piblog

pibil's blog:

Thu, 04 Mar 2004

FireFox keyboard shortcuts #
From Nick Bradbury's blog, this handy chart of keyboard shortcuts for FireFox. |/open-source|

Tue, 24 Feb 2004

FireFox Extensions #
I have switched over to FireFox as my default browser. Now at version 0.8, it is a very capable and stable browser, and with its available extensions, I do not miss any features I had with the full-blown Mozilla.

My favorite browser extensions are Live HTTP Headers, editCSS and Link Toolbar. I especially enjoy the Link Toolbar because it adds the Site Navigation bar that I had with Mozilla and I can't seem to navigate without now. |/open-source|

Wed, 21 May 2003

Meta-distro Gentoo #
My favorite columnist (most of the time), Nicholas Petreley, has written a review of Gentoo Linux, which happens to be my current Linux distro. He too loved it and is even switching to Gentoo from Debian. |/open-source|

Thu, 15 May 2003

SCO FUD #
More FUD from the dying SCO Group. This time they are warning commercial end users of Linux that we may be at legal risk, since we are using Linux which they claim contains their IP. They believe this so much, that they have suspended the distribution of their Linux (not that anyone was using it). Rubbish! I think that their lawyers just realized that they were limited by the GPL covering Linux and that they could not restrict the rights of its users. RIP SCO. |/open-source|

Tue, 22 Apr 2003

InfoWorld dropping Open Source column #
In his last column for InfoWorld, Russell C. Pavlicek announced that InfoWorld was revamping their trade magazine and that the open source column was being eliminated. To be honest, I preferred the column when Nicholas Petreley was reporting but still I hate open source to lose a voice. Hopefully, InfoWorld will continue their coverage of open source issues and news through other means. |/open-source|

Fri, 11 Apr 2003

Stallman Interview #
SearchEnterpriseLinux.com has posted an interview of Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU Project. It's short and focuses on the SCO lawsuit, but I am always interested in listening to what Mr. Stallman has to say. |/open-source|

Tue, 08 Apr 2003

Mozilla Goodies #
Among the hundreds of Mozilla Projects, some are just too cool. LiveHTTPHeaders is one of those tools, and I came across it thanks to Sam Buchanan. In the past, I used Lynx to show me what HTTP headers were being reported back to the UA for a particular web application I was working on. But even then it was ineffective because Lynx only understood certain mime-types, for example. Now I can do this directly from Mozilla! How cool is that! |/open-source|

Tue, 01 Apr 2003

Gentoo fools #
Of all of the April Fools posts today, I enjoyed Gentoo's the most. |/open-source|

Go Go Mozilla #
HP announced today that they will be providing the Mozilla browser with their HP-UX flavor of Unix. Previously they had only been providing Netscape's Navigator with the OS. Starting with their next release, expected sometime in June, they will include both browsers.

This is definitely a validation of the open-source model and that of the Mozilla team's efforts. Not only will HP be providing the browser, but they will also be backing it up with support and patches. To me this says that enterprise companies like HP believe that they can work with open-source and that projects like Mozilla are viable. |/open-source|

Mon, 24 Mar 2003

Red Hat 9.0 #
I just received a notice from Red Hat that they will be releasing the iso's for v. 9.0 on March 31^st to subscribers. I am really quite disappointed that they are calling it 9.0. I had been using the beta for the past couple of months and it is really just an 8.1 if that.

It really doesn't matter to me anyway because I just switched to Gentoo. I still like Red Hat and believe that they are good for Linux in general, but I just felt it was time to move to a different distribution. |/open-source|

Tue, 18 Mar 2003

Mr Linux at Oracle #
There is a fairly insightful interview of Wim Coekaerts of Oracle on ZDNet's news page. Mr. Coekaerts is the Linux guru for Oracle and is internally called Mr Linux. The article discusses the balancing act Coekaerts and Oracle have to do in keeping true to the open source nature of Linux while enabling their closed source application to maximize its market potential.

I was surprised to learn that Oracle has a group of 1000 engineers working on the Linux kernel whose code in turn gets released back into the community. It really is awesome when you think of the magnitude of the Linux development community. And all of that kernel work flows through one man... Mr Torvalds. |/open-source|

Tue, 11 Mar 2003

Mitchell Kapor resigns from Groove board #
Yesterday, the NY Times ran this article (registration required... blah!) that Mitchell Kapor resigned from the board of Groove Networks due to the fact that DARPA was using Groove software as a component of their antiterrorist surveillance software.

I have always had a great deal of respect for Mr. Kapor. He is a strong proponent of Open Source software (including his Open Source Applications Foundation) as well as his support of privacy and freedom through his founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I think his resignation is more symbolic than anything else, as Groove is really Ray Ozzie's (a former Lotus cohort) company. But at least he had the resolve to do it. |/open-source|

Fri, 07 Mar 2003

SCO Group sues IBM #
It's really sad to see the SCO Group fall to this level. When they were Caldera, their Linux distro was OK; mainly targeted for the server market but never made any real inroads although they had some innovative utilities. Then they bought SCO and tried to convert SCO Unix users over to Linux, but this failed. Soon after that, Linux fell out of favor internally, Ransom Love left the company and they disappeared from UnitedLinux.

So around the beginning of 2003, they refocused on Unix, not from a development standpoint, but from an IP perspective. When they acquired SCO, they bought all of the 20 to 30 year old patents from the Unix that spawned from the University of California's Berkeley campus. Some of this work ended up in projects such as *BSD which, in turn, ended up in source code everywhere (including Linux and Windows). So how does a company, with managers and stockholders desperate for revenues, capitalize on these patents? They sue, of course!

In January, the SCO Group hired David Boies, former US prosecutor of the Microsoft anti-trust trial. When this news came out, there was a lot of discussion on the net that if SCO actually tried to act on these supposed patent infringements, it would be fruitless in the courts as well as kill any hopes of industry support for the company.

Well, yesterday, it actually happened. The SCO Group sued IBM for 1 billion US dollars. Why IBM? They have the biggest pockets and have invested heavily in Linux development. They could try to sue Red Hat, SuSE et al., but there would be no money it for SCO. But in suing IBM, they are going to run into a sawmill. You see, IBM has a few lawyers of its own. And they didn't spend a billion dollars of their own on Linux on a whim.

From my sphere of influence, I will not have anything to do with SCO or any of its products from now on. |/open-source|

Thu, 20 Feb 2003

Open Source Code Quality #
CNET published an article today on a whitepaper being distributed by Reasoning, in which Reasoning tested the TCP/IP stack of Linux versus three other commercially available general purpose operating systems. They would not specify which operating systems were tested, but that two of the three were flavors of Unix. They found that the Linux implementation of TCP/IP had a defective rate of 0.1 defects per 1,000 lines of code versus between 0.6 and 0.7 per 1,000 lines of code in the others.

Now I do not know anything about Reasoning or their methodologies, but I found this article to be interesting on two levels if, in fact, the results are accurate. First, most operating systems, including Microsoft, use a TCP/IP stack based on BSD's code. Therefore they should all have the same defects... right? Not necessarily.

If a company based its TCP/IP on code obtained from BSD eight years ago, it could have partially languished all the year's since then. Meanwhile Linux and other open source projects (including BSD) have continued to improve their code. Closed-source vendors could not just simply plug the BSD code into their product. They had to re-wire it to work with their operating system (sometimes as an afterthought, as in the case of Microsoft) thus causing deviations, they could have bugs in their code added onto the BSD code, and if the original code they received had bugs, they would have to recognize them and re-implement the previous steps.

Secondly, Eric Raymond's concept of "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" rings true. If a project remains active, with multiple developers working on the code, then the best possible product will prevail. |/open-source|