I’ve tried to get Xen working properly under Debian Etch, and haven’t had a whole lot of luck. Not entirely sure what I’m doing wrong. I don’t have any error messages handy right now, and I’m not asking for assistance just yet. Please hold your “RTFM” flames for now. I’m going to take another stab at it and perhaps seek assistance from my faithful readers… so get ready 
Well, I guess I’ve set the bar for excitement pretty low… But… I unpacked the shower tonight and test-fitted the 3 main pieces in the bathroom.
Yay! The corner is square! …well, at least as square as the shower pan.
I had to finally cut out the old supply plumbing to get the wall pieces to fit right.
The less thrilling news is that I need to build out the wet wall (where the supply plumbing goes) to fit the new valve dealie. Hopefully an inch and a half will be sufficient.
…more good news:
The hole for the new closet flange is far enough out from the wall to accommodate a 12″-offset commode. Whee!
Alright… I admit it… In the grand scheme of things, it’s not all that exciting. I suppose V.J. Day or Apollo 11 might have been a slightly larger deal.
Well.. to be fair, I want a DOZEN!!
This article on The Register talks about a tiny server box that runs on 14 watts. It’s made by a Japanese outfit called Plat’Home… weird name, but it looks like a bitchin’ little box. I’d be perfectly happy to split out some of my home server functions (Asterisk PBX, RobotRadio, web, mail, print, et cetera) onto a few of these puppies.. and leave the big boxen to handle storage.
Schweet!
It’s a big day! After futzing with the stupid soil pipe for the toilet in the bathroom I’m renovating (for two days), I finally got it unhooked from the stack. Whee!
Here’s the bastard thing on the back patio. Boy was this fun to pull out.
Here’s the stack, from the bathroom above. You don’t want to know the horrors that lie beyond that wad of towels. Trust me on this.
Well, with the closet flange removed, I could finally put the second sheet of underlayment down, and nail it all…
Nope, not ready for the toilet just yet. That flange won’t be plumbed and screwed down until the vinyl goes in.
…and this is where the new shower is going… the supply plumbing will be replaced, and a drain hole still has to be cut. Be patient.
Yay! All my posts from my technotrike blog on blogspot.com have been moved over here… I will leave them up on blogspot for a while, but… this is the place for your future Technotrike fixes.
Originally posted 2/14/08 on technotrike.blogspot.com –ed.
This has me completely befuttled.
There’s an investment firm that sees SCO as a good investment. Worth $100M, no less.
Really, I think this says all that needs to be said.
A company whose principle product for the last five years has been what amounts to poorly-thought-out extortive slip-and-fall litigation, in which it has been found, not only to not be right, but to be not even be wrong… This is a good place to put one hundred million Dollars?! A quick note for Stephen Norris Capital Partners: Y’know the snow removal at my apartment complex is usually pretty shabby… Perhaps we could come to an understanding….?
I mean I’ve made some stupid purchases in my time, but… I don’t feel so bad about them now.
Originally posted 2/1/08 on technotrike.blogspot.com –ed.
This is horrifying news. Microsoft, in a move which is, actually, completely in-character, has decided to try to buy its way into a (or another) market where it has failed to dominate on its own.
Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo! for $44.6 BILLION. On the one hand, I’m thinking, “Anti-trust? Yeah. I think so. I REALLY think so. Anti-competitive? Absolutely.” If the government doesn’t stop this one, it’s all over. You’ll be eating MS-TacoBell and getting new MS-Goodyear tires at MS-PepBoys within a decade.
On the other hand, Microsoft, with its $303 BILLION market capitalization, and dwindling (20-something Billion, down from a high of 50-ish billion) cash reserves, may be over-reaching. Microsoft’s online services have been a consistent money-loser, from what I hear, and most of those ventures have been parnered (MSNBC) or acquisitions (HotMail). This means, that, if MS lives up to their reputation, they’ll buy Yahoo, re-brand it and drive it into a hill like everything else. It’s sad for Yahoo!, its employess and fans, but may turn out to be the deathknell for Microsoft. …which would be good for the rest of us.
See, Vista’s a pig and just about everybody knows it. Office2007 is a pig, and just about everybody knows it. Dell, ASUS and Lenovo have either stepped in, or are planning to step into the Linux waters for consumer PCs. MS’s lobbying power seems to be waning (their OOXML “Standard” was resisted by the ISO)
Maybe, just maybe, Yahoo! has to die for the greater good.
I’ll tell you one thing, tho… if this deal does go through, I’ll immediately abandon my Yahoo! email address, which I’ve had for 10 years. Yahoo!, if you take this offer, you’re dead to me.
Originally posted 1/5/08 on technotrike.blogspot.com –ed.
This article is little more than Linux-bashing tripe from an Apple apologist. It does state that part of what gives Mac a leg up over Linux is that MS Office and Adobe tools are available for Mac OSX, but not for Linux, which is true.
The article uses statistics that are from a source which … well… I don’t quite get. For example, How are they figuring market share? I work in an office with 10 desktop PCs, all running Linux. There are a couple MS Windows VMs in there too. We all connect to the Internet through a NAT. Are they figuring market share based on the requesting IP address? If so, they’re seeing one machine which flip-flops between Linux and (occasionally) MS Windows. I have 6 Linux PCs at home, from which I access the Web. I access the Internet through a NAT. Are they seeing my 6 machines as one?
And here’s another thing. Not every machine used as a desktop computer is used to browse the web. I have a couple machines at home, which are “desktop machines” in that they have GUIs installed, with the full spread of standard desktoppy apps, but I rarely browse the web from them. My studio machine is mostly used for audio, video and image editing. My current HTPC is used for viewing movies.
Linux desktop adoption statistics will likely always be a little shady, and widely varied. Anybody can pull a rabbit out of their ass from such a pool of statistics and present a statistic that supports their own position. Statistics, in general are suspect by the very nature of how they’re compiled. Linux desktop adoption stats are almost useless.
From my personal experience, Linux has about a 99% desktop market share. There are no Macs in my home or office, and 1 machine running MS Windows on hardware.
This, of course, is to say nothing of servers. We have 10 servers in our office, and 25 at our IDC running Linux, and about half of them are running 2 or more Linux virtual machines. I administer around 100 running Linux images… 1 MS Windows, 0 Mac.
So… Like I said to my girlfriend’s mother about presidential candidates, figure out what works for you, and then pick the one that fits your needs. The advertising and the statistics and all the rest of it means nothing. Try it out. Give it a fair shake. If you like it, use it. If you don’t like it, don’t use it.
I run Linux all over the place because it works for me. Your mileage may vary.
PS I’m writing this on one of my eeePCs.
Originally posted 1/1/08 on technotrike.blogspot.com –ed.
I’m writing this on my brand new ASUS eeePC. This thing is pretty spiffy. They keyboard is, admittedly tiny, but certainly serviceable. With built-in wireless, OpeOffice.org and an easily available terminal (with SSH built in) this little baby rocks. It’s got a solid state hard drive, which is great for battery life, as well as lightning-quick boot-ups. The downside of the solid state drive, tho, is the limited write lifetime of flash memory. This should be mitigated through judicious use of off-board flash drives.
I have to admit that I was a little uncertain, when I heard that ASUS has skipped over the normal “desktop” metaphor, but as someone who’s worked ona variety of GUIs, going back to Tandy DeskMate and MS Windows 3.1, the tabbed “Program Manager” UI is a bit out-of-fashion, but perfetly apt for the screen resolution of the eeePC.
Once one gets past the seeming awkwardness of the tabbed app picker thing, the eeePC is a delight. The 900MHz Celeron, while not exactly super-computer-class hardware, is definitely adequate for mobile word-processing, web-browsing, emailing and so on. One should be prepared for a little reduction in desktoppiness in a tiny $350 potable computer, but this machine definitely delivers a good level of laptop capability in a super-portable very-well-built package at an outstanding price.
Oh, and the really great news is that this is one among an increasing class of OEM computers being marketed to consumers with Linux pre-installed. I bought two, and plan to use them in my DJ business, when I start it. I may get a couple more just to keep in my car and truck… ’cause you never know when you’ll need to compute
I was considering the iPod Touch and the Nokia N800 for quick and dirty internet access and SSH connectivity, but with the iPod in the $300-or-better neighborhood and the Nokia about the same, both with no keyboard, and the eeePC at $349, with basically everything I need in a laptop and not much bigger of a package than the Nokia… um… it was kind of a no-brainer. OK, the eeePC is bigger than either of the other two, but I don’t need to carry a separate Bluetooth keyboard, and don’t have to wait for Apple to open up their SDK, or risk bricking the stupid thing to put Linux on it. The eeePC has linux on it already (albeit Xandros), and if I want to put another distro on it, there’s really nothing standing in my way. Having said that, i think I’ll stick with the pre-installed software (at least for now), as it seems to have all the hardware stuff already worked out… like the Wi-Fi drivers, the function keys and power management… so…
The only gripes I have with it so far are:
All-in-all, after a mere 4 hours of use, I give the eeePC a four and three-quarters stars out of five.
I’ll see about udating this a little later, after I’ve have more time to put this little honey through its paces.
… A quick post script: laptop bags for a machine this tiny are a little tough to come by, but portable DVD player bags work great. The CompUSA near me is going out of business, and I managed to pick up 2 such bags for $.98 each!!!!!
Originally posted 11/14/07 on technotrike.blogspot.com –ed.
This, pointed to by this, which I got to from this Slashdot article basically demonstrates that the people within Microsoft who work on MS Windows want it to be more like Linux and Mac OS X.
Pardon my Les Nessman-like restrained snicker.
… and yet… somehow, they also seek to add more bloat.
I don’t know… The Phenomenal Cosmic Power of UNIX-Like Operating Systems has grown on me. There is nothing compelling on the MS Windows side to make me want to switch.
I was talking about this with a friend… she’s taking some UNIX and other engineering classes… and she had to do a paper for Technical Writing… a newsletter article. So she was doing it as Linux promo piece.. an interview with an enthusiastic Linux System Administrator (me). She asked what was the one thing that made Linux a better choice of Operating System. I paraphrased Aladdin, by saying, “Phenomenal Cosmic Power!!! Itty-bitty living space.” She then asked what Microsoft would have to do to win me back… I told her that the “free-ness” of Linux is certainly liberating… but that’s not the only thing that makes Linux the right choice for me. If Windows was free (as in beer) and Linux was as it is (F/OSS), I would still choose Linux. Because it’s BETTER. Better shells, better modularity, better choices, better catalog of software that matters to me, better security, better performance, better efficiency, better usability… as in better.
So… in the end… Microsoft and it’s minions seem to be trying to cosmetically placate the Windows users who know Linux or Mac users who brag about usability features they’ve had for years (perhaps a decade or more). I think, tho, that as time goes on, it’s going to get harder and harder to build Band-Aid upon Band-Aid onto the decidedly non-UNIX-ey foundation of MS Windows and still justify charging $400 for “the good stuff”.
