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Happy Halloween Folks! (You too Tim!)
--Dietrich

Power Outage in Area where most openSUSE Servers are Located

Friday, October 10th, 2008 by Andreas Jaeger

Just a quick note: We have a power outage in the part of the city of Nürnberg where the Novell office and the main server room is.  This means that many of our servers are right down, especially the download redirector, the mailing lists, the openSUSE build service and users.opensuse.org.

I will post a message once the power has been restored and all machines are running again.  Current estimate (11am Nuernberg time) is that it will take another 4 hours (until 3pm Nuernberg time which is 13:00 UTC) at least to restore power.

Note: the power companies do not know yet exactly where the problem is.

This server and the wiki are located in another data center and are therefore available.

Updates:

13:15 CEST: New rumor: Current estimate for power restoring is six more hours, they need to dig up the street.

16:45 CEST: Bad news: It will take longer until power gets restored.  The local power company just stated "22:00 to 23:00″.  We will try to get then the first machines up but might not get everything running during the night.  Btw. currently it seems that it's only our office complex that is without power, the rest of the area has power again.

17:15 CEST: I just chatted with our admins, and they currently hope to have everything up Saturday around 13:00 CEST (11:00 UTC) if - and only if - there are no major problems like hardware failures.

18:05 CEST: The admins will start early tomorrow morning - there's no sense waiting for the power company this night.  The estimate stays at 13:00 CEST (11:00 UTC).  We've never experienced such a long outage before, this is exceptionally bad.

19:02 CEST: Beineri has uploaded some photos from the construction site (thanks!).

20:04 CEST: Marko has uploaded some photos as well (thanks!).  Some notes: I've heard (no official confirmation) that our office building has two power lines and currently both are getting repaired, they started with the first one and now dig out the second one as well.  Our building seems to be the last one in the area to get power back since it's the only one with a 20kV line.

More

numerodix blog: on Perl

I've written code in Bash, C, C++, Haskell, Java, Pascal, PHP, Python, Ruby. So I feel like I've been around the block a few times, as far as choosing a language. And yet, Perl leaves me bewildered.

One of the pillars of Ruby is something called "the principle of least surprise". What it means is that when you're not sure how to do something in Ruby, and you just do what seems most likely to work, it works. It's a wonderful quality, and it seems to be based on Perl, because Perl is the exact opposite.

Perl smacks horribly of apprenticeship culture. One where the novice is carefully guided through the valley of death, across the bridge over the pit of lava, past the nine-headed monsters, by a veteran monk. Send a tourist out there with a map and he's likely to be sent home in several pieces.

More Here

+===================================================================+

Obviously, this fellow is a bit conflicted but still makes some interesting points.  Hacking Perl on-line can be treacherous.  The best way to go about learning Perl is to start out with a few good books and go from there.  It builds the foundation and reduces the frustration level to a tolerable level.  Still, you do need to have a high threshold of pain. ;)

I've recommended a few good books on Perl in this article.  Hang in there Perl Hackers!

--Dietrich

I am downloading over bittorrent openSUSE 11.1 Beta 2 and will be doing some serious 'tire kicking' this week.

This will be an 'upgrade' from 11.0 verses a 'new install', so it should be interesting to see how it goes with the new YaST update system in place.

Anticipate a follow-up preview of what's new with openSUSE 11.1 some time next week.

--Dietrich

Given that this is a blog for Linux IT Consultants, I found the review of web statistics (analog) interesting.  There are a surprising number of readers from the Windows camp.

Listing operating systems, sorted by the number of requests for pages.

no.
reqs
pages
OS
1
2849
429
Windows
 
2023
263
  Windows XP
 
214
78
  Windows Server 2003
 
550
61
  Windows Vista/Server 2008
 
54
21
  Windows 2000
 
7
5
  Unknown Windows
 
1
1
  Windows 98
2
526
417
Known robots
3
765
222
OS unknown
4
2172
158
Unix
 
2172
158
  Linux
5
589
55
Macintosh

BTW, this is a very short time-span sampling.  Notice how many are still using Windows XP vs. Vista.

Come on, now.  You know you like Linux.  Admit it.  It runs rings around Windows.  So go download yourself a copy of Linux and install it.  It's FREE, you know. 

Is it me Folks? Bueler?  Never mind.

Computerworld: When Linux does well: the e1000e Ethernet bug fixed

October 2nd, 2008

One reason I love Linux is that when they're a problem, it gets fixed. Usually, it gets fixed in a hurry and that's exactly what happened with the e1000e Ethernet bug.

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That sums it up.  When there is a problem, Linux gets fixed--in a hurry.

There is much to be concerned about nowadays when it comes to personal and business travel with Laptops and other digital devices.

The obvious concerns include the potential for Laptop theft and theft of sensitive/personal data.  Another concern is the potential for delays at Airport and border checkpoints while Laptops are searched for incriminating data. 

To the extent that there is sufficient room for interpretation and potential for abuse of legal authority for determining when it is appropriate to initiate a search/seizure of Laptop property, the U.S. Senate is proposing legislation of the "Travelers Privacy Protection Act" to restrict the right of US customs to search or seize laptops, iPods and other digital devices.

There are ways to mitigate your personal risk when travelling.  One option is to not store sensitive data whatsoever on your Laptop.  Another is to simply not bring your laptop along when travelling.  The latter is not ideal especially for business travelers.

I have found the safest, fool-proof way to travel yet with a Laptop is to remove its hard drive and leave it at home.  Set up the Laptop's bios to boot from CD and bring along a CD/DVD of Knoppix.   Knoppix is a Linux distribution which can be run directly from CD.  Nothing gets stored on the CD and everything runs in memory 'read-only' from RAM disk.  When you shutdown, all data in RAM is gone.

Thus, you can boot up Knoppix and either use NoMachine NX or RDP thin clients to reach your corporate office Desktop or home gateway PC when needed.  Both of these client applications are found on the CD.  I prefer using NX as the entire session is tunnel-encrypted and exceptionally fast over even the slowest 56-K dial-up connection.

So, be smart, when equipped with a Laptop with no hard drive, you can simply declare the device has no data drive on it whatsoever.  If there is no data drive then there is no need to search, thus no delays in travel, no worries.

--Dietrich
.

All of this 'hype' about the iPhone, G1, yada yada has just about reached a high crescendo.  It's just so silly.  They don't shine a candle to the Nokia N-series N95/N96.

There are still some N95s in the product channel but the newest is the N96.  You don't have a touch screen (horrors) or a keyboard (OMG), but it does do a lot.  Here's some of the things I do with it:

• Sync your Evolution, Outlook, etc calendar, contacts, tasks with PC Suite (USB, Bluetooth)
  
• Push IMAP email (Consilient)
• Open more than one application at a time (no can do with iPhone)
• Run Java applications (no can do with iPhone)
• Use your N95 as a SIP-VoIP phone (e.g. with Skype, fring, TruPhone, SIPphone, Gizmo5, Asterisk)
• USB 2.0 data connection
• Bluetooth connectivity (OBEX, DUND, Keyboard, Headset, Multimedia)
• 802.11 b/g Wi-Fi
• InfraRed connectivity
• 5 Megapixel Carl Zeiss Optics Camera
• VGA Movie Camera (Play/Record)
• Windows Remote Desktop (Using RDM+)
• Virtual Network Connection (VNC)
• Secure Shell (Putty)
• Create your own 'hot spot' (Ad. Hoc with Joikuspot)
• MicroSDHC hot swapable drive (8Gig)
• Nokia Maps 2.0 (Entire US off-line map stored on MicroSD drive with Voice turn-by-turn Drive/Walk directions)
• GPS Navigation with Nokia Maps, Google Maps
  
• Great Browser (using Apple WebKit), but you can install Opera or Opera Mini (free)
  
• Accelerometer (works great with RotateMe portrait/landscape and Step Counter--pedometer)
• Tether your Laptop for Internet access via bluetooth (EDGE, 3G speeds with a data plan)
• Rip TV/full length Movies to MPEG-4/DivX and watch (TI OMAP ARM11 supports 25 fps)
• Voice activated commands
• Sound Recorder (including phone calls)
• FM Radio Reciever
• Internet Radio (Visual Radio, Nokia Radio)
• Podcasting (Create/Play)
• MP3 Music Player
• Stereo Speakers
• TV Infrared remote control (Psiloc--very important for Men)
  
• Stereo Mic/Headset connection
• TV-out connect and view pics/play movies on your external display
• DivX Movie Player
• Adobe Flash Lite
  
• Youtube Player
• Apache Webserver (Nokia Web Server)
• Replaceable/Rechargable battery (try that on the iPhone)
• Barcode Reader
• Adobe PDF Reader
• Quick Office (Word Excel document support)
• Bluetooth keyboard
• Zip Archive support
• Over the air install of Nokia SISX applications
• Gmail and Google Apps Mail binary applications for Nokia
• N-Gage Games
• SMS/Multimedia/Email messaging

Ok, I think I hit oil so I'll stop drilling. :)

Ok, the new T-Mobile HTC Android G1 arrived today.  Yawn.  Excuse me.  I'm just not impressed.  Why? Because I own a Nokia N95.  Nokia is 'king of the hill' and the N95 is the smartphone to beat.

Google's Android, the G1's operating system, has a LONG way to go to start to become a threat to Nokia's world-wide Cellphone market dominance.  The G1 certainly is nice and has some bells and whistles but it doesn't strike me as being 'better' than the Nokia N95. 

That the G1 is being compared by many media sources to the Apple iPhone amuses me.  The iPhone is a 'toy' when compared with Nokia's N95 and newest N-series product, the N96.

This article sheds light on Nokia's viewpoint toward Android and puts the size of their market share in perspective.  If you know anything about Nokia then you know about Symbian S60 and just how mature and great an operating system it is.  Developer support has and continues to be superb.  Nokia recently acquired Symbian and are beginning the process of open sourcing Symbian which will assuredly put pressure on Android and competiting open source vendors.

That will happen soon.

Written by Lisa Hoover - Sep. 22, 2008

Unlike NBC's coverage of the 2008 Olympic Games, DIRECTV customers who have the NFL Sunday Ticket SuperFan viewing package can now watch live football games on computers running Linux.
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