KDE 4.2 looks like it’s finally the right version to get me to use Linux as my daily desktop. 4.5 has more goodness baked in, 4.1 was insufficient, but 4.2 looks ‘just right’. I used to be a GNOME user, but with GNOME’s track towards Microsoft API’s (mono) for its centerpiece applications I’ve gone...
Read more →I got a National Cyber Alert System alert today about the Microsoft Internet Explorer security vulnerability, now that Microsoft has a patch out. The trouble is, everybody has known about this since last week, and anybody finding out about it today is already hopelessly in trouble. There’s nothing wrong with a notification, “hey, you...
Read more →It used to be you could get a floppy disk for about a dollar. If you needed to give a colleague a document it was easy to do so with a floppy disk, and there was no point in returning it. Today, it’s easy to get a 1GB flash drive/card for $8 or so,...
Read more →To verify the Fedora 10 package downloads, you need the new key they’re signing the Fedora 10 packages with, but it’s only included in the -release rpm which you don’t want to install on some other machines, say your repository mirror. This works: rpm --import 'http://pgp.surfnet.nl:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xBF226FCC4EBFC273' I wonder why this is different than the...
Read more →Apple’s Snow Leopard (10.6) operating system is due out in the next quarter according to slides shown recently at the LISA conference. It adds a small handful of features but it’s mainly an architecture, performance, and bugfix release. Leopard (10.5) is pretty buggy and Apple readily admits it’s not what an OS should be....
Read more →This blog is on a shiny (ok, flat black, really) new server, with much faster everything, and it’s a half-U low-power para-virtualized beta product I’m working on (more on that to come, now that I have room for pictures!). Just typing this it’s immediately apparent that there’s way more snappy (live preview with round-trips...
Read more →GNOME has a good page describing some of the concerns with linking GPL’ed software against the OpenSSL libraries. Debian believes that as long as OpenSSL and the GPL’ed software are delivered on the same medium or in the same distribution, the GPL’s ‘accompanying clause’ is invoked: There is some disagreement about what this exception...
Read more →To get the presidential debates as mp3’s: go to the (www.youtube.com/cspan) Play the debate (before you go home, e.g.) Pull the debate .flv file from your cache (e.g. FlashTmp0) run it through ffmpeg to extract the mp3 To get the file from your cache, figure out where the flash cache is and...
Read more →Saw this train car at Clark’s Trading Post: and it made me think of SSL certificates. I think that qualifies me as certifiably hopeless.
Read more →From today’s new Macbook announcement: 11:01AM Q: Concern about the glossy screens. Are you going to offer another option? A: Steve: We're going all glass -- we won't offer another version. Phil: You offset the reflection by the brightness, and consumers love it. One of the great things about a notebook is you can...
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