Linux
gregladen | December 18, 2007
Dec 18
Konrad Zuse died in Hünfeld, 1995. Zuse was an engineer and a pioneer in the computer field. He developed the world's first functional program-controlled computer, the Z3, in 1941. He also designed the first high-level programming language, Plankaklul in 1948, although the langauge was never implemented during his lifetime. He also founded the first dot-com, before there were dot-coms, in 1946. source
Dec 18
Republic Day in Niger. Niger is a landlocked nation in West Africa (barely ... almost Central Africa). The official language is French, and it includes 1.26 million…
gregladen | December 18, 2007Owing to public presure, the BBC iPlayer is now going to support Linux. But if you are a student in Newville, Pennsylvania who is into OpenSource, you may serve detention! (or NOT, see update below)
From Slashdot:
After previously limiting their iPlayer to only the Windows platform ... the BBC's content is now available to UK-based users of Linux and Mac OS X. From their site: 'From today we are pleased to announce that streaming is now available on BBC iPlayer. This means that Windows, Mac and Linux users can stream programs on iPlayer as long as their computer has the latest version of…
gregladen | December 17, 2007McKesson Provider Technologies is a health care industry software vendor. A few years ago, they began to search for ways to cut costs for the hospitals and medical offices that make up their customer base. Switching to Linux was the obvious solution.
Today, McKesson, a San Francisco-based company, offers the majority of its health-care related software applications on Linux, which significantly reduces costs for these medical offices and hospitals.
The move was solidified in February, when McKesson partnered with Linux vendor Red Hat Inc. to unveil the Red Hat Enterprise Healthcare…
gregladen | December 16, 2007
Dec 16
Constitution Day in Nepal
Dec 16
National Day in Bahrain
Dec 16
Victory Day in Bangladesh
Dec 16
Day of Reconciliation in South Africa
Dec 16
Don McLean's "American Pie" is released, 1971
Dec 16
Ludwig van Beethoven christened in Bonn, Germany, 1770
Dec 16
N'oubliez pas les Alice !
Dec 16
Bonne fête aux Adélaïde !
Dec 16
Aujourd'hui, c'est la St(e) Ãvrard.
Dec 16
N'oubliez pas les Ãberhard !
Dec 16
Décembre de froid trop chiche
Ne fait
pas le paysan riche.
Dec 16*
3. oder 4. Advent
Dec 16
Beethoven geboren, 1770
Dec 16
Day of Reconciliation in South…
gregladen | December 15, 2007KDE 4.0 is upon us. I believe it is essentially out there, being tested and messed with, with the final launch etc. happening in a few weeks (mid January).
KDE is a Window Manager (no "s" in that Window, please note) for Linux. I'm not big on KDE myself, but my daughter uses it.
KDE 4.0, compared with earlier versions, will have more stuff, be flashier, etc. etc. etc. as we would expect. And, it will use about 30% less memory.
Oh, and have you heard that Vista Service Release 1.1 is going to reduce the memory load of Windows Vista by 4%? No, you haven't heard that? Well, of course not…
gregladen | December 14, 2007
Dec 14
George Washington dies, 1799
Dec 14
Bonne fête aux Odile !
Dec 15
Argo Merchant oil spill, 1976
Dec 15
Bill of Rights adopted, 1791
Dec 15
James Naismith invents basketball, Canada, 1891
Dec 15
Sitting Bull shot in head while submitting to arrest, 1890
Dec 15
Statue Day in the Netherlands Antilles
Dec 15
Thomas Edison receives patent on the phonograph, 1877
Dec 15
Aujourd'hui, c'est la St(e) Ninon.
Dec 15
N'oubliez pas les Nina !
Dec 15
Bonne fête aux Christiane !
Dec 15
Aujourd'hui, c'est la St(e) Christina.
Dec 15
Waffenstillstand zwisch RuÃland und…
gregladen | December 12, 2007
Dec 12
E.G. Robinson born, 1893
Dec 12
First wireless message sent across Atlantic by Marconi, 1901
Dec 12
Independence Day in Kenya
Dec 12
Debian GNU/Linux 1.2 alias ``rex'' released, 1996
Dec 12
N'oubliez pas les Chantal !
Dec 12
Nachrüstungsbeschluà des NATO-Ministerates, 1979
Dec 12
ÐÐµÐ½Ñ ÐонÑÑиÑÑÑии
Dec 13
Apollo 17 leaves the moon, with "last" men to walk on moon aboard, 1972
Dec 13
Dartmouth College chartered, 1769
Dec 13
Geminid meteor shower (look south)
Dec 13
Republic Day in Malta
Dec 13*
Parashat Va-Yishlah
Dec 13
Ted Nugent, the motor city madman,…
gregladen | December 10, 2007Seagate's new "Free Agent" (ha!) drives are all broken, it would seem in an interesting way that makes them partially incompatible with Linux and other *nix based operating systems, including Macs.
Seagate representatives claim that there may be workarounds for this, but they do not intend to find out what they are and will not support them.
Solution: Never, ever buy a Seagate product again. It really isn't necessary to do so. There are plenty of other disk manufacturers. Also, wait for the next bit of news on this, about how Microsoft bribed Seagate to pull of this particular…
gregladen | December 8, 2007
Dec 08
Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) born in Venosa (Italy), 65BC
Dec 08
James (Grover) Thurber born in Columbus, Ohio, 1894
Dec 08
First Ph.D. awarded by Computer Science Dept, Univ. of Penna, 1965
Dec 08
Blessing of the Water in Uruguay
Dec 08
Mother's Day in Panama
Dec 08
Our Lady of the Cacupe in Paraguay
Dec 08
Jim Morrison is born in Melbourne, Florida, 1943
Dec 08
John Lennon is shot and killed in New York City, 1980
Dec 08
Afflux (50th of the Season of The Aftermath)
Dec 09
Ball-bearing roller skates patented, 1884
Dec 09
Independence Day in…
gregladen | December 7, 2007There has been a lot of interesting discussion on the benefits and negatives of a stable API on this thread, with good points being made on both sides. If you don't know or care what that is about, then just move along, nothing to see here...
But if you are interested, Greg Kroah-Hartman (an advocate of the changing API) sent me a document that may be worth reading. It is, in essence, the argument opposing the stable API:
The Linux Kernel Driver Interface (all of your questions answered and then some)
Greg Kroah-Hartman
This is being written to try to explain why Linux does not have a…
sporte | December 6, 2007I know it's strange! I never thought I would actually go to web sites (intentionally!) to watch computer ads. But the Mac guy is so cute! And the ads with Mac and PC are sooo funny!
I think these little film clips rank right up there with Steven Colbert and The Office.
What think you?
gregladen | December 6, 2007Better than what you may ask? Better than:
-Older versions of LInux ... it is always improving.
-Windows. Hands down.
-Apple's operating system before Apple chose, essentially, Linux (a Unix variant) to run its eye candy and development environment on
But why, specifically, is it better?
One reason, apparently, is because the Linux Kernel does not have a stable API.
So what, you ask, is a Kernel and/or an API? Very simple: The Kernel is the guts, the most basic part, the way-down way-down of the operating system. What is the API? That stands for Application Programming Interface. The…
gregladen | December 3, 2007Now and then a program (a "process") will need to be killed. It got annoyingly slow, or got stuck somehow. In Windows, the final solution for killing a process is "alt-ctrl-delete" which may or may not give you the capacity to shut down a process, and if that works, it requires a lot of struggling with dialog boxes, etc. Best case scenario in Windows is that the process dies cleanly. Often, a Windows process will leave messy bits and pieces of itself behind that may affect performance or create security problems, and often, the worst case scenario happens ... you've got to "kill" the…
gregladen | December 1, 2007According to my Linux Calendar, this is the anniversary of Rosa Parks refusing to move to the back of the bus AND of Martin Luther King's boycott two years later, AND the independence of both Portugal and the Central African Republic And it is even Anniversary Day in Chatham Islands (when everyone celebrates their anniversary, I suppose).
Here is the full output from my Linux Calendar:
DEC 01
Woody Allen (Allen Stuart Konigsberg) born in Brooklyn, NY, 1935
DEC 01
First national corn-husking championship, Alleman IA, 1924
DEC 01
Martin Luther King Jr., leads black boycott of…
gregladen | November 27, 2007RAIDs (Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive [sic] Disks) are considered pretty handy for a number of things. This is an example of productive and practical use of a RAID. Granted, this project does not have the archaic grandeur of a Floppy Disk RAID, but then again, the capacity and performance of this system are utterly superior to those of a Floppy Disk RAID. The following is meant as an instruction sheet of how to build a rock-hard USB stick RAID system and simultaneously transform from an ordinary nerd to a SUPER LINUX GURU.
Get your sticks together and go here.
gregladen | November 23, 2007Your are typing some text into your FIrefox 2.0 Browser, and you spell something terribly wrong. Like this:
I am so glad I upgreaded to Firefox 2.0, because it has a built in spell checker.
You see the error where you meant to type "upgraded." So you right click on it to pick the correct spelling, and accidentally hit the "Add to Dictionary" menu choice, which is annoyingly placed right next to the correctly spelled word.
From now on, you can never be sure if your text will be correct. Bummer.
There is a way to fix this.
In Linux, go to a terminal window.
Change the directory to where…
gregladen | November 15, 2007
I like to report advanced technology that runs open source systems, like LInux.
From Manufactum of Germany, we have a two pound PC, running Linux, of course, just over seven inches maximum dimension. It runs at 500 MHz, can handle a gig of RAM (default 512 MB) and an 80 gig hard drive. It is pre-loaded with Debian with KDE as your desktop. That part is totally configurable, of course.
Imagine replacing all the computers in your lab with something the size of a Tom Clancy novel. That would leave piles of room for, say, a bigger fridge in which you can store samples. And beer.