Colin Charles Agenda

I took a vacation recently, which involved heading down to Hobart, for some rest & relaxation. And lots of food (read: oysters, seafood, yum!). I packed my suitcase with some books for some late night reading, and am pleased to provide some form of review.

Linux Server Hacks by Rob Filkenger was definitely interesting. I’d say I found at least 1/4 of the hacks useful, with others probably being common sense (or maybe I already knew them). There were some useful scripts, and overall while this book doesn’t earn a keeper on my shelves, I did take away some useful bits and pieces: xargs tips, looking for setgid/setuid binaries, hdparm tuning, rsync backups, iptables fun, a tool called vtund that I’ve never used, ntop, their very own httptop, and a few more.

Linux Performance Tuning and Capacity Planning by Jason R Fink and Matthew D. Sherer had some rather basic and shallow information, that you’d have learnt as part of the LPI Level One certification at least. There was a section on network tuning as well, which is important with things like NFS. I was hoping I’d see some details about AFS (because I know a very large install base), alas zilch. But there are good bits of basic information, like if you’ve ever wondered what RSS means from the ps output? A good introduction to LVM exists; this book was published in 2001, you hardly notice much about IPV6 in their networking chapters. And afaik, TCP ECN has been enabled by default for a while – sure it caused misery for a while, its all good. This isn’t a keeper on my packed bookshelf.

Linux Security Cookbook by Daniel J. Barrett, Richard E. Silverman, and Robert G. Byrnes seems to be woefully out of date, but maybe its because it was published in 2003. I found the examples of creating PAM-aware applications useful, and there were some good tips about sudo (have you thought that restricting su to a sudo user would be a secure solution? Apparently it isn’t, thought combined with SELinux I’d think otherwise). Yet another non-keeper for the bookshelves, though it’d be helpful if there existed an updated review copy covering SELinux, AppArmor (of which I know nothing about) and a whole lot more new happenings in the last three years.

What I did find as a keeper was: Optimizing Linux(R) Performance: A Hands-On Guide to Linux(R) Performance Tools (HP Professional Series). I’ll review this later as I soak up more of the text.

Technorati Tags: book, linux, performance, reviews, security

The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) has decided that by December, next year mobile number portability will be available in Malaysia. This has been available in Australia since September, and more importantly in Singapore since 1997! (read more on mobile number portability).

A proposal has been floating around since 2004, and its going to take them another year to implement it. Three years to conduct research. Datuk Dr Halim Shafie, heading the Commission and all their research has decided that Maxis, Celcom and DiGi are receptive to the idea – so what’s the reason for the deferment?

Healthy competition between three providers is hard to do. Opening that limit up in itself will encourage more competition (even for service reselling, like how B resells Optus). Of course in Malaysia, its all about protecting the connected companies.

“Telcos in those countries have improved their delivery services since MNP was implemented,” he added.

It seems like Halim Shafie knows what MNP will mean for the consumer. Yet, its been dished about for the last couple of years. Let’s hail the day a consumer rights group in Malaysia will actually be taken seriously or perform useful actions.

Technorati Tags: malaysia, mcmc, MNP, mobile, number, portability

I spoke to the Apple folk on Friday in Sydney, and wore my “Veni. Vidi. Codi.” t-shirt that was gifted to all WWDC 2006 attendees. After Virgin decided that we shouldn’t leave Sydney, changing our gates three times, because of the bad weather, we finally left. When I did land in Melbourne, one of the flight attendants was talking to me because of the t-shirt I was wearing and he wanted advice on buying his first Mac.

He’s now sold on the idea of a MacBook, and even if he needed the Windows goodness, he’d get it, thanks to BootCamp/Parallels. Merchandising is important…

Incidentally, at the second gate, they told us the plane there was unserviceable. However, they managed to fly that to the (sunny) Gold Coast. Seeing that there were no major dramas in Saturday’s papers, I guess planes can become unserviceable depending on the weather?

Oh, and I tried Keynote (demo-version for 30 days). Man, I was impressed. Its highly polished. And it works well with the remotes that Apple ship nowadays. It seems to take presentations to the next level. And the interface, its just simply amazing. Need to outdent a bullet? Just drag it and the grid shows up. Amazing, amazing, amazing.

I am now the proud owner of a Nokia N73. Thank you Optus. Of course, getting to use it is a little quirky.

I’ve not been able to get the Flickr Upload working. Maybe this is something Optus decided to disable? Anyone can confirm this? Instead, I’ve decided that a ShoZu account is probably what I want, and that’s my “interface” to Flickr or even to WordPress it would seem. Oops, scratch that. Flickr Upload does work, it just seems to be configured a little differently (and if you’re doing it on a Mac, you need to send the file via the Bluetooth File Exchange utility in Applications/Utilities). One thing ShoZu is missing seems to be the MovableType API.

I’ve not been able to get it to sync with Linux, which is a bit of a pain, but I’ve managed to get it to sync with iSync on the Mac. You want to read Adri’s excellent post on the topic, and get this file. I’d say read the site, but I can’t read German myself. Now my calendar and contact details are on my phone, which is rather nifty, because unlike the iPod, I can edit entries here.

Inserting the memory card is a pain. You need nails. I just cut mine yesterday. I thought this was bad on the Nokia 770, but this one’s worse. Speaking of which, the chargers for the Nokia 770 and the N73 are similar! No more old Nokia phone chargers (though they do provide the dongle for it, if you absolutely need to use it).

I can’t figure out how to display the time thats being taken on the current call. Help? This was available on the Ericsson T610, and the Minute Minder is generally useful as here we have free 20 minute calls to other Optus customers. Also, the Autolock seems daft – why do I need to enter a pin to unlock a keylock? On the T610, after 20 seconds it’d keylock the phone, but unlocking it was simple and didn’t require a PIN. Can this be replicated?

It has a built-in radio. Very cool stuff. I just paid $5.50 so I could get my favorite ring tone, Bittersweet Symphony on the phone. Talk about a Optus Zoo sham. Worse, its not even the tune that I wanted, but a twenty second MP3 rip!

And the camera phone, probably the reason I went with this, is just amazing. The photo quality is great. Its got more megapixels than my first digital camera. Technology has come far!

Quirk: once I’ve locked the keypad, and open the camera, it takes a while before all things start working. This is with the radio playing in the background.

Anyways, more after some playing. In other notes, I’m sick. High fever, flu, and its really hot outside. Sigh.

I always knew that the built-in iSight on the MacBook Pro will come in handy. That, and the fact that Photo Booth is installed probably makes it all the more worthwhile. (i.e. I found out its first use, in a long, long time)

Sue-Anne in sepia

For a party at hand, all I can say is, its fun. Look at what I managed to grab at Sng’s birthday party the other day? Or should I say, what most of the guests managed to grab themselves, and I just happily uploaded…

So there, Photo Booth is a great little application for a party. The iSight works in Linux these days, but we lack a funky time-waster like Photo Booth. And no, I don’t think anyone should bother wasting their efforts on it either – there are more important things to conquer.

Technorati Tags: isight, party, photobooth

Caught Why Do Fools Fall in Love. Not my kind of show. I did see Episode 9 of The Ghost Whisperer and there was a Fedora Core (GNOME-based) desktop, and a spreadsheet was open in her antique store. Fedora in the movies!

Now, Skype is still one of the only packages that I use that isn’t available for Linux/PPC. I can use Gizmo’s voip features thru Ekiga, and that works a charm. It would seem that there are quite a lot of users looking for Skype for Linux/PPC. Of course now that Apple has bowed out of the PPC market, I really do wonder if the folk at Skype see more reason to do this; however, keep in mind that a lot of the PPC-based Macs will be around for a long time to come.

The current line run Linux just fine, even if Leopard wouldn’t (i.e. Linux will run perfectly on your G3, Leopard by the looks of it, won’t).

Then I notice that Google and Skype are in a deal. Does this mean that on my 770, I can actually use SkypeOut? Does this mean that I can use Tapioca to do GTalk or Skype via my Linux/PPC box?

Technorati Tags: fedora, gtalk, linux, linuxppc, movies, reviews, skype, voip