HackNBlog @ Salamanteri Server

I believe most here have already read about Google starting up an operating system of their own, Chrome OS to compete with Windows as their next project. I’ll share some of my feelings about good, bad and the futile related to this hopefully neat project.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Google want’s to provide users with an OS that boots up lightning fast and ready for web in seconds from switching power on. They want the system not to clutter up but always run as fast as anew. They want to provide an OS where there is no fuss and fighting with new hardware, configuring the system (that usually needs knowledge below the average) and no updates that break things or change&confuse the user interface. This all sounds good - and it also already sound familiar.

Gathered not from Chrome OS official blog but from a zdnet blog entry, let’s check some known facts:

• It runs on top of Linux kernel.
• It will boot directly into the Chrome Web browser
• It will be aimed primarily at netbooks
• It will run on both x86 and ARM processors
• It will not be designed to have local storage; all data will be stored in the cloud
• Google will not entice developers to build software to run on the Chrome OS; instead, they want them to build Web apps that will run on any standards-based browser
• The three most important features will be “speed, simplicity and security”, according to Google
• Google will release the software to the open source community before the end of 2009
• Announced Chrome OS hardware partners: Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba.
• Netbooks running Chrome OS will be available in the second half of 2010

(more…)

Ok, first off I don’t usually write about Windows OS specifically and do not use it, nor have I even tested Windows 7 myself. That being said I decided that since this is a big issue for some I should make one of my exceptions.

If you are using Windows 7 beta then you know (at least you should) that it expires tomorrow (July 1, 2009) and after that it will annoyingly shut down your computer every two hours. Other than that it will function untill August 1, 2009 when the beta will expire completely.

Next step is to either return to your old Windows version or install upgrade to RC. Unfortunately Microsoft does not officially support upgrading from beta to RC (they recommend clean install) - however browsing the web I bumped into this guide at tomshardware.com that tells you how to do the upgrade (and if nothing goes wrong save you from the trouble of re-installing everything): Windows 7 Beta Begins to Expire July 1, 2009.
If you don’t want to read what tomshardware has to say about this, to just skip right into upgrade procedure guide go straight to Microsofts own document, “Delivering a quality upgrade experience” on their Engineering Windows 7 blog.

I just thought that it might be polite to post this here, just in case that some reader is in this particular situation, pondering how to upgrade his expiring Windows 7 beta (even if it’s just running on top of Linux+VirtualBox ;) ), so there.

P.S. Don’t expect that I will take a habit of writing about Windows, because I rarely will. Sometimes but rarely, as I see it this is mostly *nix (and specifically Linux) use and programming related blog :)

Well, guys (and girls <3 )… I haven’t written anything for some while because I decided to take a vacation. Now I feel bad about it because this is not my job, this is my hobby and I don’t really understand why I haven’t just kept on blogging. Well, anyway, expect some new writings here again :)

On another subject, this very server (named salamanteri) was under attack. Surprisingly though it was not an attack through the internet - it was a very physical attack. What can I tell about it? Well, it was me and my friends having a laugh, drinking way too much beer. My friend got in an argument with my other friend, one thing led to another and in the end I was in fight with my friend and he was attacking my computer very physically. Thank goodness nothing on my server was broken (but my desktop system is another case - although weird, nobody remembers anything happening to it, might be just a normal hardware problem). In the end I can only quote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (and ask you to consider alcohol just another drug, and not exactly a mild one): “One of the things you learn from years of dealing with drug people, is that you can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug. Especially when it’s waving a razor-sharp hunting knife in your eye“.

Well, that’s about it… I will return soon, probably writing about Linux and gamers. A very popular subject I might claim.

Last sunday I was at Machinae Supremacy concert. The show was great, but hey, what else than pure awesomeness could result from combining good metal music with niiice SID sounds from good ole Commodore 64?

Anyway I just wanted you to hear that Machinae Supremacy made a statement concerning P2P filesharing. First they spoke about some new law in Sweden that is targetted at filesharers and then they made a clear statement: “We want you to download out songs!”. Also they have clearly stated on their website that they support The Pirate Bay.

So go now, you can find some of their songs available for download right from their website at www.machinaesupremacy.com - or you can go to thepiratebay.org and download them via bittorrent. The last option may or may not be legal in you country but what the heck, the guys who make the music not only approve it, they encourage people to do this!

Other than that I also bought a cool T-shirt (the one on the right, linked to Machinae Supremacy online shop catalog). I love it :)

One great milestone for Mozilla FireFox 3 browser and in the battle against the more pathetic dinosaur of the browser world, Internet Explorer, was achieved early this year when FireFox 3 beated Internet Explorer 6 on most used web browsers statistics (at least according to StatCounters statistics).

Currently the lead is however still kept by Internet Explorer with it’s 7th release which is used by approximately 40% of users while FireFox 3 has around 24% of users. Internet Explorer 6 was left behind FireFox 3 with userbase of around 22%.

So despite this milestone Internet Explorer still has strong grasp of users worldwide. However as an example in Finland FireFox 3 is doing even better, having taken a 47% share of all computers in our country and leaving Internet Explorer 7 with only 29% of users we here in Finland are clearly leading the change away from Microsoft controlled browser monopoly (for more detailed statistics of browser use in Finland click here).

Okay, I just shamelessly copied this entry with minor modification from one of my favorite blogs, Steve Parker’s uRandom, but I felt it was important enough. The entry at uRandom quoted another webpage and linked to it. Below is just a copy of what Steve has on his entry.

From the page:

In just 20 minutes, he found and cloned the passports of two very unaware US citizens

Do watch the 5-minute video: http://www.engadget.com/2009/02/02/video-hacker-war-drives-san-francisco-cloning-rfid-passports/.

Btw, Steve, if offended about me copying your entry, take contact and I’ll remove or rewrite the thing. Hope you wont though ;)

So, on my last post, “1,234,567,890th second since UNIX epoch. Where will you be?“, I predicted that on that particular second in time I would propably be sleepind or high. But I wasnt. Instead I was very sober and still awake - watching Futurama movies with my friend. It was all good time but now it’s gone. Still asking, what did *you* do on that moment?

“At 11:31:30pm UTC on Feb 13, 2009, Unix time will reach 1,234,567,890. Where will you be at this momentous second?” - from Bell Labs

Surely you would want to find out what time this second comes in your local time? Well, provided that your *nix system has perl installed you can run the following command in shell:

perl -e 'print scalar localtime(1234567890),"\n";'

Here in Finland this will not happen on Friday 13th but very soon after midnight on Saturday. More precisely at “Sat Feb 14 01:31:30 2009″, as was reported by the above line of perl code… I myself will most likely be high or sleeping at that very moment - where will you be?

P.S. See also: One of those magic times: On Friday the 13th! by Jon maddog Hall & The 1,234,567,890th second approacheth at Linux-Watch.

To quote osnews.com article Nokia To Add LGPL to Qt Licensing Model…

After Nokia purchsed Trolltech last year, doubts arose about how Nokia would handle the dual licensing model of Qt, the advanced cross-platform toolkit which lies at the base of the KDE Free software desktop. As it turns out, these doubts were unfounded, as Nokia today announced it’s going to add the LGPL to Qt’s licensing model, starting with Qt 4.5.

…and the press release…

The move to LGPL licensing will provide open source and commercial developers with more permissive licensing than GPL and so increase flexibility for developers. In addition, Qt source code repositories will be made publicly available and will encourage contributions from desktop and embedded developer communities. With these changes, developers will be able to actively drive the evolution of the Qt framework.

Personally I’m eager to see if this will result in code exchanging between the GTK and Qt projects - something that the licensing has prevented before. It would seem logical and beneficial to both sides to take on that path but only the future will tell…

…damn. I just noticed that this blog has been unavailable for at least two days. This was because of a bug in my under-development plugin for Wordpress.