Practical Technology

for practical people.

May 3, 2011
by sjvn01
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OpenDNS offers IPv6 Internet DNS services

OpenDNS, a popular third-party Domain Name System (DNS) provider, is now offering IPv6 DNS support. The company claims that “OpenDNS is the first major recursive DNS service in the world to offer the service.”

I’m not sure that they’re the first, but I do know this is a big step forward for network administrators. I use OpenDNS myself for DNS look-ups. It provides faster DNS look-ups than ISP’s DNS I’ve tried and it’s proven to be more reliable than many ISP’s DNS servers.

We need to start working with IPv6 for our Internet connections because we’re down to the last dregs of our IPv4 Internet addresses. Asia’s out of IPv4 addresses now and it won’t be long now until the last IPv4 addresses are assigned. With IPv6 and its 128-bit addresses, we’ll have enough Internet addresses until the day we need to start worrying about interstellar Internet addresses. But, of course, to use them, we need to switch over to IPv6.

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May 2, 2011
by sjvn01
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Chrome 11: The Best Browser?

Was it only a few weeks ago, that we were looking at the latest crop of Web browsers? Why, yes, yes it was, but now Google has released yet another newer, faster, better, and more feature-full version of its Chrome Web browser: Chrome 11.

Voice to Data

Besides the usual improvements in security and speed, which I’ll get to in a moment, Chrome 11 comes with a new, interesting feature: voice-to-text, or more properly, voice-to-data. So, with a Web site set up to handle it, such as Google Translate, you can “talk” to the Web.

Currently, Google Translate is the big application that uses it, but Google promises there will be more. It’s clear, for example, that a voice to text feature, once it’s perfected, for Google Docs would find fans.

This voice-to-data feature uses HTML 5’s Speech Input application programming interface (API). This proposed API was developed and proposed by, guess who, Google.

I found it to work “amusingly” well. It made far too many mistakes for me to consider using it, but when you consider that it’s a first try at a mass-market cloud-based real time translation tool, it is impressive–just not very useful yet.

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May 1, 2011
by sjvn01
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Shuttleworth on Ubuntu 11.04 Linux & Unity

Ubuntu 11.04 has been out for a few days now and while, generally speaking, I like Ubuntu’s new Unity interface, I know some people really dislike it. So, who better to explain why Unity looks and works the way it does than Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu and the company behind it, Canonical?

Shuttleworth opened by saying that the main point of Ubuntu 11.04 with Unity was “to bring the joys and freedoms and innovation and performance and security that have always been part of the Linux platform, to a consumer audience.”

How did Canonical do it? Shuttleworth explained that it was a combination of user design testing with professional design work. “We committed to test and iterate Unity’s design with real users, and evolve it based on those findings. We’ve documented the process we’re following in that regard, so that other free software projects can decide for themselves if they also want to bring professional design into their process. I very much hope that this will become standard practice across all of free software, because in my view the future of free software is no longer just about inner beauty (architecture, performance, efficiency) it’s also about usability and style.”

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April 29, 2011
by sjvn01
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Attachmate reveals Novell, SUSE, & Linux Plans

Now that Attachmate owns Novell, what does the formerly obscure company plan to do with its $2.2-billion operating system and networking prize? I interviewed Attachmate via e-mail CEO Jeff Hawn and this is what he told me.

Before launching into the interview, I’ll note that most of Novell’s senior executive staff won’t be hanging around. Ron Hovsepian; President and CEO; Dana Russell, CFO; John Dragoon, CMO; and Markus Rex, SVP and General Manager of open platforms and long time SUSE leader have all left. So it is that Attachmate is starting with a clean management slate.

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April 28, 2011
by sjvn01
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What you need to know about the new Ubuntu

The latest release of Ubuntu 11.04, the world’s most popular desktop Linux is out today. But, this is not just a one step forward update. No, it’s a giant leap to a new kind of Linux desktop thanks to its Unity desktop interface. Here’s what you need to know today about it.

First, as before, you can download Ubuntu 11.04 from the Web to your PC. In the next few weeks, you’ll also be able to run the Ubuntu 11.04 desktop from the cloud, but that’s not available yet. You can, however, give Ubuntu 11.04 server a try from the cloud today though.

Finally, you can also try Ubuntu 11.04 within Windows using Wubi. With this approach, you treat Ubuntu just as if it were a Windows application and run it within Windows. While this isn’t as fast as running Ubuntu as a native operating system or on a virtual machine, such as VirtualBox or VMware Player, it’s the easiest way for Windows users to give Ubuntu a try.

Most users though will want to download Ubuntu 11.04 and then use the operating system’s ISO image on a CD or a USB stick to either try it out or install it on their PC. If you use this way, you can install Ubuntu beside your existing operating system.

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April 27, 2011
by sjvn01
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What works, and what doesn’t work, with IPv6

As you may know, a lot of SOHO/consumer network gear doesn’t support IPv6 yet. At the same time, some vendors claims that their Customer Premise Equipment (CPE) works with IPv6, but it’s compatibility is, shall we say, a little questionable. Now, the RIPE Network Coordination Centre, the technical arm of RIPE, the Internet’s Regional Internet Registry (RIR) for Europe, is conducting a global survey to see what’s what with the devices people are using today and IPv6 compatibility.

They’ve done this survey before–IPv6 CPE Survey – Updated (January 2011)–but they’d like to make it more complete and useful.

Specifically, RIPE say that “we would like to receive more feedback on the IPv6 capabilities of currently available CPE. This will make the evaluations of the CPEs and the information we publish in the IPv6 CPE matrix more useful.”

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