Month: October 2007

Linus provides 10 funny quotes, mostly developer/linux based funnies.

A nice little article about how Apples growth is affecting its customers, is Apple short changing all of its loyal customers, fans and newly won over customers by looking more for profit rather than customer satisfaction?

Over at the Ask Apache site there is an article about Google Analytics and how to speed up your page load. You can read it here: Speed Up Google Analytics with Urchin.js

Ever notice that sometimes your sites take a while to load all the way because google’s urchin.js file is taking forever?

You may recognize this problem when you see something similar to this in your browsers status bar “Transferring data from google-analytics.com…”
Time To Setup?

4 minutes I got tired of seeing that all the time and so I set up an automated cronjob that runs every 12 hours and downloads the latest version from google, and saves it to my website directory, then I reference /urchin.js instead of http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js.. and my site loads a lot faster!

If you have ever ran into a problem with trying to strace apache or other processes that spawn children, then this script will help you out greatly. This small perl script will grab all of the PID’s of the current process and its children and then run an strace command on all of them to provide strace output from all of apache. You can modify the strace line to your liking as well as the log names, by default it logs to a file based on date and time to the /tmp directory. Code included, click ‘Read More’.

Shouldn’t the Air Force have more than this already implemented? Hopefully this software doesn’t take lots of tax money and never go anywhere or even get implemented.

LifeHacker has a review up on their site about a little application called ‘mRemote’. This is quite a piece of software and you can tell that the developers have spent some time on it. I have always been an advocate of being more organized and efficient. With mRemote everything that you need is in one screen, and everything that was left out with Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection Client is in mRemote. Tabbed windows, supports RDP, VNC, SSH2 and telnet protocols. There is also a connection manager, so you can setup all your connections and then point and click to connect.

A lot of points they make do kinda conflict, asking for more for a lower price. However, there are a lot of good points. The points I agree on are ditching fireware for esata, and onboard raid controllers.

October 12, 2007 (Computerworld) — The recent word from The Inquirer that Apple may be hoarding all of Intel’s new 45nm Penryn processors — and possibly paying for the privilege — has prompted a lot of speculation about the future of Apple’s Mac Pro desktop lineup. Apple’s professional machines, which now use Intel Xeon Cloverton chips topping out at 3 GHz, are called workstations by Apple and offer quad- and eight-core configurations. They’re fast, and they sport professional prices to match, with top-of-the-line eight-core units starting at $3,997.

Read More

Here’s an article from FiringSquad about their trip inside NVIDIA’s Santa Clara campus, which houses many labs and their massive group of grid computers. Good read, images included!

NVIDIA releases a new product, on average, every 6 months. Sometimes sooner, sometimes later. But what goes on behind the scenes to make this happen? Earlier this week, we had the opportunity to find out exactly what happens behind NVIDIA’s closed doors. We were given almost unrestricted access to NVIDIA’s many labs and their high-performance computing center; what we saw was impressive.

We were essentially given unfiltered access to see and talk with the people at NVIDIA. The engineers did not have to turn off their monitors when we walked into their labs. We were simply asked to black out any parts of the image that could reveal confidential information.

Read More

Interesting read about Universal partnering with BMG and Warner to develop a new music subscription service to try steal some of the market share that Apples iTunes currently has.

Universal getting ready to take down iTunes? – Universal CEO Doug Morris is looking to partner with Sony BMG and Warner to develop "a new music subscription service that will try to loosen Apple’s grip on the online music market.(more…)[CrunchGear]

This is a similar application to PC Backup, both are software managed backups which are open sourced and free as in beer. I will be doing a review of this software if time permits, as it does look really good instead of manual rsync backups.

RESTORE 4.0a28-1 (Default branch) – RESTORE is an enterprise network backup and recovery solution for Windows, Novell, Mac OS X (data fork), Unix, and Linux systems. It is scalable to a complete backup solution for multiple workstations, servers, and data centers. It operates over local area networks, wide area networks, and the Internet.