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Hauppauge shipping wrong card in PVR-150 boxes

By on January 29, 2007 in Home Page, LAMP, Linux, Technology

Passing on a warning from the GNHLUG mailing list: at least at NewEgg.com, folks are reporting that when they buy a PVR-150, a card for capturing video off cable, they’re ending up with a different card in the box, one that’s not compatible with current PVR-150 software. At our MerriLUG meeting 11 days ago, we had Jarod Wilson presenting on MythTV and the PVR-150 got prominent mention. It’s been on sale recently in on of the Big Boxes. Perhaps it’s being discontinued? In any case, the manufacturer needs to make good on what they claim is in their boxes. Hopefully, this is just a packaging issue.

Followup: nope, it appears to be intentional by Hauppauge. There’s an entry in their Wikipedia page referring to this, and a quick Google shows that this is a known issue on the mythtv.org site and the ivtv-users mailing list. Very disappointing behavior. Caveat emptor.

Things we wish we’d known about NAS devices and Linux Raid

By on January 22, 2007 in Home Page, Linux, Technology

Thinking about deploying NAS? Before you do, you ought to read through Things we wish we’d known about NAS devices and Linux Raid by Daniel Feenberg of the National Bureau of Economic Reasearch, a private, nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization boasting 16 of the 31 US’ Nobel prizewinners in Economics as past or present staff members. Having reliable data to work with is important to them. There are some interesting lessons learned in the humorous reviews of systems they have used:

“That turns 20 minutes of scheduled downtime to several days. I can only assume the motivation was to discourage the upgrade.”

“Later, NFS exports of snapshots were added at our request. This is the only time any NAS vendor was willing to learn anything from us.”

and

“I’d be very reluctant to put data on a proprietary system with no aftermarket support. Every vendor is in constant danger of being acquired, divested or turned around. When that happens you and your box are no longer “strategic”, and contract or not, requests for help are likely to be brushed aside. Even with an enforcable contract, the vendor can easily discourage calls for service by proposing solutions that don’t save your data.”

and

“In a crowded server room you won’t be able to tell which system is beeping, so some visual indicator is essential – but not generally provided. ”

Excellent pointers, worthy of review. There’s also some good discussion of the statistics and odds of disk failures and double failures. Well worth a careful review if you need to be thinking about storing a large amount of data reliably.

CentraLUG, 5-Feb-2007: Matt Brodeur and GnuPG, OpenPGP, keysigning

By on January 18, 2007 in Home Page, LAMP, Linux, Security, Technology

The monthly meeting of CentraLUG, the Concord/Central NH GNHLUG chapter, happens the first Monday of most months on the New Hampshire Institute Campus starting at 7 PM. Next month’s meeting is on February 5th at 7 PM.

Directions and maps are available at http://www.centralug.org and on the NHTI site at http://www.nhti.edu/welcome/directions.htm. This month, we’ll be meeting at our usual location in the Library/Learning Center/Bookstore, room 146, marked as “I” on that map. The main meeting starts at 7 PM, and we finish by 9 PM. Open to the public. Free admission. Tell your friends.

At this month’s meeting, Matt Brodeur will present an introduction to e-mail and file security using Pretty Good Privacy (PGP). The talk will cover basic concepts of encryption and digital signatures. Examples and demos will use GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG), a free (GPL) implementation of the OpenPGP standard available for most modern operating systems. Following the presentation, a PGP keysigning event will be held. Anyone interested in exchanging key signatures with other local PGP users can find details on our website,… as soon as we’ve set it up. Stay tuned.

Matt Brodeur is a Quality Assurance Engineer at Red Hat in Westford, MA and volunteer in local LUGs. He has previously presented OpenPGP talks at the Boston Linux & Unix User Group.

More details on the group and directions to the meeting can be found at http://www.centralug.org and at http://www.gnhlug.org.

Ernie The Attorney: Avoid penalty for switching cellphone carriers

By on January 16, 2007 in Apple Macintosh OS X, Home Page, Technology

Ernie The Attorney blogs about how to Avoid penalty for switching cellphone carriers when you’re signing up for the new Apple iPhone. He points to Mike Arrington’s TechCrunch where Mike suggests, “My recommendation is to simply throw out the PC and switch to Mac. You’ll do it eventually anyway. Might as well do it now.” Wow! Will the iPhone be the new driver for Switchers?

Want an iPhone? Beware the iHandcuffs – New York Times

By on January 14, 2007 in Home Page, Technology

In today’s New York Times, Randall Stross writes, Want an iPhone? Beware the iHandcuffs

Here is how FairPlay works: When you buy songs at the iTunes Music Store, you can play them on one — and only one — line of portable player, the iPod. And when you buy an iPod, you can play copy-protected songs bought from one — and only one — online music store, the iTunes Music Store.

Well, I suppose that might be “fair play” if you make your living selling iPods or you’re a record company whose business plan is to sell listeners the same music over and over, each time they want to listen on a different media. Great business if you can get away with it.

Make no mistake: I’m not advocating we steal content. That’s not right. The Campaign for Audiovisual Free Expression puts it succinctly:

  • Piracy of an artist’s work is illegal. Fair use is not.
  • We have the right to hear, speak, learn, sing, think, watch, and be heard.
  • No one should assume by default that we’re criminals, and the technology we use shouldn’t do so either.
  • We have a right to use technology to shift time & space.
DRM-encumbered devices are Defective By Design — intended to prevent you from using all of the capabilities of the device.
 

Groklaw – EU Commission Study Finds You’ll Save Money Switching to FOSS

By on January 12, 2007 in Home Page, OpenSource, Technology

Groklaw points to EU Commission Study Finds You’ll Save Money Switching to FOSS. The “free” adjective has always been a burden for FOSS, but when the other choice sounds like “Open Sores” it doesn’t take a marketing genius to decide… that geeks shouldn’t try to sell software. The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) stalking-horse has been one of the best ways to confuse the issues, like the “shopping cart” estimates of cost of living. It depends if you prefer organic tofu or roast beast. Calculating the total cost of developing, maintaining, installing, training, supporting, migrating to/from and disposing of software is a guesstimate so mired in swags and assumptions it can mean whatever the company paying for the study wants it to mean, now can’t it?

Survey of email servers shows Open Source still king

By on January 11, 2007 in Home Page, Linux, OpenSource, Technology

Over on the O’Reilly site, Ken Simpson and Stas Bekman write of their adventures “Fingerprinting the World’s Mail Servers.” They report:

Of the 400,000 domains we surveyed, 31.2 percent of them (still) receive their email via open source mail server software. Of these, the most popular by far is still the old guard, Sendmail (12.3 percent), with Postfix a relatively close second (8.6 percent). Exim and qmail are roughly tied (5.3 and 5.0 percent, respectively) in third place.

Interesting.

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