Al Hoang

Seems Vietnam is trying to make heavy overtures at the policy level to bring in Open Source to the country.   I welcome that gesture as right now Vietnam is a heavy Windoze shop among the people that actually have the oppurtunity to use a computer and using free or really really cheap software would make it much easier for the Vietnamese to access software without outright pirating it.

I wonder if the government needs any consultants to help them in the transition.  I’ll go

I run djbdns as my DNS server rather than BIND. I’m sure if I learned enough on BIND I could administer it just as well safely however since I tend to like getting stuff like DNS configured then kick it in the corner and let it go I figure djbdns is more my style. And from what I’ve read I’ve not read many exploits (heck any) on djbdns so that makes it easier on my maintenance.

However, I was diddling with a split DNS setup at home and needed to reset the cache on dnscache so I could see the new entries without hitting cache. Anyways it seems it’s as easy as:
svc -t /var/service/dnscache

(Assuming you run dnscache out of /var/service rather than /service)

Kudos to the following link for pointing the way.

Seems this rant shows how you can get bitten by RedHat then get crappy support from them. However…
Is the person a paying support customer? If not you’re not entitled to that much I bet.

And here’s my plug… if you’re going to run Linux… run Debian it’s free and in the many years I’ve used it I’ve never had an unbootable system from upgrading… only from me screwing with building my own kernels and playing with the bootloader.
But my bigger suggestion is to run FreeBSD.

I downloaded BottomFeeder, a SmallTalk powered blogging tool. I was really overjoyed to see it being a cross-platform piece of software with OS X support. So I glady downloaded it and started looking through it. Here is what I found…

• First off, the manual didn’t have any explanation besides the bare minimum for how to get this running in OS X. Plenty of instructions for Windoze users. How the hell is this supposed to work? How am I supposed to install it? Okay whatever I can figure this out…
• When I uncompressed it I just found a directory full of files. There wasn’t an Application Bundle that I could just drag around and start up. It seems there was some file called bottomFeeder. What’s that? Is that the executable? Clicking on it in the Finder didn’t do squat. How am I supposed to make this run anything?
• A little thought I drop into the Terminal then try typing ./bottomFeeder. Now a window pops up that says ‘Open’. What the heck is that for? Oh I get… it’s a SmallTalk program looking for an image. Okay…. I’m supposed to find the image file. Just look for the large file sitting around.
• Next I try, ./bottomFeeder bottomFeeder.im
  
• I start looking through the menus. Hmmm doesn’t look that bad. I want to import all my NetNewsWire subscriptions into it. I just need to use the Import subscriptions. Hey… wait where’s the .opml import? I try loading All Files and then loading it in, no go. I wanna quit… Cmd-q. No?
• Ugh, this is the last straw. BottomFeeder for Windows might work quite well and integrate well with the Windows GUI however for OS X it’s an embarassment. Nothing in the DOck, nothing in the Finder Bar on top, no instructions on how to get started. And the last straw… how come it can import piles of different file types but NOT the one I need to use??? Geez

Score: 1/10
At least the thing runs and does stuff but I can’t do any blogging in this thing. Back to the drawing board. If this is supposed to show SmallTalk’s power I’m not convinced. I want to be a believer but not with a demonstration like that.

I’ve been getting acquainted with Panther’s new features. So far I find the UI snappier than Jaguar which is a good thing since I want my UI to wait for me and NOT the other way around.
But here’s some very cool stuff:


man sendmail

SENDMAIL(1)                                             SENDMAIL(1)

NAME
       sendmail - Postfix to Sendmail compatibility interface

VIM(1)                                                         VIM(1)

NAME
       vim - Vi IMproved, a programmers text editor

Apple’s been doing some cleanup under the hood of the UNIX layer underneath. Now that’s service! One other nice thing I’ve noticed is they’ve been going through cleanups of the UI for various programs and making sure that Cmd-, actually means bring up the Preferences. Beforehand programs like Mail.app DID NOT respect this convention and it made it a pain to memorize which particular programs adhered to the new set of keybindings and which ones didn’t but I’m very glad Apple has been going around fixing these warts that have made daily usage a pain.

Chad Dickerson links to Scott Rosenburg’s thoughts on some motherboard issues he was having:

Scott Rosenberg has a darkly entertaining�(though not to him)�post about his recent travails with a motherboard replacement:

Paper clips and solder points?� Are we talking Heathkits here?� These kinds of stories make me seriously doubt the future of autonomic computing, at least for technology�devices that aren’t sitting in a highly-regulated data center environment.

At first I was thinking of nodding my head and thinking “ouch” then I thought about this again knowing what I know about hardware and it’s like… DUH!
If you know anything of how electronics and computers are made at the circuit level most of the commodity stuff isn’t made to be durable or have layers of protection against physical elements like some military grade hardware. So well yeah, one thing will knock down the whole machine. Of course if we’re thinking autonomic computing there are 2 strategies:

1. Make these small components really durable like living organisms so that one bad solder won’t take out the whole system. That will be the start to making the electronics more durable
2. Admit that the electronics stuff would cost too much money and stop thinking in terms of one machine as being the whole organism and just stuff a bunch of PCs and view each of them as one cell (parallel computing anyone?).

So far survey says #2 is winning rather than #1. Anyone that builds #1 charges piles of money for it so enough of these components won’t hit enough of a mass market.

James Robertson’s Blog mentions how he hates flying foreign airlines because they don’t have a power adapter.
Now, I understand the geek fascination with using all your electronic gadgets on the plane… however I tend not to most of the time although I guess if I had a programming project I might get lost in it HOWEVER….
I flew on JAL a little over a month ago (Chicago->Tokyo) and I remember asking the flight attendant if there was a power outlet and she kindly mentioned look under your seat. However, you needed a cigarette adapter to plug into (which I had not bothered to pick up before leaving). Perhaps some planes don’t have this feature but jeeze before you complain about not having power (and frankly not having electricity is a nice wake up call to doing something else besides doing something relies on electricity) look under the seat.

BoingBoing points to GPS Tagged JPEGs. All I can say is… cool!
Although people better start taking more care when taking pictures and posting them if they don’t want to be located.

For some reason, when I upgraded to Panther my Dock shortcut to the X11 Server
busted. After fiddling around I noticed in the Consoloe that it was complaining
about some unrecognized option when launching. I found X11 in the
Applications directory and tried that but the same problem. After scritching my head for a bit I ended up trying to start X from Terminal by just typing X. Lo’ and behold it worked! But I just got an X server without much that was
interesting. So then I tried starting xterm from the Finder (Show in Finder
on the X program brought up /usr/X11R6/bin).
Then the familiar little X11 icon popped up again and this one I ended
up keeping in my Dock and NOW things are working. Not sure what exactly that did to fix it but it ended up fixing it.

Here’s the beginning of the message I got from the Console:

Unrecognized option: –xquartz-be-xinit
use: X [:] [option]
-a # mouse acceleration (pixels)
-ac disable access control restrictions
-audit int set audit trail level
-auth file select authorization file
bc enable bug compatibility
-br create root window with black background
+bs enable any backing store support
-bs disable any backing store support
-c turns off key-click
c # key-click volume (0-100)
-cc int default color visual class
-co file color database file
-core generate core dump on fatal error
-dpi int screen resolution in dots per inch
dpms enables VESA DPMS monitor control
-dpms disables VESA DPMS monitor control
….

Joel has lots of positive things to say about this:

This is a great implementation of a simple idea that brilliantly solves the nagging problem that it’s just not easy enough to transfer large files down the hall, let alone halfway around the world, and it’s going to take off like wildfire.

Mayyybe… but you still need to download a piece of software to get this working but at least it’s reasonably cross platform. I remain skeptical. What happens when something goes wrong? Does it handle this well? What about if the company goes under what happens to the service? Maybe I”ll try it out but I’m still skeptical.

According to a survey by Perseus… 66% of the blogs they sampled were abandoned after a short time. Well, can’t blame them. A blog is just another thing to take care of. At least it’s not as useless as a tamagotchi (I could be wrong though).

Ouch.

Looks like they better not over-rely on the Playstation to pull them through or else the war against MS will not be so lopsided like it is now.

Hmmm not sure what to say. Just read the article and judge for yourself. Seems right now it’s Japan but I’m sure Vietnam would love to work with the U.S. I’m not sure what to think of the software industry and its future.

My friends find the goofiest links to send to me….

Welcome to Godiva Japan’s English Language Shopping Page !
We are pleased to present this fine assortment of Godiva products for shipment to Japan destinations only.

Geek Note: Looks like the Japanese Godiva store is powered by PHP. Just look at the URL