Hughservers.com

Well, shockingly enough the mid-week links happened as promised.  Now on to the normal weekly Sunday post.

I’m going to go for a slightly less serious bunch of posts this week.  Mainly videos and the like.  I think my first mention must go to this Japanese toilet training video.  It is utterly hilarious.  Well worth a watch.   Second is a rather amusing video about the differences between men and women in the shower.  Very accurate and really quite funny.  Finally on the YouTube extravaganza, here is a video of a syncronised stunt driving team.  The section where they change a wheel whilst driving on two wheels is excellent!

My final link is to a trailer on the quicktime site.  It is of the movie Paprika, which is a product of Satoshi Kon, of Perfect Blue, Tokyo Godfathers, Paranoia Agent and others, fame.  The trailer is again very good and shows all the hallmarks of his work.  Hopefully the finished product will be just as good.

And I’m afraid that is it for this week.  Have a good one.

Not going to be a mentally massive mid week links, more a small feeler to see how I can fit this into my evening’s activities.

Firstly I’d like to talk about Backtrack, this is a linux based security distribution, which can be booted from CD, USB key or over a network.  This distro is based on two exsisting distros Whax and Auditor Security Collection, which merged to form Backtrack.  The distribution is built on a Slackware core and is designed specifically to be used for network penetration testing.  It supports a rather wide hardware platform, has a vast range of software and quite a few nice features.  Specifically integration with the metasploit framework.

Now for a few random links.  First up is Linux MCE, a distro that combines Ubuntu and MythTV into one easy to install package.  Secondly is zcars.org a kitcar maker that makes conversion kits to put bike engines in a variety of cars.  Cool kits and a good website, with plenty of good videos.  Thirdly, peacefire.org a organisation that aims to prevent unnecessary censorship of website, specifically for young people.

Like I said this was going to be short, so one last piece:

What if google wanted to be sued when they bought YouTube?  That is the thought behind the article on michiknows.com.  Quite an interesting thought.  As the article states Google obviously wants to be a major player in the video advertising world, when it finally hits the internet in what ever form it takes.  So from that point of view having the current major player in the video world makes a lot of sense.  Especially when the second largest site is the myspace video site.  Myspace is owned by News corp, Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, who I’m sure would love to have the number one video site on the internet.  Basically seems to be a bit of a rumble between the old and the new.

A good article, well worth the read.  The outcome will be interesting to see, thats for sure.

There should be a sunday links up as per usual.  Maybe another post before then, who knows.

Ok, the mid-week links were missing in action. Whoops. Oh well, this will be a more meaty post…

In an article El Reg describes how many companies who make use of open source products are struggling with new management when they are taken over. Or just as commonly, management misunderstanding open source software and taking the usual hard line against it. As they do when confronted with anything that they don’t understand. Technicians and developers often use products because they are the best tool for the job, or the one that the techie knows best. Often managers who don’t understand such products react negatively to such usage. I’m not at all surprised by this kind of reaction. This blogger predicts much more such coverage in the future as open source becomes even more mainstream and moves more strongly (as it is currently doing) into markets that it currently isn’t strong in.

In a rather neat piece of webdesign, Katherine Gallia has coded a rather nifty site that changes the design depending on the time of day. Reminds me of the shame I have of not updating this site or even re-theming WordPress.

I’ve mentioned Jacob Nielsen before on this site. His columns are generally quite interesting and this most recent one doesn’t disappoint. He makes a good point in that learning a specific UI isn’t really a particulary good way to teach children computers. It would be much more worthwhile to teach them generalist skills that will allow them to use pretty much any program, not just Microsoft Word by rote. Which does seem to be what some people consider computer education.

Plenty of good meat for rantage coming from The Register today. Another shout out to how businesses are not catching up with technology at all. To those you who work in IT, you’ll probably know that virtualisation is the new thing, here to save us lots of time, effort and money. You know, the new silver bullet. Yes, of course… Anyway, the reg article notes how quite a few IT departments out there are unsure about how many virtual servers they have out there. Potentially creating a licensing hell. Unless you use *nix. But if you use Microsoft, they are trying to limit how many times you can move a VM about, or move a license from VM to VM. What a shocker there. Microsoft in trying to squeeze even more revenue from the enterprise market.

I’ve been using the GTD Tiddlywiki for some time now. It is a skinned and tweaked version of the rather fantabulous Tiddlywiki. It is basically a single HTML page, with a large chunk of javascript to provide the dynamic content and CSS for styling. The GTD version is mainly based around the Getting Things Done philosophy. It is slanted towards generating lists and the like quickly and easily. Even if you aren’t interested that much in that sort of thing, it and tiddlywiki are both good pieces of software and well worth a dabble if nothing else.

Unfortunately, the gearbox on my car died it’s final death this weekend.  I’ve only just got back from having had the car towed back home.  So there won’t be a post this Sunday, as I’ve not got the time to arrange anything.  I plan on doing a Mid Week Links tho, so check back around Wednesday.