It's been a long, long time since I was breathlessly excited about a web site. In fact, it hasn't happened since Wikipedia demanded my attention. LINFO is such a site. Get a load of this from their about section:

"The Linux Information Project (LINFO) was launched in early 2004 by Bellevue Linux Users Group (BELUG) for the purposes of (1) promoting an interest in and the use of Linux and other free software and (2) making such software easier to use by providing high quality, comprehensive and easily accessible information about it in a single location."

'We believe in open source and we want to help you understand just how and why it's fabulous.' 

A customer recommended CrossLoop for remote desktop between Windows boxes - it works a treat. The key features which put it ahead of the competition (VNC, Citrix, RDP etc.) are:

• free (but not open source)
• tiny - quick to download
• tidy - it doesn't leave crap everywhere
• intuitive i.e. easy for a typical user to download and install
• simple and friendly - host/join, click to connect
• encrypted (it uses tightVNC for this)
• simple to share files
• excellent compression, works well on thin-ish connections
• it bloody works

Your mother/father/guardian/Luddite friend can use this!

There is now absolutely no excuse not to give Linux goodness a fair go. Wubi is a small .exe which allows you to run Ubuntu without having to nervously pfaff about with partitions or run in toffee-slow virtualisation. Utilising Red Bull, prayer and superstring theory it creates an entry in the boot record allowing you to restart your box, select it from the boot menu whereupon it downloads Ubuntu and runs it inside an NTFS partition. No performance hit, all hardware detected. If you decide you don't like it - boot into Windows and delete the file - bonzer! Get it here: http://wubi-installer.org/

On our sequence systems there's a significant increase on logging used throughout the system and it's saved my butt quite a few times. The more logging the better. Having read 

 http://highscalability.com/log-everything-all-time

I am now planning on reviewing the OJBase logging stuff which makes it trivial to do logging both to text files (the infamous oj.log) and to an event table on a database. Need to handle log rotation, separation and maybe look at increasing the efficiency rather than hammering the hard disk all the time.

The Laptop Herring

A bunch of people sitting in a meeting, staring at their laptops, is a fat meeting. The people sitting at their laptops have no incentive to change a thing because they’re lost in whatever has captured their interest on their laptops. This is a lazy meeting full of people who are ignoring the most important question: “How do we figure out how to never have this meeting again?” Even worse, an organization that lets this meeting exist is a rotting organization. It’s a company where it’s slowly becoming acceptable to sit there and do nothing.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=s-DqZ8jAmv0

I found an old Olympus m:robe iPod pretender this morning and wouldn't have been surprised if my Ubuntu Feisty 64bit distro's various media players recognised it but alas, no joy. After some piling around the web, I could only find forum posts lamenting its incompatibility with Linux in general. But if it isn't compatible with Linux...

I had a Window XP disc kicking about so I gave VirtualBox a go. Selecting it for install in Automatix, it took a couple of minutes to download and install. I opened it, created a new 10GB disk image, popped in the XP disc and powered up the virtual box. I was straight into the Windows installation routine and 45 minutes later, I had a full installation running with the network card and CD drive functioning. It was then a simple matter of selecting which USB device to allow (the m:robe mp3 player) and install the horrific Olympus iTunesy software and Bob had become my uncle. Performance is first rate - I can watch DVDs with Windows media player - and cloning the image is as easy as copying a file.

Interesting article on Slate:

"A week ago, I ceremoniously yanked out my MacBook's Ethernet cable and toggled off the Wi-Fi. Once I was positive the machine was cut off from the Internet, I added a task to my online to-do list. It worked. I sat back and smiled, agog—I had just seen the future of software."  - http://www.slate.com/id/2168419/fr/flyout