Practical Technology

for practical people.

November 16, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

The Linux desktop may soon be a lot faster

Linux is fast. That’s why it’s 90%+ of the Top 500 fastest supercomputers run it. What some people don’t realize though is that Linux is much better at delivering speed for servers and supercomputers than it is on the desktop. That was by design. Over the last few years, though, there’s been more interest in delivering fast desktop performance. And, now, there’s a Linux kernel patch that may you a faster, much faster, desktop experience.

The patch by Linux kernel developer, Mike Galbraith, adds a mere 233 lines of code to the kernel’s scheduler, but it cuts desktop latency down by a factor of ten. Now, that, that’s impressive. It’s almost like getting a new computer.

More >

November 16, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

Facebook’s E-Mail Flop

As I watched Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg yammer on and on yesterday about Facebook’s new messaging service, which he claimed really and truly wasn’t e-mail, I kept thinking: “Yawn. It’s e-mail, and it’s bad e-mail at that.”

Oh sure, it includes SMS and IM as well, but so what? Other Web-based e-mail systems, like my Gmail account sitting in another window as I write this, have been all-in-one communication centers for years. Heck, back when I was using Lotus Notes and Sametime on a regular basis years ago I could do this. Come on guys, unified e-mail is sooo 1995.

So what does Facebook Messages really bring to the table? I don’t see anything. To quote my wife Clara Boza, a legal marketing consultant, “Why would I want to use Facebook messaging?” Why, indeed. It’s just another damn e-mail account to check.

More >

November 15, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

IPv6 basics: Getting started with IPv6

Some people still think they don’t need to worry about the growing shortage of Internet IPv4 addresses and that they need to start thinking about how to migrate to IPv6. Oh boy are they ever wrong.

As I write this in late October 2010, the Internet is officially down to less than 5% of the possible IPv4 addresses. The bad news? It’s actually worse than that, according to the real-time IPv4 Address Report, we’re down to 4%. At this rate, local ISPs and businesses won’t be able to get new IP addresses after January 2012.

That doesn’t mean that Internet addresses won’t be available. They will be. But, as with good domain names, you can expect to start paying a pretty penny for your IP (Internet Protocol) addresses. This won’t matter so long as you or your business doesn’t expand or move, but when you do, as time goes on you can expect to pay progressively more for your new addresses.

When the Internet began, IPv4’s possible 32-bit 4.3 billion addresses looked like more than enough. We didn’t see mobile devices coming or predict that people would start carrying two or three IP devices — smartphone, laptop, tablet, MP3 player, etc. — at once. We could blame Vint Cerf for this vision failure, but it’s too late to play the blame game. It’s time to start working on the problem.

More >

November 14, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

Fedora, like Ubuntu, to dump X for Wayland

When I first saw that Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, was dumping the X Window System, which is the networking windowing system that’s the foundation of almost all Unix and Linux graphical desktop, for Wayland, an OpenGL-based display management system, I wondered if other Linux distributors would follow. After all, everyone in Linux graphics circles had one or more beefs with X-too complicated, too slow, too filled with archaic junk and so on. On the other hand, everyone in Unix circles had also been using X since the late 80s, long before Linus Torvalds started work on Linux. Could people really give up X that quickly? You betcha! Fedora, Red Hat’s community distribution, has also decided to start to move to Wayland too.

After the recent Linux Plumbers Conference, a gathering of core Linux developers, Fedora’s “graphics cabal,” Adam Jackson, Kevin Martin, and Dave Airlie decided that while Wayland wasn’t ready yet, with work, Fedora could, and should, use Wayland in place of X for its graphics stack.

More >

November 12, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

Here comes the 100GigE Internet

This summer, the IEEE ratified IEEE 802.3ba, which sets down the technical guidelines for 40 Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) and 100GigE Ethernet. Now, companies and organizations are beginning to deploy these faster than fast optical Internet backbones.

More >

November 11, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

We’re a long, long way from securing the Web with SSL/TLS

Firesheep can certainly be mis-used as a hacking tool. It was meant, however, to serve up as a wake-up call to everyone that Web site managers were doing a lousy job of securing their Web sites. How has that worked out? Not well at all as far as I can tell.

I, and lots of other people, have written lots of stories about what you can do to protect yourself from Firesheep; how to keep your Wi-Fi connection safer; and what Web site administrators need to do to secure their sites. So, I’m sure some people at least are trying to practice safe Interneting. But, what about the Web hosting companies and the major Web sites? Eh, not so much.

Over at the official Firesheep Google group, there’s a whole 143 messages, and most of them are technical support style questions. I don’t see a single message about how would someone go about securing their Web server. Mind you, there’s no rocket-science to how to start using Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or TLS/SSL over HTTP (HTTPS). But, you’d think someone would ask. They haven’t.

Far more telling is AccessNow’s analysis of the top 100 Web sites. According to AccessNow, a group devoted to the belief that the realization of human rights and democracy in the twenty-first century depends on Internet access, only 99 of the 100 most popular Web sites currently use TLS/SSL correctly.

More >