plug: IBM Next Generation Linux Event in NYC
If you’re in the NYC area, IBM is hosting a great “Next Generation Linux” event at the Hilton on Church St. It should be a great day of speakers discussing where Linux is heading, what makes Linux unique and “special”, and what workloads are great for running Linux. It’s a packed session from 9-12 (breakfast at 8 if you’re an early riser).
You can register here:
https://www-950.ibm.com/events/wwe/grp/grp017.nsf/agenda?openform&seminar=692H5MES&locale=en_US/
| Time | Description |
|---|---|
| 8:00 am | Registration & Continental Breakfast |
| 9:00 am | Welcome & Introduction |
Linux and Innovation
|
|
| Break | |
Linux for Business-Critical Workloads
|
|
| Break | |
Breakout Sessions
|
|
| A Customer’s Perspective: Linux for Business Critical Workloads | |
| 12:00 pm | Wrap Up & Q&A |
| RSVP for Lunch! Take this opportunity to chat with the speakers and to network |
Monday, April 28th, 2008
WordPress 2.5.1 is out – note the new step to increase security
There are some important security updates in WordPress 2.5.1 so update when you can. I also noticed an added security measure they’ve included with a secret key for hashing cookies via the config file. (Check out the last paragraph)
http://wordpress.org/development/2008/04/wordpress-251/
Secret lives of blogs
Since 2.5 your
wp-config.phpfile allows a new constant calledSECRET_KEYwhich basically is meant to introduce a little permanent randomness into the cryptographic functions used for cookies in WordPress. You can visit this link we set up to get a unique secret key for your config file. (It’s unique and random on every page load.) Having this line in your config file helps secure your blog.Many thanks to Steven Murdoch for responsibly reporting the security issue (CVE-2008-1930) and Alex Concha for reporting an XSS issue.
Thursday, April 24th, 2008
Greetings from Hardy Heron
The good news: Hardy Heron is fantastic.
The complicated news: there appears to be a bug in the Wubi installer that can set the drive path incorrectly. It doesn’t ruin anything, but it could be tricky for novices that run into it. More on this tomorrow.
Download your Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron ISOs today!
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
Ted Ts’o Dissects “What Sun was trying to do with OpenSolaris”
Ted put together a great set of insights into what Sun may have been up to with OpenSolaris. Ted has a great way of cutting through the marketing BS and gets right to the heart of what’s going on. Obviously I completely agree with him on a few issues. Do any of these sound familiar? I think I’ve covered some of this before here, and here, and here.
From Ted:
So that explains why it’s take three long years to try to get basic open source development tools (such as putting Open Solaris source code in a distributed SCM located outside of the Sun firewall) for Open Solaris. It was never was Sun’s intention to try to promote a kernel engineering community, or at least, it was certainly not a high priority for them to do so.
So if you run into a Sun salescritter or a Sun CEO claiming that OpenSolaris is just like Linux, it’s not. Fundamentally, Open Solaris has been released under a Open Source license, but it is not an Open Source development community.
I find it unbelievable Sun’s executives still forge ahead as though there are no issues – this was a half baked plan when it launched and unfortunately Sun has to cut costs and can’t invest what’s required to do this right (not to mention Sun also made some big mistakes – anyone using the CDDL?). In the meantime, Sun and its investors have missed out on the huge Linux boom that quite honestly… Sun was best positioned to take advantage of. Oops…
Jonathan, what community are you looking at – where is it? Please show me. (I’m sure your shareholders would be interested too.
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
IBM Launches New Approach to Servers (errr… a twist on the Google approach) – and it’s all based on Linux
IBM launched its iDataPlex server systems today – think of it as a “Google” for your datacenter. It’s targeted at web workloads and is insanely dense and power efficient compared to traditional server buildouts. And it uses Linux on commodity hardware so it’s also ridiculously cheap. If you’re a web hosting shop or you have your own web farm that could use a serious overhaul, iDataPlex is a very cool solution.
Did I mention it only runs Linux?
Ashlee Vance cracks me up – it’s clear from this article he’s been talking to vendors for two long (see the last sentence in this quote):
The system itself is quite remarkable. IBM has reworked its approach to rack servers allowing it to place twice as many systems in a single cabinet. This attack centers on delivering the most horsepower possible in a given area while also reducing power consumption. IBM hopes the iDataPlex unit will attract today’s service providers buying thousands and tens of thousands of servers and also big businesses such as oil and gas firms and media companies that will also possibly pursue a grid-ish data center computing model pioneered to some degree by Google.
But the really awe inspiring bit of iDataPlex comes from the fact that IBM is willing to go after this market at all and that it did so without screwing up the hardware design.
Ars covered the details as well over here:
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
KVM is adding features for Memory Overcommit
Interesting to see that KVM is adding in memory overcommit features – this adds significant flexibility for virtualization management. You can read more on Avi’s blog:
http://avikivity.blogspot.com/2008/04/memory-overcommit-with-kvm.html
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
Apple switching back to Power architecture?
Just saw that apple has acquired PA-Semi who ironically builds processors based on the IBM Power architecture (the same architecture it dumped for Intel for its desktop/laptops). It’s interesting to see them come full circle although this is clearly a mobile device opportunity and I’m guess not for desktop/laptops…
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron” arrives tomorrow
Unless you’ve been without internet access for days, you should know by now that Ubuntu’s next release is due tomorrow and that is always an exciting time. So fire up your fastest mirror tomorrow and see how much bandwidth you can grab before a billion others do the same ;)
I really like the direction Mark is taking with Ubuntu on the server. One, it offers a competing model for the industry compared to the RHEL/SLES model, two Ubuntu is pushing the technology further (e.g. KVM) and making it very easy for users to adopt (ala Microsoft Windows), and finally, it’s one platform that does well in many circles from desktop to server (ala Windows). So while Red Hat, Novell and Oracle fight over what’s left of Sun’s Solaris install base and grab some of the Windows opportunity, Ubuntu is driving straight into the Windows Vista SP1 Party with a fresh alternative. Now let’s just get those “Apple-like” Ubuntu systems we need with all the Adobe apps on them ;-)
Ubuntu article: http://www.linuxworld.com/news/2008/042108-ubuntu-linux-takes-on-enterprise.html?page=1
P.S. I claim absolutely no insight into what amount of sheer stupidity or drunkenness led to that Microsoft video link. I think sogrady said it best with just, “words fail me”.
Monday, April 21st, 2008
OOXML: A standard with no implementation
Even Microsoft cannot conform to its own OOXML standard…
Tuesday, April 15th, 2008
Mainsoft adds features to port ASP.Net AJAX to JAVA (and onto Linux)
Mainsoft has really cool technology for migrating Windows apps to Java which then lets you run the apps anywhere – Linux, UNIX, Mainframe, cellphone … ok, I’m not sure about a cellphone ;-). Now they’ve added ASP.Net AJAX to their portfolio. I *think* the only thing they do not port today with their product is Windows Forms… I could be wrong, but my golden rule has been if it runs on a Windows server, it will run on Linux or any platform that runs Java.
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Application-Development/Mainsoft-Ports-ASPNet-AJAX-to-Linux/
Mainsoft’s new product lets developers use Microsoft’s ASP.Net to build applications for Linux.
Mainsoft has announced tooling that enables developers to use Microsoft’s ASP.Net AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) on Linux.
Saturday, April 12th, 2008
Hello Winamp – we meet again
I remember using Winamp back in college. It was 1997 and downloading music from websites (yes, actual HTML links to download XYZ by Whoever) started to become popular. I don’t recall when Napster really hit my radar (not that I would admit to ever using it), but Winamp and MP3 were 1:1 in my world. When Winamp 2.0 came out, I remember playing around with all the skins… I even created a JCU skin at one point… memories.
It’s been a while since I’ve used Winamp though. Having moved most of my systems to Linux, I have rarely seen much of Windows and admittedly lost touch with Winamp. Today am happy to say that we’ve reconnected.
Our reconnection starts with an absolute hatred of iTunes and a horrible relationship that involves completely erasing, syncing, and re-creating libraries, playlists, etc b/c Apple decided to build in all kinds of DRM into iTunes. It’s nonsense and the challenge has always been in my mind, a lack of alternatives. The latest issue I’ve had is that my MP3 library is on a RAID array and for some reason, iTunes keeps on blowing up the RAID array… not good. I can’t even imagine how that’s possible, but it’s highly repeatable. I start Windows, RAID array is fine. I do anything, leave Windows on for 2 days, it’s fine. On the second day, if I open iTunes and do anything that involves accessing a file… my RAID drive splits into 2 separate drives in Windows Explorer and if I reboot – I get a degraded RAID array.
I have a system at home that has Windows Vista 64-bit. I needed Windows b/c I needed a couple things: 1) Photoshop, 2) Video editors for my home movies recorded on the awesome Sony HDR-SR7 HD video camera, and 3) web conferencing (although I don’t need Windows anymore now that I have the latest Ubuntu).
So back to my plight. I bought an iPod Nano 3rd Generation a while back simply because it’s thinner and lighter than my last MP3 player. It’s perfect for skiing is really what it comes down to.
I tried Songbird, but it’s way too early (couldn’t add any songs to my iPod). I tried a demo version of some terrible app that supposedly integrates into Windows Media Player. I searched for any way to get gtkPod on Windows, and even considered a Busybox/gtkPod route. And then… a Google search finally led to a blog, a blog to another blog’s list of alternatives and there it was: “Winamp.com”. The solution quickly unfolded before my eyes. Winamp – it’s been years, but boy am I glad to see you again.
So I fired up Winamp and right there, it found my iPod without me doing anything. I can click drag files onto the iPod and it’s seamless. And here’s the best part – you can play songs OFF the iPod and you can go in and delete files from the iPod (no check a box in the library / sync nonsense).
Winamp is the best iTunes there ever was. It’s like seeing a good friend from college that you had so many great times with but lost touch through the years. Now, let’s go have a beer.
Escape iTunes: Download Winamp
Thursday, April 10th, 2008
IBM develops memory with 100x data capacity; does this create new hope for Vista
With 100x your current memory, you may actually be able to run Vista faster… :-)
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9915449-7.html?tag=bl
Tuesday, April 8th, 2008
KVM for Mainframe Linux
Wow, KVM has been ported to run on IBM mainframes – just think… over 1,000 Linux images… each image can host many KVM images… KVM uses QEMU which could theoretically emulate other processor architectures.
Well, let’s just start with KVM is available for any IBM System z users out there.
http://blog.codemonkey.ws/2008/04/kvm-for-mainframe.html
Tuesday, April 8th, 2008
Swiss Education System to migrate 9,000 desktops from Windows to Linux
Great news for Linux as a desktop platform as the Swiss Education System signs up 9,000 desktops for the move.
http://www.linuxwins.com/9000-swiss-education-computers-drop-windows-for-linux/
From the Google translated page, it appears these desktop were in dual boot setups and are now going to be straight Ubuntu Linux.
What is the use? Candolle In college, it was anticipated the guidelines of DPI. Après des années de « dual boot , c’est-à-dire d’ordinateurs équipés d’un double système d’exploitation Windows/Linux, les machines tournent désormais exclusivement sous Ubuntu, une «distribution» de Linux. After years of “dual boot, ie computers equipped with a dual operating system Windows / Linux, the machines are now exclusively under Ubuntu, a” distribution “of Linux.
Friday, April 4th, 2008
Thank Google Day
I don’t get the impression that enough people really understand what a good thing Google’s manipulation of the C-block auction is for the average American. In 5 yrs, you’ll understand. Verizon does not have a motto to do no evil (I’m a customer, I know).
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/04/700_mhz_strategies_revealed/
Friday, April 4th, 2008
My old neighborhood featured in ComputerWorld for migrating its schools to Linux
I was so proud to see a city that I used to “hang out” in when in high school (usually at a batting cage, on a baseball field, or in a gym for pitchers-catchers practice – see a theme?) has begun deploying Linux PCs across its school district. I’m from the Cleveland, Ohio area originally and Brecksville-Broadview Heights is actually a very nice area so while budgets and schools may always seem to be in conflict, I have no doubt, B-BH’s school district is doing much better financially than others. If it makes sense in a city that could afford Windows, I’m sure it makes sense in many other school districts across the world. I’ll have to try meeting up with John next time I’m in town visiting.
I’m copying/pasting an usually large amount of text from ComputerWorld and recommend reading the entire article here:
http://www.linuxworld.com/news/2008/040108-school-districts-serve-up-lessons.html?page=3
Brecksville-Broadview Heights City School District opts for Eee PCs
John Schinker is the technology coordinator for the Brecksville-Broadview Heights City School District in Ohio, which is comprised of six schools serving some 4,800 students from kindergarten to grade 12.
Schinker oversees all aspects of technology for the district, including hardware, software, instructional applications and networking operations.
Schinker purchased eight Linux-based Eee PCs for the district: one for the technical staff, one for himself, and one for each school, with instructions to pass them around among students and staff to determine how they can fit into the district’s educational environment.
“For us, the price was the major selling factor. If we had gone with Windows, it would have increased the cost by about US$150 and the hardware would be underpowered. Even running XP SP2, we would need more RAM in them. Linux was really the way to go to keep the cost manageable,” Schinker said.
So what do the kids think of Linux compared to Windows?
“So far, it hasn’t been an issue. Other than the Eee PCs and most of our servers, we’re Windows only. But the Eee PC is so intuitive, it hasn’t been a problem. Our experience with the Eee PC has prompted us to look at using something like Linpus on our older desktop hardware too,” he said.
Schinker said one positive outcome from Linux is that it forces the district to limit the scope of the Eee PCs.
“By not running Windows, we can put some limits on the expectations of the little laptops. They’re not going to run Accelerated Reader, or Successmaker or Adobe CS. We can focus the expectations on the things that it does well rather than trying to make all of these other applications work, and that is really nice from a tech perspective.”
What the Linux Eee PC will do for the district is allow kids to access the Web, write essays and stories, collect and graph data, and prepare and deliver presentations.
“My own kids, ages 6 and 8, really like Tux Paint. They say it’s as good as or better than the commercial Kid Pix program.”
But Schinker doesn’t think it matters what OS kids use, as long as it is tailored to their educational needs.
“Certainly the user interface on the Eee PC is intuitive…but there are plenty of Windows front-ends that will do the same thing and are just as easy to use.
“I think the older kids will have concerns that aren’t focused on the OS per se; they’ll be more easily frustrated by the screen resolution and keyboard size than the younger kids, but I don’t think the OS is a concern for them,” he said.
With the education sector typically under funded, the low entry cost to open source has its appeal, Schinker said.
“On the server side, almost everything we use is open source. We run Linux servers with Apache, MySQL, PHP, WordPress, Moodle, Samba, Xmail, Dovecot, SquirrelMail, etc. In almost every case, we’ve been able to implement better technology for less money because of the availability of open source and open standards technologies.”
But the cost savings aren’t always worth the migration efforts.
On the desktop the district tends to use more proprietary software, such as MS Office which costs around US$60 per copy. While OpenOffice would be more economical, Schinker said it is not worth the compatibility issues a migration would result in.
“I do think we focus too much in education on the tools. There’s the argument that we should be using what the ‘real world’ uses to better prepare our students. I argue that we need to focus on teaching concepts rather than specific software applications. Those skills can then be applied to whatever software package they end up using,” he said.
Friday, April 4th, 2008
Rethinking IP
I saw an interesting article over at HBS’ Working Knowledge website. I think Prof. Jim Heskett is definitely asking the right questions and yes, I would agree that the entire world needs to rethink Intellectual Property and how we protect incentives to innovate vs consumption of IP across a Commons. I think the paragraph where Jim discusses brands across a community has very, very close relevance to some of the issues open source communities face. Included in the spectrum are the commercial open source companies that seem to have come to a peaceful state with their own strategy, but personally I think have only muddied the water further within external communities.
Now all we need is an answer to how it can be done ;-)
Or has the culture of “free” become so deeply imbedded in the minds of a new generation of users that content developers can only hope for partial, occasional, or eventual financial rewards for their efforts?
…
More generally, are views of ownership of intellectual property changing? If so, how will it affect the way intellectual property is valued for financial purposes? Are laws worldwide regarding intellectual property out of date? What do you think?
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008
Airwolf is on Netflix Instant Watch!
I just noticed that Netflix added Airwolf TV episodes on its instant watch library – sweet! It’s been so many years since I’ve seen Airwolf – I was a big fan as a kid – if you can’t tell.
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008
Are April Fools’ posts for fools? Are you fooled? I pity the fool
Ask a good IP lawyer you know whether Jonathan *could* do this if he suddenly wanted to… ask your IP savvy lawyer to read the Solaris 10 license, then the Contributor Agreement, patents that could cover Solaris and explain to you what IP a vendor could still control or use against you if you were to start making OpenSPARC chips, ship Solaris around the world, etc… You may also look at what Solaris products you actually might use on a server… and the IP/licenses associated there. Have you seen anyone benchmarking Solaris 10 and publishing results online? Oh, that’s right, it’s not allowed (See the post from emantion near the end). Was that a surprise to you considering all the “open” messaging you may be hearing? Did you confuse OpenSolaris with Solaris 10?
Then consider that while the CDDL isn’t too bad, it was intentionally developed to be incompatible with the GPL and the only open source OS to really matter, the Linux kernel. (Sorry BSD guys… I know… you’re hurt, but … sorry) Once you have an answer from your astute lawyer, I’d ask, would having all that power and control in one vendor concern you? Could they take it away?
http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/a_new_strategy
I pity the fool.
Now ask your lawyer to read the GPL license that comes with RHEL, Debian, Ubuntu, Asianux, OEL or SLES (ignoring MSFT/Novell for the moment). Simpler? Want to post a benchmark comparing any Linux distro’s performance? Go right ahead. Can any 1 vendor stop you? No…
Continuing this line of thought, now look at where all the other industry vendors participating in mass open source collaboration are heavily investing right now, today, and tomorrow. You can read about this over at the Linux Foundation (yes, the second plug for this fine work). Or you can look at Apache or even one that surprises me daily, Eclipse.
http://www.linux-foundation.org/publications/linuxkerneldevelopment.php
And some actually are still surprised that Red Hat keeps growing amid pointed attacks from Sun, Microsoft, and Oracle? “First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.”
Winning was just the next step ;-) Congratulations Red Hat, Novell, Debian, and Ubuntu.
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