Thushan Fernando Uncut

Wishing everyone a very Merry Christmas and a Happy, Safe & Prosperous New Year.

Hope you were all good boys and gals and the quite old n hairy, slightly overweight but cheery bloke got you something you wanted. Even with all the naughties I’ve done this year (lets not elaborate on those), he still managed to visit my place and leave an I-Sobot under the tree. Unfortunately with the relatives and various visitors around the house I havent had a chance to open it up, when I do I’ll post some pictures and information. In the meantime, checkout this video about what i-Sobot can do.

Its My Life, hardware christmas, greetings, isobot, naughty, new year, nice, santa, snow, wishes, xmas

OpenSolaris 2008.11 has just been released, it encompasses some super cool new features and I’ve been waiting patiently to try this OS - need something new to learn!

The OpenSolaris 2008.11 operating system is a point of integration for the installation, desktop, and package management system projects on OpenSolaris.org. Today, the OpenSolaris 2008.11 live CD is available with the following feature updates:

ZFS Time Slider and Songbird;suspend/resume and CPU power management; Distribution Constructor and Prototype Automated Installer; WebStack with 64-bit MySQL, CherryPy, and DTrace for Ruby; GNOME 2.24, OpenOffice.org 3.0, and Firefox 3; Many F/OSS applications added, including top, sudo and Emacs; 700 additional man pages and Package Manager online help

Just a bit of background, OpenSolaris is based on Solaris, which was originally released by Sun Micro-Systems in 1991. Sun decided to release Open-Solaris to build a developer community around their Solaris product. Eventually it seems they will be basing technology for Solaris from OpenSolaris. So you know OpenSolaris will rock your world if its backed by Sun.

Download page for OpenSolaris 2008.11 or Direct Download of ISO and the 2008.11 Release notes.

Checkout the newly revamped OpenSolaris website, in particular the Learn area. Personally I’m looking forward to seeing the ZFS, Virtualisation Enhancements and DTrace loving.

Developer, Its My Life, Kernel / Internals, OpenSolaris, Operating Systems, hardware, software OpenSolaris, operating system, solaris, storage, sun, zfs

A refreshing new episode of the Simpsons came out last night, amongst the highlights was the spin on the “Apple subculture” and the ‘coolness’ of it all. It pretty much summed up my thoughts on the whole elitist crowd of sour Apples.

From the clip:

You’re all losers.

You think you’re all cool because you buy a $500 phone with a picture of a fruit on it? Well guess what? It costs $8 to make and I pee on every one.

I have made a fortune out of you chums, and I’ve invested it all on Microsoft. Now my boyfriend Bill Gates and I kiss each other on a pile of your money.

- Bart Simpson as Steve Mobs

Bart You legend, summed up my thoughts exactly. Following that speech you can see the inspiration from the 1984 Apple commercial following.

The embedded version appears below as the Youtube version has been yanked, this is from DailyMotion thats still kicking.

It also touched on the touchy subject of Muslims in these uncertain times.

General, Its My Life, humour apple, bart, douche, ipod, isuck, itouch, losers, mapple, mybox, mycube, mypod, mytouch, simpsons, the simpsons

Unless you’ve been living under a rock the last few days you would have heard about the shocking development in India (Mumbai - India’s business capital) come face to face with an onslaught of terrorism. Thankfully today, the commandos have successfully brought an end to the 3 day seige.

According to reports, upwards of 60 young men entered Mumbai in small inflatable boats on Wednesday night, carrying bags filled with weapons and ammunition, and spread out to nine locations to begin their attacks. Lobbing grenades and firing their weapons, they entered hotels, a railway station and several other buildings, killing scores and wounding even more.

…

Mumbai disaster official R. Jadhav told AFP that 195 people had been killed and nearly 300 injured in the battle, which began when the dozen or so militants split into groups to attack multiple targets across the city, including the main railway station and a hospital.

TV channels described the attacks as “India’s 9/11″.

But I came across a post on the Boston that shows (at times quite graphically) the extent of the chaos.  Surreal and unbelievable that such attrocities can be carried out in the name of a religon or ideals.

For a deeper look at the situation, see the article on TheAge titled Mumbai: attack on all fronts.

General, Its My Life extremist, india, islam, mumbai, muslim, terrorist, war

Developer, Gaming, General, Its My Life, Operating Systems, hardware, humour, software clean, computer, crazy, daily dilbert, dilbert, fix, funny, house, humour, literature

This weekend saw the 24-hour launch party for Call Of Duty 5: World At War at Swinburne University in Hawthorn (my old uni). With a scourge of ubber nerds and geeks gathering from all around town to come play CoD5 first.

Amongst the promoters were Alienware - who provided PCs, Sapphire Technologies - who’s graphic cards donned the Alienware boxes, Razer - Keyboard & Mice, V - to help keep the gamers on the ball and Microsoft who graciously provided a stack (100 or so) Xbox 360s to keep things moving.

Activision even went so far as to keep the troops entertained with several models representing Alienware, Razer and ATI for eye-candy (because you know some geek out there is going to want to get their picture taken with them) - which reminds me:

I didn’t a chance to take too many shots - far too busy playing CoD5, but everything that was taken is available in the Swinburne Call Of Duty 5 Launch set on Flickr. It was a night of (maybe too much) gaming - which was followed by a quick 4hr ‘break’ to play at a LAN Games at another venue not too far from uni, dinner at the good old Hong Kong Seafood Hut and an overload of caffeine (V, Mochas, Red Bulls). Aside from CoD5, inside the BA building, you could jam out to some Guitar Heroes if all this mindless, senseless killing is gotten to you.

Everyone attending got to take home a show-bag with some goodies - self-heating coffee mug, dog tag, CoD hat, t-shirt, CoD pen, lanyard and just to confuse you, a copy of Spider-Man 3 for PC. You could also buy a copy of the game and gear but if the price was any indication, I doubt many did.

Of course, Swinburne’s big promo of hosting the launch is to bring to light the awesome games oriented degree they offer. The double degree probably takes the cake for having the longest title for a university degree in the history of the world and competes directly with RMIT’s BIT: Games & Graphics Programming degree.

Bachelor of Multimedia (Games and Interactivity) / Bachelor of Science (Computer Science and Software Engineering)

Take a looksy, who knows, you could be working on the next Call Of Duty!

Developer, Gaming, Its My Life, PC, Xbox, software activision, alienware, babes, call of duty, call of duty 5, fps, gamer, games, Gaming, girls, lan, launch, microsoft, multiplayer, party, promo, razer, swinburne, war, world, world at war, xbox, xbox 360

We are giving away all of our software for free on Tuesday, October 28th, 2008. This is a fully working, fully supported copy of either CrossOver Mac Professional, or CrossOver Linux Professional. No hooks, tricks, timebombs, or gimmicks: it’s the real deal.

Yes you read that right, thanks to the Lame Duck challenge posted by CodeWeavers earlier this year, they’ve had to ruffle some feathers in the upper-management team to release their software for free as per their challenge:

The catastrophic cratering of the global economy, falling gas prices and President George W. Bush’s recent executive activities have indirectly prompted Saint Paul gadfly software developers CodeWeavers, Inc., to provide free software for every American on Oct. 28, company officials reluctantly announced today.

In July, CodeWeavers – whose software lets Mac OS X and Linux users run Windows programs without having to Microsoft for a Windows OS license – launched the Great American Lame Duck Presidential Challenge (lameduck.codeweavers.com) to encourage President Bush to make the most of his remaining days in office by accomplishing a major economic or political goal by January 20, 2009.

What were those challenges?

The goals focused on President Bush making specific positive accomplishments in areas such as the economy, home values, the stock market, the war on terror and other key issues. Specifically, one goal called for President Bush to help down bring average gasoline prices in the Twin Cities to $2.79 a gallon.

On Monday, Oct. 14, gas prices in Minneapolis and St. Paul did just that.

“That morning, I was filling my tank at Big Steve’s Gas Palace in St. Paul,” said Jeremy White, president and CEO of CodeWeavers. “I had just finished my morning corn dog and 64-ounce Dr. Pepper when I looked at the pump and noticed gas was at $2.79. I screamed ‘Woohoo,’ then I yelled ‘Oh, crap!’ as I realized every American can now have my software for free. Kind of upsets my fourth quarter revenue projections…”

Quick, go signup and grab a free bargain. Its not restricted to just US citizens either - and both Mac and Linux versions of Codeweavers is available. Cheers big ears, thanks for your efforts!

For the next round of freebies, the challenge has been set as follows…

• Return the stock market to it’s 2008 high
• Reduce the average price of a gallon of milk to $3.50
• Create at least one net job in the U.S. this calendar year
• Return the median home price to its Jan. 1, 2008 level
• Bring Osama Bin-Laden to justice

As a parting thought of wisdom from the greatest and most widely known comedian IN THE WORLD, I leave you with:

“It is clear our nation is reliant upon big foreign oil. More and more of our imports come from overseas.”
- Beaverton, Oregan, Sept. 25, 2000

Such deep deep meaning, you can find more inspirational words of wisdom from The Complete Bushisms.

Cool Tools, Developer, Its My Life, Linux/Unix, Operating Systems, Windows, hardware, humour, software america, bargain, bush, bushism, codeweavers, dubya, dumbass, free, george bush, linux, mac

Here’s something to keep in mind the next time you see your administrator at work.

Keep your friends close, but your admins closer.

With that, something for the developers of the world.

Yes, we all need to be hugged sometimes but these days developers need it more than anyone else (well aside from Administrators).

Go on, go into that dark room that people barely visit and hug a developer today. You’ll bring a smile to their faces, turn their frowns upside down and who knows they may actually help you the next time your stuck  instead of asking you whether you’ve tried turning it off and on again like those pesky admin types who usually just sit there playing solitaire all day (or so the story goes).

But you know what, on your way up back to your 15th floor desk, why not give the Admins a little shout out and see what they’re doing too. Who knows, maybe next time they’ll make one for the less fortunate Administrators of the world.

Developer, Its My Life, humour admin, boss, closer, Developer, enemies, Friends, funny, hug, humor, manager, marketing, quote, random, sales

I miss Japan, the culture, the weather (back then), the people, the atmosphere and the food. But I thought I’d share this funny billboard I came across when I was in Osaka. I was walking on my merry way one day looking for a coffee shop - either a Starbucks or a Doutor (anywhere with a decent shot!) and came across this billboard not too far from Osaka station.

No idea what its advertising as theres no mention of a brand or company, but I knew the moment I saw it - and fell into a fit of laughter - that its something I simply had to take a copy of.

Its My Life, Japan, Travel, humour billboard, fun, funny, humour, japan, osaka, qwirky, wierd, wtf

I’ll admit it, I still have a floppy-drive attached to my maturing beast, which is primarily used as my day-to-day development box. Floppies come in handy for that odd install of XP or below that require RAID drivers (though you can just use nLite and bundle it by default).

But what about the CD-R’s and DVD-R’s in the days of Cloud Browser based Operating Systems (funny)? I recall burning ISOs like no tomorrow when new versions of Ubuntu were released - and I’m sure everyone else who has gone down the Linux or BSD route has had similar experiences.

But before you go burning that ISO at the next install (maybe Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex at the end of the month) you might want to consider an alternate route - and whats more, I’ll bet you it will install faster on newer systems.

I bought a Corsair Voyager GT 16Gb (pdf info-sheet) flash drive a few months back, whilst I’ve been fairly disappointed that its advertised speed fell short of expectations due to the Samsung manufactering process changes, I still kept it dear to myself having paid about AUD$109 for it. (I name things, the drive was dubbed DrSporky). Even though its rated at about 34MB/S read (so realistically it should do about 25-30MB/s) I’ve managed to clock about 19-21MB/s copying a 500Mb file using Teracopy - a real benchmark not a synthetic test and 8Mbp copying it back to the drive (see below). Nothing to sneeze at, but the difference between the GT and the non-GT was the 30MB/s+ read-speed I figured.

I use it almost daily and it carries around a bootable version of Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) thanks to the multi-platform utility UNetbootin.

UNetbootin is written in C++ using the Qt4 Toolkit engine (full information is available on the Universal Netboot Installer page on Launchpad) so its compatible on Windows and Linux. Simply download the latest version, insert your USB drive and either let UNetBootbin download the distro you’d like to try _or_ browse to the Disk image to one you’ve already grabbed.

Give it a go and see what you think, installing Ubuntu 8.04.1 on a mates system (ASUS P5KPL-CM & Core E2180) took less than 10minutes (at most 20 if you inlude boot and configuration)!!! The best part is that you can easily reuse it easily formatting etc *AND* store your own things ready to utilise whenever you need it.

So the next time you got install _anything_ give UNetbootin ago and make use of that fast USB Drive instead of wasting CD/DVD writables that you usually endup throwing away.

Its My Life, Linux/Unix, Operating Systems, Windows 16gb, bootable, bootable usb, bootcd, corsair, flash, gt, iso, linux, mlc, nand, samsung, slc, ubuntu, unetbootbin, UNetbootin, voyager, Windows