Practical Technology

for practical people.

August 25, 2011
by sjvn01
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Steve Jobs: The NeXT Years

As an East-coast based technologist I barely knew the Steve Jobs of Apple’s early years. As a journalist covering Unix though I did get to know Steve Jobs when he founded NeXT and directed the creation of NeXTStep, the first Unix desktop meant for a mass market. Today, you know its direct descendant as Mac OS X.

For the last decade, you’ve known Steve Jobs as the wizard-king of Apple. From his throne room at Macworld or Apple’s developers conference, he would strive forth in his robes of office–a black turtleneck and jeans-announce “One more thing” and determine the shape of computing for the next year. Hate him or love him, he was the trend-setter not just for Apple, but for all computing. And, just like the Wizard of Oz, outside his throne room, he would have nothing to do with you. That wasn’t the Jobs I met in 1989.

The Jobs I knew, still chastened by his forced departure from Apple in 1985, was happy to talk to the press. I think he rather liked me since I was one of the few people who took his new company, NeXT; his new PCs, the NeXT Cube and the NeXTStation, and his new operating system, NeXTStep seriously.

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August 25, 2011
by sjvn01
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Twitter adds SSL security

I was sitting in a local coffee shop recently and, since I was bored, I kicked on a Windows instance in VirtualBox on my Mint Linux-powered laptop so I could run Firesheep. Firesheep was, and is, a hacking program meant to frighten people into being serious about their Wi-Fi security. It didn’t work. Most people, and Web sites, still don’t secure even their logins. So, sure enough, out of twenty-one active Wi-Fi connections, I could look over the shoulder of twenty of them. This is just sad.

Still, some interactive Web sites are finally adding basic security. The Google sites support Transport Layer Security (TLS) and its ancestor Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) for protection, Facebook added encypted security early this year, and now Twitter is joining the list of sites that use SSL to secure its users’ connections.

It’s about time!

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August 23, 2011
by sjvn01
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So, want to manage a cloud with open-source software?

The sad, bad secret about cloud-computing is that setting up a cloud and running an application on any of them is relatively easy, managing it though, that’s another thing entirely. That’s where companies like Convirture come in.

Convirture’s open-source project is ConVirt Open Source. With it you can manage both Xen and KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine)-based virtual machines (VM) and clouds. Specifically, with ConVirt, you can create and provision “gold” images, diagnose performance problems, and balance load across the datacenter, all from a Web-based interface and with consistent feature set across open-source virtualization platforms.

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August 23, 2011
by sjvn01
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Three simple steps to setting Google+ straight

When I read Violet Blue’s account of her struggles to maintain her Google+ account, it occurred to me that Google isn’t just making life hard on some of its most dedicated users, it’s also making life hard on itself. More than ever I was reminded that Google is an engineering company, not a people company. So, here’s my short list of some very basic, very human, things Google could do to make life better both for its users and for its own staffers.

First, Google doesn’t really have a policy on Google+ names yet. Oh, they came up with something–everyone will need to use their real names!–but clearly they never really thought that out. After all, some of their own top people don’t use their “real” names!

So, until Google has really thought out and laid out what the heck their naming policy is going to be, may I suggest that Google cut everyone some slack with their names? Sure get rid of “Darth Vader” or “Iluv youlongtime,” but let’s use some common sense with most people shall we?

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August 23, 2011
by sjvn01
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Hurricane Electric takes its IPv6 expertise to the datacenter

Hurricane Electric, arguably the world’s largest IPv6-native Internet backbone and co-location provider, has expanded its IPv6 Professional Services offerings so that they can now help you with IPv6 datacenter deployments.

If you’re a home user or just have a small office/home office (SOHO), you don’t need to worry about the fact that we’re running out of IPv4 addresses anytime soon. It’s a different story though if you’re managing a datacenter. In a datacenter, you can need hundreds or thousands of new Internet addresses on any given day. Since the American Registry of Internet Numbers (ARIN) expects to allocate its last IPv4 addresses before year’s end, datacenter managers must start converting over to IPv6.

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August 22, 2011
by sjvn01
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Ubuntu Linux bets on the ARM server

In today’s data center, millions of instructions per second (MIPS) and gigabyte per second (GBPS) throughput are well and good, but being green (having a low power consumption) is becoming just as important. That’s why Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, is betting that in the long run, ARM processors will play an important role in tomorrow’s servers and datacenters.

Ubuntu Linux doesn’t play a big role in the x86 business server space. For Linux, Red Hat takes those honors. So, after four years of working with ARM, Canonical is trying to win a new server market for itself by helping create the ARM business server space.

Here’s how Canonical plans on making this work. In October 2011, the Ubuntu Server 11.10 release will be released simultaneously for x86, x86-64 and ARM-based architectures. The base image of the releases will be the same across architectures with a common kernel baseline. The ARM architecture will also be part of the long-term support (LTS) version of Ubuntu Server in 12.04 and other future releases.

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