Techsplatter

Why Blackberry's fall could be bad for business communications

2012-01-28T22:32:00.000+08:00

The general consensus is that Blackberry is on it's way down. There is some cheer-leading of this to some degree amongst the tech savvy because of what Blackberry has become: slow to innovate and expensive to use for so few features. I personally hate my Blackberry. It has a large touchscreen which freezes on me regularly and no Wifi built-in because when it came out, phone carriers were afraid

What the new WebOS foundation can do to make WebOS a success

2012-01-18T05:21:00.000+08:00

HP has done the right thing and is contributing WebOS to the community by making it Open Source. This alone won't guarantee it's longevity. But WebOS fans can take heart at the success of FireFox as proof of how a closed source product can live on as an open source project. The success of FireFox is the success of the Mozilla foundation. The history lesson is best left to Wikipedia. But the model

Blackberry SMTP servers identified as sending Spam?

2011-12-22T15:49:00.000+08:00

Spamhaus.org servers were marking some blackberry SMTP servers are being spam relays or sending out spam. The servers were added to the XBL and CBL lists and as a result many messages from BB did not reach their recipients. Problem is, they appeared as delivered on the BB device. The message were probably delivered the the BB SMTP servers but communication from the servers were rejected by other

What to do with WebOS now that it's Open Source

2011-12-13T11:10:00.000+08:00

Never stop hoping against hope. WebOS, whose pedigree can be traced back to PalmOS and the popular Palm Pilot series of PDAs (they were mini tablets, for you young'uns), will be OpenSource. I've already had my say on what could be done with it here and here so I'm not going to repeat myself. So the question will be who will do what with it. Will it be the next phone OS? Suddenly the open source

Recover from a missing kernel : The Problem

2011-11-16T23:49:00.000+08:00

You read right. A missing kernel. Although this sounds terminal, the fix was fortunately simple enough. If you are in a jam the solution is here. But the journey how it got to this is a cautionary tale of "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing'. This is a long post. A novice sysadmin in a small company had problems with CentOS VMs on VMWare ESX version 3. I had set it up for them a few years

Recover from a missing kernel : The Solution

2011-11-16T23:48:00.000+08:00

This is part two of two parts. You can read about the problem here. The Solution The solution was simple. I needed to install a new kernel. I found that the sysadmin had an iso of the CentOS installation DVD on the VMWare server's datastore. The beauty of most modern distros is that their installation CDs or DVD come with a Repair Mode boot option. I modified the VM's setting to mount the iso as

2011-11-01T06:01:00.002+08:00

The introduction to the comments section on http://www.ritholtz.com : Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data, ability to repeat discredited memes, and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Also, be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor even implied. Any irrelevancies you can mention will also be

Windows vs Linux: Are we still fighting yesterday's war?

2011-10-25T17:11:00.000+08:00

I use Linux on my desktop daily, both at work and at home. I avoid Windows as much as possible but I also use them every day. I use them every day because everybody else is using Windows and my job is to help people make most of their PCs. Do I wish they were on Linux? Yes. Have I tried to convert them to Linux?No. That may seem odd but I have done the opposite in the past. I have converted some

Linux to the Rescue... Again

2011-10-18T20:51:00.000+08:00

The least favorable job a Linux guy can get is... supporting newbie Windows users. While we live in a virus-free, relatively trojan-less environment, our Windows brethren are waist deep in shady toolbars, gotcha embedded web auto-downloads and the un-safe USB drives. It tickles me to no end when a web pop-up tries to convince me that I am looking at my files in windows explorer..on Linux. And

Wide Pictures and Bad Packages: A Hugin tale

2011-10-11T20:15:00.003+08:00

I love my Kodak Z1012. Specifically I love it's in-camera panorama picture auto-stitching feature. I've tried some of the newer cameras' click and sweep panorama picture feature and I am not impressed. The quality is a bit off, like it was a video grab instead of a static picture. Nothing as good as the quality in the picture below which is built from three snaps. Interesting cloud formation in

The real legacy of Steve Jobs

2011-10-06T16:01:00.004+08:00

When people are going to talk about Steve Jobs, they will most likely point to his most recent successes at Apple, notably the iPad and the iPhone. They will talk about it bringing computing and the Internet to the masses, beyond the 'computer literate' or even the 'computer interested'. They will point out how it made using a computer be so natural that we have stopped talking about using a

New ideas for WebOS Part 2

2011-10-04T14:56:00.001+08:00

This is Part 2 of ideas of what to do with WebOS. For HP or whoever owns WebOS by now. Read Part 1 here. Go vertical in Business The Blackberry Playbook is a dud by all accounts. So why not a make a proper business tablet? There is a market for it even though Apple would like you to not think of them. A real business tablet that actually has a proper mail client that works with normal mail

Choosing an Android smartphone

2011-09-29T17:28:00.002+08:00

This is in response to a comment at the end of a previous post asking what smartphone to buy. There is no point of me saying such-and-such model is good because these things change all the time. Like anything else, it that depends on what you want to use it for. Gaming, Social Media (Facebook-ing), just checking mail or an attempt to replace your PC. Three elements make up a smartphone. The phone

HP seeking new directions for WebOS? Here's some.

2011-09-27T08:53:00.001+08:00

Why do I care for WebOS? Mainly because it is the continuation of Palm. I want to see another personal computing pioneer who has done so much innovation in the mobile / handheld computing space to survive and reap it's rewards. Palm has done so much to survive and grow in the face of challenges including change when change was required. Not too many have survived in the way they have. WebOS may

Welcome to Techsplatter.com!

2011-09-23T20:27:00.000+08:00

Looking at the past few posts (and the pile in draft), I have come to the realization that my posts are no longer limited to my linux adventures anymore. A few commentary crept in and now is the most read around. To do the title justice, I've decided to rename this site to techsplatter.com. Here some of the changes you can expect to see: More commentary posts, my take on current tech news and

HP split is nothing like IBM's

2011-09-08T06:09:00.002+08:00

Senior management at HP are probably wondering what is the noise surrounding about HP saying that they are interested in selling off / reviewing their PC division. It's not like something on this scale wasn't done before. Didn't IBM do it and walked away stronger than before? I think they need a reality check. When IBM sold off it's PC division, there wasn't as much noise although it was a

Mandriva or Mageia?

2011-09-06T03:01:00.002+08:00

I've been putting this off long enough. I am a long time Mandriva user from the days of Mandrake. Not exclusive, of course. It's the distro I use at home and on my laptop at work. I promote it to novices and other Linux users alike. I think I use it because it appeals to the lazy part of me. I get things done with little or no hassle. No fireworks. Not too much bling. Not many surprises. Ever

Apple after Jobs

2011-08-30T17:59:00.017+08:00

That is question on a lot of tech pundit's mind. I've followed Apple news since the 80s, having started on the Apple ][e. The best way to figure out what Apple could look like is to look how other companies have moved beyond their original founding or influential founders. The story is very much varied. There is that other company that Jobs have left and worked out ok, Pixar. He believed in

Will WebOS be another opportunity lost?

2011-08-22T02:31:00.004+08:00

You know you have been in the game too long when you see things happen twice. Or more. When I heard about what HP did with WebOS tablets and their future 'direction' on it, I was amused and upset at the same time. Amused because the way it was announced speaks volumes on the decision makers themselves rather than WebOS itself. You can bet that it was no knee jerk reaction. This was planned for

Webmin: The Unsung Hero

2011-08-17T02:24:00.101+08:00

Webmin is probably one of the best kept secrets of sysadmins around. Everybody uses it but rarely talks about it. Less still admit using it. Why? Because it makes the difficult config jobs point-and-click easy. It makes what seems to take countless command line commands into a few clicks of the mouse. That is probably why it's an open secret. It does take away some of the mystique of being a

A Lawsuit a Day, Keeps Competitors At Bay

2011-08-12T15:00:00.002+08:00

When did Apple become the Man? Apple has always been protective about it's copyright. Some of us remember their Interface Wars with HP and Microsoft in the early 1990s. But they have been smart about it. They have been protective of their copyright but generally shared their innovation. They popularized 3.5 inch Floppy Drives, Ethernet, Laser printers, Firewire to name a few. But their lawsuit

Nokia afraid of Linux success?

2011-08-10T12:35:00.002+08:00

Just to follow up on the last post where I touched on the growing prominence of Linux on the Consumer Computing devices: The news that Nokia is not going to sell the N9 in the US yet should not be surprising. What surprising is the decision to stop selling phones altogether. The situation is likely this: they don't sell a lot of smartphones (Symbian phones) in the US. The market segment that they

Rise of Consumer Computing and Fall of the OS

2011-08-08T19:01:00.002+08:00

Like it or not, Linux as we know is changing. With the rise of the IPad, the face or the interaction between a user and their computer has changed significantly. The interface is simpler, touch interaction, full screen and instant-on. Interface between man and their machines has always been evolving. This most recent wave of change is significant in relation to Linux because it sees the goal of

MSSkype spells trouble for Citrix?

2011-06-28T19:13:00.000+08:00

Did Microsoft buy Skype for itself or was this a clever way to move funds out of the US? If you don't know what the latter means, Skype is registered in Luxembourg, which has a more favorable tax rate than the US. So, there is speculation that the high price for Skype is partly to save on taxes. It did seem odd that Microsoft bought it outright and made it a unit of Microsoft, instead of

Flash and CUPS

2011-05-03T20:09:00.002+08:00

Once great thing about Linux is that it's components work good together. Even when they don't, you can always use how they work together to get what you want, at least in some part. My toddler was asking for a coloring picture for Elmo, the Sesame Street muppet. The official site at www.sesamestreet.org didn't have a picture so I went to the Sesame Street section on the PBS site at kids.pbs.org.