Stella GNU/Linux is finally born. It is a desktop focused, Gnome2 based Centos 6 remix (exact words of the maintainer). The features look really neat if you are looking for a CentOS/RPM based OS that is rock stable rather then bleeding (buggy) edge...
You can get it here (1 Gbps, IPv4, IPv6).
This year FOSDEM is supported by CodePlex (among other sponsors). CodePlex is Microsoft's vision/version of an "Open Source" project hub.
I don't know what strikes me more, that FOSDEM would accept dirty money or the realisation that Microsoft has completely (or so it seems) changed their minds about open source.
It was only in 2008, before Bill Gates retired from Microsoft that he said such things like:
"there is this thing called the GPL, which we disagree with."or
[Open source creates a license] "so that nobody can ever improve the software,"
It still seems difficult for MS to integrate the term "open source" completely, it's all over the CodePlex website, but on the FOSDEM page there is a link to www.microsoft.com/opensource which redirects to www.microsoft.com/en-us/openness/default.aspx. It's as if it's too much too soon to have the term "opensource" in a microsoft url. : ]
In the end I guess one could say that Microsoft is a better place without Bill Gates. Maybe Apple will soon follow .. HAHAHAHHAHA!!
Today I discovered PhpTop and I must say it looks really cool. This will show Php processes like top.
To install, you can either get the .deb packages or just download the binary (which I did to try out first), and add this to your php.ini (I personally added this to /etc/php5/conf.d/phptop.ini which seems to work as well):
auto_prepend_file=/path/to/phptop_hook.php
And voilà.
You can even output to HTML and hence generate a nice web page... .
Everybody loves Firefox, they are your friends, they are the "resistance", the alternative.. . the Free browser and all that crap. Yet, they somehow have started to annoy me to a point where I almost considered using Google Chrome... heck, I might just. :] (kidding!)
Here are just a couple of #$!%U*&ing things that annoyed me today..
I'm not alone here, there are others annoyed by this as well. Please click on "I have this problem too" (if applicable).
Why remove such a simple ergonomically correct menu item ? People used it, they just broke it. (You can install a plugin that includes that functionality).
Nowadays many computers have 64bit processors, so you can often use 64bit operating systems and enjoy 64bit programs. Cool. Some programs are not available in 64bit mode, that's fine but Firefox is available in 64bits since 4.0 .. However, you cannot easily find it. I've even found some tips on how to get the Firefox to run using ia32-libs, libraries to run 32bit programs on 64bit platforms !!
Funny thing is, while clicking through the "Need Download Help" button I found myself searching for 64 bit Firefox, the first result is "Uninstalling Firefox".
Anyway, if you still don't hate Firefox (or, like me, it's the browser you hate the least), you can get your 64 bit version from the Mozilla FTP site.. (of course this link was found somewhere on some forum or something... maybe some other rant).
The other day I upgraded my computer, I went from my 6 and a half year old laptop to a 4 year old desktop, and wow that's an impressive upgrade. Anyway, my username changed, hence the path to my photos has changed too, and Digikam stores that info in its internal DB (sqlite). Even if you copy your digicamrc file and your photos, and the digikam4.db database you might have to edit the db yourself to let it know the new path.. This is not as complicated as it may sound.
You can use sqlitebrowser for exampe. On Debian:
apt-get install sqlitebrowser
Then open your digikam4.db (wherever it may be):
sqlitebrowser digikam4.db
and edit the path, "specificPath". Images may help, so voila:
Go to the Browse Data tab, look at the specificData row.
Double click to edit the the cell and correct the value to your new path. Don't forget to "save" the database changes, you should be all set. ... the volume identifier (in my case at least) will be updated by Digikam.
Note: It took about 25 minutes for Digikam to start after these edits, but since it works totally normally.
Hopefully there could/should be a tool in a newer version of Digikam to add a tool to help with this.. Anyway, if this helps you today, that cool. : ]
Over the past couple of days Jag and I have set up a little special page that gathers aircraft data in a most beautiful way. Check out air traffic contrlol. For some explanations, read on.
This is data captured by a radar then decoded using a GPL program, ADS-B decoder written by Meinolf Braeutigam and edited by Jag. Jag captures the data as he lives near London Heathrow, then feeds it to my database and then our page displays it to you...
The colors are based on the ICAO of each aircraft, they use hexadecimal web color compatible code which we in turn use to color each flight.. which means that each aircraft has it's own unique color.
The past week has left 65% of the Interweb (the part of the Internet that cat lovers use most) was trembling with great ph34r as CVE-2011-3192 has been out there causing people to pull their hair out while coming up with RewriteRules that could save the day while we wait the "in 48 hours fix" which just didn't come in time...
Well actually, I personally didn't mind as a little DDOS would have just given me an excuse to just shut down the web server for a few days and use my bike a bit more...
In any case, I don't know about your favorite distribution, buy mine has just released an official patch that also addresses another issue...
So voila, update/upgrade your Debian server and you can now sleep tight, that was the last vulnerability for Apache for *ever*.
Recently Microsoft bought Skype and then Skype started to break down and have many little issues here and there. Of course the expected result has been confirmed in the FSF's latest mail.
Skype has been in the news a lot lately: Microsoft agreed to buy the company, their network has gone down twice recently, and they're threatening to take unspecified action against developers who try to write free software to make calls on their system.Read more about these Skype replacement projects at the FSF website.
I don't use FTP anymore to transfer files.. However today I *had* to. This is the day I realise that I still haven't found the perfect FTP client.
Don't get me wrong, I like this program, however it's when I need to "get" recursively that I start to have to think.. is it "mirror" or "mirror -R" ? .. knowing that one of the options will delete stuff remotely I have taken the habit of simply not using this tool. It does seem completely stupid to have such an option when most people are used to the "-r" switch.. . why would "get file" become "get mirror directory/" ? So close yet, no. (And yes, I know, I can be that way : ] ).
hmm, well, it's actually the program I've used the most, it has bookmarks and stuff, uses the normal "-R" syntax, it also has some neat features useful when scripting. However it does not support any form of encryption, so it can only be considered private if used in 1855. Another issue I encountered today, is when I finally was going to recursively get a directory I got this new and neat error:
tar: This does not look like a tar archive
Yes, directories are not tar archives, thanks for the heads up.
This one seems cool, I'm sure it's the best one for me EXCEPT (of course) that whoever develops this program does not seem to care about the users enough to leave a help file or something. There is a manual, but say you copy a file that already exists, you get a nice prompt:
Overwrite? [yncauR, ? for help]
And yes, the "?" has no effect (in my case at least). Even the "help" command does not work. So this could be the one, but I might never know. To be fair, I met this program only recently so maybe when we get to know each other better things will work out... .
I think that the 3 developers need to get into some threesome and bring to this earth a decent, simple, functional command line GNU FTP client that works..
Microsoft has purchased Skype. Now I'm wondering what is going to happen to this software. I know its never been Free Software, however in it's early days it was directly available for GNU/Linux at a time where most other software vendors would not consider platforms other than windows and macos. Another thing is that I have to admit that it does work and it works well.
So what will happen next ? I predict they will first drop the GNU/Linux version. Then they will of course drop the p2p system and prefer a centralised method that will make it less efficient... Good side is that maybe more work, technical and promotional, might go into XMPP + Jingle (Jabber) and that would be cool. In the meantime, brb need to delete an account.
Humble Bundle is back and it's cooler than ever (because it's frozen). The idea is:
The really cool part is that it will run on the operating system that reasonable people prefer, GNU/Linux. The games will also run on the gaming OS, Windows and the show off OS, MacOS.
Go get your copies at Humblebundle.com. Also note, just like last time, it seems that GNU/Linux users are far more generous than the users of other operating systems... .. .
The other evening I attended a conference by RMS on Free Software and digital exclusion. The talk was interesting and motivating as usual, even though I already agree with 99.99% of what he had to say. There was one point however where in response to a question he said:
Don't be defeatist, take a constructive approach.I could not help myself from noticing that even at a Free Software conference by RMS himself so many people were armed with computer-phones running one of the most (if not the most) restrictive operating systems known to human kind. And many of these people seemed to be big fans of Richard Stallman.
Today while writing this up I found an audio recording of the talk in mp3 format as well as a video... . in Flash format on Indymedia !! Really ? Yes really. The same on another site, although there is a an "alternative" OGV format.. Shouldn't it at least be the other way around ?
So tell me, how can I not be defeatist ? And what do RMS fans think when they take a picture of themselves with RMS using their Iphone ? Are they totally missing the point ? Which brings me to my first question.
The strongest point (most probably went unnoticed) in my humble IMHO was: If we encourage people to use Free Software by pointing at some kind of practical advantage and not talking about it as justice versus injustice we wont teach people to keep their Freedom. This is precisely the root of the Freedom issue, digital or analog.
This work is licensed by Emmanuel Revah under a Creative Commons 
