Bob Sutor

Daily links for 07/29/2010

2010-07-29T16:30:12Z

Amanda McPherson’s Linux Foundation blog · New Benefits for Linux Foundation Members
“So if you care about the protection of Linux, please consider joining as an individual member or feel free to email me with your thoughts and ideas for the program.”

tags: linux

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

© Robert S. Sutor for Bob Sutor, 2010. All rights reserved.
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Categorized under: Blog and Website.
Tagged with: .
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Sailing: Not wet yet

2010-07-29T11:46:26Z

I’ve been doing a lot of running around for business trips over the last few weeks, so haven’t had much of a chance to post updates here. I did pick up the used 1988 Catalina 22 sailboat that I mentioned last week.

My son and I had planned to drive down to Chautauqua Lake on Saturday morning, but on Friday night the forecast looked just terrible. It was supposed to rain all day, heavily at times, and I was not going to do my first towing of the boat for 140 miles in torrential rain. By Saturday, the storms had been been moved back and it looked like there was a window of nicer weather in which we could do the 2 1/2 hour drive down and then 2 1/2 hours back.

As I was driving down I was debating about whether I should take the interstate or the local roads when I had the boat in tow. The answer became obvious the more I thought about it: I should take the route that involved maintaining as constant a speed as possible and minimizing starts and stops. This meant the interstate, and it was a good choice.

The boat is now sitting in the driveway, though I have moved it from the location shown in the photo. Tomorrow morning I need to reattach the trailer with boat to the car and bring it to a service station to get the trailer inspected. I’ve already removed the old name and registration numbers from the boat and put on the new New York numbers.

The new name for the boat is “Amanda”. There is little work that has to be done on the sailboat, though I will need to get some new interior cushions for the cabin. Otherwise it’s just outfitting her with a few more things to make her ready to go in the water. Next time I’ll discuss the process of figuring out which body of water that should be.

© Robert S. Sutor for Bob Sutor, 2010. All rights reserved.
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Categorized under: Sailing.
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Daily links for 07/27/2010

2010-07-27T16:30:13Z

Ubuntu’s two big advantages over Windows and Mac | ZDNet
“I’ve been using the latest version (10.04) of Ubuntu Linux since April and there’s a lot to like about it. I announced earlier this year that I was giving desktop Linux another look, and I went with Ubuntu because it is the Linux distribution most focused on a desktop OS. I have lots of observations about the Ubuntu experience and how it compares to Mac and Windows, but I’m going to save most of that feedback for another article.

Today I want to talk about two significant advantages that Ubuntu has over Windows 7 and Mac OS X.”

tags: ubuntu linux windows
Novell Releases SUSE Gallery for Publishing and Sharing Linux-based Appliances — WALTHAM, Mass., July 27 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ –
“Novell today released SUSE® Gallery™, a new online showcase for registered SUSE® Studio users to publish their appliances and cloud-based applications. With SUSE Gallery, end users can browse published appliances for the solution to their particular commercial or personal need, and then download the appliance free of charge. With an appliance, the end user avoids the typical installation and configuration headaches that come with many traditional software applications. For independent software vendors (ISVs) and other software developers, SUSE Gallery represents an opportunity to broaden the exposure of their application and reach an entirely new audience.”

tags: suse novell linux
DIY-BOAT.COM – Articles
“In a world where you can buy rod holders in gold metal and dock lines in every color of the rainbow, it was perhaps inevitable. But it is nonetheless shocking. Duct Tape, considered among the most useful inventions since it was developed during World War II, has gone designer.”

tags: boat diy

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

© Robert S. Sutor for Bob Sutor, 2010. All rights reserved.
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Categorized under: Blog and Website.
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Daily links for 07/23/2010

2010-07-23T17:16:35Z

Government Computers to Get Linux-Based Operating System | Business | The Moscow Times

“The government is hoping to launch the first version of a “national operating system” for its computers as early as next year, a senior Communications and Press Ministry official said Thursday.

The operating system, for use on the computer systems of government agencies and state-run companies, will be 90 percent based on the open-source Linux operating system, Deputy Communications and Press Minister Ilya Massukh said.”

tags: linux government russia moscow
Build a $200 Linux PC – How To by ExtremeTech

“So we asked ourselves: What’s the lowest point at which these two goals could intersect? If we needed a simple computer right away, and wanted to spend as little as possible, what could we build? We knew we wanted to aim low, almost ridiculously low—so we decided on what seemed like almost an unthinkable total: $200, which would include everything needed for the base computer itself (but not counting the monitor, keyboard, and mouse, or tax and shipping charges).”

tags: computer linux build

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

© Robert S. Sutor for Bob Sutor, 2010. All rights reserved.
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Categorized under: Linux, News, Open Source, Politics / Government.
Tagged with: Russia.
Twitter: bob_sutor

Daily links for 07/22/2010

2010-07-23T17:18:57Z

Ubuntu Linux brings IBM DB2 to the cloud – Computerworld Blogs

“Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has always had many user and developer fans. Enterprise business fans? Not so much. Canonical hopes to change that with today’s, July 21, launch of a virtual appliance of IBM’s DB2 Express-C software running on the Ubuntu cloud computing platform, in private and public cloud configurations. The company also announced that IBM has validated the full version of DB2 software on Ubuntu 10.04. “

tags: ibm linux canonical db2 ubuntu cloud
Canonical, IBM plunk DB2 databases on Ubuntu • The Register

“Commercial Linux distributor Canonical has won the buzzword bingo for the week by putting Ubuntu, cloud, and appliance in the same sentence in announcing a partnership with IBM. It’s meant to bring the latter company’s DB2 databases to the latest Ubuntu 10.04 Server Edition Linux.”

tags: ibm linux canonical db2 ubuntu cloud

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

© Robert S. Sutor for Bob Sutor, 2010. All rights reserved.
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Categorized under: Cloud, Linux, News, Open Source, Software.
Tagged with: Canonical, DB2, IBM, Ubuntu.
Twitter: bob_sutor

Daily links for 07/21/2010

2010-07-23T17:18:23Z

Canonical bundles Linux, IBM database for the cloud | Cloud Computing – InfoWorld

“Canonical is offering enterprises a chance to try cloud computing via a virtual appliance that bundles Ubuntu Linux with the IBM DB2 Express-C database running on the Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) public cloud platform.”

tags: linux canonical ibm db2

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Sailing

2010-07-20T15:33:00Z

One the things about having a blog is being to write about the various hobbies and recreations I pick up. I started blogging in August of 2004, so you all missed my starting fly fishing, which I still do but less frequently, and golf, which I never do anymore. With the latter I decided that I really didn’t have time but it would be better to at least try it before I retired. Since retirement seems a long way off, it will be some time until I get back to those clubs.

Once hobby that I am not starting but returning to is sailing. I sailed when I was a teenager in a little unsinkable boat called a Sunflower. I bought it for a few hundred dollars in the 1970s and then carried it around on top of my mom’s Toyota Corolla.

As you can see from the photo, it had a single sail. It also had a centerboard and a simple rudder, so it was no trouble running it right up to and then on to a beach. My primary memory of it was running up a rather long lake only to have the wind completely die, forcing a very slow paddle back to where I had parked the car.

I didn’t sail much again until I was in graduate school. I was in the Adirondacks visiting my future wife Judith and her family at the lakeside cabin they had rented. The cabin—excuse me, “camp”—came with a Sunfish sailboat and I took Judith out on it, being the cool, experienced sailor I was.

We sailed around for a while but then I noticed that the steering had deteriorated. Then I realized that the rudder wasn’t attached. It wasn’t a simple question of it slipping out: the bolts holding the rudder assembly had unscrewed themselves and dropped into the lake.

We were only a hundred meters or so from shore, so I used the rudder as a paddle to get us back. My future father-in-law swam out to help tow us in, another indelible memory.

After a delay of more than 25 years, I’ve decided to try again. I live in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York about an hour south of Lake Ontario. We’ve got water and we’ve got lakes. I don’t think it makes sense to wait another 20 years to sail again. Therefore, I bought a boat.

In a few days I’ll be driving down to Chautauqua Lake to pick up my new-to-me but used 1988 Catalina 22 sailboat. It’s at the small end of cruisers, the so-called pocket cruiser class. This also means it is trailerable, and that’s how I will get it home.

While it would be possible to trailer it from lake to lake, I’ve been told repeatedly that this gets old fast. The summer is half over though, so I don’t think I’ll worry about finding a slip for it unless something comes along. During the winter I’ll look at my options.

I’m not likely to sail the boat for a couple of weeks after I get it because of our family schedule. I plan to put the boat in the backyard away from trees and power lines and practice rigging and unrigging it several times. I’ll have plenty of opportunity to look foolish after that, but at least I can work some things out ahead of time.

© Robert S. Sutor for Bob Sutor, 2010. All rights reserved.
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Categorized under: Sailing.
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Daily links for 07/20/2010

2010-07-23T17:20:10Z

Java’s team of rivals: Conflicts and alliances in the Oracle era

“Oracle may be Java’s new proprietor, but SpringSource, Apache, and Eclipse are driving the development agenda too”

tags: java oracle eclipse apache
Social Media Draws a Crowd – WSJ.com

“Analysts and ad executives say the space won’t be dominated by small competitors for long because advertising holding companies and bigger public-relations firms will likely ramp up acquiring the smaller boutique firms, much like they have done with other digital areas such as search advertising.”

tags: social media
Virus targets Siemens industrial control systems | Technology | Reuters

“The German company said the malware is a Trojan worm dubbed Stuxnet that spreads via infected USB thumb drives, exploiting a yet-to-be-patched vulnerability in Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system.”

tags: virus siemens microsoft windows
Amazon Says E-Books Now Top Hardcover Sales – NYTimes.com

“Amazon.com, one of the nation’s largest bookstores, said Monday that for the last three months, sales of electronic books for the Kindle, Amazon’s e-reader, outnumbered sales of hardcover books for the first time.”

tags: amazon kindle ebook
Linux First Steps | ITworld

“Every now and again someone writes me and asks me “What’s the best way for me to get started in Linux?” Over the years, I’ve answered in several different ways, but here’s the summarization of my thoughts.”

tags: linux

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

© Robert S. Sutor for Bob Sutor, 2010. All rights reserved.
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Categorized under: News, Open Source, Social Networking.
Tagged with: Apache, Eclipse, Java, Oracle.
Twitter: bob_sutor

Daily links for 07/19/2010

2010-07-19T17:21:39Z

Mozilla Ups Security Bounty from $500 to $3,000 | News & Opinion | PCMag.com

“Fancy a bug? Mozilla has upped the cash bounty it’s awarding industrious users that find security-threatening bugs in its Firefox, Thunderbird, or Firefox mobile products. As well, users will be eligible for the $3,000 award—kicked up a notch from the previous $500 award—for hunting down security bugs in Mozilla services that, “could compromise users of those products, as released by Mozilla Corporation or Mozilla Messaging,” says the company.”

tags: mozilla firefox security
Initial program | DrupalCon Copenhagen August 23-27 2010

“After reviewing 240 sessions submitted for the conference, the track chairs, the Copenhagen team and the Drupal Association are proud to present the DrupalCon Copenhagen program.”

tags: drupalcon program drupal opensource
10,000 Boat Names – Home

All the names you could ever want.

tags: boat names

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

© Robert S. Sutor for Bob Sutor, 2010. All rights reserved.
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Categorized under: News, Open Source, Sailing.
Tagged with: Drupal, Firefox, security.
Twitter: bob_sutor

Searching from the Firefox address line

2010-07-19T13:53:06Z

One of the nice things I liked about the Chrome browser was searching from the address line, that area at the top of the screen where you would normally type in some URL like http://www.sutor.com. Firefox has a search area on the upper right, but I really like the idea of having one place to type in something meaning “this is what I want, you figure out how to get me there.”

I don’t believe that Firefox did not have this capability when it first started, but you can now set it up to do a search. In fact, it probably works to some degree right now. Try it.

To make Firefox initiate a Google search when it can’t decode what you typed as a web address, do the following:

Type in about:config in the address line.
If you get scared off by the warning on the next page, stop. Use the search entry area instead.
Otherwise, click the button about being careful.
Scroll down to where you see keyword.URL in the first column (which is called Preference Name).
Double-click on it and replace the command there with http://www.google.com/search?q= .
Click the OK button and you are done.

I first learned about this technique at LiewCF.com, which says pretty much exactly what I told you above. Kudos to that site and author.

© Robert S. Sutor for Bob Sutor, 2010. All rights reserved.
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Categorized under: Open Source, Software.
Tagged with: Firefox.
Twitter: bob_sutor

Daily links for 07/16/2010

2010-07-23T17:20:51Z

RIP OpenSolaris – Computerworld Blogs

“Good-bye OpenSolaris. It’s been fun knowing you. Unfortunately for you, it’s become all too clear that your new parent company, Oracle doesn’t want a thing to do with you. “

tags: opensolaris oracle open-source

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Flowers in the summer heat

2010-07-16T01:29:24Z

We’re fully in the middle of summer here in northwest New York State, climate zone 5b. In another month the nights will start getting quite cool, though we’ll still have some very warm days into September.

A month ago I posted an update on what was blooming as summer was about to start. Most of those blooms have passed, but others have taken their place. Here’s a visual tour.

Daily links for 07/15/2010

2010-07-15T21:32:46Z

Standards

ODF 1.2 Begins Final 60-day Public Review

“A major milestone was reached for the OASIS ODF TC last week. The latest Committee Draft of ODF 1.2 (CD 05) was sent out for a 60-day public review.”

tags: odf oasis standards

Industry Criticism

Windows Phone 7: Don’t bother with this disaster | Mobilize – InfoWorld

“Microsoft needs to kill Windows Phone 7 and avoid further embarrassing itself by shipping this throwback. It’s not a question of whether Windows Phone 7 will fail — it will — but how long it will take Microsoft to admit the failure. For the company’s sake, the earlier it fesses up, the better.”

tags: windows phone
Five Reasons You Don’t Need Microsoft Office 2010 – PCWorld Business Center

“So, the bottom line is this: forget Microsoft Office 2010. It’s not worth the money, the few updated features, the prolonged learning curves, the decreased efficiency, or the headaches.”

tags: microsoft office
451 CAOS Theory » Judgment day for open source at Oracle

“There are signals of continued problems and dysfunction — namely lack of support, organization and communication — in the OpenSolaris community. This follows on a deterioration of the OS leadership and support since Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, including the elimination of OpenSolaris CDs, one of the things that made the open source version of Solaris more like Linux. “

tags: oracle opensolaris sun
OpenSolaris board in OpenRevolt against Oracle | Deep Tech – CNET News

“One of Sun Microsystems’ ambitious dreams, a vibrant open-source community for the Solaris operating system to rival the Linux collective, is in serious danger of evaporating in the Oracle era. “

tags: opensolaris oracle sun

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Installing (and reinstalling) Linux on your desktop

2010-07-14T00:03:15Z

Yesterday I set up a laptop with a Linux distribution, including everything I needed for work. Today, I’m doing it again.

My reason for repeating the process had nothing to do with Linux. I decided to do something to the configuration that I suspected would be risky and possibly dangerous. Indeed, things got pretty messed up.

At that point I had a few choices:

Try to debug and fix the situation.
Try to find someone to help me fix it.
Say the heck with it and reinstall from scratch, or the CD, as the case may be.

The first option was possible, but I would have a lingering feeling that something was still wrong and would come back to bite me when I least expected it.

As to the second, my local IT support staff is me, so this is really the same as the first option.

I went with the third choice, reinstalling. This is not that big a deal, though it is time consuming. For the most part, the installation and configuration is done while I’m doing other things, like writing this entry. Here’s the general outline of what I do.

Get the latest version of the Linux distribution you want to install and put it on some sort of media. Sometimes I’ll put it on a USB key, other times onto a CD or DVD, depending on how large it is. The USB key method is a little more involved and usually involves tinkering with the laptop BIOS to get the boot order correct. After the installation, I then have to go back into the BIOS and reset it so it boots from the CD drive and hard disk. Putting the distro on a CD or DVD is usually simpler though it does consume a piece of plastic. You do need to be careful that you are burning the installable image to the disk and not burning the file that contains the installable image (an .iso) to the disk.
Insert the USB key, CD, or DVD in your machine and reboot. If the USB key is not read, you’ve got the boot order wrong.
Answer the questions. Be honest. When you are asked for your password consider using a stronger one with letters in different cases and funny characters rather than the name of your first pet. We all know that one.
Let the installation continue, remove the media and reboot.
If the system did not automatically connect to your network, look around and help it find the network.
At this point you may think you have a sparkling new system and you do, sort of, but you need to check for and install updates. This is usually somewhere under “System Updates” under some menu, possible “Administration.”
Downloading and installing the updates may take several times longer than installing the system in the first place. Just let it do its thing while you do something else.
Now you do have a sparkly new operating system on your machine. The next thing you should do is configure your browser. This means firing it up and installing your favorite addons or extensions. I use XMarks to synchronize my bookmarks across machines, so I can have my usual browsing environment up and running in about 10 minutes.
If you wish, install proprietary drivers for things like graphics.
Turn off BlueTooth unless you know you’re going to need it.
Now make things pretty. I go to InterfaceLIFT and get a nice background that suits my mood. Note that they also have sizes for mobile devices and iPads. You can use the same background across all your machines and devices, if you wish.
Install your preferred software. My short list here is FileZilla, Adobe Reader, Adobe Flash, Adobe AIR, TweetDeck, and Komodo Edit. Thunderbird is another good possibility.
If you’ve this done before and there is software you know you want to uninstall, do that now.
Configure your editor. I use both gedit and Komodo Edit, so I go into preferences for each and set up the environment the way I like it. For gedit, make sure you check out the plugins.
If you have a DropBox account, install the software image suitable for your distro.
Now install your VPN if you need one for work. If you are doing this from a home office, you need to get a copy of the VPN installer on your machine. You can put it on a CD, a USB key, ftp it over using FileZilla, or grab it from your DropBox directory.
Check that the VPN is working by firing up the browser and looking at some web pages inside your firewall.
Install the software your company wants you to use.
Reboot, and get to work.

Daily links for 07/10/2010

2010-07-12T20:35:45Z

Firefox 4 beta 1 is a smart-looking, snappy performer – Computerworld

“The just-released first beta of Firefox 4 takes some smart design ideas from Chrome, mixes in a few of its own and throws in a few new features and snappier performance. Add these benefits to Firefox’s existing world-class library of add-ons, and Firefox just might leapfrog other browsers and become the best of the bunch — if the beta keeps progressing along its current positive path. “

tags: firefox beta
U.K. government could drop Microsoft for Linux | NetworkWorld.com Community

“Among the dozens of staff-submitted ideas for the British government to save money are two that suggest dumping Microsoft and moving to Linux, OpenOffice and other open-source applications.

To be sure, they are just two among the 60,000 ideas proffered by those who work in the public sector, but just 31 of those were listed on the website for the Chancellor of the Exchequer. ”

tags: uk government open-source

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

© Robert S. Sutor for Bob Sutor, 2010. All rights reserved.
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Categorized under: Linux, News, Open Source, Politics / Government.
Tagged with: Firefox, Microsoft, UK.
Twitter: bob_sutor