A movie we saw in the cinema yesterday, and which we can highly recommend, is “Up“.
Debian developer Patrick Schönfeld took this case and this mainboard to build a 15W PC. He describes his experiences with Debian on his blog.
The Center for networked systems has an interesting lecture about Facebook. Almost the whole open source stack can be downloaded here.
Open Source is hot these days - even the White House is now using it for their web site.
Always wanted to build a media center PC? Read this first.
Still contemplating to run out to the stores and to get Microsofts’ latest and greatest? Think again. The German BSI wouldn’t do it. They think its threat level is “4 high risk” (out of 1-5, with 5 being “very high”).
But of course, Microsoft isn’t alone in this - after all, software is only made by humans. Seems that Sun’s Java System Web Server has a hole as well.
And in case you didn’t know: you can read the daily security warnings concerning Linux and truly open source software at LWN. More - and also more positive - news from them are in their archives. This is a weekly must read.
A monthly one would be the Linux Gazette.
Enough for today…
I’m writing this from work, and don’t have too much time, so without further ado:
About practical encryption, cloud computing, a Linux sysadmin book for (maybe) non-Linux experts, and HannahMontanaLinux.
Done. All found this morning via LXer.
My fellow LXer author Sander has written an interesting article about Open Core Software, which he describes as “The worst of both worlds“.
And Debian developer Barry Hawkins pointed me to Steven Levitt’s interesting talk about child carseats on TED.
Some of you may know that the term “Red Book” doesn’t only stand for a description of the de-facto audio CD standard, or for the famous IBM Redbooks, but also for a book from psychologist C. G. Jung, which was published recently. Should make an interesting read. Here’s the Wikipedia entry about it.
The Intel developers’ and engineers’ blog has some interesting articles about Open Source, Cloud Computing, and Virtualization.
And for those of you who still run Microsoft Windows, or who maybe are waiting for Windows 7 and its “XP Mode”, or who’d never think about trying anything else - how about having both worlds? Tom’s Hardware shows one way of how you could do just that, together with lots of screenshots.
Enjoy your weekend, like I will…
This was a tip from my friend Peter from yesterday. Played in a music store. Thanks Peter; really liked this one!
Found these today, and it’s too much to read at work. Still some make good points, others have great tips, so they’re worth reading IMHO:
Enough for the moment; have to work now.
A friend asked me lately about open source replacements for a big groupware solution from Redmond, which had me sighing on the simple thought of it.
Just found an interesting blog entry from Debian Developer Adrian v. Bidder, who summed my thoughts up pretty well, here.
However, I haven’t dealt with those during the last years, I have to admit. I have had a look at phpgroupware and egroupware once for my former boss, friend and employer Andreas, but that was long ago, and I want to have a look at alternatives to PHP-based solutions.
Kolab is maybe the most interesting of the really free solutions, while Zimbra looks the most promising (I think it has won a lot of awards even before they were bought by Yahoo!). At least their flash-based presentation looks very very professional, and like the software product I’m supporting now as a day-time job, it runs within a Tomcat container.
That would be an interesting task indeed. Let’s see when I find the time to do all that.
Aaahh - finally I found out what was keeping my system busy in Ubuntu, while Debian ran perfectly fine.
Looking at the system monitor in Gnome, I found an unnamed process dying and respawning all the time - so you had no chance to kill <pid> - it was always faster. I tracked it down to vino.server with top, and soon found Bug #340515 - and then some others - in Launchpad.
Not solved yet as it seems, but the workaround is simple:
sudo su
pkill vino.server
exit
And then there was silence… aaahh, what a relief! 
Oh, and of course you can disable it permanently - just switch off the Remote Desktop in the Startup Applications if you don’t use it. And the sensors applet went down another 2-3 degrees:
That’s with the Scythe Big Shuriken on top of the Intel Q8400, running unmanaged at the moment to cool down the northbridge with the Nvidia 9300 graphics as well. The slower running case fan is a Scythe S-FLEX SFF21E (120mm with 1200RPM max).
For an even more silent HTPC, you would want an Intel E5200, and get away with a managed Big Shuriken (at around 650-700RPM), and an 800RPM case fan instead.
This is what we’ll say in a couple of years.
It’s about Microsoft, and the thoughts of an ex-Microsoftie. Read more about it here (sorry, no time - lunch break is as good as over):
http://www.cio.com/article/493224/Ex_Microsoftie_Free_Software_Will_Kill_Redmond?page=1
http://www.amazon.com/After-Software-Wars-Keith-Curtis/dp/0578011891
http://www.freeformdynamics.com/fullarticle.asp?aid=678
At the last address, you can download the mentioned report for free - it was sponsored my my employers…
We’ll move in next week Friday. So here are some pics which you could title “before”:
These were the pictures from the ad. Pics from us moving and how the flat looks like after we moved in will follow in 2 weeks or so. The place is close to Frankfurt airport; a view from our place to the skyline of “Mainhattan” looks like this:
We’ll keep you updated. Enjoy…
