IBM Linux Ad: Prodigy

(flash video)

Media-Win7 Love Affair Ends Thanks To DRM?

Slashdot | Draconian DRM Revealed In Windows 7

“A few days’ testing of Windows 7 has already disclosed some draconian DRM, some of it unrelated to media files. A legitimate copy of Photoshop CS4 stopped functioning after we clobbered a nagging registration screen by replacing a DLL with a hacked version. With regard to media files, the days of capturing an audio program on your PC seem to be over (if the program originated on that PC). The inputs of your sound card are severely degraded in software if the card is also playing an audio program (tested here with Grooveshark). This may be the tip of the iceberg. Being in bed with the RIAA is bad enough, but locking your own files away from you is a tactic so outrageous it may kill the OS for many persons. Many users will not want to experiment with a second sound card or computer just to record from online sources, or boot up under a Linux that supports ntfs-3g just to control their files.”

I’ve found it strange how (almost) all media around the intertubes has been “in love” with Windows 7 which is just Windows Vista slightly decrapified and slightly optimized – coming out 3 years after Vista first came out. The whole thing seems to be a success story in lowering expectations.

This whole DRM thing is the first big mainstream negative piece about Windows 7. Hopefully, the first of many.

And in case you missed it when it first went around the blogosphere: Is it Windows 7 or KDE 4?

In this video, we take to Sydney’s streets to find out what people think of what they think is a Windows 7 demonstration. The net result? Mainly, people just didn’t like Vista.

[flash video]

My Future Netbook Or Something

If I ever buy a netbook it needs to have a proper OS. Windows is even more of a joke on a netbook than it is on a normal laptop and since I don’t foresee apple coming up with a netbook in the near future, linux is all that’s left. And no, that crap Asus ships and calls linux is not an option. Windows wannabe Xandros with a lame interface – no thank you. Ubuntu is currently the (only) way to go. And I mean normal Ubuntu not Ubuntu with weird interface (DJ Silly Remix). Sure you can install something like Ubuntu EEE if you have an eee pc or similar but that still might not get all your hardware runing properly plus why did you have to do it yourself? That should’ve been done by the manufacturer imo.

I also find some of the hadware on the current generation of netbooks lacking. There’s nothing that can be done about the SSDs at the moment. They are all slow, low-capacity energy-vampires. One could go with the traditional mechanic drives but that’s soooo last century. The memory is a different story. 512MB is definitively not enough. 1GB is usable but 2GB would be nice. But the biggest let down in my opinion is the battery life. Assuming you don’t stick with windows or the windows wannabe that comes pre-installed, you won’t get past 5h of battery life. And knowing the reviewers and my own careless use of computer resources, that probably translates into 3h in my hands

Granted some may say I’ve missed the point of netbooks. That all netbooks are for is browsing the web, reading email and instant messaging. Nope. That’s just all you can do with the current hardware. Ok the truth is you can do a lot more but you’ll soon run into limitations. Say I want to fire up eclipse and work on my JADE powered project for the Distributed Intelligent Agents course. It’s painfull enough on my macbook I can’t imagine it being bearable on the current crop (read crap) of netbooks.

But that’s not what netbooks are for right? And if it’s just browsing and reading email, an iPhone will do. But work still needs to get done and while my macbook is great for that, I’d still like a more portable option. One I wouldn’t be too afraid to drop/lose. A more task-oriented option (e.g. work on proj A for 2h at a random place with wireless) without the hundreds of applications I keep conveniently open on my macbook would also be nice.

Obviously there are already many options in the market and more to come. But I’m not paying more than 350 eur for one. That’s the price of an eee pc 901. So all I have to do now is wait for another 12 months for it (or rather its sucessor(s)) to reach the kind of hw specs I want and for them to either drop the pseudo-linux or for ubuntu’s netbook support to improve a bit.

Noise Sample

How Digg Works is a nice blog post on the digg technology blog that gives an overview of the digg network architecture: load balancers -> application server (apache, memcached, gearman) -> database server (MySQL) / file server (MogileFS). Quoting:

“Digg uses Debian GNU/Linux across the board with a mixture of MySQL, Memcached, MogileFS, Python, PHP, Apache, Gearman and various appliances to serve up billions of requests a month (and more every day!)”

What’s New In Python 2.6. My highlights: new documentation format using Sphinx (which btw looks incredibly powerful – read “complex”), awesome (but still optional) with statment (from future) to replace try…finally blocks, multiprocessing package,and more.

I had more stuff to put in this post but it has been in my “draft” folder for more than a week now so I’m just gonna post it like it is.

Advanced Linux Administration Course – Porto

My friend José Gaspar will be teaching an Advanced Administration Course (Curso Administração Avançada de Servidores Linux)

Some highlights/keywords:

• Servers: WWW, FTP, DNS, DHCP, LDAP, E-Mail
• Samba (with quotas)
• Security
• XEN

Location: Rua da Boavista, Porto Portugal (link)
Date: From April 22 to June 3.
Schedule: Tuesday and Thursday, 19h-23h (4h)
Duration: 72h
Price: 300 euros

More information (in portuguese):
http://moodle.libhertz.com
http://www.solutionsout.com/cursos.htm

Services Left Behind

I’ve recently started using my macbook as my only personal computer.

One of the big side effects is that I no longer need to synchronize multiple computers running different Operating Systems. This had been one of my major headaches with computing. My solution was mostly rsync/ssh synchronization of certain directories with my home server and a switch to web applications.

So, now that the need is gone, I’m migrating back to conventional desktop applications.

Gmail
The first web app I started using. I tried to migrate to thunderbird but I simply don’t like thunderbird. So I’m now using Apple’ Mail App.
I still use the gmail service, I just don’t use the web interface regularly.

Google Calendar
The second web app I started using. I like it a lot but it did make 2-way synchronization with my cellphone and palm (up until Palm Desktop stopped working) painful. Yes there is software around to do it. BusySync looks awesome but I don’t think there’s any reason for me to pay money to use a service I don’t really need anymore. GCALDaemon is Free but I was unable to get it properly configured plus I just don’t trust software that’s hard to setup.
I now use just Apple’s iCal to manage my calendars and in case you’re curious I used the BusySync trial to migrate – it was painless.

Remember The Milk
Less known than the google services, Remember The Milk is an online task manager. I started using it less than a year ago – only after Palm Desktop stopped working. Before that, I used just my Palm TX and I had started using iSync to synchronize my Palm and my cellphone. The side effect was I couldn’t use 2-way sync with my cellphone which isn’t that much of a problem as it seems because I don’t really like using my cellphone for that. Still, there’s just no point in using RTM anymore, so I now use iCal/Mail App to handle my tasks. Since I only had a handful of tasks to complete, I migrated by hand.

What’s next?
I’ll consider switching feed readers from google reader to NetNewsWire. Migrating is painless since I can just download my OPML from google reader

I use a private blog as a notepad of sorts. I previously used just regular .txts in a specific directory and then switched to Journler. But Journler wasn’t available on Linux.
Maybe I’ll continue to use the blog for my longer notes but switch to Mail App for smaller ones. Maybe not. I’ll need to think about it and try it.
Plus there’s the issue of wether it’s gonna be easy to get the data into whatever application I choose. I migrated from Journler to a wordpress blog via an Automator script and MarsEdit.

The Elephant In The Blog
The iPhone. With the SDK out and App Store, I want one. So I now have to think what will work better with the iPhone. For instance, how good is the Newsgator iPhone web app compared to gReader? What’s the best way to synchronize my notes with the iPhone? Etc. I’ll want to speak with iPhone users about this.

Mac Only

After 10 years I no longer consider myself a linux user and all it took was a few months of using OSX.

Mac is so much better it makes no sense to compare it with anything else out there at the moment. It’s in a league by itself.

Note: My home server still runs linux. Linux is without competition in the home server market in my opinion.

A List of Open Source Games

A List of Open Source Games (wikipedia)

Many of these games are lightweight multiplayer and multi-platform (Linux, Mac, Windows)

Personal Picks:
Assault Cube
Armagetron
BZflag
FreeCiv

Must try:
OpenArena
Nexuiz

Multiple Monitors in Linux Tip

When editing your /etc/X11/xorg.conf, keep in mind that order might matter. Example

Section “ServerLayout”
Identifier “Layout0″
Screen 0 “Screen0″ 1600 0
Screen 1 “Screen1″ 3280 0
Screen 2 “Screen2″ 0 0
InputDevice “Keyboard0″ “CoreKeyboard”
InputDevice “Mouse0″ “CorePointer”
EndSection

It’s important that the Screens show in order. The following might not work (at least it didn’t work for me)

Section “ServerLayout”
Identifier “Layout0″
Screen 2 “Screen2″ 0 0
Screen 0 “Screen0″ 1600 0
Screen 1 “Screen1″ 3280 0
InputDevice “Keyboard0″ “CoreKeyboard”
InputDevice “Mouse0″ “CorePointer”
EndSection

because the order is wrong.

Sapo Codebits 2007 – The Summary Part 1

The Talks/Workshops

* Amazon WebServices Architecture by Mike Culver – I learned more about S3 and I knew nothing about EC2 which is actually very interesting.

* IronPython and Dynamic Languages on .NET by Mahesh Prakriya – I missed it but a lot of people said it was brilliant.

* Building platforms by Fred Oliveira – I got to learn more about microformats, APIs and web scraping.

* Creating a game in 60 minutes (Criar jogo em 60 minutos) by Paulo Laureano – this one was inspirational the concept was mixing sample code using to create a game quickly. While actually creating a game took me between 6 and 8h that can be attributed to the lack of sample code to do certain things I wanted to do.

The Contest

For the first 6-8h or so I worked with Celso Pinto and Armando Alves on an idea by Samuel Martins – Sapo Boa Vida. Andreia Gaita helped me a bit with some peculiarities of DOM. My code fetched the information from Sapo GIS.

Later my code was converted to PHP by Celso and I went on to work on my game project (the one inspired by Paulo Laureano’s workshop) while Samuel started with the PHP and Celso went home. I only interrupted my work on my game project, Kill All Squares, to help Samuel with PHP’s DOM – Celso’s conversion of my code was a bit too literal and as Joao from the Sapo Team found out, PHP’s DOM is a bit more peculiar (strict) requiring the NS to be specified.

Sapo Boa Vida eventually won one of the prizes (the prize for the best Mashup).

People

I met a lot of people – many from prt.sc and from the Sapo Team but also others. Some caused a very good impression. I got a lot of good tips, advice and even help in the contest (from the people I already mentioned).
I probably would’ve had more time for the contest and would’ve been able to work on a 3rd project (there were other ideas) but one of the big points in going to this kind of events is talking to other people.