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| 2004-01-18 |
SFU download frustration^Wannoyance |
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Most people interested in Windows-UNIX interoperability (yes, if you still dual-boot *n*x with Windows, you are included) should have heard of the big news of last week (since I was told the week starts on Sunday). Microsoft's Services for Unix (which some people rightly commented should have been called Unix Services for Windows is now available as a free download, at a healthy 200 MB reminiscent of a full Service Pack.
Which is as should be; this is a complete replacement of the anemic POSIX subsystem MS put into NT 3.1 for buzzword compliance, and comes with lots of neat features - NFS browsing from Windows Explorer, compilers and userland tools from BSD, etc. as you could read from the linked articles (hint: the Slashdot article is actually more instructive).
Now, I don't mind having to log in to Passport to be able to download, but when even trusty Getright fails to grab the download link from IE, things are getting just a *bit* out of hand. Presumably the need for profiling outweights the need for efficient download speeds.
Which is where my plug for Mozilla Firebird comes in. It gives you the full URL of the link in the prompt window that asks whether you want to Open or Save a hyperlink. You just need to highlight the visible part of the download URL and it will automatically scroll, which is actually... kind of neat.
No, I am not disclosing the URL here. Might break some EULA, though I don't see it written anywhere. If you need SFU, why don't you... install Firebird first? It's a small 7MB download, after all...
How ironic.
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posted at 19:01:04
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Downtime |
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I have not been blogging much; been busy with other things - applying to grad school, for instance - and I was telling myself I would not post an entry until I have PyDS and its dependencies packaged for the Fedora Project.
Now that that's done and is just waiting for QA testers, I could finally re-unleash my creative impulse... err.. not quite.
Anyway, if you are running Fedora Core 1 or Red Hat 9, please give the Fedora Package Submission & QA Policy and help out. Much appreciated.
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posted at 18:46:08
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| 2003-10-24 |
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I just downloaded, compiled and installed Straw from CVS, and I dare say it infinitely improves the experience. No more frozen GUI while it's refreshing feeds, and oh, status icons per feed!
I'm so impressed, in fact, that I am going to talk to the developers about hosting my RPMs until I have the time to get them past Fedora QA. Red Hat and Fedora users, stay in touch, I'll be back :)
For those bemused, Straw is, of course, the GNOME RSS feed reader written in Python.
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posted at 12:01:52
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.. is shared by PBS' Robert Cringely. And cringe one should. Woe to Microsoft's many customers, it seems that they still do not understand open source development methodology.
What not to understand about peer review is beyond me. To add to that, open source developers tend to be passionate about their subjects, maintain longer attachments to their projects, while commercial development teams get shuffled around, to the point that the open-source SMB implementation, Samba is faster than the native implementation.
But as the Arabs say, let the dogs bark, the caliph passes still ... |
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posted at 10:00:16
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| 2003-10-22 |
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No, not that KGB, but Keith's Group Blogger. Cool Web-based RSS aggregator written in Perl. It does not produce an RSS feed yet, at least not the one that runs the free accounts, but pretty neat. Oh, one can't reorder the list of sources yet. Might be a headache once the list gets a bit longer, or if you want to keep it alphabetical to prevent complaints of favouritisms...
Heard about this from Seth Nickell's blog. Two thumbs up!
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posted at 13:03:44
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| 2003-10-20 |
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A SuSE user e-mailed Macromedia about porting Shockwave to Linux and got an encouraging reply: send enough requests (say, a few thousand) and the demand for the port would be considered sufficient.
So, without further ado, I point you to the request form. Sign away! In the interest of desktop agnosticism you may put a combination of kernel/glibc version, though really only glibc matters. |
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posted at 19:56:32
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Some people want to know if they could share their iTunes folder between multiple users on the same PC. It is quite simple if one is used to Unix and using soft links, but for non-Unix types out there, here it is...
Note that the source and destination folders need to be on NTFS volumes. Some XP OEMs bizarrely ship their PCs with FAT32 volumes; convert is your friend. |
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posted at 13:26:08
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| 2003-10-18 |
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Three cheers to PyDS, PyCS and blogs in general!
Considering how many personal friends I know are into blogging it's quite surprising that I have not actually heard of full-featured community servers until now. There's always something missing - either RSS feeds or image support or worse - both.
Typing this from Windows. If this works out I'll install PyDS on my Linux laptop too.. the list of dependencies is rather unappealing. Perhaps I should give Debian or Mandrake a whirl - PyDS is available on both - but the new Red Hat booter is just too nice...
Guess that gives me something to package for Fedora then.
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posted at 15:22:24
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| January 2004 |
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The personal log of a simian-descended bipedal entity who calls himself Michel. Read on to explore where most other bipedals have not gone before...
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