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A different thing in a real OS.

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Through the weekend I believed that I had managed to screw up my OpenSolaris installation. So serious was my suspicion I was planning to erase the disk and reinstall the entire system. The sound system that I’d manage to get working wasn’t, the ZFS snapshot system kept failing into maintenance mode and the NetBeans IDE that I installed disappeared. Perhaps living in a windows world tainted me but in my ignorance, I recognized my lack of understanding and started Googling.

Sometimes panic can instill reason, and so with some illustrations and illumination from the OpenSolaris.org site, I discovered that the issue was the multiple packages that I had been downloading. The ZFS file system had been doing boot snapshots and I was rebooting into one of many boot ‘pools’ that were ‘confusing’ the system, when I was shown the tool for selecting the correct boot environment, and deleting the others, everything became stable. The sound works, the tools were there and it all works.

One note, the ZFS file system in OpenSolaris will surprise you, it takes a ‘snapshot’ of the ‘partitions’ you choose, and performs a type of backup journal of all the files there. Given that, the file manager, using a slide bar, allows you to ‘time slide’ the directory through the entire snapshot history to display the changes that have happened. Very interesting, but it takes a bit of getting used to. I have ‘time machine‘ on my Mac, though I have not used it, so I suspect this behaves in a similar fashion.

There was one issue, of course created by myself, in and effort to get video on the system I purchased a Logitech 3500 video class webcam with built-in Mike. And while the Ekiga VoIP and video conferencing application could detect and use the video from the camera, the built-in mike would kill the sound system. So I’m operating without the camera, hoping for a bugfix.

The conclusion, more or less, is that the fixes I perform, did not require a drastic rebuild and the loss of my work. Only some understanding, and some learning on my part. Learning about how a real OS operates, and protects itself. Something toy OS’s from the past have made us all believe don’t exist.

Time to learn that something old, is new again.

No good thing goes unpunished

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I just got the home server running on a dynamic dns server, and sure enough, we are already getting spam comments on the wordpress software I installed there. I knew our server wasn’t going to to go unnoticed when both Google and Yahoo found it Friday. But really, spam?


http://rwjordan.homeunix.org/
http://mjordan.blogsite.org/

The distributed Internet

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A posting from Bernie Goldbach Powering the Information Age reminded me about the nature of the Internet. The underlying structure of the Internet is distributed, fault tolerant networking, initially intended to continue operating after a nuclear war. In the current climate, it routes around ‘damages’ like ‘censorship’ firewalls, and corporate throttling of bandwidth.

But one of the other things it’s good at is distributed computing, two nodes in the same domain can be geographically separated by an entire planet. This seems to escape the mindset of current datacenter deployment. While it might make sense to concentrate servers into small areas, in an energy constrained world perhaps powered by distributed power sources, it doesn’t. the loss or degradation of the power source to a datacenter places it on the back foot operationally, constrained to secondary generation, it server’s, all the server’s in the datacenter become vulnerable to the same ‘outage’ which the Internet will also treat as ‘damaged’ and route around.

Given a properly functional broadband infrastructure, servers located at the endpoints of the networks will as a whole, be less likely to be dropped from the Internet as damage. The likelihood of power being eliminated from a large distributed server domain is also contained. In a potential alternative energy future where solar and wind could be the primary source, distributed ‘green’ servers fit the requirement.

Cork Cliques

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One of the first things I had heard about Co. Cork is the Cliquish nature of Cork. Everyone is always saying Cork is a small place, but when you are out in Cork, you are out forever. There are no open doors here, and no friendship extended. If I and my wife were not already rather private and reclusive, Cork would surely make us very lonely, and she grew up here. We have many times the friends online than we have in the whole of the Cork. Still it bugs me, but efforts to extend our circle have been proving fruitless and a waste of time as exampled in my last post.

it@Cork are Elitist Snobs!

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I just got rejected from a it@Cork meeting. Which reads;

Hello Rxxxxxxx,
Thank you for your interest in it@cork however only staff of member companies can attend the AGM.
Regards,
Alison

Axxxx Rxxxxx
Events and Marketing Executive
it@cork
Work days: Monday – Wednesday
Tel: +353 21 2307076 Fax: +353 21 2307046
Email: xxxxx@itcork.ie Web: www.itcork.ie
Blog: http://blog.itcork.ie

Unfortunately that’s not what it said when I registered to attend. As seen in the following Google Cache page;


Interesting how things have changed without an apology, (see below) The internet never forgets.


The truth that RTE does know.

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RTÉ

… a Public Service Broadcaster, a non-profit making organisation owned by the Irish people.

RTÉ is a State owned and operated propaganda wing of Fianna Fáil! There is no other way to put it. In a free society, only a free and open press and broadcaster can be truly unbiased, anything else is a sham. All funding and support comes from the government, not the ‘Irish People’ truth is the last thing to be published. Bite the hand that feed’s it, you must be joking!

RTE should be cast out in the public domain, where a wealthy broadcast media giant can buy it … broadcast …. print … political propaganda … biased economic news….err….

Oh well! I’ll just have to turn off the telly and read more Blogs….

Internet to shutdown to help environment.

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In this article Revealed: the environmental impact of Google searches the Times On-Line quotes from an energy researcher who has no access to Google energy data to state “A Google search has a definite environmental impact.” Much like posting his article online. Perhaps he should reflect on the old adage Without Reliable Data, I’m Just another A__Ho_e with an Opinion!

Google Rebuttals: Powering a Google Search

Apple virus scanning

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This evening I installed ClamXav_1.1.1 into my MacBook and scanned my home directories. I was expecting nothing as I almost never download anything serious. But the scan did question several of my blog MySql backups which were lingering around in gzip formats, and one curious Java File ms03011.jar-3847f8dc-7fafd5ef, so I googled it, finding nothing, but abbreviating it down to ms03011.jar and found all sorts of hits, mostly with regards to ‘Adware’. The AV software had no recommendation, so I move the file(s) with that name from the library directory, and logged out and back in, and , it might be my imagination, the whole system seem to respond quicker. It could be nothing, but it didn’t hurt.

Opera Mini 4.2 on Palm T/X

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I’m impressed, Opera Mini 4.2 works on my Palm T/X without crashing (so far) and the rendering of pages, while small, actually look like the real thing. Further, snapback to the previous page is very quick, and painless. I’ll be doing more testing, but this is a breakthrough as far a browsing on the Palm. I’ll have to try it on my S40 Symbian Phone (6300).

Settling back into Cork

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Sunday, and I’m not back on the road to Dublin, I am now configured to work half time for my employer in Dublin rather than a full redundancy. The concession is, I get to work from home, and while this is not the ideal, it should keep us in beer money through this recession. Besides I could use the rest. The job never did require my presence in the office, it’s was only a vast empire of personnel from the perspective of management. I never touched any of the hardware, nothing I did in the office couldn’t be accomplished from anywhere on the planet. I was just another gopher popping out of the cubicle to reinforce the illusion of power. Long live VPN and the internet 😉

Apple’s iPhone is closing the door on the future

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After hearing about how the iPhone can phone home and kill apps? I knew that my choice to purchase a Palm T/X was the correct one. But this is even more a vindication of my choice of the Nokia 6300 to act as the modem for both my MacBook and Palm T/X when Apple pulls posted iPhone modem app Apple won’t even allow you to use all the abilities of something You Own! just because they made it. DRM be dammed, being slaved to Apple is even worse. And just when Apple was beginning to increase marketshare, Job’s paranoia is making Apple into another Microsoft.

Introverted American News?

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I have mentioned the disaster which constitutes ‘The News’ in the United States. But Now I have confirmation in this article THE CHANGING NEWSROOM which clearly shows a introversion of the perspective from the News Room. What the article suggests, is that this is good, and that the papers are being read more than ever, but that they are loosing revenue. These ideas are counter opposed and if representative, indicates that they are NOT being read, and NOT being used as a serious advertising channel because they are not being read.

I think that both of these could be explained simply, there is nothing to read in them, nothing to attract the attention of the public. Aside from scandals, papers rarely would be considered ‘hard hitting’ incisive in-depth producers of valuable information. And they wonder why they are failing! Shallow meaningless babble can be had on any street corner, what people are seeking are facts, and analysis. This is what is driving the move to the Internet to fulfill the desire for information. In the Cloud which is the internet, someone somewhere is talking about what interests the seeker. The Papers are not cutting it, it’s as simple as that.

A little WordPress cleanup

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A nearly perfect WordPress distribution was disrupted by a loss of my ‘tags’ which affected the catagories on my blog. A reload of the wp_catagories table and contents, and then this MySQL script managed to put things right.

update wp_terms tt, wp_categories cc
set tt.name = cc.cat_name, tt.slug = cc.category_nicename
where tt.term_id = cc.cat_ID