Info
2006-02-23 linux produces good citizens
Since Bill Gates wrote a letter to hobbyists urging them to stop copying software the term 'pirate' and perhaps 'warez' have been quite widely used. I think the association between 'warez' and microsoft has always been strong, to the best of my knowledge the MS Windows platform does not come with a compiler, so how is someone to share their inventions with others?
There is a strong culture among Windows users to provide one another with software programs, in binary format. There are very few programs available to MS users in source code format. Those programs which are production quality often require the user to use the program on a trial basis to which the user may be locked out at the end of the trial, or simply nagged.
In the linux land, the oposite is true. There are few programs which are delivered in binary-only format, there are no naggs. So there is no need to download cracks, hacks or warez. To the best of my knowledge there has only beed on 'linuxwarez' site, since loki are no longer in business this has since past (I'm not really fond of warez anyways).
To me now, having to pay for software, or having to crak it just isn't right. Why should I use some bondage and discipline tool where the software is not free (as in beer). Many programmers have colaborated to produce very stable software, without the nags, without the bloat, but with huge functionality because they believe software should be this way.
I suspect that if the government inspected the average home windows computer they would find numerous copies of illegal software, but on the other hand the average linux user would have a spotless disk, in my opinnion, at the very least they would find expired trials.
This in mind, there is a portion of computer users who probably use BSD or GNU/Linux just because it's free, or because they're a charity.
2006-02-22 google rules
Google totally rules. It's a brilliant service. Linux just wouldn't be what it is today if google didn't provide such a wonderful service for people to communicate with each other through mail archives and ordering results with page rank.
That isn't to say that people are unable to use it without the search provided by google, but it certainly allows one to be more productive. If one wishes to find a how-to, the chances are one does a guick google for it first.
2006-02-17 working more at home than at work
Of late I appear to be working on a greater number of projects at home than at work. There is of course stuff left on my todo list, but I've recently given myself more things, though the greylist program of my own, which is now to optionally use sockets, for postfix use.
Most importantly is a PHP page I'm working on.
I cannot forget about my monitor daemon either. That's quite high on the todo list also.
2006-02-15 in the words of vanilla ice
In the words of vanilla ice, "if you got a problem, you I'll solve it". A friend at work reported his laptop was switching off after a short period of use, sounds familiar? Yes it's become clogged with dust, the air cannot flow and cool the heat sink that draws heat from the CPU (remember the first law of thermodynamics, heat travels from a hot body to a cold body).
I have noticed this before, and is how I eneded up with a p4 laptop for a couple of hundred quid, the seller thought the laptop was faulty, Dell informed him that the laptop required some work to cure the problem (300 quid IIRC), however, after a few hours in my care the problem was cured with a quick hoover of the cooling fins, no more over heating, and runs Linux perfectly well (in fact, since the time this page was created).
Why does this happen so frequently? Well, consumers demand faster latops for less money, this means using less developed CPUs which draw greater currents. This genrates heat which requires cooling. The more air blown accross the cooling fins increase the probability of air paths becomming clogged with dust. As the cooling fins get hotter so too does the CPU. Once the thermometer reads a high termperature it increases the voltage to the fans, which blow futher more air across the cooling fins, which thus completes the viscious cycle.
Anyway, his laptop runs sweet as a nut now.
2006-02-13 good news for me
Great news for me, no one has noticed anything not working that should be, which means I have got everything right, or the customers have left us. Now all that is left is to have DNS fun.
I am beginning to notice some of my Slackware skills have disappeared. I seem unable to do things if the tool is not in the Debian package handler. It's still not clear if this is because I want it as a package or if I am too lazy to download, configure, make, make install. Maybe a bit of both.
2006-02-12 huge firewall change
Woke myself up at 0500 hours today (Sunday) specifically to perform a change on the firewall pair at work. I spent much time last year looking at the way I was writing rulesets before deciding on a shell script that takes a list of host addresses and a set of pre-defined ports to create a bsd pf file. This allows the company to do more things through making a small change to this script.
I seem to have got everything right in a few minutes so, will find out what was missed Monday.