Slashdot has an article up reporting that VMware may be planning on purchasing the SUSE division from Novell. According to the Wall Street Journal VMware is in the process of attempting to purchase the SUSE Linux operating system. What’s interesting to me is not that VMware might be trying to buy SUSE but rather than Novell would consider selling it to them at this stage in the game. Although I’ve been less impressed with Novell’s strategy (particularly around .NET/Mono integration) and support, the operating system itself isn’t that bad. It doesn’t seem to be very strategic for Novell, but perhaps this is why I’m not a businessman.
Hubble Photo of Carbon Star
I just came across this cool photo of the binary star AFGL 3068 on Bad Astronomy. The star is dying and is wrapped in a cloud of carbon and because it’s a binary star the cloud has formed a spiral around the star itself. You’ve probably never seen anything quite like it and the accompanying article is also worth a read if you have any interest in astronomy.
CRTC Matching Line Speed Ruling
I came across this article on Slashdot this morning, apparently the CRTC has ruled that ISPs such as Bell must provide the same network service to resellers as they currently do to their own customers. This means that ISPs such as Teksavvy that currently provide service over Bell’s DSL infrastructure and copper should soon be able to provide much higher capacity uplinks via Bell’s newly deployed fibre network.
I haven’t had a chance to read the actual ruling yet but from what I gather the only small print is that the big ISPs will be allowed to charge a 10% markup. If you’re interested Teksavvy has posted this press release (PDF).
Pioneer One
I came across a link to Pioneer One last week and I downloaded it over the weekend. I finally got around to watching it this evening and I have to say that for a $6000 budget it’s not that bad, in fact I’m sure hoping that it continues, I’m pretty curious about the plot. Anyway I won’t bother repeating stuff you can just read on the site itself, but the idea of micro funded entertainment is really neat. I’ll be following this closely.
Training Courses
I’m on a RHCE course all week this week, it reminds me how much I don’t fit into classroom settings. The material we’re covering is actually pretty interesting and I’m motivated to pay attention because I’d like to pass the exam on Friday but I still find myself drifting off in my own head.
Where are those training programmes from The Matrix when you need them?
A Couple Things
I’m still plugging away at the Aubrey-Maturin series and I’m still enjoying it, about halfway through HMS Surprise. I mentioned it to a friend recently about the series and I agreed with her that it’s probably a bit of an acquired taste but if you’re in to sailing and/or military or historical fiction you should check it out.
Also, you should check out PBS Video if you haven’t recently. Although some of the content is geofenced (and there are ways around that if you’re creative) there’s a lot of good stuff there for the watching. Lately I’ve been enjoying American Experience in particular, oh how I wish we had PBS in Canada.
Diaspora
I just pledged $25 to the Diaspora project on Kickstarter. I won’t repeat all the details here, but it’s in many ways an answer to my complaints about Facebook. I’m still a bit leery of some aspects of social networking regardless of the tools but the idea that I manage my own data directly is incredibly appealing. I urge you to check it out and if you feel strongly about it go ahead and sponsor the project. Anyway, off to Montreal… have a great weekend!
G20 Summit Plans
You are probably aware that the G20 Summit is on its way to Toronto in the not-too-distant future. From what I’m hearing it sounds like the Toronto Police, OPP, RCMP, CSIS and their friends are going to be out in full effect for the duration to enforce a DMZ they’re putting around the Convention Centre and Intercontinental Hotel. It’s a bit of a double bummer because my office is inside one of the planned security cordons and it sounding like I have to get added to a list and get ID’d in order to go to work during the duration. I was thinking about taking the week off and going on vacation but it doesn’t sound like that’s an option as by coincidence I’ll be the only one in town who does my job during that week.
I don’t understand why the Powers That Be decide to hold a meeting in the middle of Canada’s largest city when they want to make sure that nobody can get close enough to interfere with their plans, but I digress…
All this nonsense has got me thinking about what I’m going to do that week when I’m not in the office. Frankly I think most of the G8/G20 protesting is somewhat pointless and more akin to pissing into the wind than to meaningful political statement, however I’m not that impressed by the heavy handed tactics that the police have tended to use at the behest of their masters. So I’ve started thinking I might make a somewhat concerted effort to go out and attempt a photographic “study” of the whole thing.
I’ve been getting more serious about photography lately (just bought a new lens for my D80, but more about that in a future post) and it might be an interesting exercise, not to mention my definite feeling is that documenting things is probably the best way to avoid problems. I’m just not sure how keen I am on getting even indirectly involved. I need to think it over a bit more before I make up my mind…
Flickr is Cool
I’m a pretty slow adopter of new “fad” Internet tools, particularly when it comes to so-called social media applications. Though I don’t have any illusions regarding the level on anonymity anybody can have on the Internet these days (read none), I am not very comfortable with ease with which sites like Facebook merge one’s “private” and public lives by default. As a result I tend to avoid anything that even smells like Facebook, thus I was very surprised when I started playing around with Flickr last week. I’m so far behind the curve on Flickr that I think I can safely assume that nobody’s going to accuse me of being a trailblazer but I still thought it might be worthwhile to share.
I used to run a lot more software on my personal website but I just don’t have the time to maintain tools like Gallery with my current day job if I ever want to take some time off from being a sysadmin. (Which I do!) So I started looking at alternatives to Gallery in the WordPress plugin database and didn’t find anything I really liked but it gave me the idea that I should investigate using Flickr to host my images. At any rate, after playing around with Dan Coulter’s phpFlickr class and fumbling my way through the Flickr API I’ve managed to cobble together a passable little photo gallery with all the backend content and meta data being stored on Yahoo! servers. This also has the side benefit of reducing my bandwidth usage and hopefully speeding things up for remote users. I’ll probably rework things someday once I actually read the Flickr API documentation and figure out a slightly more elegant way of doing things.
I’d post the code I wrote to create my galleries but I’m so rusty with PHP it would probably be a crime. Once I clean things up a bit and standardize how I’m doing things I’ll try to make it available for anybody who might be interested, the only serious limitation of my approach is that it is not a full-fledged WordPress plugin so it requires the ability to execute inline PHP on WordPress pages to call my gallery function but it’s still fairly simple to do and doesn’t require much overhead compared to building and managing a local photo gallery.
I also integrated Lightbox into the photo galleries to make things look a little sharper. I’m not completely sold on it yet but it’s not that hard to replace so I’m going to wait and see.
In any case, I just wanted to draw attention to the Flickr API and phpFlickr for anybody who might be trying to solve a similar problem. They’re incredibly powerful and so far I’m quite happy.
You can see my Flickr photostream here.
Flash is Not a Right
I just finished reading this post on Slashdot as well as the linked blog post. I’ve been hesitant to weigh in publicly on what I think about the whole Adobe/Apple war that’s going on right now since I’m not really a iPhone OS developer and and I don’t pretend to be a technology maven (or pundit). However, I do have some opinions on the matter and Bogost has presented a more articulate explanation of some of my thoughts than I ever could.
I’m not overly keen on the idea that Apple chose to close their platform to Flash developers (or even to Adobe and other third party tools providers) but at the same time Steve Jobs’ public argument isn’t entirely without merit. Adobe’s response has been pretty flaccid, in my view premised more or less on the idea that because lots of people use Flash, Apple should therefore support it.
Flash, in my experience, is actually not that well optimized for any platform and Adobe gives the impression that non-Windows platforms second class citizens. Being a MacOS X/Linux user I probably see the whole argument through a slightly more jaded lens than your average Internet/iPhone user but I have experienced Flash crashing web browsers and my netbook (running Windows 7) only heats up and burns its battery off at a rapid rate when I hit heavy flash sites.
It’s too bad that Adobe hasn’t done a better job of integrating Flash, when the first apps and media players first hit the web I was pretty impressed. But times have changed and the world of proprietary (and in particular) Windows/PC/x86 based tools on the web seems to finally be behind us thanks to mobile devices and Apple (as well as RIM) have been key players in this space. The whole debate appears to me to boil down to a major clash in philosophies and interpretations of what the concept of “open platform” means.
I don’t know if there’s a “right” answer to this, but I’m sort of hoping that both sides stick to their guns and we get to see where the rest of the industry/public do. My impression is that neither side will come out unscathed and I hope that this isn’t a massive miscalculation on Apple’s part because I’m quite concerned that this may be an ideological or profit driven move rather than a genuine effort to move mobile computing and HTML5 forward. It’s hard to tell the difference when Apple is no flock of angels and could very plausibly be basing their moves on either motive (or both).