My brother in law, a real to life cable-guy (but of course much more than such a small definition), came over to help me out with my new hdtv tv/hdpvr setup.

Once it was all sorted out we were in my “office” & he said.. “You have a mac.. I’m jealous”… or something like that.

What’s funny about this is that TV to HDTV is like Linux’s fonts/display to OSX’s.

Last week, The One Laptop Per Child initiative put a name on their first laptop device. The new name is “Children’s Machine” or CM1, apparently taken from the title of Seymour Papert’s book of the same name (published in the early 90s.) There isn’t a signficant amount of technical update. I should mention, though, that the team has brought up Forth on the laptop recently. I used Forth at Atari Coin-op and I can attest to its ease of debugging hardware. Redhat is still slated to deliver a “skinny” version of Fedora Core to be shipped on the laptop.

The laptop boasts energy savings and out-of-the-box networking capabilities. The display can operate in two modes; the transmissive mode consumes just one watt, and the reflective mode consumes only 0.2 watts. The mesh networking capability allows users to talk to one another and to the Internet with no configuration. Another energy-saving trick is that since the laptop nominally consumes a mere 2 watts it can be charged by human elbow-grease.

The laptop is a “… flexible, ultra low-cost, power-efficient, responsive, and durable machine with which nations of the emerging world can leapfrog decades of development–immediately transforming the content and quality of their children’s learning.”, according to their website.

Join me as I talk to Pandora’s CTO Tom Conrad about his OpenSource initiative and the Music Genome Project.

Pandora is primarily based on open source software - from the PostgresSQL database running in Debian Linux to the web client developed in OpenLaszlo. Check out “Inside Pandora: Web Radio That Listens to You for a technical look inside the box and how they provide personal enjoyment to 2.5 million registered listeners with Pandora’s unique music-matching analysis.

Technorati Tags: Pandora, music,

A few weeks back I found that, for some reason, one of my machines wasn’t allowing X forwarding over SSH (which is normally run as standard within my local environment, since I have lots of users who at least occasionally run graphical stuff on multiple machines).

The initial error came up as:

xterm Xt error: Can't open display:
xterm: DISPLAY is not set

The obvious test was to try setting $DISPLAY manually (although this would obviously not have been a good permanent solution). New error:

xterm Xt error: Can't open display: localhost:10.0

Digging around online a bit, I found the suggestion of moving the -nolisten tcp option from /etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc - this may well work, but I was unhappy with it as it didn’t match the setup I had on other machines which were entirely happy with X forwarding.

Eventually, I found the problem: not only do you need X11Forwarding yes in /etc/ssh/sshd_config on the machine you’re sshing into, you also need AllowTcpForwarding yes. (And also ForwardX11 yes, or ForwardX11Trusted yes, depending on your security preferences and access requirements, in /etc/ssh/ssh_config on the machine you’re sshing from, for the record.)

So fairly straightforward in the end, but took me a few min to disentangle, thus recorded here for others’ reference.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadenijad now has his very own blog. That’s fine. The content is entirely what you might expect with one notable exception. Several Israeli bloggers, including Yael K.’s Step By Step, which I read regularly, report that if you access the Ahmadenijad blog from an Israeli IP address the site sends you a little gift, a cyberattack in the form of a virus or trojan (reports vary) designed to exploit an Internet Explorer vulnerability.

To quote Yael:

Does Iran now use the Internet to harass Israeli citizens? To take advantage of the increasing Iranian-Israeli dialog online?

In a word: yep. The attack is smart enough to mostly ignore IP addresses from anywhere other than Israel, though it has been reported to have been triggered from Spain as well.

My one little piece of advice for friends and readers in Israel: Ehad Linux, an Israeli Linux distribution based on Mandriva 2006, is really quite easy to install and use. (Yes, I plan to write a review.) Those of us who run Linux have been blissfully immune to all the security nonsense which routinely plagues Windows users. Indeed, security has been one of the issues which has helped propel Linux adoption in corporate and government data centers in recent years.

No, installing Linux is not a security panacea. You still need to patch regularly and become educated about keeping your system secure. It is, however, a very good start.

Rick Moen’s LinuxMafia.com knowledgebase has some great information. I ran across a series of postings the other day that clarified the problem with loadable Linux kernel modules at the GPL.

I recently attend a Philadelphia Area Linux Users Group (PLUG) meeting presented by Toby DiPasquale titled “Google Internals”

Slides here: Google Internals talk for PLUG by Toby DiPasquale.

Why is this of interest on a Linux blog? As many of you may already know, Google uses a version of Red Hat to power their servers, running on old kernels (it is speculated that they run on 2.0 or 2.2 kernels).

This Google Internals talk takes you through the basics of how Google uses their approximately 450,000 servers to run everything from Google search to GMail worldwide. The slides are based on information gathered from reliable Google sources, including talks given by Google staff, and gives you a very basic framework for understanding what is “under the hood” over at Google.

I’ve been a big fan of Firefox since practically the beginning, back when it was called Phoenix or Firebird. I like the way Firefox does things. It’s feature rich and the UI is well thought out. Sadly, lately, for me Firefox has become unusable.

I’m currently running Firefox 1.5.0.4 on three Linux distributions: Vector Linux 5.1, Fedora Core 5, and Xubuntu Dapper 6.06. On all three the browser crashes frequently on all sorts of web sites seemingly at random. I’ve had it happen on a diverse variety of sites, generally fairly complex ones, ranging from eBay to the Israeli daily newspaper Yediot Ahranot. There is one website, one I use all the time, that will always cause Firefox to crash: Yahoo! Mail. Any attempt to read mail on the Yahoo! website generates a crash. Yes, the Mozilla Quality Feedback Agent pops up and yes, I dutifully send in my report. I’ve talked to friends who run Firefox on Windows and it’s stable on that platform, even on Yahoo! Mail. On Linux, however, it is totally unstable to the point of unusable. This wasn’t true of the 1.0.x releases but has been the case, and has seemingly gotten worse, with each 1.5.x release.

The net result is that I find myself using either Opera or Konqueror. They work just fine. Other browsers based on Mozilla’s gecko engine do not. Flock crashes the same way Firefox does while Epiphany and Seamonkey just hang. It’s frequent enough and annoying enough that I’ve all but abandoned all of these browsers.

So… what is going on? Is Mozilla working on this? Do they still care about us relatively few Linux folk or is a stable Windows platform good enough for them?