After reading Sebastian Kügler’s blog with KDE 4.1 screenshots, I am officially installing kde 4.1 on a few boxes. This would be my first foray into KDE world since about 2000. Nice work guys!
Archive for July, 2008
KDE 4.1
Jul 31
Foxconn!
Jul 30
Matthew Garrett conspiracy theory of the day — Ok so this Ryan guy was apparently banned from the forums, I didn’t see the situation but based on previous interactions with the community as a whole, we all know how everyone goes “CoC!!! OMG!!” so that was likely.
What I love is in this link, in the comments, they somehow get to the point where it’s one big conspiracy and everyone is trying to cover it up. Entertaining read? Absolutely. Reality? Not so sure 
Whats happening on the internet:
Foxconn + Linux
Jul 28
Just thought I would update everyone, I contacted Foxconn as I am sure many others did, and here is what they said:
“Dear Steven:
Thank you for taking the time to make us aware of the situation and also suggestions. Foxconn has no intention to reject Linux. As we all know that Linux is an open source system and there are various flavors available in the market, and that is why we could not perform the specific function tests on every version of Linux. However, we do have tested some Linux systems previously.
As for the Linux issue, our FAE team is working on this issue and hopefully it can be resolved soon. So if you have bought any retail Foxconn motherboards and got this issue please email us your system configuration and problem descriptions. We will be happy to look into it.
Again, we apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused.”
I am satisfied with their response, I don’t believe there is anything to worry about there.
Communities
Jul 25
Recently I gave openSUSE a try just out of pure curiosity. One of their biggest weaknesses is that their community feels like a veritable ghost town. With that said, I wanted to both give kudos, and appreciate how much ubuntuforums.org rock (the people make the forums)!
Here are my top 5 threads that were really ‘cool’ to me:
Linux memory management
Jul 22
I have a second blog in which I don’t go on any rants etc, just post technical stuff. I just posted a entry today on Linux memory management, especially with databases. One thing that was confusing to me originally is that, for instance, on an Oracle server, I have a free output like this:
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 16027 15889 138 0 48 14673
-/+ buffers/cache: 1166 14860
Swap: 5122 486 4636
So there is like 15 gigs cached out of 16 gigs total. Obviously with 2 million oracle processes, it is hard to tell how much memory it is actually using, and I stumbled on the ‘ipcs’ command which lets me see those shared buffer sizes.
If you have a bit more insight into this and can proof read the blog post, that would be great to let me know if I made a mistake. Thanks!
Symfony + Oracle
Jul 16
I am a big fan of the symfony web framework, found a cool article on oracle’s site: Oracle Symfony in PHP Minor. If you want to use symfony with oracle, that is a great start.
I made a custom app about a year and a half ago using Symfony + Oracle 10g, so it’s good to see it getting exposure now (there was almost no information on it when I gave it a shot, clarity is nice).
Groovy on Grails
Jul 14
Been playing with this a little bit. If you are using Eclipse, and it won’t run the app and complains about ‘gant.gant’ not being in classpath, then your GRAILS_HOME variable has a trailing slash. Remove it and it works. It is sad how long that took me to figure out
PyOhio registration open!
Jul 13
PyOhio – some very cool talks lined up, I am especially eager to see the Turbogears and weblogic talks. Anyone from the Ubuntu community going?
ELive
Jul 11
I saw the distrowatch announcement on the ELive beta, so I figured I would give it a try. On a very low end system with an old intel card, this thing is fast and definitely has a wow factor. I recommend anyone with a spare blank cd check it out. Enlightenment used to be the king of window managers, it could be again if they keep this up.
Check out elivecd.org for youtube videos etc.
The fall of XML
Jul 9
It’s funny, now that google has released their Protocol Buffers, everyone is beginning to see XML is not a one size fits all solution. I am very happy about this. I design and maintain many systems, and any I have made in the past few years have used xml for communication. Not because it was the best idea, or the right idea, but simply because it was buzzword compliant and an easy sell. Now that there are more voices out there saying ‘XML is NOT the way’, this gives me a bit more power to implement things in a simpler way.