Practical Technology

for practical people.

March 25, 2011
by sjvn01
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Fixing Firefox 4’s Mac multi-touch woes

I may not be a huge Firefox 4 fan, but I do like it and I use it, along with Chrome, on my Linux and Windows boxes. On my Macs Minis, I tend to use Safari. My wife, on the other hand, loves Firefox and uses it on her latest MacBook Pro all the time. Until that is, she updated to Firefox 4 and discovered that all her Firefox multi-touch goodness was gone.

She was no longer able to pinch in or zoom out of her Web pages with a few gestures on the MacBook Pro’s touchpad and she was not a happy camper. And, if she’s not happy, I’m not happy.

After playing around with it for a while, I elected to fix it the brute-force way: I uninstalled Firefox 4 and brought back a copy of Firefox 3.6.16 from her Time Capsule using Time Machine. In passing let me say that Time Machine is the best backup and restore program out there on any operating system. You just set it up once and then you don’t need to think about it every again until you still recover something and then recovering a file is as easy as one, two, three.

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March 24, 2011
by sjvn01
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Want to buy an Internet IPv4 address? Cheap?

I predicted that IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4) hungry companies would start shopping for IPv4 addresses and a market would be created. I was right. As part of Nortel’s bankruptcy settlement, Microsoft has offered to buy Nortel 666,624 IPv4 addresses for $7.5 million (PDF Link).

Making this call didn’t require me to be a Nostradamus. It’s basic free-market economics. Internet IPv4 addresses are now in short supply and with no more ever coming down the pike and the demand for Internet addresses increasing it was only a matter of time and dollars. Of course, everyone should be switching over to IPv6, but given a choice between buying their way–for a while anyway–out of a problem or investing in a major network infrastructure, Microsoft, at least, is going for the buy option. It won’t be the only one.

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March 23, 2011
by sjvn01
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Openflow: Internet 3.0?

If it’s not broke, then don’t fix it. I may make a living on the cutting edge of technology, but I like that advice. Now, just as we’re finally switching from IPv4 to IPv6 for the Internet’s master protocol, the newly formed Open Network Foundation (ONF) is proposing that we use the OpenFlow as a new standard on how packets are forwarded through network switches and how we’ll manage them.

Was packet switching really broke? Did we need yet another network switch standard? Well, actually, according to the researchers who came up with OpenFlow, we don’t. Instead, according to their 2008 white paper, OpenFlow: Enabling Innovation in Campus Networks (PDF Link): “The basic idea is simple: we exploit the fact that most modern Ethernet switches and routers contain flow-tables (typically built from TCAMs [Ternary Content Addressable Memory) that run at line-rate to implement firewalls, NAT [Network Address Translation], QoS [Quality of Service], and to collect statistics. While each vendor’s flow-table is different, we’ve identified an interesting common set of functions that run in many switches and routers. OpenFlow exploits this common set of functions.”

In other words, the OpenFlow researchers wanted to standardize what a lot of network vendors were already doing.

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March 22, 2011
by sjvn01
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Android Linux FUD Debunked

The claims that Android has intellectual property worries from Linux and its Gnu General Public License, version 2 (GPLv2) are rather absurd. After all, Android is a smartphone/tablet optimized Linux. Android may have real legal worries from Microsoft and Oracle, but from Linux? I think not. And, now Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux, has declared that these claims are so much junk.

In an e-mail to my friend Brian Proffitt, Torvalds declared that the claims that the Android violated the GPL “It seems totally bogus. We’ve always made it very clear that the kernel system call interfaces do not in any way result in a derived work as per the GPL, and the kernel details are exported through the kernel headers to all the normal glibc interfaces too.”

Sean Hogle, a technology attorney, agrees. Hogle wrote, “The most objectionable aspect to the Mueller and Naughton blog entries are the wildly exaggerated claims that Android applications will be forced to be licensed under the terms of the GPL in open source code form.”

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March 21, 2011
by sjvn01
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OpenSUSE 11.4: A blast from Linux past

I’ve liked openSUSE since before it was named openSUSE and went by the unlikely name S.u.S.E Linux 4.2 back in 1996. It’s come a long, long way since then. Today, this Novell-supported community Linux distribution makes both a strong, server and desktop. For all that, though I’ve found in this go-around some fit and polish issues.

To test it out, I put openSUSE 11.4, on two computers. The first was a Gateway SX2802-07 desktop. This PC uses a 2.6GHZ Intel Pentium Dual-Core E5300 processor and has 6GBs of RAM and a 640GB hard-drive and was being wasted doing nothing but serving as a full-time Windows PC. The other was VirtualBox 4.04 VM (virtual machine) running on my Mint 10 desktop. Behind the VM was a Dell Inspiron 530S powered by a 2.2-GHz Intel Pentium E2200 dual-core processor with an 800-MHz front-side bus. This box has 4GBs of RAM, a 500GB SATA (Serial ATA) drive, and an Integrated Intel 3100 GMA (Graphics Media Accelerator) chip set.

Neither of these are exactly screamingly fast PCs. I’d characterize them as inexpensive, older PCs. You’d almost have to try hard to get slower PCs in today’s market. That said, openSUSE 11.4 ran like a top on both of them. I especially noticed on the Gateway PC, which I’d been using for Web browser benchmarking on Windows 7, just how much faster openSUSE is than Windows 7. It was like moving from a family sedan to a sports car.

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March 21, 2011
by sjvn01
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Microsoft vs. Android

It’s pretty clear that Microsoft, a many-time failure at mass-market tablets has decided that if they can’t beat Apple and Android at popular tablets, they’ll sue them instead. That’s my only explanation for Microsoft suing Barnes & Noble, Foxconn, and Inventec over their Android e-readers.

Microsoft, we now know, from Microsoft’s Horacio Gutierrez, Deputy General Counsel for Intellectual Property & Licensing, that Microsoft was trying to win by litigation even before Microsoft commercially released Windows 7 tablets. Gutierrez wrote, “We have tried for over a year to reach licensing agreements with Barnes & Noble, Foxconn and Inventec. Their refusals to take licenses leave us no choice but to bring legal action.”

Now, I’m no lawyer nor am I a patent expert, but Microsoft’s patents strike me as the kind of bogus software patents that are a perfect example of why software patents are a horrible idea. The patents cover such “patentable” ideas as “Loading Status in a Hypermedia Browser Having a Limited Available Display Area” and “Selection Handles in Editing Electronic Documents.”

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