Posts by wheelybird
24 posts • joined Tuesday 9th November 2010 12:31 GMT
Re: "...digital copies of books should "deteriorate"..."
"They'll be inventing hardback and paperback versions of ebooks next."
They have. :( I went to buy an ebook once. It cost £20 because it was 'the hardback version'. Needless to say I didn't buy it.
Re: It's not even subtle
Actually, it really is an interesting place. Worth a visit if you're on holiday in the south of Spain (don't forget your passport), but avoid the town centre as much as possible. Stick to the nature park which covers most of the side of the rock.
Yes. IMAP is a web protocol. It's a very efficient web protocol. With IMAP idle, supported by several IMAP servers and quite a few clients, you get 'push' email. For example, my phone connects to my Dovecot IMAP server and I get email notifications the moment they hit my inbox. CalDAV etc. are also widely supported on mobile devices. iPhones can do CalDAV. CardDAV is for contacts, it's less widely used but I think the the iPhone does them.
So you *can* do essentially the same thing using open protocols. I can prove this by doing essentially the same thing with open protocols.
Posted in Sinclair BASIC comes to Raspberry Pi
Re: The BASIC this article describes sounds more like
Sounds similar to SAM Coupe BASIC, which was based on Speccy BASIC.
SAM Coupe BASIC was pretty damn good.
Just not true
The whole point of the Vita is that it's a portable console with proper controls. You can't compare playing Temple Run or Angry Birds to playing Assassin's Creed or LittleBigPlanet on the Vita. Trying to control a game using virtual controls is awful, and I'm sure you can't get joypad peripherals for your phone, but they're not widely supported or are ever likely to be.
Re: SQL Injection
Hey. Why are you blaming the systems operators? The blame here goes to the developers and management for not hiring whitehat pen testers. Systems staff rarely get a say in which software they run on their systems.
Servers
Well of course you should use the correct tool for the job. I use a GUI on my desktop, and you know what; I often use a GUI file manager to copy and browse files!
However, I find that I can't do that so easily on remote, production servers on account of not running a GUI on them and in fact not installing the libraries I'd need to use to run a GUI on them even if I wanted to. Crazy! So when you're talking about being a *LINUX SYSADMIN*, you perhaps shouldn't be surprised that people flame you for telling people to use a GUI.
Your articles, despite the titles, simply aren't aimed at professional sysadmins and the advice you give for novice/trainee Linux sysadmins won't be applicable for a large number of Linux installations.
Re: Not all that useful...
Are you joking?
Look up some basic network design and then get back to me when you understand it. You are, like the author of the article, assuming that you have one server and it's directly on the internet. I mentioned things like high availability before, which is one aspect of good network design which is what you do if you're professional. How the hell do you get high availability with a single box whether or not it's got iptables on it?
Re: Not all that useful...
SELinux isn't new technology; it's at least a decade old. It is is badly designed and poorly documented technology though.
The point I was making, however, is beginner Linux admins ought to turn off SELinux because they'll try and do something simple and it won't work because of SELinux. There are other things they could do which aren't mentioned in this article which will make their systems more secure anyway and won't be such a pain-in-the-arse.
For one, CentOS has a stupid amount of services running as default, most of them ridiculous. If I remember correctly, one is a bluetooth service or something mad like that. The first step to securing a box is to stop unnecessary services. Another is not to run Webmin which, If I remember, has had some pretty nasty vulnerabilities in the past.
There are indeed thousands of Linux boxes directly on the net. In fact my personal server is. But when I say serious, I mean serious as in "Let's hire a sysadmin to look after this" type serious. I would expect at least a screened subnet type network setup for running a serious network system, whether Linux or any other OS. Not only does it aid security, but allows you to move from a server that's a single point of failure to something more highly available.
The conclusion is of course that this article is aimed at hobbyists rather than people employed as a sysadmin, therefore SELinux would be a hindrance.
Not all that useful...
You do make some good points, but you should point out that this advice is only of practical benefit if you're placing a Linux box directly on the internet without being behind a firewall. I doubt you'll find any serious Linux setup that isn't behind a dedicated firewall.
Tools like ClamAV are designed to scan files going through the Linux system that will end up on other systems - Windows and Macs etc. There are very few viruses and trojans for Linux. If you've updated your system in the past year then you're probably safe against the ones that do exist. However you should really mention tools like Chkrootkit which will actually check for this stuff, or Aide which works as an intrusion detection system.
Incidentally, as a Senior Linux sysadmin with over a decade of commercial experience, I would advise turning SELinux off on your CentOS boxes. It really is more trouble than it's worth. However, Apparmor on Debian/Ubuntu boxes isn't too shabby, so keep that one running.
KSplice
KSplice is a great product; it allows us to meet PCI (payment card) compliance without rebooting our live servers every time a kernel update is uploaded to the repo. Shame Oracle had to go and buy it though.
Of course, you don't need to install Oracle Linux to use KSplice - it runs on CentOS already, along with Debian, Ubuntu etc.
It's very difficult to try and run a commercial Linux infrastructure these days without running something or other from Oracle (e.g. MySQL, Java etc.), but I can guarantee that if I ever fancied commercial Linux support, Oracle are the last people I'd go to.
Posted in Valve to raise Steam for Ubuntu
Re: Other distros
RHEL and CentOS are primarily server oriented distros. Ubuntu is primarily a desktop distro and indeed the majority of desktop installations use Ubuntu.
So that's why they're releasing for Ubuntu first, though I'm sure that someone that uses an "enterprise" distro as their desktop will have no trouble getting an Ubuntu package to run on CentOS.
Posted in Google Nexus 7 Android tablet
Re: HDMI / Docking connector
There's no HDMI or indeed no USB MHL. If this had either of those then I would have bought it despite the lack of SD socket. I don't get why you'd have such a powerful media device with little storage and no TV-out, especially if you use this Googly Play film rental thing. Surely people would want to play their films on the TV? *sigh*
I ordered an Hyundai A7HD instead - not nearly as fancy specs-wise, but it has HDMI out and a SD slot and a resonable screen for a few quids less.
Not just java...
MySQL was also hit by this bug. Specifically MySQL on Debian based servers (and Slackware).
Here's a fix (which would have been handy to know yesterday);
/etc/init.d/ntp stop;
date;
date `date +"%m%d%H%M%C%y.%S"`;
date;
/etc/init.d/ntp start
This solves the problem.
People seem to have adopted runaway climate change as a religion - that is they get very worked up about something that they don't understand and have no proof for. Try suggesting to the more vociferous types that, no matter how hard we try, human impact on the Earth's climate is never really going to amount to much. The least that will happen is that they will scoff at you for being ignorant.
It's annoyed me so many times that all this climate research never seems to have taken into account the distant past - not just hundreds of thousands of years ago, but millions of years ago when the planet did indeed have a fair amount of CO2. The climate has shifted dramatically, but it seems to bear life still the last time I looked.
I look forward to the believers in runaway human climate change respond to this study with derision. As they surely will.
Posted in Why GNOME refugees love Xfce
Choice, not fragmentation
I don't like Unity. I gave Gnome 3 a go, but even with mods to make it more like Gnome 2 I couldn't bring myself to enjoy it; mostly because of the lack of wobbly windows ;)
As much as I didn't like these two new offerings, I didn't start having a tantrum about how unusable Linux is these days because, and here is a point which people keep overlooking and which I think this article is helping to address, if you don't like it, don't use it.
There are other desktop environments for Linux, and switching between them doesn't mean (as this article suggests) that you need to reinstall your current distro.
A visit to Synaptic or Software centre or a one line command with yum will download a new desktop environment for you and you can log out of the current one and then log into your new environment.
I think that this is what Shuttleworth meant when he talked about 'different ways to skin Ubuntu', though I think he's not being proactive enough in telling people how to avoid Unity if they dislike it so much.
"After the reveal"
Do you mean, after the revelation. Do you really need to work so hard to unneccesarily hack bits out of a language when there's no reasonable need to? Do you feel like you've saved yourself some time not typing those couple of extra characters? Perhaps time enough to take a relaxing bath or write a novel? In text speak.
Bah
It was stated on the HP website that they expected a significant price reduction. I phoned to pre-order one at the beginning of last week (because the site was down) and the chap at the end said they would be reduced and bundled with accessories. I've not been able to get back in contact with them by any means since, and I've not had any communication from them at all despite their website claiming that they've been contacting people.
I seem to be one of the the few people who wanted one of those phones even before the price cut, but sadly I've been beaten to it by hundreds of people who intend to resell them on the ebays for twice the price. *sigh*
Second best priest?
Linux the second most popular server OS? Not according to any of the stats I've seen in the past years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems#Servers
What a lazy, pointless article.
Fanless
Chromebooks are most likely to be ARM devices - fanless, cool and light. I have an Toshiba AC100 (which would make a good ChromeOS device). It's very slim, light and has an eight hour battery life. The inside of the case is actually mostly air. In hours of use, it's got ever so slightly warm.
So yeah, netbooks are old hat. Smartbooks are the future.
This has been going on for a few weeks now.
The BBC started doing dynamic 1080i/p a couple of months back now (and yes, it's 1080p25, and yes, it's in the Freeview specs). It's only the BBC HD channel that they're doing it on, though.
It's not just Sony TVs that had/have problems. A lot of Samsung TVs had OK sound, but the picture blanked for each i/p switchover. Perhaps they've been fixed now.
The BBC and Sony have known about this problem for a while now, but it took them ages to respond to user complaints. In fact, Sony only admitted to the problem three or four days ago.
The BBC explained what they assume the problem is a couple weeks ago, but decided to keep running their dynamic switching experiments rather than wait for the manufacturers to get a fix in. Considering that a large percentage of Freeview HD viewers own the Sony / Samsung TVs, that's an odd decision.
Distro upgrades
They also update all of your installed applications, remember? The actual OS components being updated will be a small percentage of the total.
A failure a day
We use sagpay on our website. I used to screen-scrape Sage's status page for our alerting system until they got wise to that and made it restricted access (they don't like people knowing that their systems are knackered).
After that I started scraping their RSS feed, but that didn't work very well because they used to only update that once they'd (temporarily) fixed their problems, with a 'all OK' message.
However, since their last 'upgrade', they've started being more honest on their RSS feed, and actually reporting when there are problems. The down-side to this is that there have been very few days in the last month when that alert hasn't been fired because of their poor systems.
So I've had to turn of alerting for their system.
I suspect the Windows XP laptop they run their system on is become a bit old an knackered now.
Posted in E Ink unwraps colour e-paper reader
One obvious application
That seems to have been missed out. Digital photo frames. It's the future.
Oh, and porn.
