Friday, February 26, 2010

BBC activates iPlayer Flash verification - Locking out open source

Read this article on H-Online!

Did you know, there is software to store streamed Flash? You find this info in that article.

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

New Python shell is a DreamPie

This article on H-Open reports on a nicer python shell.

Novell wants to be a big player in the mobile business

Novell's "open source .NET development environment MonoDevelop will now support development of Meego applications" (not quite "yet another" mobile platform) according to an article on H-Open. This article also reminds us, that MonoDevelop already supports iPhone and Google Android development.

another column-oriented database: Apache Cassandra

I came across an article at H-Open on Apache Cassandra. The Cassandra project was actually started by Facebook, but then open sourced and "donated" to Apache, and Facebook got a Gold Sponsor of Apache. The article also includes a hint on Google's BigTable. "Cassandra is used by a number of other companies, such as Cisco, Twitter, Digg and Rackspace."

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Firefox-3.6 and certain extensions

Whenever we are offered another nice major release of Firefox, I always fear, certain extensions won't run any more and I have to find replacements for them. Now, when 3.6 and it RCs got released, there were a couple of weeks of big uncertainty (at least for me), during which I really didn't know, whether these extensions would follow this release step.

There is Sage, the lightweight RSS and Atom feed reader, (article on wikipedia (I just updated it), its home page). If you follow more than two or three feeds, what other tool can you actually use? I hope, its developers will never abandon this very nice piece of software.

There is "Live HTTP headers" (aka "LHH"), an extension for tracing the HTTP protocol traffic between you browser and the HTTP servers you are talking to. It has a mozdev home page.
This is a Firefox extension intended to be used by software developers.
There are also extensions to this extension like LHHreplay.
There is an extension to Microsoft's IE by the name of ieHTTPHeaders, that is rather similar to LHH.
I heavily depend on both of them (LHH and ieHTTPHeaders), as I use their trace files in order to generate (raw) perl scripts from them to mechanize web server accesses.
I started several years ago with several such projects to run a lot of my daily tasks, tasks like downloading market data or downloading bank account statements. And I add a few such scripts every year. Just recently I created a script to download the call record from my telephone+Internet router, an AVM fritz box.
A couple of weeks ago, there was a chap from Microsoft, who told me, he wanted to try my software for personal use. After I sent him my software, I never heard from him again.
Maybe my software is just too bad read and too ugly (a colleague of mine (a rather ego-centric guy) keeps saying so), but maybe he is just not very polite.

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Facebook Chat moves to XMPP/Jabber standard

If you are heavily interested in Instant Messaging and also Facebook, then you may want to read this article on H-Online.com.

three-finger salutes on computers

The most famous three-finger salute is Control-Alt-Delete.
Today I came across another one: Control-Shift-Escape -- that one starts the Task Manager on various Windows-s.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Linux freezing with kernel "2.6.31.8-0.1-desktop"

after migrating from openSUSE-11.1 to openSUSE-11.2
together with a few further online updates
including a kernel upgrade to 2.6.31.8-0.1-desktop,
my system started freezing a couple of times for two days.

I made up my mind googling for "linux freeze",
found a hint saying, that 2.6.31.8 causes trouble,
fell back to 2.6.31.5-0.1-desktop,
"et voila": the problem is gone.
What a relief!

I hope, this article helps others in similar situations.

Update:
Well, actually 2.6.31.5-0.1 didn't really change the situation.
I only thought so for a short while.
I am sorry, I gave that impression.
But after switching off WiFi, communicating through eth0 has helped since,
my system has not frozen sice.
Of course I would like to use WiFi again very soon.

Update (2010-02-09):
Right now I have an "uptime" of 2:30 hours with 2.6.31.12-0.1 (that I downloaded from openSUSE.org today), connected to my router through WiFi, which seemed to freeze that version of the kernel, that made me start this article.

Update (2010-02-10):
I actually did not expect this change to happen in the near future at all,
but now it looks, as if I will no longer need to "rmmod ath9k" (remove my wifi kernel module) and "modprobe ath9k" (reload it) again.

The wifi connection to the access point resp. "wireless router" got lost, as I had to power off/on that device, and before I could remove that kernel module and load it again, the connection already worked again as with any other OS, I have around, and as anybody would actually expect.

Very nice.
My Linux has not frozen for almost 18 hours,
its wifi connection started resynchronising by itself,
what more can I expect ...

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

column-oriented databases

I read this article on InfiniDB, and I thought, it would help at least myself, if I took a note on it here.

The centrepiece of InfiniDB is a column-oriented back end ("engine") . MySQL database 5.1.39 serves as the basis of InfiniDB and comes linked to the back end. Since there is no indication of other storage engines either in the source code or in the InfiniDB documentation, this seems to be a pruned version.
Of course, using a pruned version makes it impossible to combine queries into different engines, I am not going to describe the disadvantages here.

Other column-oriented free databases (Infobright, LucidDB, and MonetDB) and also a commercial one (Kickfire) get mentioned in that article.

This topic always reminds me of my time in an environment, where FAMEdb got used.