And yes, this meme is the ultimate meme just like 2010 will be the YoLD. Mark my words.

via Linux Hater’s Blog

Laptop:

ragnarok@DragonBoat:~$ vrms

Not too shabby, if I do say so myself.

You have got to be kidding me.

I was thinking I’d mosey over to their website, as much as I generally decry centralized media repositories, and see whether I couldn’t stream a bit of live coverage of the Olympics. Wishful thinking, perhaps, but the homepage seemed promising:

See that hopeful little tidbit about downloading clips in HD? Unfortunately that’s probably locked down with DRM, or at the very least a proprietary downloading application. Too bad I can’t tell you for sure, because the freaking page won’t load!

Does NBC really think it can keep going like this? This is the freaking Olympics. Firefox 3 was downloaded 8,002,530 times on the first day of its release, and still NBC doesn’t think it’s a priority that their website work with it.

Do you see that? My swapfile is empty, dude. Usually right from boot that’s already filling up.

Today is a pretty good day.

But know we have further insight into his brainchild, ReiserFS. Behold. (Click for large version.)

Full credit for the snapshot goes to my buddy Carl.

I didn’t go, as on the return trip I was laden with spoils of fruit and grain, and had to bear ever onward to stash the bounty at home. But I did look them up on the information superhighway, and it appears that the Munich chapter of GUUG meets every second Monday of the month. Looks like I have plans for April already.

The German Unix User Group is a non-profit organization for professional computer users using any kind of Unix system.

Unix, in this case, includes the free Unix variants like Linux and the BSDs as well as commercial Unix systems. The important factors for us are openness of the systems, adherence to standards, and the chance to take a look behind the scenes.

Funny that this has me way more excited than a date with a pretty girl, but there you have it.

I’m also doing maintenance on my own machine, so it’s really convenient to have a second one on my desk. (Nothing like two screens to make me miss home.) This way I can still surf and chat while I mess around with low-level settings on my box. It’s great.

As I’m working today, I get an IM from Will. He and I have our IM clients configured to automatically exchange digital fingerprints and encrypt our conversations. He of course didn’t know I wasn’t on my normal machine, so he IMs me and I get hit with about three paragraphs of ciphered text. I laugh and tell him (unencrypted) to hang on while I install the encryption package on this machine.

Here’s the terminal output from that effort:

conor@roslaptop:~$ sudo apt-get install pidgin-otr
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
libotr2
Suggested packages:
libotr2-bin
The following NEW packages will be installed:
libotr2 pidgin-otr
0 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 93.5kB of archives.
After unpacking 324kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y
WARNING: The following packages cannot be authenticated!
libotr2 pidgin-otr
Install these packages without verification [y/N]?

I’m sorry, but I find it absolutely hilarious that a digital verification package meant for encryption and online security fails an authentication check itself.

I know it’s just a temporary glitch in the repository, or even something weird I’m doing with my network here, but I thought it was a blast. I love how the recommended choice for proceeding was no (capital N).

So tonight I’m typing in the date for the backup in ISO 8601 format, and because I only ever have a vague notion of what the date is, I do a bit of guess work. I type “20071231,” and then think to myself, “No, it’s past that!”

I backspace and correct the date: “200701OH WHOA NO WAY!”

It’s 2008.

Everybody does this, so don’t pretend you won’t be writing “08″ for at least the next week.

Also, I have to mention that I’m completely aware Thursday night is an odd night for backups. When scheduling a regular backup, the intervals should be arranged such that they occur after the highest periods of usage, in order to ensure maximum data restoration in the event of failure of the primary storage device. Given my computing habits, this would be Sunday or Monday night, given that weekends I have a ton of free time and tend to do tons of surfing and thus data grabbing and filesystem changes.

I didn’t choose Monday night for the same reason I cannot bear to set an alarm for 7:00am. It has to be 7:04am or 6:57am or something. I hate it when numeric values feel smooth. By offsetting them, injecting a little intentional inaccuracy, they gain texture and character, and I let them into my life.

That said, I still use KDE. Weird, huh?

About a week ago Wal-Mart began selling a $200 Linux machine running on a 1.5 ghz VIA C7 processor and 512 MB of RAM. While the specs are useless for Vista, it works blazingly fast on Ubuntu with the Enlightenment Window Manager. The machine is now officially sold out of their online warehouses (it may still be available in some stores). And the product sales page [CC] at wal-mart.com is full of glowing reviews from new and old Linux users alike.

I suppose this is a good time to mention that I’ve gotten an e-mail from the chaps at OLPC, saying that the Give One, Get One program is officially underway, as of yesterday. I still haven’t decided whether I can afford to drop a chunk of change on this, but it’s really important to me to have one.

Hopefully the OLPC is as successful as this Wal-Mart contraption.

“Contraption” is the word of the week.

As was widely expected, the laptops never did make it under the $100 mark, even after taking advantage of economies of scale. They’ve skidded in at just under $200, still a bargain (according to me) considering the remarkable amount of hardware packed into the device. And now the OLPC committee has decided that for two short weeks in November 2007, it will make the device publicly available to Americans in a “Give 1, Get 1″ program. This bumps the price up to US$400, but means that the person who buys one of the devices will also be paying to have one sent overseas to a student in a developing country.

David Pogue from the New York Times has reviewed the XO-1, the first iteration of the OLPC laptop. Here’s a video of his time with it.

I want one. I’m definitely considering buying one when my stipend comes. I know it’s a real piece of junk in terms of a laptop, and I know that I’d look like a complete fool if I’m ever seen in public with it. But I really, really want one. Buying one in November would also mean that I’d be foregoing money I should be spending in Europe, for example on traveling.

So I’ve some deliberating yet to do. But I have a yearly gadget allowance for myself, and this fits the bill nicely. Thus far it’s shaping up much better than picking up an iPod Touch, though I might change my mind on that if I ever see Linux and/or Rockbox running on a Touch.

The OLPC is the start of something big, whether a soaring success or an utter failure. Either way, given my interests both personal and professional, I think I want to be on board at least in a small way like grabbing one for myself and one for a student far away.

Plus, I could look at porn on it.

[Gartner] stated that open-source products accounted for a 13 percent share of the $92.7 billion software market in 2006, but should account for 27 percent of the market in 2011 when revenue is expected to be $169.2 billion, according to Gartner research.

Full post here

Those are some pretty impressive statistics, I should think, especially for an industry that’s been repeatedly accused of being the new wave of communism. (Additional coverage of that here.) So open source is profitable, and it’s scaring Microsoft. Both good things!

But there was something that made this news much richer. Let’s keep in mind that Vista is bombing terribly, OK? It’s known for being little more than eye candy, without stability and a decent software ecosystem. Apparently there’s now a new Linux distribution that emulates the Vista interface nearly identically. This is of course especially precious given the precedent set back in the mid 1990s when certain word processors “revamped” their interfaces by stealing ideas liberally. The verdict was ultimately that one can sue over how a program works, but not over how it looks. (Can anyone give me details on this? I googled fruitlessly for links.)

The last point I’ll make on the subject (in this post, that is) is that of evangelism. With sites like Larry the Free Software Guy, Libervis, and of course Free Culture, it’s extremely difficult to defeat the diffusive mentality that wants to create a kind of new world order.

I mean, which do you find more inspiring:

• This silly bastard, who probably died a martyr moments after this video ends…
• Or this silly bastard, who will probably soon die either of a heart attack or from self-loathing.

Anyway, last point. The beta of Gutsy Gibbon, the latest iteration of Ubuntu, was just released.

Sorry that there were so few words in this post that weren’t hyperlinked.