Hughservers.com

Just a quick festive edition of Some Sunday Links.

Firstly, this one is a bit late, but the Norad Santa Tracking website is a great christmas site.
Komar.org, has in the past been a bit of a swiz.  For a few years Alex Komar did tell a few porkies about how controllable his lights are.  But this time (well from 2005 onwards) it seems to be real.  Take a look for yourself!

One of my favourite christmas viral videos is the light show that Carson Williams set-up to the Transiberian Orchestra’s Wizards of Winter song.  He’s now set-up a company to sell his expertise to others.

This is a bit late I know (seeing as this comes out in september), but Larry Wall’s yearly ‘state of the onion‘ speech is always a good read. It isn’t just a speech about the Perl programming language, it does touch on a wide variety of subjects.

On the subject of speeches worth reading, this one by Paul Vixie is well worth a read. He focuses mainly on the subject of digital rights and how it affects a non-technical audience. One of the most interesting parts is about how DRM affects the average person. He also touches on how organisations such as the RIAA and MPAA try to monetise the sale of music via the web, largely due to their own greed and ignorance. Another nice touch is the advocacy of buying and ripping CDs, over buying music from online stores.

10 who matter is a interesting article about the 10 people who have been a very large influence on the open source community. It focuses more on those who have played a part since the beginning and who have written some of the most used pieces of software. Not just focusing on some of the more well known celebrities.

For those of you who like your programming, complex and scientific, there is a nice Haskell introduction page floating around currently.

Only one piece of software this week, a cross platorm IRC client, xchat. Originally (and primarily) a unix peice of software. It does have a windows version available, which due to the time taken is a piece of shareware, with the code available. However, others have gone and made their own windows builds. Which is nice. xchat has a whole raft of plugins and nifty features. It also has a nice clean UI and is quite compact and stable.

On the interesting but tough theme, one of the OsX86 guys has figured out how to setup OsX from a pendrive. Which is pretty frigging neat. Not sure it is the most kosher of processes, but hey. Nice if you can do it.

Continuing my round up of various nifty ‘Web 2.0′ sites, I’d like to talk about Basecamp and Freshbook.

Basecamp is part of a suite of web-based software from 37 signals. It is a project management system, but all contained in a very nice user-friendly website. It provides a whole bunch of utilities and features to help people work on projects. It is quite a useful system, if the people working on the project are spread out over a wide area. Probably the only downside to this package is the cost. However, seeing how much some businesses spend on utter crap (sharepoint anyone?), they are pretty well priced. Freshbooks (see next paragraph!) has a similar price structure. A small (but with all the features) try-out account, and then a progression from cheap to moderately expensive.

Freshbooks is a billing/accountancy package, which is all online. You can even go as far as sending invoices via post from the system. It isn’t really something I can see myself using really. I don’t run a business. But for those of you who are freelancers or running a small company, I can see something like this being really quite handy.

I’ve recently been reading a bit more around the art of web design. And one name that pops up quite a bit is Jakob Neilsen’s. Now I don’t agree with absolutely everything he says, but by and large he’s generally pretty spot on about a fair few things. Well worth taking into account when you are doing a design. Admittedly it isn’t always the sort of thing many people are actually interested in. Most people don’t care about such things, doesn’t mean that they don’t find it useful to have a well thought out site.

Might as well be this Sunday’s links.  Ho hum.  Really need to get on top of these…

Well, first an amount of sadness.  Despite his wife and kids making it out ok.  James Kim didn’t.

As usual the Daily Mail continues in it’s fine tradition of quality articles, by posting something written by a raving misogynistic loon.

There is a mighty fine article on linux.com about how various distros go about building a secure release.

Lugradio released their latest episode.  Well worth a listen.

Ack, sorry about the length and quality of this post.

I’ve been at my parents this weekend, I’ve only just got back, so this post will be pretty short.

So, with no further ado:

When your sysadmin is bored…

Why you need to learn C, a worthwhile article, but you could make that point about pretty much any language.  It is always worth learning a new language, as it will make you more flexible in the long run, even if you don’t stick with it and forget half of it once you stop using it on a day-to-day basis.  Sensibly, the guy doesn’t bother with allowing comments, you’d get flamed to hell and back for that.

The Ubuntu linux project has made a pretty surprising announcement recently. They are planning on adding the nvidia and ati drivers into the distro by default. A poll about the issue was recently put up on the ubuntu forums. Personally I’m quite shocked by this. Ubuntu is based on Debian, which has always taken a hardline approach to non-free code in the distribution. I can see the short term advantages to this line of action. It will help the adoption of the distribution, by those switching from other OSes. However in the long run we want manufacturers to contribute open source drivers. Legitimising closed-source drivers will not achieve this. The only advantage I can see to this is that once Ubuntu has a large user base then they can exert a lot more pressure on manufacturers.

The Zune doesn’t seem to have had the best launch so far. So far it seems like a poor attempt to knock the iPod/iTunes combo of the top spot. It is a combo of mp3 player and the online store to buy the music from. The whole shebang (much like the iPod) is integrated. Engadget and wikipedia have a pretty good writeups of the technical details.

There are a number of rather good knockoff of Zune ads and combinations of other ads floating around the net already. One I like is a spoof of the PC Guy and Mac guy ads, others rip more directly on the ad campaign, one likening the Zune tagline, “Welcome to the Social” to an orgy – “Welcome to the Orgy” the other one contrasts using the Zune to toking on a bong. Not quite what the marketing guys wanted I’m sure.

Stunningly enough the current incarnation of the Zune isn’t compatible with Vista. This fact is stated quite clearly on the website. I do think that they are trying to get something out of the door that works, to try and distract from the time they’ve taken with Vista. It must be quite important for them to make sure this project doesn’t over run. As is often the case, they can use this first incarnation as a large-scale beta test.

Obviously the Zune is DRMed to hell and back. They’ve even managed make it incompatible with their existing music scheme, PlaysForSure. As well as being incompatible with that, you can’t use it with any of the other major DRM systems, Apple’s FairPlay or Real’s Helix system. Personally if I was going to buy a player anytime soon, I’ll be buying the daisy player or an iriver. Specifically the nifty little u10 player. Nice large screen and it plays ogg.

Software

Cygwin is a method of getting some unix-like functionality under Windows. It works surprisingly well and is something I’ve used on and off for years. I’m still stuck to windows due to the distinct lack of Voice Recognition software available. Cygwin makes the whole experience a lot less painful.

Hardened Gentoo is something I’ve been poking into a fair bit recently. I’m running Gentoo on the server I share with a friend. I’m also planning on running it on the RAID array I’m currently building. It would be a great idea to learn how to really lock it down. However, the project isn’t exactly easy, or user friendly.

A while ago, whilst researching routers and ADSL modems, I came across OpenWRT, a linux based firmware for many routers and modems. I’d been hoping to make my own router, using a embedded pc such as the net4801 made by Soekris engineering. However I was hoping to find a MiniPCI ADSL modem (I couldn’t, if you know of where you can buy one, let me know please!). So after that pipedream became increasingly expensive I went back to OpenWRT. I purchased a Linksys WRT54G (v3.1) to install OpenWRT on. I’ve not quite got round to it, but there is a qemu/vmware image doing the rounds that I’m going to fire up to see what you have to play with.

Recently I’ve been looking into a truly portable and fault tolerant method of storing my emails and a small number of crucial files. Work, dissertation, websites etc. Rsync.net is I think going to be a part of this solution. It is, as the name kind of suggests, a company that offers disk space, which is accessible via rysnc (or unison, or a number of other related programs)

I’m a big fan of laptops that are actually portable, this new offering from Samsung looks like it is actually pretty damn portable. It has a super small screen and the keyboard folds in half, tucking back under the screen. I’m a big fan of the 13″ laptops (macbooks, powerbooks, ibooks etc) that apple produce. They are rather expensive tho, even with the student discount that I get.  Annoyingly, most 12″ laptops tend to be more on the expensive side.  Bit of a pain that.
OpenMoko, or the open source mobile phone, seems to have hit the news big time this week.  It does look rather stunning.  It is made by a company called FIC.  It has a GPS inbuilt, which is very nice, but no camera, wifi or bluetooth.  That is more of a pain.  Still the GPS makes it worth the price alone which, will probably be around the £180 ($350) mark.  Maybe a bit more, but hopefully not too much more.

Finally, this is one for all the unix geeks. We’ve all run a command and then realised the devastating effect it is going to have on our system. rm -rf * is one of those commands. This well written and interesting story details what happens when it all goes horribly wrong, and most importantly, how with a little bit of luck and some know how you can pull it all back from the brink of disaster.

Kernel swearing & Linux Counter

Linux users can some times be a bit odd, but they often come out with the best stuff. For example there are several pages dedicated to the number of swearwords in the kernel source code. The first version was written by a chap named Sean in 1998. This version hasn’t been maintained by since then. However Vidar Holden has taken up the challenge and continued the count into the new millenium. On a slightly more sensible note, there is another linux count that is much more worth while. The Linux Counter has been going since 1993 in one form or another and since 1999 in it’s current version. I am registered as user #259267, and I did so in 2002. Not really that long, and after all that time I’m still not as much of a linux whiz as I’d like to be.
God this is late. And I’ve dumped a lot of the stuff I had planned on doing just to get it up. Totally forgot about this, had friends over last weekend. Been a long week at work.

That I totally missed doing a post last weekend.  It it half done, I’ll post in a mo.

Typography [markboulton.co.uk]

I’m quite geeky at times and that this article on typography really caught my eye, isn’t all that surprising. This article is one in a series focusing in on design and specifically website design.

Kloth.net – services

I’ve been using the services section of Kloth.net for a while now. Mainly the web-based copy of dig. It has a great set of forums, which have some good posts on them. Well worth the read. He’s also a radio ham, which is always a good thing. There are a few little utils on the site, but the main thing is the excellent services the site has on it.

Spotback

Spotback is a web 2.0 style news site. It acts as and aggregator and validator for news. You can rate each story, a bit like digg or slashdot and this determines whether the story gets shown as much. The feature from my point of view is the built in RSS reader, so you can add your own news.

Songbird

Songbird is the best media player I’ve come across recently. It reminds me quite heavily of a media player on KDE, called Amarok. Songbird uses firefox for a foundation. For me the best feature is the rather nice layout and the ability to search your whole music connection quickly. It also has a built in web browser, which you can use to download music you like on certain blogs and webpages. An interesting feature, but you have to find some pages that have music embedded that you like the music on.

Ok, that is it, I’m all out now. Sorry it was late.