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On a
Monday 
September 3, 2007 --
It is another holiday in the U.S. (and Canada). It likely will rain, a fitting end to a "Summer of Rain" in Austin. I've listened to the three songs I usually listen to on Mondays, by the Boomtown Rats, Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five, and (The Rev.) Al Green.
More...
Desktop virtual machines (DRM bites me,
too)
(1972) "I can hear the fireworks...
And it's almost Independence Day." - Van Morrison
July 4, 2007 --
I can hear the fireworks.
It is Independence Day.
...
However, back to virtual machines, the device drivers provided
by Fedora, VMware and/or Windows 2000 do not seem sufficient to
work with the
Content
Scramble System (CSS) Digital Rights Management (DRM) scheme used
with most commercial DVDs.
Whenever I would try to play "Jurassic Park" with ShowTime, it would
either simply hang or complain of some CSS problem and then hang.
I have a few non-commercial DVDs. One DVD that my grand-daughter's
other grandfather made of her birthday party plays just fine with ShowTime
running in the virtual machine.
So virtual machine performance passes my test, but this application
(playing DVDs) doesn't seem very usable.
More...
Upside Down (Windows over Fedora 7
Linux)
June 18, 2007 --
For some time I've wanted to make better use of a fairly robust X86
machine that was mostly generating heat and wasting electricity while
performing minimal duties as a Windows file server.
...
Eventually, it dawned that I should try turning the software upside
down.
Instead of running Fedora in a virtual machine on Windows, the raw
hardware could run Fedora and the Windows file server could be relegated
to a virtual machine on VMware on Fedora.
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Real
Virtual
May 21, 2007 --
Sometimes I feel overly cautious as I re-engage with virtual
machine thinking. When IBM, Microsoft et al aggressively tout the
advantages of deploying servers as virtual machines, what's the
sweat?
Last month I plunged into decisions and experiences with virtual machines
in the "real world" -- production environments.
Alas, there was no time for writing stories then, and
the thoughts are fleeting.
More...
Free code meets free
sectors
March 28, 2007 --
My wife dryly prefaces nostalgic comments with "back in the McKinley administration" (at the turn of the previous century).
In the McKinley administration, telegraphs were normal distance
communication.
In 1927, the baud
became a measure of transmission speed.
In the 1990s, Andy Grove and others at Intel spoke of
"free bauds" in anticipating Internet hyper-growth.
Joe and I repeated (paraphrased?) the Intel-speak as "free
MIPS
meet free bauds" in our
Barriers Breaking Down
chapter.
Though Intel did and does charge for processors, their prices in the
mid-1990s were likely a few (U.S.) dollars per MIP and today are likely
below a penny per MIP.
At a free WiFi hotspot, megabits of Internet access are literally free.
The smallest allocation unit of most disk drives is a 512 byte sector.
500GB disk drives are readily available for under $200 and have roughly a
billion sectors, so the marginal cost of a disk sector is under
0.2 micro-cents.
In the last week or so, I've become
re-enamoredVRM
with virtual machines
and am using them to gobble up tens of millions of sectors with free
software.
More...
Looking at and past the
windows
(1965) "Same old places and the same old songs...
It's the singer, not the song." - Jagger/Richards
(1929) "You may forget the singer, but don't forget this song." - A.P. Carter
January 19, 2007 --
My head hurts from all of the explorations I've allowed myself,
such as
- Trying to make Windows XP, PuTTY,
SSH and
Samba cooperate so that I can
securely access Windows shares (and Samba shares of Linux file systems)
off-premises. An aggravating battle, not for the faint of heart,
but I won.
- Helping a friend, a 20-year Mac user, recover an eMac which
OS X had helped mess up. (He seems to have "won" but seems
forced into testing his disaster recovery procedures.)
- Exploring PmWiki and
MediaWiki to try to
"evangelize" a new church Wiki.
I tried both, on IIS on NT4 Server, on
Apache on NT4 Server, and Apache on
Fedora,
FreeBSD,
and ubuntu.
MediaWiki is way too hard to work with for my purposes.
PmWiki is delightful on Apache, and probably OK on supported
IIS, but I never got it to work on IIS/NT4.
- Continuing to clean up self-certified SSL connections for IMAP,
LDAP, sendmail and other things I'm probably forgetting.
- Reading lots
of what others have written recently about Vista and OS X.
...
If the details are not of interest to you, here are some summary suggestions:
- IMO, not one of the prominent platforms (Linux, Mac OS, Windows) does everything well. Not even close.
- It is easy to find staunch advocates of each platform and
dramatically contrasting writings extolling
OS X
or
Vista
or
Linux.
- Except for the staunch advocates of a particular platform, not one
of the platforms is good enough to get excited about.
- The next releases (Fedora/ubuntu 7, Mac OS 10.5, Windows Vista)
are not that much better than the predecessors.
- Personally, there is no urgency to upgrade to Vista or 10.5,
certainly not enough motivation to spend money. (With free versions of
Linux, there's a little more curiosity basis for exploring
the upgrades.)
More...
Looking out the
windows
(1965) "Same old places and the same old songs...
It's the singer, not the song." - Jagger/Richards
(1929) "You may forget the singer, but don't forget this song." - A.P. Carter
January 2, 2007 --
While the "real world" mourns President Ford and ponders the past,
present, and future of our planet, many in cyberspace find now
the time to ponder hardware, software, and Internet platforms.
More...
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