The tech and other cents

Missed feature in Digg

2008-07-24T00:31:00.000-07:00

While I'm not that fond of making waves about that or this web service, there's one thing that bugs me with Digg. I'm also sure, that this also is a problem for a new diggers and occasional diggers as well. I'm talking about new submissions.

As many of us use Digg, it has become bookmarking service, and social networking service. People use it to look what are their friends up to. But for a new user or occasional digger, all these things are either unknown or not that important. That leads to a following problems:

1. The new user will probably only see "first-page" items on Digg, which were brought there by heavy-diggers.
2. The new user submission will be buried in a million of similar ones in 10 minutes.

While one of my submissions came through the haze and showed up on the front page, I feel the same problem as well. You post something, watch as it gets 3 diggs, and you never see it again. This sucks.

So here's an idea. Took at the current state of things:

There's no chance that ~17K entries will be seen. I doubt if 1000 of them will be read at least once.

What Digg should have, is a sort of a hint for "digging" for new posts. An example of similar idea I found on Gentoo Forums:

This feature would help to some newbies to get some diggin'. That would add to a "social" part, wouldn't it?

What do you think?

4th of July

2008-07-04T07:19:00.001-07:00

To all Americans among you:

Happy 4th of July!!!

Opera 9.5 is 66% faster than IE7 - and I have numbers to prove it!

2008-07-03T06:05:00.000-07:00

Hi All

I just found an interesting study, that compares cache efficiency of Opera, IE7, FF3 and Safari (on Windows) and finds, that Opera is the best one, leading 66% over IE7. From the site:

As it is clear from the results, Opera 9.5 caches web content most effectively, performing 3-times less disk operations that Internet Explorer 7. FireFox 3 coming on the second place with a minor -12.87% disadvantage. Safari 3.1.2 is on the third place with 6,991 accumulated disk operations. Internet Explorer 7 is coming on the last place with a huge -66.63% disadvantage relative to the Opera web browser.

Read full post here

Maybe I should consider using Opera now?

The new computer

2008-07-01T06:39:00.000-07:00

Hi all

I've purchased a new computer couple of weeks ago. I made a research on my locale market, and found that I want the following configuration:

CPU: Intel Q9450
MB: Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS3R
Memory: Mushkin CL4 4Gb
HD: Western Digital WD5001ABYS
Case: Antec Sonata Plus 550
Graphics: Gigabyte GeForce 8500GT Silent 512Mb

All in all, it came in about $1630.
Currently, my main work requires me to work with lots of different Windows configurations. It lead me to use the following installation:

Main OS: CentOS 5.2 (updated 2 days ago) 64bit
Windows OS: XP machines in VirtualBox.

This configuration was chosen to provide as versatile environment as possible.

CentOS Linux was chosen as enterprise-grade OS, providing me as stable environment as possible.

It is a great, quite machine. I'm happy.

Universal Tracker

2008-06-02T01:08:00.000-07:00

Hi All

My friend started a new project for the Android platform: the universal tracker called "Unit".

Cited his definition:

Unit is a mobile application for tracking lists of owned, loaned and borrowed assets (such as books, CDs, DVDs or board games) using Android mobile platform.

Here's a demo screenshot:

He's currently looking for help developing the application, so if you like this, join him!!

Thanks :-)

Firefox3 RC1

2008-05-20T10:52:00.000-07:00

I cannot believe its happening to me.

I've updated to RC1 as expected by suggested update. Now the thing crashes on me almost constantly!!! Even in Gmail!

Anyone knows whats going on?

Beta 5 was so solid compared to RC....

Running tests on Windows.

2008-05-04T06:47:00.000-07:00

Hi all

I need a free tool for testing a GUI application. Something in lines with Mercury's WinRunner.
Does anyone knows something like that?

Thanks

Cellular Video Calls: reality that never happened?

2008-04-27T08:06:00.000-07:00

Hi all

I recently started working for Comverse - the company supplies solutions for telephony providers, mainly cellular ones. Our product lies in the core of the operator's network and manages all or some of the services provided by the operator, such as Voice Mail, SMS, MMS, Video Calls, etc. Our system can provide a complete solution or integrate its parts with other available solutions in the market.

As I'm having an educational process now, I got an interesting thought during the studies. I got an insinuation from some of the cellular operators in last years, that video calls ability was the major drive behind the transition to fast networks, such as 3G, 3.5G and next generations. While it is true for some cases, I am not that sure that it is completely valuable.

Just think about it: would you perform a video call using the modern handset that has a video camera? Of course not - you'd have privacy issues right away. Do you really want the whole world to hear what you are saying? So what the point then in having fast network but not providing any type of service with it? Probably this is one of the reasons that cellular providers have problem: they have the infrastructure, but no services to monetize it. So everything else costs more to cover the losses. And this is something that I as consumer do not like.

I wonder why is it so in my locale that we do not have an unlimited connection cellular plans. We do have various packages, but they all are paid per minutes or MBs of data - just similar to what dial-ups used to be ages ago. It really would be great to have internet everywhere, and I think that cellular companies are not getting something here.

It's not that they make more money on pay per minute/byte basis. It's just me not buying the service at all while this is the payment scheme. So general users of this are business folks that gotta have an access to their email at all times. And even then, better options exist (we have WiFi hotspots almost everywhere now).

Just wonders of the world I guess.

Oh Gentoo, what had become of thee?

2008-04-23T06:25:00.000-07:00

Dear friends

Yesterday was an important day for me. I stumbled into a very important issue, albeit small, which made me to come to the following decision: I am leaving Gentoo as a desktop platform.

It does not come as an easy decision. I've been using Gentoo and quasi-actively participating in the community for about 5 years. I have it installed currently on 3 out of 4 computers I have (the last one being mac mini, which I keep with Mac OS X). So why would I take this decision?

It all began with a one simple thing. You may have read my previous posts on various WINE installations, and I use some Windows applications with WINE. But recently Internet Explorer stopped working. I've tried to reinstall it (and it is easy in Gentoo, just as in any other Linux distribution with decent package manager), but to no avail.

Next step was slightly more complicated, but still quite simple: I've used VMWare to install complete Window XP environment. It worked fine for awhile, until I couldn't use VM images between different computers I have. It just stopped working. Besides that, the performance of VMWare on my AMD Athlon 1.8 with 1G of memory was, to say the least, appalling. Next came Innotek (now Sun) VirtualBox. This is the best emulation environment I could find to work on my computer. It works fine, and I use it for all my Windows-related projects.

But as a side effect of all installations, system began breaking. I started noticing various weird things, such as sudden applications freezing at times, etc. Couple of days ago, when there were no applications running, I've seen CPU usage at ~80%, I did what most Windows users do. I rebooted the machine.

And then, system just broke. System utilities seemed nowhere to be found. Some init scripts seemed to be incorrect, etc. I somehow fixed the situation by copying old versions from other projects, and updating the system. But now, GNOME has problems with graphics and themes, and most applets do not work and even do not exist. It just never ends, does it?

So, as a normal user of Gentoo, I went to emerge my world. I haven't done that for a couple of months, so there were almost 1G of updates waiting for me. I've downloaded all the packages, and began the emerge.

The thing that broke the last straw was a simple apache update. The system update failed because I had an old version. Not because compile didn't work. Just because it needed me to manually do something!! It redirected me to a Gentoo doc site, which has 2 lines of code that fixed the problem, and emerge now runs again.

Why in the heavens name wasn't this done automatically? Why did I loose half a day, during which my system could be updated? I lost this time because update procedure stopped. I had to fix the Apache configuration, so my GNOME desktop could continue updating. I understand that this specific issue with Apache may be serious, and that not many ordinary people run it on their computer, it still bugs me. I don't like it when I have to do this sort of manual intervention in update procedure.

So what is the problem here? Daniel Robbins created a Gentoo moto once: The goal of Gentoo is to design tools and systems that allow a user to do his or her work as pleasantly and efficiently as possible, as they see fit....If the tool forces the user to do things a particular way, then the tool is working against, rather than for, the user. (cited from Gentoo Philosophy)

The problem is that I spent too much time caring for the computer with Gentoo. I don't have that luxury anymore. There was time, when geeking with the machine and fixing problems was cool. Today, its a burden. I value time, and I only have 24 hours a day of it.

I believe that this may be one of the general problems with Gentoo. When it began, most folks using Linux were techies, who cared about all the bits on their computers. Gentoo fit very well in this community, so it flourished and became very popular. It provided tools that noone had (and used to compile anything manually anyway), and community of a good will and lot of friendship. It had the best documentation (and maybe still do) among brothers, and best team of engineers.

But nowadays, many users want word processor, web browser, email program and video player. They want it now, and not wait 20 minutes when compilation will finish. They don't care about technicalities. And as Gentoo haven't changed its nature, it doesn't fit for majority anymore. Sabayon anyone?

Gentoo distro has proven over the years, that it will stay the way it is. And that's why it won't be back on my desktop soon.

So, Gentoo, stay on server.

Ubuntu, CentOS - my desktop is waiting.

Linux on the desktop now!

2008-04-21T01:32:00.000-07:00

Hello all

I just read an article, where Novell's CEO says that Linux will not be on the consumer desktop in at least for another 3 years. And that made me think.

We, users of Linux and open source software, would be happy to see everyone using Linux. We use it every day ourselves. And we're happy with it. Dell is installing Ubuntu Linux on various models, and people are buying them, preferring this to installing it by themselves. IBM, Sun and other vendors provide Linux systems just as they do Windows-based ones. Isn't this a nice trend that shows readiness of an operating system and its acceptance by vendors?

With this trend, how can it be that Linux on the desktop will take another 3-4 years? And what does it mean exactly? Linux desktop share currently stands about 3-4% of total desktop installations. Another 3-4% goes to Apple Mac OS X installations, another similar share to other alternative operating systems (such as Free/Net/OpenBSD, BeOs, Haiku, OpenSolaris, etc).

But Windows OS is spanning over 90% of all desktop computers. So, my guess, that in 3-4 years Linux installations can get to say, 10%. Will this mean that it is "on the desktop"? What numbers it should show for CEOs and other similarly hierarchially placed people, compared to a Windows OS so they will consider it "there"?

I personally believe, that any tool that you use should server its purpose and serve it well. If it does not do what it is supposed to do, choose another tool. I recently began to believe that there's a place for Windows systems as well for Linux systems, but I am still open-source minded. Choosing Linux or Windows, or Mac or Solaris is purely business decision in many cases. If choosing Linux on the desktop provides me with the tool to do my job (or work, or fun and procrastinate) - that's fine. If Window does the same - that's fine too, I'll just go with cheaper solution in the long run.

All the tools I use in Windows (those that are not forced on me anyway) are open source - VirtualWin, vi, GIMP, Open Office, Firefox, Innotek VirtualBox, 7zip; and much more - and if I go to Linux I will use the same tools, so I don't have to re-teach myself each time I switch platform.

So for me Linux is really on the desktop for about 4 and half years already. I don't even use Window at home anymore. And yet, Novell's CEO thinks that it will take another 3-4. If that's what a CEO thinks, then no wonder that it is all about Novell Linux. Maybe they are hibernated and there's an alarm clock set into the 3-years distant perfect future.

I wonder where RedHat and Ubuntu will be by then.

Cheers.

Update: it seems I'm not the only one

My new computer

2008-04-13T04:10:00.000-07:00

Hello folks!

It's been a bit more than 2 years since I have Serenity - an AMD Athlon machine. And it's time to grow further. So I've made my research, and I got planned a machine that will serve me for my modest needs for another 2-3 years.

As prices plummeted seriously lately, and since dollar is not what is used to be, I can get pretty decent machine for a buck. I don't play games, my main needs are VM running (even couple of machines at the same time), Photoshop/Gimp rendering (for pics like these). Here's my configuration of choice that I'm thinking to have:

CPU: Intel Q9300

Motherboard: I'd like to have an Abit IP35 Pro, but its availability seems limited in my locale. So I'd be happy for other suggestions.

Memory: Mushkin or Corsair, 4Gb, CL4

Graphics: any NVidia 256Mb PCIe will do.

HD: 7200rpm, 250Gb or any other that gives good price/size ratio.

DVD burner: we have LG's and NECs laying around here for ~$30, so its easy.

PSU: Zalman, Thermaltake or Antec. These are the decent ones we have in local market.

Case: something simple, but that can sustain my system

Please let me know what do you think about it, and I'd love an MB suggestion that plays nicely with Linux. My main intention is to run Xen or other VM, and run Linux and Window under it.

Another thing that some folks may not understand, is my attention to run it with Ubuntu. To tell you the truth, I'm still the Gentoo person, but it takes increasingly more and more time to just maintain my Gentoo-based Serenity, and its only updates. My rsync doesn't work, updates are slow and I got many errors while updating a lot, which requires an attention as it renders system unusable.

I understand that those may be very easy to fix, but as I've said - I don't have time to deal with it as I had before, so I'm going to try my luck with customized Ubuntu for a while. Besides, I like learning new things, with Gentoo I feel like I don't know what's up there. And I've always wanted to learn Ubuntu.

Gentoo star seems to have eclipsed lately, I think I might get to fixing it when I have time later on...

Cheers.

Back to the net

2008-03-25T04:49:00.000-07:00

Hi all

I've been away for a long while and it feels now like a long vacation. I've done few nice things in a meanwhile, the major 2 being visit to Italy (Tuscany) and starting a new job.

So Italy - I had a great time visiting one of the most beautiful places in the world. We've been in Tuscany, where one of the best wine in the world is produced, and saw medieval cities built very long time ago. We also saw Renaissance structures, but most of all - we liked how the new integrates with the old, and how countryside is full of buildings built within last 5-10 years but look like they stood forever on those green hills.

And now I started a new job - I'm in intergration position in Comverse, working as subcontructor. My job would be packaging the company's products and integrating them into a complete offer, which mainly means a lot of perl/bash/Linux stuff, which in turn makes me very happy.

Have a nice day everyone.

:-)

Google Calendar offline

2008-03-13T09:59:00.000-07:00

I've just stumbled into this: I've tried to add something into my calendar, but got this:

Google is down ????????

Of course not, but it's fun anyways :-)

Back from Italy

2008-03-11T08:09:00.000-07:00

Hi all
I had a great time in Tuscany last week!! The trip was a present for my significant birthday date last Thursday.
It is also great to come home :-)

I have posted few photos from the trip, you're welcome to take a look here

La citta ideale

2008-02-24T05:00:00.000-08:00

Hi all

I'm going to Tuscany in about a week, so I need as much information as possible - can anyone direct me to sources of "ideal city" architecture?

Thank you very much

The keys to a blog success

2008-02-21T07:03:00.001-08:00

You all know how it is: you hear in the blogosphere about making money from blogging. Then you find and read thoroughly the major league: the Problogger.net and JohnChow.com; and then you make up your mind: "I'm going to do that too. If they can make it, so can I".

And then, you go and read Darren's list of newbies tips, and John's ebook. But you decide that you're not ready to pay for the blog yet - after all, you're just trying out, right? So, you sign on Blogger or Wordpress, just to save a $100, but you do register domain, because everyone agrees that it is the most important thing you should start with.

And then you start posting. At the beginning, you're on fire. Finding everything you can on the net, posting like a crazy. But, for some reason, stats do not go up. Then you say to yourself, "well, maybe no one really reads what I write", and you post less and less. And then, no one really reads your blog.

Such a state of things would probably describe most of new bloggers (and that would include myself as well). The idea of making money out of blog is very attractive, but many do not succeed at making enough for cup of coffee. Why is it so?

The main reason is that many newcomers start with the obsession over statistics and the idea of earning the same money that big shots do. They check visits every few hours, they check how much cents they've made out during those hours. They put many ads into the blog, and wait until money and readership would thrive. Big mistake!

So, here's the list of things required to make any blog successful:

Create an interesting content

That's it. Nothing more (at least at the beginning). Everything else is the result of this action number 1.

But there are more things that I'm doing for my blog:

Listen more to Darren from ProBlogger and John from John Chow. These guys apparently know what they're doing.
Less is more: that recent post on ProBlogger made by Skellie from AnyWired, is really a good one. I decided to post not more 4 technology-related posts a week, including posts regarding the process of building the blog itself. In addition, I removed some advertisers which didn't bring anything in a long while, and just made a bad impression for being there.
Stop caring about statistics. Don't check it every few minutes. Its a stressful action: you wait, it doesn't rise up, you panic, you loose motivation. Just stop doing it. In 10 minutes you checking for statistics, you could have an outline for a new post.

In a nutshell: if you want your blog to succeed, you have to build it. Blog is a content, not ads.

I only have to remember that myself :-)

Looking for freelance projects

2008-02-18T00:09:00.001-08:00

Hi all

After years of handling different systems and hardware including servers and storage and also considering the fact that I want to make my life better (and much more interesting) I would like to ask your help with finding freelance projects (those that can pay internationally).

Currently I can do consulting for IT technology on all levels (design, requirements, building), implementing, integrations, customizations and optimizations of complex systems (except programming), blogging and technical writing (without proofing). I'll be thankful for any ideas and leads that you can give me.

Last project I did was to build customized distribution based on Gentoo for small computer based on AMD Geode processor. The distribution comes on DVD (which is based on Gentoo LiveCD) and installs complete system on the computer. It will be available as an optional download.

I will provide as much additional details and information as needed.

Thanks in advance.

Fedora Kickstart installations

2008-02-17T08:40:00.000-08:00

Hi all

I'm writing this in a hope that someone knows the issue.

I'm creating a spin with Revisor (spin of Fedora 8) and while I'm including the kickstart file, the installation doesn't seem to perform the "post" part. What am I doing wrong?

Thanks a bunch...

Commercial Ubuntu

2008-02-14T22:01:00.001-08:00

Hi all

I just read a post by Bruce Byfield, where he raises an interesting question: after the fact that Canonical will try and offer commercial software from a specific repository, would anyone use it? And if not, could it alienate other users of Ubuntu from using the distribution at all?

He continues to argue for a whole 2-pages-long article for something that I don't even think exist. His main point is that this idea of commercial repositories has been tried out before and it didn't work. Why try now? After all, it's just a matter of time until something else will replace our current software:

A download service might find a temporary niche in offering software for which no free equivalent exists. For instance, despite recent improvements in apps like Kooka and Tesseract, someone who regularly needed to convert scanned text to a usable format might welcome a GNU/Linux version of OmniPage. The trouble is, given the speed with which free software is developing, such a market would be temporary, lasting a year or two at most. A service specializing in these niches would continually lose out to maturing free software, with no prospect of replacement products.

But why doesn't he see that this service may not be different from other software distribution methods? It seems he more argues the fact that there are proprietary and commercial application offers in Linux, than the fact that they are provided in Ubuntu. But, as it seems to me, the main reason for Canonical to do so is not for all Ubuntu Desktop users - its for business users and maybe even Ubuntu Server users, who may use those proprietary applications for their businesses and need a standard way of installing applications. Why should the way of installing Parallels be different than one for installing Open Office? It should not.

Sun has its own software distribution system, just as Apple's Mac OS X and MS Windows do. Why is it forbidden for Linux distributions to have one that includes commercial software?

I can provide the example of commercial software that I have used and had to install on Linux: IBM Rational ClearCase (and trust me, moving to other version management tools was much more expensive in human-hours because of the huge amounts of code and fast workforce turnover). Yes, the are free/open source alternatives, but they were not viable for that specific case.

I see the offer by Canonical as very pragmatic, practical and not hurting Ubuntu in no way. Ubuntu is Linux distribution. Canonical is the company behind it, which goal is to make money. So what is the problem that they try to monetize the free infrastructure they supported to build? The infrastructure is and will remain free, and as there's no additional effort required (except maybe for billing system in-place), Canonical has nothing to loose - and much to gain.

Here's another question while we're here: why the author doesn't criticize the Red Hat's model where you pay for the distribution first, and then if you use proprietary software, then for the software once more? Is it that much better? I don't see users ditch Red Hat and its siblings (Fedora and CentOS) just because Red Hat has proprietary parts in it.

And I don't believe that Ubuntu users will drop using Ubuntu because Canonical has proprietary repositories.

I side Canonical in this specific case not because I'm pro-Ubuntu. While I am pro-Ubuntu, I'm really distribution-agnostic person (although I do have some emotional and personal allegiance to Gentoo). But I think that author just emotionally reacts on the offering of something proprietary for Linux. While it is perfectly fine for some users to be upset, business people might actually be glad that they will be able to get the software they anyway want or need in a standard fashion.

Update: I just thought about it while answering to one of the commenters. Would this issue be such negatively reviewed if IBM or HP would offer such a repository with their own commercial offerings and not Canonical? I wonder...

zRaven in Linux review

2008-02-09T10:00:00.001-08:00

Dear all
I've been contacted by the Zoundry, developers of Zoundry Writer and got notified that they've got zRaven into beta, so I might try it and run in Linux. Here's the quote:

Please note that Zoundry Blog Writer has finally be deprecated and replaced with a new version called Raven.

We're really striving to make it the best product we can, so we'd love it if anyone interested could give it a try and give us some feedback. Raven just went into public Beta testing this week.

We haven't tried getting Raven to work under Linux, so obviously your mileage may vary. However, I do think we have done a much better job with the UI this time around. :) Let us know what you think.

This is very cool to be contacted by them, so here we go. I've decided to play around with a new release. But I have to give the following notion: I've tryed zRaven before. When I performed a research about different blog editors for Linux, I've even tested some of them in Windows first, using VMWare image. And if I liked the program I would test it on Linux later. And that's how I got to run and test Zoundry Writer. And Raven was also one of them - I liked its interface and apparent simplicity.

So, first to my testing results: Raven runs and works in Linux under Wine. But there are some serious caveats, which I will go over now. To install Raven, you will need a pretty recent Wine installation. I did this in both 0.9.46 and 0.9.54 versions, but your mileage may vary. I think that it should work in most versions. The install is pretty straightforward: define your WINEPREFIX variable and run the installer.

The installer will run and Raven will be installed. But before you could run the program, some manual handling is required:

Install MSVCP71.dll. You can download it freely from the web. Just google it, unzip and copy to your SYSTEM and SYSTEM32 Wine folders.
Do the same with gdiplus.dll and shlwapi.dll files.
Now there's a need to hack around a little: run winecfg with the WINEPREFIX set to your WINE system folders. Go to a Libraries tab, and remove gdiplus and shlwapi from that list. This action is required to make Wine to use native Windows libraries, because its own do not implement all the necessary functions for GUI manipulations.

Now you should be able to run Raven. Just use "wine <path to Raven.exe>" command. Here are some shots for the proof that it works (here are the shots from Gentoo Linux, I've installed it also in Fedora but haven't tested yet):

So what does work? Mostly everything. Posting to multiple blogs, good editor, tags, offline editing, posting as drafts...

What doesn't work? At this moment, and I haven't resolved it yet - the right mouse click causes an exception and error. The program doesn't crash, I just can't use right click on the mouse and some toolbar buttons with multiple functions (like 'back' button in browsers). Which leads me to inability to use certain features (which at the moment I'm not even aware of).

Now, my impressions from using the program:
What I like: I like the interface. Its very slick and simple. It is convenient to write a post to a blog. I like that it supports major blogging platforms, and includes posting as draft and pinging different services.

What I don't like:
I don't really got the idea of separating tags, links and images and their representation in Raven. I'm just not yet comfortable with them, and plus that I cannot use the right click button on the mouse to learn other features, makes me uncomfortable.

I'm also not sure that opening a new window to edit the post is the best way to do the thing (I might have left it in the same main window and use tabbing feature).

I didn't like that only 32 out of my 146 posts were downloaded into Raven. I haven't found the setting which changes that and allows to download all the posts in blog.

What I really don't like or hate:
It's probably Wine's fault and not Raven's (well not all of it), but I have really bad problems with graphics and performance. I had similar problems with Zoundry Writer - which makes me believe that it has something to do with GUI framework used in Raven - and so it is originated within the program itself.

When I switch from the window of Raven to some other window and then back, it may take up to 5 seconds to redraw all the icons and window borders. The text typing is ok, but deleting and replacing it is PAINFULLY slow and makes the experience really unpleasant. Now the last but not least: XHTML formatting that Raven uses is the same as in all other blogging platforms. But Blogger is terrible in parsing this specific formatting, so some sort of tweaking will be needed after posting anyway.

So, did I like the Raven? Yes and no.
Yes because I like its interface better than Zoundry Writer. It's slicker and more beautiful and easier to navigate. Icons are more up to date. In short - it is better.
No, because I haven't been able to fully realize the application's potential due to problems both in Wine and the Raven itself. I don't really understand all the options in the program and I can't at the moment understand them because of technical issues.

So, what can I say about the program? I like it.
It can be ran in Linux. While it is still in beta, you may encounter some difficulties in using it, but it works and can be tested and played with.

What about me then? Am I going to use it? No.
At the moment, I've created working script, that takes a simple html (which is not really an html - just few markings such as 'title', 'italic' and 'bold' formatting) and posts it as draft on Blogger (If you decided to use the aforementioned script, and have problems - let me know, I'll try to help you out). I find it much more efficient, as I can create my posts anywhere in VI or Bluefish or OpenOffice Writer. I find it more useful because I work on the draft after all - and doing it my way takes less time and effort.

Now you can run the Zoundry Raven in Linux! Enjoy.

Have any questions? Feedback or suggestions? Ask them here!!

Totally Free Wordpress Hosting

2008-02-05T07:54:00.000-08:00

For anyone who tries to be a blogger or create some sort of information resource, the most important issue is always with high quality of the blog or site. It relates both to design and content. It takes awhile until the design makes you happy, and it can also take few iterations until you're happy with the posts.

You create the post, and proofreading it, and post as draft, and reading it again. Then you fix few things, post it online. And then you find that you're not so happy with some phrases, and you change them and post again...it takes awhile until you're totally happy. All these back and forth iterations are not always convenient - you may have a bad connection. Or you have a hosting with limited bandwidth. Or you're not sure, or anything else. Or, maybe, you'd like to see how it would look like without actually posting.

Or, you're just like me. I've posted few times already that I'm thinking about moving my blog to Wordpress. I want to try Wordpress and see how it looks and feels like before I do it on a real blog.

I might have a solution for you. It will help you to do anything you want without actual posting or making design changes to your blog. It is very simple actually, and the magic is in virtualization. It's hardly a surprise for anyone. Our personal computers are strong enough to be the host for both our own tasks and also for virtual computers. So, what you can do is to create your own virtual server that will only run Wordpress (and its all required components, such as web server, database and php engine). You can then work with your local server while you're trying to verify issues such as design and/or posts, and only after you're sure - you could post it to your official blog.

Now I will explain the procedure I tested. Just keep in mind that while it shows how to work with Wordpress blog engine, the idea can work for any other web or other resource you'd like to use. I looked over the web for all sorts of virtualization techniques, and the one I found to be the easiest is the VMWare image of rPath Wordpress Appliance. It is the basic VMWare image of a virtual computer, which includes all required software components needed to run Wordpress. Its size is about 130Mb, which is while not that small, is not big either - a connection to DSL would be enough to get it in about half an hour.

The download includes Wordpress version 2.2, so you will need to update it if you want the latest and the greatest. After the download is complete, unzip the file, and start VMWare Player with the file inside extracted folder. It will start the virtual machine. Here is the example of how will the login look like after the start. I have a DHCP server running on my network, so the appropriate IP address (the picture is clickable):Then, go to {IP}/wordpress/wp-admin/upgrade.php in your browser (IP will be written on that login screen, user: admin, password is: password) - it will allow you to update the MySQL database and now you will have the Wordpress installed. To update it to the latest version from rPath, go back to the virtual machine, and do the following:

login as root, no password needed.
execute "conary updateall"

After all updates are done, the appliance will be updated to Wordpress 2.3.1. Another way to update, is to follow the standard Wordpress Update procedures.

After the update, go to {IP}/wordpress/wp-admin/upgrade.php again - and then you have the up-to-date Wordpress with basic installation.

Now, you'll be able to "play" with themes, plugins and design without hurting your live site. You can try out and build your new site. You can post here and fix those posts until you're happy. And after you are, you can post it on your live blog. Here's the example of my "possible" blog after few tweaks - I imported this very blog there just to see how can it look like (click to see larger picture):This technique allows to do all sorts of experimenting while your live site is still very untouched, functional and working. It is also very helpful if you don't have a Wordpress blog yet and thinking about the move. It would allow you to play with it and to test it and to decide whether it worth the effort.

Enjoy being your own webmaster!!!

EEE PC is hottiest and sexiest than ever

2008-02-04T01:26:00.000-08:00

The issue of an EEE PC has been already written over many many times. I wrote a comparison of the laptop to an Amazon's Kindle. There also was a news post about schools being purchasing those laptops and then Ars Technica published their own review and reinforced my opinion.

Now, I think the laptop has riched even the business niche. I hear that a lot of people who need a laptop on the road to read and respond to emails, to have a Skype calls and browse the web are very keen to test and use this device. After all, its price at ~$400, and weight ~1kg, are very attractive points. Added to that the fact, that this is a fully functional laptop with a decent hardware specifications, make a really attractive deal.

I just read an article by James Maguire at Datamation. I like the following saying by the author:

Unlike Apple, though, Asus will never have to fork over a rebate to customers who bought as soon as the doors opened, then suffered buyer's remorse when the price inevitably fell. Instead, the Eee PC fans will keep scooping up these small units as fast as the company can make them. Until, of course, competitors flood the market, and a $75 unit finally hits the streets. That will be next year's must-have ultra-portable.

I doubt that this laptop will conquer the ultra-portable niche (although it might), but at the very least it probably will make waves to the whole industry. And who knows, maybe the likes of IBM and Sony will listen, and make some of theirs ultraportables comparable in terms of price. But just imagine the possibility: a $100 for eeePC? I'll take 2 please...

That could really change things around, could it? I think that OLPC camp would have now something else to worry about.

Open Sourced Microsoft

2008-02-02T23:34:00.001-08:00

I've noticed lately, that I've been commenting Brian Proffitt's posts a lot. Well, I do so because I think he's a great journalist and makes valid points in technology, as a contrast to many others who seem to be completely ignorant on the issues they write about.

This time Brian is trying to explain the Open Source strategy Microsoft has. Here's the main quote I think:

... if you use open source technology and contribute to it for others to use, you potentially could help make your competitors stronger. And if your failed marketing campaign just happens to send more business to our opponent... in this situation, that might not be a clear loss, because it could also change a government's perception of Redmond being unfair.....

I will admit that this may be a reach. But I also think, with Microsoft's ongoing legal woes and the threat of the LAMP space forever closed to them using their traditional business practices, this whole notion of competing with open source on open source terms does not sound so far fetched.

I mainly agree with this notion, but here's the catch: after the long war (in business perspective of course) Microsoft has on Open Source projects in general and Linux in particular, how much trust would potential clients put in this vendor? Isn't the success of the vendor depends on its actions? So in the nearest future, would potential customers be able to trust Microsoft with its own open source projects? Can they?

Can a customer trust Microsoft embracing the enemy and building its own Microsoft AMP stack? That's another issue to think about.

Can Microsoft be open sourced?

The Working Platform - Computer In Appliance (TM)

2008-01-27T11:58:00.000-08:00

I just read another nice post by Brian Profitt from Linux Today about the the idea of an appliance-like computer. And I have the possible candidate to answer Brian's question.

I recently understood that most of my "computer"-related work is either already done or can be moved to be totally online. Once the process is complete, it allows the following (or combination of them):

I'm totally online. I never loose my data because I have it online all the time. The only moment when its not there is that split of a second I loose my wireless connection and my data not uploaded yet. I can do my work (or entertainment) anywhere, anytime.
I'm totally "dead" without internet connection. My powerful computer has no use for me. I can't access anything. I can't do anything. I'm so addicted to being online, that I have problems figuring out what are computers for. Although my movies and music are local and with me, I have no wish to "consume" them - after all, I can't access my email (don't tell me its unrelated! It is. I am not addicted).

Then I've thought about it even more.

We have an internet connection nowadays everywhere. I walk around my neighborhood and I catch easily 10 open WiFi spots. Many can check their email with 3G mobile phones, or even use them to connect to the "real" Internet. Many of those phones are good enough for Internet by themselves. WiMax is promised to come in couple of years give or take. So we have connectivity problem solved. That, probably, also solves me the "problem" with an Internet ~~addiction~~ usage. This means, I can work virtually everywhere anytime.

Now, what bothers me at this point, is the computer itself. I mainly use browser and email. I use simple editor for documents/blog writing. I am actually rewriting this post in vi. I use simple photo management application. I use somewhat more advanced pictures editing application. I use multimedia players.

These all are hardly resource intensive tasks. But my computer starts to crawl when I open more than 2 heavy applications at a time (which happens from time to time). Besides, when I'm thinking about installing applications and maintaining the computer, I wonder: why should I invest so much time in it?

So, I know what I want. I want a TV-like usability computer - something that just works. I want a "work" appliance. I want an appliance which is lite, small, convenient, has a long battery life, and fast and responsive. I want to know what it does and how it does it. I want to be able to customize it. I want my computing everywhere with me.

There's another possible use. I've wrote an essay on computing for grandmas. I think that an appliance computer can easily be used in those cases.

So, in one sentence - is there a future for appliance computing? I think that it might be.

Pushing Gentoo forward

2008-01-22T23:53:00.001-08:00

Hi all

Being part of a Gentoo community (and I am after all an ex-User Representative. The "ex" part in it is because the project is debunk and no longer exists), it hurts me to see my favorite Linux distribution getting to the point of no return. Like, the Tipping Point in reverse: after this point nothing can be done to stop its destruction.

I'm not pessimistic person in general. I'm just an outside (and a little inside) observer, who wishes all the best but can't really affect anything. I just read Brian Proffit's support call for Daniel Robbins' offer to step as the leader of Gentoo's legal affairs again. I am gladly joining the call, because I think Gentoo is in position where it needs leadership.

Gentoo was founded by Daniel, who left it in 2005 for personal reasons. This act may be seen as treason by some, or a happy occasion by others. It doesn't matter though, because for awhile Gentoo was a thriving community and had an inertia of speeding mass to move it forward. But frankly, it didn't work so well. When I first started to use Gentoo, it was a spectacular thing. It was the best distribution out there (and I've been around many). The documentation was spectacular. The community was awesome.

But what happened since then? At the beginning of 2006 (just about a year since Daniel left), I started to feel bored. The place wasn't fun anymore. There were still fun thing from time to time, but nothing really exciting. And yet, I got 3 people to Gentoo. And there was still a community of great people around. Which led to a following attempt to "do" something to make things better. It was a great project - to allow users to get some level of respect from developers and to influence somehow the community. The project was User Representatives, and, well, its dead now.

Why would such project die? 1 reason: lack of interest. After a while, it was quite clear that the team would not be available "enough" to do the work they (I mean us) were chosen to perform. That, and additional lack of communication from User Relations team (not intentional) lead to "death" of this attempt.

So where does it leave Gentoo? Many senior (as in "time within Gentoo", not age) developers left the project. Many IRC channels are silent for weeks. Main gentoo.org page looks like its 2001 and it looks like the only news are the news that Gentoo is still alive and kicking. That's not good.

So here it is. The distribution is OK nowadays, but not exciting. The community is fine nowadays, but not thriving. The documentation is still one of the best. What is all this means?

I see 3 possible options:

Gentoo will keep its problematic state. The community will deminish to the point it was in 2001 or even earlier. Then, as Gentoo is ok with small communities it will thrive again until it gets big again. Rewind. Repeat. I suggest we call it a "Gentoo pulsation". Like the Universe and the Big Bang theory.
Gentoo will keep its problematic state. It will slowly die as mainstream distribution and will either remain in the hands of a few or will be supported by the folks like Sabayon Linux.
There will be changes good enough to bring it from dusty shelves and rise to another level. This can be done with proper decent leadership (and I don't specifically mean Daniel here - I mean leadership

And yes, I think that Daniel can make (3.) happen.

Cheers.