Colin Charles Agenda

I don’t normally get excited by seeing an ad on television. In fact, I don’t normally watch “live” television that has ads in it, to begin with. But on this cold day in Melbourne, I was blown away by the Heinz soup ad.

I found that in 2002 Slate had an article about this exact ad. Leo Burnett/London created it, and I’m wondering if they’re reusing it or its just reached Aussie shores. A must read, Ad Report Card: hot soup, cold comfort.

Technorati Tags: heinz, soup, ad, instant gratification, 2 minutes, hot soup, cold comfort

Like many out there, I’ve got an itch to check out what OpenSolaris has to offer. With DTrace (something I’ve played with extensively in OS X Leopard betas), ZFS (something that might show up in OS X for file system storage), Zones, and a whole bunch of other features, I’d be a luddite not to check it out.

But I must admit, Sun has got a way of confusing you. Going to the Downloads page tells you that their main intent is to confuse users. How am I supposed to choose between Solaris Express Community or Developer edition? The former is updated every other Friday, does that necessarily turn me on? Then there’s NexentaOS and the like.

Who distributes operating systems in segments? Sun do!

An OpenSolaris newbie like me, ended up picking the Community edition as well as NexentaOS. I think I’ll get them to dual-boot on my soon-to-be-dedicated Solaris box. Now, once you’re done getting their Community edition (the Sun download system doesn’t allow you to get all 3 segments at once as well, mind you – you’re limited), all 3 1GB zip files, you get the pleasure of unzipping each and every one of them, and then (get this, its really funny), use cat to make them into one large DVD ISO.

Apparently I’m not the only one who thinks this sucks. Ian Murdock has adressed this (or well, is open to comments on how to address this). Glynn Foster has also spoken about building the community mojo – Ubuntu’s ShipIt program was a great success, maybe Sun should consider this for OpenSolaris? Time-based releases are better than “builds every other Friday”. Take a cue from Ubuntu’s download page. Redmonk’s Stephen O’Grady has his traditional Q&A on Project Indiana – a must read.

Technorati Tags: opensolaris, sun, download, community, silly download mechanism

Reading Dave Hall’s experience with 3, I can attest to their horrendous service. I never looked at Virgin offering cheap rates, but from their website, it seems that on a post-paid account, I can get 300MB of data for $10/month. I’m currently paying 3 $29 for 200MB of data (and yes, they’re cheaper than what Optus can offer).

Which certainly has me interested in becoming a Virgin post-paid customer. From their website, it seems that if I just want a SIM, I’ll be a pay as you go customer. Which works out well for me, as all I really want is data + any excess (at 1.5c/KB).

However, what Express Card can I buy outright or via eBay, that will work with Linux (and preferably, OS X)? The Novatel Merlin U530 that Dave has is a PCMCIA card, not something that most newer laptops have. What are my ExpressCard options? And does Virgin charge for roaming rates? 3 charges you extra if you’re not within their 3 Broadband Zone and are Roaming [via Telstra]. 3’s advertised MobileBroadband card now apparently offers an Express Card option.

Technorati Tags: data, 3g, virgin, 3, expresscard

When it came to an OpenOffice.org related presentation, my slide deck always contained a mention about security. However, as it gains in popularity, and a more bloated (read: MS Office-compatible) feature set, security alone is not going to be a selling point. In fact, when it comes to OSS advocacy, the word “free” (or the idea of zero/minimal cost) is also not a large selling point, neither is the “you can view the source code” (erm, yeah, so what do I do with it?). But I’ll save that rant for another day.

It seems there’s an OpenOffice.org worm in the wild, that affects Windows, Linux and Mac OS X systems. BadBunny as it has affectionately become known, comes to you as an OpenOffice.org Draw file, which displays a man in a bunny rabbit suit engaging in sexual intercourse. While you see this, its launching mIRC or XChat (on OS X and Linux) and forwarding it to other IRC users. Assuming you don’t have IRC installed, this shouldn’t do anything, right?

Apparently, not only does BadBunny come with some StarBasic, it also has got some other evil components that use JavaScript on Windows, Ruby on OS X and Perl for Linux. I wonder, why they just didn’t use JavaScript across the board? Why Ruby on OS X (Perl would’ve sufficed). Seems very odd, the choice of multiple languages.

This is largely a proof of concept, but it just goes to show that no matter what you’re running, its a good idea to practice safe computing practices. What peeved me though was a quote from Sophos in heise Security:

If the BadBunny developers had any financial intentions, they would have selected a more popular software structure and not included bizarre images, Sophos adds.

Is OpenOffice.org a non-popular software structure? I highly doubt it. Writing virii is like a coming of age present for some, and while OpenOffice.org was ignored as a suitable platform, its being recognised now. Mohandas Gandhi said: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” I think OpenOffice.org is at stage 3 (not just because of the virus writers, but also because of the plight towards ODF).

Technorati Tags: openoffice, openoffice.org, badbunny, worm, macro, starbasic, cross-platform, windows, linux, macosx

As Ubuntu becomes more mainstream, and there are more desktop users showing up thanks to its ease of use, and hardware partnerships like Dell (I hope their sales go well), Ubuntu is going to have to rock hard when it comes to software support as well as hardware support (for workstations and laptops).

Today, I was looking for video podcasting software on Linux. PenguinTV came out tops, and I’ve never really got Democracy TV to work the way I wanted. Stable version 3.0 is out, and there are quite a number of fixes since 2.80 (5 releases to 3.0). Feisty DEBs on the website are available, but they’re i386 only, and I opted to go via the apt-get, Ubuntu way (okay, Debian way). I got version 2.80 and I thought I’d bug report it: #119262. All in hopes of a newer version. Within the hour, my request got rejected:

Thanks you for your bug report. We can find this out via merges.ubuntu.com with a lot of extra information – there’s no point reporting an update bug unless you actually plan to do the merge, attach the debdiff, and subscribe ubuntu-universe-sponsors. However, if you would like to help fix this bug, please come help us.

Now, I’m your average, and typical Ubuntu user. I just expect things to work. I’d like software thats new, and at the latest release. I am your typical Dell purchaser. I have no interest in merging, attaching a debdiff, and getting on yet another mailing list.

I don’t blame the person closing the bug report, because thats what I would have possibly done when I was futzing with Fedora packages and actively doing volunteer distribution development. However, this doesn’t bode well to Bug #1 being fixed anytime soon – PCs for sale do include free software like Ubuntu, the marketing that it has amazing features and benefits are known to quite a lot of folk, but its not nearly as user friendly, yet. Let time pass?

Technorati Tags: ubuntu, penguintv, bug, new release, mainstream usage

In an effort to reduce the number of open tabs I have in Firefox, I have some rather interesting MySQL-related resources that I think the rest of Planet MySQL will quite enjoy.

• Linbit (the makers of DRBD) and MySQL are in a partnership now, and Irwan Jamaluddin, a systems adminstrator at one of the only Linux support companies in Malaysia, has recently blogged about his journey with DRBD and MySQL. The operating system base is RHEL 5, and there is a step-by-step guide on how he got it working. From what I gather, its a cut-n-paste tutorial, not something I’ve verified, but I’m sure I’ll refer to it when I want to play with DRBD.
• MySQL Basics in Pictures. Granted they’ve used an odd version of Linux for the basis of the tutorial, but that doesn’t affect the quality of the tutorial. Covers all the basics, from getting started, simple administration, queries, table manipulations, very basic security, and web access. Incidentally, they also offer some PHP Basics, that MySQL beginners might find useful.
• The official announcement for the MySQL Users Conference Japan is out. September 11, and 12 2007, at the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation, registrations open up in July, its free to attend if you pre-register, but costs 5,000 yen if you walk-in (~AUD50).
• The MySQL Database Server rPath appliance is out. Single installation CD, QEMU/VMWare/Xen images. The version of MySQL shipped with it is rather dated (5.0.24), 5.0.33 is available in the rPath repositories already (still, somewhat dated!). But this is a one-stop solution to running MySQL (i.e. its dead easy), so give it a twirl.

Technorati Tags: mysql, drbd, rhel, basics in pictures, uc-j, mysql users conference, japan, rpath, mysql appliance