Over at Scripting News, Dave Winer notes, “Congratulations, you made it to the shortest day of the year. They all get longer from this point on.”
Archive | December, 2005
Linux Certification
Over at Linux Watch, Stephen J. Vaughn-Nicholls opines “You don’t have to have a Linux certification to get a job working with Linux, but it can’t hurt.” I’m a big fan of certification, as I think eventually the vendor- and industry-level certification will be viewed as Continuing Education requirements for Licensed Software Practitioners. I’ve lectured about this years ago. I’ve also practiced what I’ve preached, earning a Novell CNA, Microsoft Certified Professional, Certified Solution Developer, Certified System Engineer and MySQL Core Certification through the years. I also worked as one of the lead authors for Microsoft’s Visual FoxPro 6.0 Distributed Applications exam, so I appreciate the difficulty of creating a legitimate certification.
Like a diploma, some certificates may just be an attendance report crossed with a good deal of bulk memorization, but it also shows a willingness to work within the system. A four-year degree generally indicates a bit of patience, too. But on the flip side, remember what they call they guy who graduates at the bottom of his class in med school: “Doctor”
Certification can be what you make of it. An educational opportunity, a means of self-evaluation, and a chance to distinguish yourself in the marketplace.
Dabo goes video!
In “Dabo Part I: The AppWizard,” Andrew Ross MacNeill interviewed Ed Leafe in a videocast demonstrating the Python n-tier framework dabo. Ed was so impressed with the power of video presentations that he’s tried his hand at it himself. Check it out at http://leafe.com/screencasts/codedemo.html. Ed used dabo on a Fedora Core 2 workstation and recorded it using pyvnc2swf and Sound Studio on the Mac. Very cool!
The Difference between Red Hat and Novell
Over at Linux-Watch.com, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols posts The Difference between Red Hat and Novell which in turn points to Matt Asay’s essay by the same name. Interesting to read an inside and outside view of the situation.
ARM: Whil Announces GLGDW 2006
Andrew MacNeill – AKSEL Solutions] reports: “Whil’s back: Moving from Windows to Linux and now back to Fox….. Whil just announced the return of the Great Lakes Great Database Workshop 2006 with one track of 14 sessions covering every major aspect of Fox development.”
Microsoft patch Tuesday for December
Microsoft issued two new patches and re-issued one other patch on their monthly patch Tuesday. MS05-054 is “Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer,” yes, IE, that exploit delivery engine that also displays web pages. Get it patched, and use it only when absolutely necessary! MS05-055 is a very specific patch for Windows 2000 SP4 that patches an exploit which would allow an elevation of privileges. MS05-050, “Vulnerability in DirectShow Could Allow Remote Code Execution” was re-released to for a “revised version” of the security update for users of Windows 2000 SP4, Windows XP SP1 and Windows 2003 – sounds like a patch to the patch.
Get patching!
Derek Slater, CopyFighter
Joho the Blog posts “[Berkman] Derek Slater. Derek, the first Student Fellow at the Berkman Center, is giving a lunch time talk. He’s leaving next month to work for the EFF.org. He’s going to talk about the study he just released, written with Mike McGuire of the Gartner Group. The key findings: 1. People like talking about the music they listen to. They want to make recommendations, sometimes by sharing the music. 2. We should embrace consumers wanting to share their tastes in these ways because it’s good for both business and culture. But (Derek says) we shouldn’t think of music sharing only as the sharing of…
Nut-Graph: visualize blackouts
And once you have NUT monitoring your UPS serving multiple servers, consider adding Nut-Graph to give you a visual display of incoming voltage, load and battery status. Requires NUT, mod_php, MySQL 4.1 and Perl and jpgraph. Very slick!
Intel says AMD/MIT $100 laptops won’t succeed
OSNews reports Intel Chairman Derides USD100 Laptop. Intel’s chairman chided plans by rival AMD and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to build a $100 laptop for the developing world. At a press conference in Sri Lanka on Friday, Craig Barrett said that potential computer users would scoff at the computer’s lack of features. Barrett also said the device isn’t worthy of being called a laptop. “I think a more realistic title should be ‘the $100 gadget’,” he mused. “The problem is that gadgets have not been successful.”
I wonder how many of the six billion earthlings have had a chance to try one of these?
Multiple machines off a single UPS?
A client recently asked if we could add another server to their network without having to add another UPS — they had a UPS with plenty of surplus capacity, but the serial cable from the UPS went to a Windows Server 2003 to provide for the (essential!) soft shutdown. However, I would be installing a Linux server. How to get the two to get along?
One solution is using the Network UPS Tools or NUT for short. On this page Jeremy Herr explains how he set up one Linux machine and two Windows machines off a single UPS. One machine connects to the UPS and monitors the UPS status. NUT is set up as a couple of modules: the server (daemon) monitors the UPS, client software talks to the server. Normally, the client software is on the same machine as the server, but multiple machines can run the client software and communicate over a network to the server, provided each of the components is configured properly. Cool architecture!