Practical Technology

for practical people.

May 20, 2008
by sjvn01
1 Comment

Apple TV vs. Netflix Player

It took over a year, but the Apple TV finally had a worthwhile competitor, the Netflix Player by Roku Digital. I’ve been using the Apple TV since day one and the Netflix Player for only two weeks, but I can already see the real differences and for the most part Apple TV is the clear winner.

1) The Interface: Here’s its Apple TV all the way. Since the Apple TV 2.0 refresh, the Apple TV is a pleasure to use and you can rent and buy TV episodes and movies while never leaving your couch. The one problem is that there’s still little rhyme or reason to which ones you can rent and which ones you can buy and until you’re actually looking at a title’s information, you can’t tell which is which.

The phrase ‘bare-bones’ was made for the Netflix Player’s interface. With it, you can watch movies and TV shows from the Netflix library and you can fast-forward or reverse—no chapters here—and that’s about it.

Before you can watch anything on your Netflix Player you need to queue it up from your Netflix account on your PC. Some writers have been reporting that you don’t need a PC to run Netflix Player. That’s not true. Netflix states that you “must have a computer running Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or higher, or Windows Vista; Internet Explorer version 6 or higher; Windows Media Player version 11 or higher; an active broadband connection to the Internet; 1GHz processor; 512MBs of RAM; and 3GBs of free hard disk” space to use it. Mac users appear to be out of luck.

With Apple TV, you only need any PC that can run iTunes. Advantage: Apple.

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May 19, 2008
by sjvn01
1 Comment

Lenovo Linux-Powered ThinkPad in Action

My old reliable X40 IBM ThinkPad finally came to the end of its day so I had to replace it with a new laptop. These days though instead of having to buy a Windows laptop and retrofitting Linux on it, I have a wide variety of Linux notebooks to choose from.

I’ve tried a good sized sampling of the current generation of Linux laptops—the Dell 1420 with Ubuntu, and Asus Eee spring to mind–but I finally decided to buy a Lenovo R61 ThinkPad. It’s not that I found the other laptops lacking. For most users, I’d recommend the Dell 1420. For users on a budget or for whom having the lightest possible full-service laptop is all important, I’d commend the Asus models without a moment’s hesitation.

I, however, have been an unabashed ThinkPad fan for over a decade now. Historically, I get about twice the life span from a ThinkPad than any other brand of laptop. They’re little tanks in notebook computer clothing.

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May 18, 2008
by sjvn01
8 Comments

Linux and Sun Partnering?

What happens when you get Linus Torvalds, Mr. Linux, together with Jeff Bonwick, Sun’s master of storage and creator of ZFS? Well, right now, we don’t know.

All we know is that Bonwick has posted a trio of photos of himself and Torvalds on his blog under the mysterious title, Casablanca, with a couple of cryptic comments about chocolate and peanut butter and the phrase, “All I can say for the moment is… stay tuned.”

Jim Grisanzio, Sun’s senior programming manager for OpenSolaris, links to the blog under the title “ZFS Pics.” This seems to indicate that Sun may be talking with Torvalds about bringing ZFS to Linux. Even this conclusion is really just speculation.

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May 17, 2008
by sjvn01
4 Comments

Firefox 3 First Look

I’ve loved Firefox since version 0.93. It was so much better than Internet Explorer and the other alternatives that I couldn’t imagine using anything else. But, then Firefox’s memory leaks went from annoying me to ticking me off; I started having real stability problems with it on both Windows and Linux; and security holes started appearing far more often. I was about to switch to Safari on Windows and MacOS and Konqueror on Linux, when Mozilla got serious about not just fixing, but rebuilding Firefox. Now, Firefox 3 release candidate 1 was released early. Based on my quick look at it, I may end up sticking with Firefox after all.

I downloaded Firefox 3 RC 1 yesterday for both my Windows XP SP3 system and one of my openSUSE 10.3 PCs. Both are up-to-day systems without any problems. Installing the browser on both operating systems was a snap. How easy was it? I installed them at the same time with barely a thought.

Once in place, rather than looking at the new and nifty features, I just start using the browser as I would normally. Features are all well and good but what I really wanted to know was whether the browser was back to being a stable, reliable partner and had it stopped snatching up memory. I’m happy to report that, based on twelve hours of non-stop use and abuse, Firefox 3 is both more stable than Firefox 2.x and it finally has stopped being a memory piggy.

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May 16, 2008
by sjvn01
0 comments

WhitePages.com grapples with privacy in a Web 2.0 world

WhitePages.com does exactly what you’d expect from the name — it tries to provide phone book-style listings for both the U.S. and Canada. Of course, there’s nothing new about that, so WhitePages.com tries to do an especially thorough job. The company claims that at the end of 2007, it had 180 million U.S. adults, about 80% of the population, in its records.

As Web 2.0, social networking and a changing idea of personal privacy have come to the fore, WhitePages.com has also started to ask itself how it might offer users more control over their information while providing more and different kinds of information. Forward-thinking, maybe noble even but, as experience is showing, far easier said than done.

Specifically, founder and CEO Alex Algard has said that the company would start adding features to let people edit and/or hide portions of their directory information. At the same time early this year, the company promised that it would work on a way to let people send text messages or e-mails, using the directory information but without revealing their information — something along the lines of a social-networking site such as LinkedIn or Facebook.

For example, let’s say you were looking for your old high school girlfriend, and she’s listed in WhitePages.com’s records, but chooses to keep her information hidden. With the system Algard envisions, you could send her a note via WhitePages.com, and she could then decide whether to get back in touch with you or to call the police because you’re still stalking her after all those years.

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May 16, 2008
by sjvn01
0 comments

Fixing Debian OpenSSL

Debian, the popular Linux distribution, has just been shown to have made an all-time stupid security goof-up. They managed to change OpenSSL in their distribution so that it had no security to speak of. Good job guys!

OpenSSL makes it possible to use SSL (Secure Socket Layer) and TLS (Transport Layer Security) in Linux, Unix, Windows and many other operating systems. It also incorporates a general purpose cryptography library. OpenSSL is used not only in operating systems, but in numerous vital applications such as security for Apache Web servers and security appliances from companies like Check Point and Cisco. Yeah, in other words, if you do anything requiring network security on Linux, chances are good, OpenSSL is being called in to help

Now, OpenSSL itself is still fine. What’s anything but fine is any Linux, or Linux-powered device, that’s based on Debian Linux libssl 0.9.8c-1 code, which was released September 17th 2006 until version libssl 0.9.8, which was released on May 13th. That includes the most popular Linux of all: Ubuntu.

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