Practical Technology

for practical people.

July 25, 2011
by sjvn01
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Death, Facebook, and Spamware

Did you ever notice that we’re a morbid bunch. No sooner had the brilliant singer Amy Winehouse lose her battle with addiction and died, then a new Facebook spam leak appeared. It purported to advertise, of course, a video of her strung on crack hours before her tragic death.

Excuse me as I throw up.

Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant at Sophos, the anti-virus and security company, reported that the Winehouse Facebook spamware appeared four hours after her death.

The Facebook spamware appeared with at least five different images and messages. If you clicked on it, you’d end up sending the spam link to all your Facebook friends—and we appreciate it, really we do—and ending up, at this time, at a survey page. After that, there’s no telling what you might get. Some malware on your Windows PC; attempts to trick your mobile phone number out of you so you can be sent $2.00 news calls that you “asked” for; etc. etc.

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July 25, 2011
by sjvn01
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Sun CEO explicitly endorsed Java’s use in Android: What do you say now Oracle?

If you believe Oracle’s patent lawsuits against Google for its use of Java in Android, Google has stolen not just patented ideas but directly copied Java code. In short, Google is a red-handed thief and should pay Oracle over a billion in damages. There’s just one little problem with this portrayal of Google as an intellectual property (IP) bandit. When Android first came out, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, then Java’s owner, greeted the news with “heartfelt congratulations.” Whoops.

While Schwartz’s blog post has since been erased by Oracle, Groklaw found the page and has republished it In his note, Schwartz not only congratulates Google “on the announcement of their new Java/Linux phone platform, Android.,” he goes on to announce that “Sun is the first platform software company to commit to a complete developer environment around the platform, as we throw Sun’s NetBeans developers platform for mobile devices behind the effort. We’ve obviously done a ton of work to support developers on all Java based platforms, and we’re pleased to add Google’s Android to the list.”

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July 25, 2011
by sjvn01
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What was Google thinking!?

When I first read Violet Blue’s account of Google kicking some Google+ users out of their new social network, my first reaction was “What the he… heck Google! After due consideration, I’m no longer surprised though. In fact, I can see Google’s point.

First, Google said from the start that while “Google services … support three types of use: unidentified, pseudonymous and identified” when it comes to Google+, Google “requires you to use the name that you commonly go by in daily life.”

More specifically, Google states “To help fight spam and prevent fake profiles, use the name your friends, family or co-workers usually call you. For example, if your full legal name is Charles Jones Jr. but you normally use Chuck Jones or Junior Jones, either of those would be acceptable.”

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July 22, 2011
by sjvn01
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Don’t Panic! It’s only Linux 3.0

Linux 3.0 is out and the big changes are… ah… well. Not much.

Linus Torvalds, its creator and lead developer had warned us that this would be the case: “So what are the big changes?”

“NOTHING. Absolutely nothing. Sure, we have the usual two thirds driver changes, and a lot of random fixes, but the point is that 3.0 is *just* about renumbering, we are very much *not* doing a KDE-4 or a Gnome-3 here. No breakage, no special scary new features, nothing at all like that. We’ve been doing time-based releases for many years now; this is in no way about features. If you want an excuse for the renumbering, you really should look at the time-based one (”20 years“) instead. So no ABI [application binary interface] changes, no API [application programming interface] changes, no magical new features – just steady plodding progress.”

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July 22, 2011
by sjvn01
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Oracle acquires zero-downtime, Linux upgrade software

I may reboot my Linux systems once every six months. That’s great for my personal use and a small business. For an enterprise, that’s not good enough. Even twice-a-year reboots is twice a year too often for them. That’s why Ksplice, which enables running systems to update even critical files without rebooting was so popular when it came out in 2009. Now, Oracle has bought Ksplice, and it appears it will be keeping it services available only for Oracle Linux.

Ksplice, according to its developers, “enables running systems to stay secure without the disruption of re-booting. Specifically, Ksplice creates re-bootless updates that are based on traditional source code patches. “These updates are as effective as traditional updates, but they can be applied seamlessly, with no downtime.”

That’s quite a claim, but Ksplice works. I’ve tested it myself.

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July 21, 2011
by sjvn01
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Big files, Fast Internet? Lion download speeds

My buddy Jason Perlow had a bad day. When he tried to download Mac OS X Lion’s 4GBs, he ran into an hour-and-a-half of online road-block. When the download finally did start though, he was able to download it, thanks to his 100Mbps Verizon Optimum Online Ultra connection in about half-an-hour.

So, which can you expect? An hour and a half of freeze or a relatively fast download? I say “relatively” fast because in a perfect world 4GBs on a 100Mbps connection should take about five minutes. To find out what other people were seeing, I did an informal, totally unscientific survey of my high-tech friends on Google+ and Twitter to see what their experiences were like.

And, the answer, if you’re lucky enough to have a real broadband connection, is: Fast.

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