Things n' Stuff Thoughts about the universe in general

One of the, or “the”, most useful and least used feature of wordpress (the software that powers this blog) is the ability to take an RSS feed (or an ATOM feed – whatever fits your fancy) of basically anything! For example, if you searched the blog for the word “blue”, you can take a feed from the results just by adding “/feed” at the end of the URL¹ so that you’ll be notified whenever an article with the word “blue” in it is added.

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I have a small dilemma I’d like to share with you – and maybe get some feedback: I’m planning to buy a computer, as I currently don’t have a computer for myself at home (well – that’s not really true: I have about 6 of them, in various stages of assembly, but none of them is more recent then a Pentium 3 type and I really don’t have the time or the patience to start making something useful from all the parts). So I have set aside a budget for purchasing a computer in the next month or so. Its not that I really need one – I have one at work (not a laptop like in my previous job that I could carry it with me home – hence my need for a new one) and at home I usually leech one of Karen’s PCs – which she is mostly fine with (notice the “mostly” part – another reason I should get my own).

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זה לא משהו חדש מבחינתי – מדי פעם אנשים פונים אלי בשאלה האם GoDaddy הוא מקום טוב לרשום דומיין (לפעמים זה יותר גרוע – אני יודע שיש בעיה אחרי שהדומיין כבר רשום) – ואני תמיד מנסה להוריד אותם מזה. נכון ש-GoDaddy הוא רשם המתחמים (domains) הגדול ביותר בעולם (בערך 4 מיליון שמות מתחם, אני חושב), מה שהופך אותם לסכנה כמעט גרועה כמו מיקרוסופט.

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לחברת אפל יש אירוע ציבורי כל שנה, בערך בתקופה הזאת, בשם Macworld שנערך בסן-פרנסיסקו. כל שנה סטיב ג’ובס – המנכ”ל הכל יכול של אפל – עולה לבמה, במה שזכה להקרא ה”keynote”, ומציג את החזון של אפל לשנה הבאה ואיזה מוצר חדש ומעניין אפל ינסו לדחוף השנה לקהל מכורי המק ואולי גם לנו. בד”כ זה לא משהו שישפיע על העולם מעבר לסקרנות שבה כל טכנולוג שמכבד את עצמו בוחן משהו חדש מבית אפל, אבל פעם בכמה שנים ג’ובס מוציא מהשרוול איזה שפן שמשנה את פני העולם כפי שאנחנו מכירים אותם. בפעם הקודמת זה היה ה-iPod של אפל שהשתלט לחלוטין על שוק נגני המדיה (הי – אפילו לאלעד יש אחד, וזה אומר המון 🙂 ).

השנה, ואני מדווח על זה באיחור של כמה ימים, אז כל חובבי הטכנולוגיה שכבר שמעו על זה מוזמנים לעבור הלאה, ג’ובס הציג טלפון סלולארי.

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היום בדרך בחזרה מהעבודה, שמעתי את התוכנית הכלכלית של גלי צה”ל ברדיו (כך היא נקראת – “התוכנית הכלכלית” – כל יום ב-19:30 בערב). בד”כ תוכנית מאוד מעניינת, והיום אחד האייטמים היה דואר זבל. התראיין בתוכנית מיודעינו דודי גולדמן כתב המחשבים של ידיעות אחרונות וסיפר על פרסום דו”ח דואר זבל נוסף (של חברת קומטאצ’).

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Just to let my readers know – those of you who are not avid followers of the trials and tribulations of “Microsoft vs. The World” (movie at 11) – Microsoft has successfully pushed ECMA, an originally European standards body better known for their standardization of JavaScript as ECMA-262, into ratifying Microsoft’s MS-Office XML based file format as an international standard. All this probably just as a primer for the Microsoft Office 2007 release, and for a push for ISO standardization of Microsoft Office, and I’m not joking – (more…)

Or at least trying – Sun releases their Java language implementations under the GPL (Hotspot virtual machine for Micro, Standard and Enterprise versions, and the compiler). Which – you’d think – is a good thing, right? I would argue that it may have some very negative effects.. Read on.

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After recently acquiring Macromedia (and taking over their MacrmediaAdobe Flash business), and due to the large Shopping spree, Adobe has been conducting in the recent years, buying companies left and right (and I have many more links) you’d think that Adobe is trying to corner the computer publishing market or something. Not helped by the Adobe-Microsoft PDF dispute and some Adobe patents which look not unlike Microsoft’s idea of patenting “non-obvious” inventions (no links this time – go look it up on your own), Adobe was starting to look more and more like other computer giants we know and “love” ;-).

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Late as usual (but starting to catch up), I listened to Novell Open Audio‘s Ted Haeger interviews Nat Friedman, formerly co-founder of Ximian (The GNOME desktop company – bought by Novell and hence the link does a funny redirect) and currently Novell’s VP of engineering for Linux desktop (or something).

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I’ve been using Fedora Core for a while now on my laptop, and also on several computers at home and work. In the past I’ve tested Fedora many times, but only Fedora Core 5 was good enough compared to other major Linux distros that I thought it deserved to be run as a primary OS (mostly due to the GNOME 2.14 desktop, which despite still some annoyances matured enough to actually be a useful desktop). I’ve been running with rawhide – Fedora Core’s development branch for a few months now and I really liked the direction that Fedora was taking and I expected Fedora Core 6 to be even better then Fedora Core 5 – even though the latest GNOME, 2.16, isn’t so much different from 2.14 (as 2.14 was from 2.12) it does fix most of the problems that were still present at the previous version, but more so Fedora have introduced a lot of really interesting technology under the hood, from getting hardware to work better and easier, through kernel 2.6.18 the inclusion of Xen and other interesting tools such as the Sabayon user profile editor, to modern desktop compositing with AIGLX.

So when a friend asked me to help him install Fedora Core on his new laptop – a Lenovo 3000 N100 – I suggested he tries the Fedora Core 6 pre-release: 6 is scheduled to be released sometimes next week, and though he can’t wait till then due to external time constraints, I though that this late in the game there’s no reason the current rawhide snapshot shouldn’t be almost as good as the full release – I have a lot of experience with pre-release distributions – Mandriva and SuSE for example – and in my experience, as the products nears its release date (especially this close), there usually aren’t any major issues preventing a competent user who knows what he’s doing to install and use the product as a primary OS. So I was completely unprepared for what followed next.

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