I came across the City Data web site
tonight … it’s pretty cool. It appears that they are
aggregating census data and other information. They have some
cool “Top 100” lists … and I even found info on the city that I live in! Cool stuff …
I don’t yet have an iPod … but I’m close to getting one. I do
want to take advantage of podcasts however … so when I saw this I
liked it. I am looking for something exactly like this. I
simple background process that would grab the podcasts that I’m
intersted in, manage my local cache, and build and update playlists for
me. I’m going to experiment with this one:
Podcatcher 0.1.3. A podcast download tool. [freshmeat.net]
I really like coming across these updates on Freshmeat … another
vitualization that is gaining perfection. This is the continuing
trend to ’emulate’ or ‘simulate’ computer hardware and software on top
of other operating systems.
DOSBox 0.63. An x86 PC emulator for running old DOS games. [freshmeat.net]
I found this a very interesting read – An Introduction to Linux Kernel Backdoors.
It shows some of the details that can be gleaned from reading through
the source of the Linux Kernel, and some ways that extensions could be
developed for a wide range of uses … good and bad.
I keep thinking that once more and more “un-Linux-educated” people
begin to use the operating system, they are going to fall prey to the
same types fo scams as Windows users. We already see the huge
number of people sucked into “Phishing” scams. I believe we will
see just as many people falling for entering their root passwords, etc.
on their Linux desktops.
Maybe not … but it will be interesting to see …
This is a good one …
This goes to the old saying “For every action, there is an equal and
opposite reaction.” So if we install a lot of wind farms, for
wind power, won’t we disrupt wind patterns and cause global
effects? I guess so …
Wow … Ted is blogging and he didn’t even tell me!
I just read a post by Ted Haeger at Novell titled “When Innovation Runs Out” … it’s an interesting post. There was one thing that hit me while reading it …
In his post, he quotes someone stating “Our objective is to produce an alternative, not a substitute.”
and I really like this. It is important to see that even as an
“alternative” it is not necessarily a “replacement”. The people
who believe that Linux and Open Source is somehow going to be the “rip
and replace” solution for Windows are fooling themselves. I have
worked on large network and system migrations, and these are not small
undertakings. Instead, IMHO, I believe that we are going to see
Linux and Open Source join existing networks, and begin to expand in
their adoption and use.
It
seems a common thought that users will “transition”, or “switch” from one solution
to another. However it seems that this is seldom what
occurs. It is a tough to get users to completely give up what
they had, and embrace *only* the new. Instead, users will adopt a
new “abstraction” that provides them with more value … and the old
stuff and new stuff seem to move forward together.
Examples of this are that even though we embrace MP3, we still seem to
have a lot of CDs around. Likewise, no matter how hard I work at
it … I still have some Windows machines around … and even a Novell server or two.
I believe that we are going to see more and more solutions built on top
of powerful abstraction technologies … and the old stuff is
still going to be there for a long time.
This article reminded me of the original Microsoft presentations on NT
and the Hardware Abstration Layer (HAL) that they were creating.
This is a good interview that covers a topics that is very important to
the coming virtualization products. It is projects like this that
are going to continue to push virtualization to be more and more real.
Interview with Philippe Gerum. This is an interview of Philippe Gerum, co-leader of the Adeos project.
The purpose of Adeos is to provide a flexible environment for sharing
hardware resources among multiple operating systems, or among multiple
instances of a single OS. [Advogato]
This last weekend I completed a one year project to migrate my core
mail services from Novell NetWare. And it ended up going
amazingly smooth!
I run a mail server that is hosting e-mail for a number of domains, and
a large number of personal friends. Over a year ago, as spam
became more and more of an issue, I realized that I was going to have
to move to a more “main stream” operating system and e-mail service to
gain the latest features. I had been running the Mercury mail
server for years … however it lacked many things.
I started to look at the services that I wanted to support, and one of
those was the option to easily run TMDA. From there … I found
qmail.
I was told that installing qmail was a pain, however I quickly located
the “LazyInstaller” for qmail … and it worked smoothly. It
fetched the packages, built and installed the code, and even added
various options and patches that I wanted on the server – anti-spam,
SSL, IMAP, Web Management, etc.
As of Friday, I rolled the MX records on my server to the new qmail
server … there were a few hitches that I had to fix. By
Saturday I rolled the CN records to point to the new server. As
of Monday of this week … I am now running on qmail … with almost no
spam coming in … and all of my users in business.
I’ll post more of my experience from this week …
I love it … my friend just sent me a link to the official US Government VolcanoCam for Mount St. Helens! They even have videos that you can download.
I’m not sure that I saw the official HurricaneCams …
This is actually a pretty impressive situation … and further demonstrates the potential use of Patents to attack Open Source projects. The NoCat
project is a pure Open Source solution that could be quickly adopted by
many of the wireless HotSpot companies that are doing redirection of
web access for logins … and if they did, will this company sue the
NoCat users? Would they go after all users of the project?