John’s Blog-o-Rama

My friend and former co-worker Gary Lerhaupt was interviewed by the Broadband Daily recently about his new Prodigem service. I was the first invitee to Prodigem, and I was really impressed with the works that he’s done; it truly is a very simple way to get your content hosted and distributed. I look for this to really grow and become extremely popular over time. Congrats Gary!

I’ve been waiting on this for a long time: a music store called Mindawn that offers DRM-free songs for download. Plus, they support buying songs from a Linux desktop, and the use the op FLAC codec. Who could have ever envisioned such a crazy idea! Even though it sounds like their catalog is not very big right now, I will definitely be supporting these guys.

Putting DRM on music files is ridiculous, and I will never support a download service that does. Only being able to copy a song to 3 computers/devices is so stupid…I don’t know how someone came up with that. What happens in 5-10 years after people hit their limit, and they can’t copy the songs to their new computer? Do you have to pay more to extend them? The only choice that really makes sense for consumers is to have DRM-free music.

There’s an interesting article on news.com extra about Toyota’s R&D into robotic pods and wearable exoskeletons. The devices in the demo are pretty useless right now, but it’s really good to see more companies putting effort into wearable exoskeletons. Critics quoted in the article are correct in saying that the devices have little use right now, but I think the wearable exoskeleton market will be HUGE in a decade or two, especially for the military. Just image being able to wear a suit over your body that automatically makes you stronger and faster. This would really be useful for the military in that soldiers would be able to carry bigger and more powerful weapons, run faster, jump higher and farther, and be able to cover large distances without a vehicle. As the article points out, it would also be very useful for the elderly, but coupled with a brain-machine interface, it could be extremely useful for the disabled as well.

I was reading Jeremy Zawodny’s blog entry about Dan Gillmor leaving his regular column for a new venture. Since I had no idea who Dan Gillmor was, I checked him out and started reading several of his columns. This column in particular stood out to me, as he has expressed my feelings exactly on how I feel about Bush and his trampling on Americans’ personal liberties during his term in office. I voted for him the first time around, but certainly not the second time. He always says that he loves freedom, but so many things that he does shows that he doesn’t understand what freedom is, and that he really doesn’t believe in it. If Bush really believes in the principles in the Constitution, how can he apply those principles only when it suits his agenda, and ignore them when they don’t? I can only hope that his new Cabinet will challenge his principles and decisions, and get us back on track protecting Americans’ personal liberties.

SUSE Linux really seems to be getting popular here in the US lately. On the Dell Linux PowerEdge mailing list, there has been a steady increase in SUSE Linux 9.1, 9.2, and Enterprise Server 9 questions for PowerEdge servers over the last few months. Couple that with the announcement we made last month to support SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 on PowerEdge servers, and Novell/SUSE is really starting to pick up momentum. People in the industry have been predicting that Novell could topple Red Hat; I have to admit that I was skeptical at first, but now I think they have a real shot at doing it. Let’s see if they can continue to execute.

I just released version 0.65 of biosdisk on linux.dell.com. New features include support for creating Debian BIOS packages, URL retrieval, install/uninstall actions, and generic BIOS RPM creation. I have been working on this on and off for the past few months with Johnannes Jordens, and I think it has become a pretty solid little utility. Haven’t received a lot of feedback and not sure how many people use it, but it’s been really useful for myself personally, for flashing BIOSes on my own Linux systems, systems in the lab at work, and for BIOS distribution.

On the path to version 1.0, I’d still like to add the following features:

** Add support to update a pxelinux PXE server. Flashing BIOSes and other system software over PXE is immensely useful in our lab at work, as it removes a lot of manual labor. I’d like to remove the manual labor needed to update the pxelinux configuration for doing this

** Add support for automatically checking ftp.dell.com for a new BIOS for a given system, and then downloading and installing it. I already have the URL grabbing support with this release; now I just need to write some code that can figure out the system type and current BIOS version, check ftp.dell.com for the latest BIOS version, do a version check and proceed accordingly.

** Fix the command line option checking/parsing. This is terrible right now.

The last thing I want to look at is switching from bash to Python. The program is getting a little unwieldy, and would really benefit from an OO language. The problem is just finding the time and energy to do it, although I think it would be really interesting. Parts of this are already in Python already (blconf is, which does the menu.lst/grub.conf parsing/updating). Maybe over Christmas…