Basically Tech - open source

"Apple has declared war on the tinkerers of the world"

nospam@example.com (Rob Newcater) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 11:30:10 +0000

When DVD Jon was arrested after breaking the CSS encryption algorithm, he was charged with “unauthorized computer trespassing.” That led his lawyers to ask the obvious question, “On whose computer did he trespass?” The prosecutor’s answer: “his own.”

If that doesn’t make your heart skip a beat, you can stop reading now.

Or you can read the whole article.

London Stock Exchange abandoning Windows

nospam@example.com (Rob Newcater) — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 17:08:27 +0100

The London Stock Exchange is abandoning it's Windows-based TradElect trading system. The system crashed in September 2008.

TradElect runs on HP ProLiant servers running, in turn, Windows Server 2003. The TradElect software itself is a custom blend of C# and .NET programs, which was created by Microsoft and Accenture, the global consulting firm. On the back-end, it relied on Microsoft SQL Server 2000. Its goal was to maintain sub-ten millisecond response times, real-time system speeds, for stock trades.

It never, ever came close to achieving these performance goals. Worse still, the LSE's competition, such as its main rival Chi-X with its MarketPrizm trading platform software, was able to deliver that level of performance and in general it was running rings about TradElect. Three guesses what MarketPrizm runs on and the first two don't count. The answer is Linux.

I'm sure someone got some nice lunches out of it while it lasted.

ZFS and Linux?

nospam@example.com (Rob Newcater) — Sun, 18 May 2008 22:36:56 +0100

This is concerning a cryptic entry from the blog of Jeff Bonwick. The two guys in the photos (follow the link) are Linus Torvalds and Jeff Bonwick. Jeff Bonwick is maybe not quite as well known as Linus Torvalds. He's the CTO of Storage Technologies at Sun Microsystems, he's also the ZFS development team leader, and his blog pretty much focuses on ZFS.

So, what's this about? Aren't there supposed to be licensing issues with Linux and ZFS? All I can assume when Jeff Bonwick says:

All I can say for the moment is... stay tuned."

is that there are "talks about talks". There are certainly interesting possibilities, ZFS is impressive stuff.

Three awk resources (and one old sed)

nospam@example.com (Rob Newcater) — Wed, 14 May 2008 21:34:08 +0100

I use awk (or rather gawk and nawk) a lot, and I was intrigued to find two resources on the internet very recently. This sort of information used to be hard to come by, so it was good to find it.

The first (and IMO the best) resource I found was an awk tutorial called Getting started with awk.

The second was an Awk, Nawk and Gawk cheat sheet.

Add to that my old favourite Handy one-liners for awk, which seems to have taken it's inspiration from the venerable and much-queried Handy one-liners for sed, and you have the four resources hinted at in the title. I hope it proves useful.

Linux security tips from the pros

nospam@example.com (Rob Newcater) — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 21:09:01 +0000

I'm always interested in security tips for Linux. This article is short and sweet and contains brief snippets of advice from the likes of Ted Ts'o, Andrew Morton, Linus Torvalds, and Fyodor (yes, he of Nmap fame) on how they secure their Linux desktops and networks.

Malicious commands

nospam@example.com (Rob Newcater) — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 13:18:18 +0000

There's an alarming post on the Ubuntu forums warning of a recent trend whereby new Ubuntu Linux users are being tricked into running dangerous commands which will delete home directories, or overwrite the system disk, or the like.

One of the great strengths of Linux in particular and Open Source software in general has been the approachability and helpfulness of the community, and it seems some dweebs think its funny to exploit this openness and trick a new user to trash their system.

It's made me think. A significant part (**) of the security of a system lies in the users. Linux and Unix have always been professional operating systems, written by professionals, for use by professionals. When you use the command line to ask a *nix system to do something, the assumption is that you know what you're doing. That system won't ask you if you're sure you want to do what you've typed. It'll just do it. I don't think that should change. For me it's part of the attraction.

I've only used Ubuntu once. I was impressed, but not that much that I would leave the distro I currently use . It seemed to me that the Ubuntu people have made it possible to do pretty much anything you might want to do using the GUI, and this is the attraction that has brought in many (welcome!) newcomers to Linux. However the command line is far more powerful and flexible than any GUI, and as people slowly come to realise this and naturally start experimenting, I feel more issues of a similar nature may arise.

If you want your PC (running Linux or Windows) to remain safe and secure, you need to have a particular mindset. "Wary" probably describes it. "Keeping it simple" and experience definitely helps.

(** This is not to say that all systems are equal. Not by a long shot.)

Windows is free

nospam@example.com (Rob Newcater) — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 19:39:49 +0000

This article, Windows Is Free, is a discussion about the impact of pirated software on free software, and is an interesting analysis of people's attitudes to using pirated software. Interesting and thought-provoking stuff.

The many uses of gcal

nospam@example.com (Rob Newcater) — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 11:59:00 +0100

gcal is a remarkable console-based program.

It can be used to print calendar information, much like cal, but with much more flexibility.
It can display holiday information for over 300 different countries and states.
It can display astronomical information such as sunrise, sunset, the current phase of the moon and much more.
It can also be used as a diary or personal reminder.
It can print the current date and time. (No, really! )
It can be used to display the start and stop of daylight saving.

I'll be providing examples of how to use gcal in all these ways. Bear in mind that this article just scratches the surface with regard to what gcal can actually be used for. You are limited by your imagination!

Continue reading "The many uses of gcal"

Microsoft Fracturing the Open-Source Community?

nospam@example.com (Rob Newcater) — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 12:20:34 +0100

Mark Shuttleworth, the CEO of Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, thinks Microsoft has managed to fracture the Open-Source Community. He also suggests that what Microsoft is doing amounts to extortion:

"To say, as [Microsoft CEO Steve] Ballmer did, that there is undisclosed balance sheet liability, that's just extortion and we should refuse to get drawn into that game. On the other side, if Microsoft is concerned about its intellectual property, there is no one in the free software community that wants to violate anyone's IP. Disclose the patents and we'll fix the code. Alternatively, move on."

He's also noted that those companies which did make deals with Microsoft have made short-term gains, but will lose out in the long run.

"I don't think this will end well for the companies that slipped up and went down that road," Shuttleworth said. "Ultimately, it is the spirit of open source that really motivates your best developers. Developers have been abandoning Novell ever since they did the deal with Microsoft, and they have gone to Oracle and Google among others. That's unfortunate for Novell, but was a fairly predictable consequence of their decision and it ultimately portrays a lack of understanding about what it is that really empowers free software."

Linux-based websites perform better

nospam@example.com (Rob Newcater) — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 20:03:57 +0100

According to WatchMouse, a Dutch firm that monitors server performance, Linux-based websites perform better. The ZDNet article states that WatchMouse surveyed over 1500 European websites.

... although the websites it surveyed were more frequently based on Microsoft's IIS web server platform running Windows than on Apache running Linux, the latter option performed better in terms of both uptime and load time.

No surprise to me, really. The comparative complexity of the two systems will affect performance as well as security.

"Even though the companies in our study seem to prefer Windows over Linux, our research shows they would be better off using Linux/Apache-based websites," said WatchMouse's chief technology officer, Mark Pors.

Ubuntu rejects Microsoft deal

nospam@example.com (Rob Newcater) — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 14:27:55 +0100

Canonical, the corporate sponsor of Ubuntu Linux, has rejected an intellectual property deal with Microsoft because it refuses to reveal details of the patents that it claims are being violated in open source software. To quote Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical:

"A promise by Microsoft not to sue for infringement of unspecified patents has no value at all and is not worth paying for."

This makes previous signees Novell, Xandros and (more recently) Linspire appear to be a little hasty, and it must be said, somewhat lacking in courage and foresight.

Microsoft, Linux, and patent questions

nospam@example.com (Rob Newcater) — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 12:42:08 +0100

Microsoft, after having struck a deal with Novell, have also been busy making Linux/patent-related deals with Samsung, Fuji Xerox, Xandros, and most recently LG Electronics.

The Novell deal has been in the news for months now, and has been commented on to death. I'm not quite sure what Xandros thinks it's going to gain from this. Perhaps some extra corporate business? Certainly, it's lost a lot of face in the Linux/FLOSS community. For a company with such a community-driven base product, can it afford to do that, long-term? Time will tell.

The other three, Samsung, Fuji Xerox, and LG Electronics, have rather more transparent motives. They were bullied. They spend lots of money on Microsoft products, and probably get huge discounts. If they agree to simply sign a bit paper which indemnifies them from being sued by Microsoft for something which Microsoft could never sue them for anyway, then the big discounts continue. Some Open Source enthusiasts might boycott their products, but it's small change compared to what they would lose.

A comment on the Computer Business Review Open Source Weblog seems to hit the nail on the head:

The suggestion is that Microsoft is not so much protecting its intellectual property as it is its business model. By creating a group of ‘patent-approved’ Linux vendors and discouraging enterprise adoption of alternatives via the threat of litigation the company would be able to stifle disruptive business models and innovation – all without ever proving any intellectual property infringement.

I think we can expect a lot more of these types of deals to appear.

Linux OCR software review

nospam@example.com (Rob Newcater) — Thu, 24 May 2007 14:38:26 +0100

There is a very interesting and useful review of Optical Character Recognition software over at the groundstate.ca website. The quality of the packages tested varies, and the author recognises the usefulness of software having command-line capabilities (for running batches of conversions, for instance). Along with accuracy, ease of use is also tested, with many usage and build examples demonstrated. Well worth a read if you are interested in using OCR software on Linux.

Sue me first, Microsoft

nospam@example.com (Rob Newcater) — Sun, 20 May 2007 17:42:59 +0100

The recent litigation threats made by Microsoft against users of Linux have so unimpressed some of them that they have set up a website inviting Microsoft to sue them first.

A day without Open Source

nospam@example.com (Rob Newcater) — Fri, 11 May 2007 19:46:30 +0100

This interesting article hypothesises a day without Open Source software. It raises some interesting points.

For starters, the Internet would “disappear” for the average user. Most Domain Name Servers (DNS) are run on open source software like BIND, which turns www.whurley.com into the IP address of the appropriate server. The majority of basic Internet users would be literally lost in translation.

It's the readers' comments which raise some of the more interesting points. Imagine suddenly being without Firefox, Mac OSX (based on FreeBSD), Apache.

MSN couldn't handle load without open source.

Their sole load balancing solution is boxes from F5 Networks, all running embedded linux

Other readers mentioned that Windows would lose it's TCP/IP stack (based on FreeBSD), and that many cell phones, home routers, e-mail, and most NAS devices would stop working.