Okay, so any excuse to bring out the Laphroaig is fine by me, but
the cute little
eeePC is better than most. That it’s cute and popular
is all very well, but what really makes my day is this is the first
device I’ve seen that both doesn’t hide the fact it’s running Linux,
and is available in maintstream stores in Australia. A random review
from
the Sydney Morning Herald:
You also don’t get Windows. Asus has adopted the free Linux operating
system that’s been slowly yet steadily growing in popularity over the past
decade. This keeps the cost down and makes better use of its relatively
modest hardware, which would creak under the weight of Windows. It
does mean not being able to use your favourite Windows software but,
fortunately, the Eee PC comes with dozens of programs, including the
familiar Firefox web browser and Skype for online phone calls.
That came out on the day the eeePC was released in Australia. Three
days later, they did a
followup:
Taiwan computer maker Asus might have underestimated the local demand
for its diminutive Eee PC, as the $499 laptop is now virtually sold out
in Australia.
From that, there’s a brief take on who’s actually buying them:
“We’ve had customers coming in buying two or three units for the
family - the mix of customer has been probably novices more than the
tech types,” he said.
It’s really good to see that Linux is getting credit in pretty much
all those stories, no matter how mainstream. Xandros is pretty rarely
mentioned, and I don’t think I’ve seen Debian mentioned yet. But even
without the credit, it’s still pretty cool that with the eeePC and Dell’s
trysting with Ubuntu, the real in-roads to pre-installed consumer Linux
these days are building on Debian. I’d always expected that Red Hat
or SuSE or someone with more commercial muscle would get through that
door first (they’ve certainly had box sets more readily available!),
but apparently elitist, freedom obsessed, techno-geekery actually works
better, somehow. At least when there’s a company to put a smiley face in
front of it all :)
The other interesting thing about choosing Xandros, is that it
presumably means the eeePC is covered by Microsoft’s
patent protection
scheme – which means no baseless threats against eeePC users from
Microsoft, but also that Microsoft’s probably
getting a cut
of whatever Xandros receives from each eeePC sale. Whether you think
that’s a problem or not, the result is probably going to be that it’s
the thin edge of the wedge: it’s removed Microsoft from blocking a Linux
preinstall on consumer hardware, which means we can see that regular
people like Linux systems enough that they sell out in days. And that
means Linux systems are a fact of life, and if Microsoft try to stop them
by making it difficult for you to sell Windows systems, well, that’ll
just make it difficult to sell Windows systems – which is another win
for Linux. And once you get to the point where the argument for paying
off Microsoft doesn’t rely on keeping your OEM deal for Windows, but is
just a matter of whether their patents are actually valid…
Oh, also nice from the promoting free software angle, is that the
first thing you see if you decide to visit
Asus’s eeePC site
to check the gizmo is the
news item:
2007.11.27 ASUSTek is committed to meet the requirements of the GNU General…
Add the fact that an eeePC running a Debian-derivative has access
to all the software in the Debian repositories for no cost, and the
new government’s planned rebates and investments in IT probably mean
that parents can get close to a full refund, and you’re getting pretty
close to a choice of spending nothing and getting a popular, reasonably
functional and very portable laptop with all the software you could
ever want, that just happens to be running Linux, or paying an extra few
hundred or thousand dollars to get a Windows laptop, and then probably
pirating whatever software you end up needing.
In any event, to my mind, that makes 2007 the year of the Linux on the
desktop: everything from here is just a simple matter of quantity. What’s
next?
The french ISP free which I'm a custommer now gives ipv6 connectivity (through a curious 6to4 clone though). The nice news is that we now have really near 6to4 nodes in France all over the country. It even has quite a nice ping.
All the stuff is done through the modem, and gives autoconfiguration to the network. I just had to "modprobe ipv6" on my boxen and voil !
I've not looked at reverse DNS yet, as it's not regular 6to4 (it has a 2a01 prefix) http://6to4.nro.net/ cannot do a thing about it yet. We'll see how it goes :)
Specifically, Wifi. Connecting an ipw2200 to a rt2400 in ad hoc mode turns
out to only work with 40 bit WEP or unencrypted, and then only with bit rates
that remind me of analog modems (as I write this over an assh connection, the
cursor lags several characters. Nominally, the connection is 11Mbps, but as
soon as there's a bit of traffic, it drops to 5.5Mbps, and the actual data
transferred is always at the 4kBps level. Hmm. Fun, now the WiFi suddenly
decided to drop to 2Mbps, and it seems that I actually have 2Mbps, so probably
I should hardwire it at this setting.
Of course I didn't expect the rt2400 to magically acquire WPA capabilities,
but I'd at least expect the specified stuff to work... This is not bleeding
edge hardware, after all, so even the Linux drivers should have had time to
mature. (OTOH WEP is b0rken regardless of the bit strength, so I should replace
that rt2400 stuff anyway.)
Six months ago, a political group in Spain made a big fuss and noise when
the Government of Venezuela closed down the anti-chavist RCTV TV station,
and waved the flag of freedom of speech, called the democratically elected
government a regime , and called their president a dictator .
On Sunday night, these very same people, following orders from the leaders
of the Valencian government or should I say regime , drove up to the top of
the Carrasqueta peak in Xixona, in the South of the Valencian Country,
and protected by the winter's darkness, proceeded to force open two locks,
broke into 
This results in much cleaner message list. You can probably do this in procmail, but having it in the presentation layer has the advantage that the rewrite is non-destructive - pressing Reply constructs a subject line from the original.
An interesting discussion appeared on #debian on OFTC regarding TOR. One person
was of the view that "many intelligence and other agencies are probably heavily
involved in tor". As the discussion continued (yes, I should have pointed out
it was OT for the channel...) it appeared that privicy and anonymity were
getting confused.
I'm back (again) but I'm not feeling 100%
well (again). I'll write about the various
events I attended and share the pictures as
soon as I get bluetooth file transfer working
(is that obex?) but here are some sites I
commented on recently:
The main project I'm currently working on for money is a device driver for an actual bit of hardware.
Since people working on Windows are slightly more used to the idea that money is exchanged for goods and services, this is the primary target platform.
After dealing with all the interesting bits concerning development on this platform, I now have a .sys, a .inf, a .dll and a .xsl to install. The DLL was easy, Windows Installer has special handling for COM DLLs; the XSL file was a bit tricky since it needs to be placed in a "special" directory that will be phased out before Longhorn (the documentation is that old...), and I'm completely lost on the other two as the Installer does not know about the special registration system for drivers at all.
At this point, I started entering the rabbit hole.
In the next week I intend to drop the 
The FSF's 
My domains DNS is still hosted with the company I registered it at. I'm
planning to move it to a different company early next year. So when a friend
asked me for secondary nameserver exchange, I already set up the new DNS.So my current setup is like this:Primary and secondary nameserver are at my old provider, serving their copy
of the DNS zone (which obviously lists their nameservers as NS)The A and MX records point to my server, which will sometime also be the new
master NS. This host has an own copy of the zone file, which agrees on the
'regular' entries, but lists my server as well as the friends two servers as
NS. This is the only link from the domain to the friends servers.
Let me emphasize this: neither my server nor my friends servers are currently
listed in the .tld database. Their NS entries still point to the old providers
server. I'm planning to change that in January.Now my friend told me, that he had about 10 email delivery attempts to my
domain in his logs, obviously coming from some spammers.WTF? In order to link my domain to his server, you'd need to
Sunday afternoon I came back from the QA meeting in M rida (Spain).
I host some of the pictures on my machine: 
Monday in the evening I got a phonecall from the company where I had a personal interview last tuesday. They can adopt my apprenticeship. Yay… There are several reasons why I want to leave my current workplace (Stadt Grenchen): I have almost nothing to do, I learn nothing anymore, some people in my team were an interpersonal catastrophe, noone knows what the work “responsibility” means. I don’t want to go into the detail, but at least they reached that I got several nervous breakdowns, ending at the doctor wednesday afternoon. As I told, my nerves are down, I can’t sleep during the night here, motivation for life was down in the cave. This week I don’t need to work at all (medical certificate) and the next 2 weeks only 50%, so enough time to relax and get healthy again.
Also thanks to my girlfriend 
My friend