We are just hours away now from the release of Intrepid Ibex.  Ubuntu 8.10.  It’s hard to believe that it has been six months since the release of Hardy Heron.  But it has been.  Don’t worry though, the next release is only six months away.  April 2009.  By then I imagine people will be looking for a robust free operating system because no one will be able to afford a new computer with Vista, Umm, I mean Windows on it.  (that’s a funny commercial.)

Ok, so I am a Geek. I can’t help it.

Enjoy the new Ubuntu. I will be sure to add my thoughts on it later this weekend when i get it downloaded and installed on a couple computers.

It’s October and that means that the Intrepid Ibex will be released soon.  It’s scheduled release is October 30, 2005.  Though I knew what a Fawn was (Fiesty Fawn 7.04), I had to look up what a Gibbon was to be sure (Gutsy Gibbon 7.10).  I knew a Herron was a bird (Hardy Herron 8.04) but I had no clue at all what an Ibex was until I saw on.  Just Google Ibex and you will see a picture.  The thing sure does have some horns, that’s for sure.  In case you don’t already know, Ubuntu has releases that come out in April and October.  The version number is the year 8 in this case and the month 10 in this case or 8.10.  The current version is 8.04.

You can download the Beta and play with it and I will do just that in a couple days when I have some free time.

Remember the handspring hand held craze?  Well, if not, then you are not missing much.  Handspring was a company started by ex Palm employees that wanted to take over Palm’s market.  Today, if you don’t have a blackberry or an iPhone, and still have a PDA, chances are that you have a Palm unless it’s old and then it could be a handspring.  Basically, handsprint tried to jump into a market that was already saturated and it didn’t work too well.

Enter Cuil into the search engine market.  Ex-Google employees unleased their website last week with over a billion pages indexed.  That’s impressive but how many of them were so outdated that when they were put together people viewd them with a mosaic browser?  But hey, I thought I would at least give them a shot.  So I put Cuil to the test.  I searched for crossdotnet and hit enter.  I got a page that links to my website.  My friend Randy over at Cross Reflections  I searched for the same thing at Google and my site came up.  So who do you think I think is Cuiler?  Google all the way. 

Besides, Google is a verb now.  Cuil pronounced cool, has been taken for decades so I don’t think they will make it in the dictionary anytime soon.  I give them a year and they will be in the background like dogpile.com and altavista.com.  Some people use them, but Google is and always will be king.

Well, I told you a few days ago that I was going to try to setup an Ubuntu LAMP server. I got it installed and though the $ prompt was a bit overwhelming at first, I did some google searches and solicited a little help from my friend, Nick, and I have a blog setup for my wife and a photo gallery for me.  So much more to do, but so little time to do it.

No, not the lamp you are probably thinking of.  I am talking about Linux, Apache, MySQL, PhP.  AKA LAMP.  It comes with Ubuntu Server and I installed it one time, tried to figure it out, gave up and put Ubuntu desktop on the computer.  I am going to download and install Ubuntu Server again. I still have the old CD but it’s Gutsy Gibbon and I would like to have Hardy Heron instead.

Why am I doing this?  Because my wife is taking classes for her master’s degree and she is learning about Web 2.0 stuff like blogs, wikis, RSS and other cool new things.  She wants to experiment so I am going to setup something in my basement.  I already have a network with several PCs on it.  What’s one more?

If anyone has any pointers, I am all ears.  Otherwise, I guess I could just use google to find some good resources.

It’s that time again to present my choices for featured monthly blogs.  I found a Christian blog that I really enjoyed reading.  Why?  Because this guy seems to have been on a similar journey as me.  Similar but not the same.  It is called He Lives.

The tech blog is Pen Drive Linux.  Take a look and see if you can find anything interesting on it.  I did.

Enjoy this months featured blogs.

No, not really, but most people go there for a search.   But because of a flaw in the internet DNS or domain naming service which basically takes a name like crossdotnet.org and turns it into a number could have caused every single website you type in to go to anywhere you didn’t want to go.  It’s called DNS cache poisoning and hopefully this flaw has been corrected as of yesterday.

I had wondered if something like this was happening to me one night. I still don’t know what happened and if anyone can explain, I would be grateful.  I was trying to come up with a domain name for this website and one way I did it was just typed in the domain in firefox and if I got the TRY AGAIN, I figured it was likely that the name was not taken.  This is not full proof because a domain name can be taken and just not have a website or the website may be down at that time.  I don’t recall what I typed in but I got a website.  I typed in a slightly different name, I think with .net instead of .com and I got the same website but the banner at the top had changed.  So I typed in slasdot.org and I got the same website again, filled with ads by the way, with slashdot.org typed in at the top.  No matter what I typed in, I got the same website with that name typed in.  I rebooted my comptuer and tried those names again and got absolutely nothing, except slasdot.org took me to the right website.  That happened one other time as well.  I still don’t know if it was DNS cache poisoning or some other nifty trick.   It was weird though.  Just imagine what this type of flaw would do for phishing sites.
Anyway, to read more about the DNS flaw visit these two websites

Breitbart News Feed

Doxpara Research - This is the blog of the guy that stumbled upon the flaw.  It’s a great geek article too.

Make sure you update your computer so that you are safe from these attacks.

How many times have I heard the question “Can you help me?  My computer is….” fill in the blank.  This time it was popping up adult pictures and I don’t want the kids to see them.  Oh boy.  Can you say spyware? Yes, the incessent spyware that plagues Microsoft Windows.  My pastor,  a Korean born naturalized US Citizen, has a hard enough time understanding English, but he understands even less about computers.  He manages to email me the bulletin each week so I can put together a presentation for Open Song so that the worship service is enhanced with hymn lyrics on the wall, but as for spyware, he probably can’t even spell it let alone understand what it is.  But no doubt, he has it.  Now my question is do I introduce him to the world of Linux and Ubuntu?  Or do I try to save as much stuff as I can on his hard drive, zap it and re-install windows?  I would like to suggest he just get a new computer but why put him through the torture of Vista (blah!).

I am not sure what I will do yet, but I will meet with him and see first off if he has any programs like Norton Internet Security or McAfee Internet Security functioning on the computer.  There may be hope but I also may give him my Ubuntu laptop for a week to see if he likes it.  What’s not to like after all?

Oh well, someday maybe Microsoft will be able to get that monkey off their back.  But until then, there will always be Ubuntu/Linux OS’s  or Mac OS to help pick up the slack.

It wasn’t that long ago was it?  You know, when PC Computing magazine announced a breakthrough technology that would put an end to the VHS tape?  It was the early nineties.  Ok, I guess it was that long ago when you are talking about technology.  But it seems just months before reading about the advent of the DVD for data storage and movie marketing, I was reading how CD burners were now burning at speeds of 6X.  WOW!  I never imagined they would really burn that fast.  But I guess if I go back to my college years, I could tell you about the guy down the hall from me in the dorm that had an 80286 intel processor.  Now, I was jealous of that.

Children these days probably don’t even know there was at one time a thing known as a monochrome monitor.  I have to admit too that I am not old enough to remember programming with punch cards.  Thank goodness for that one.  Sometimes it’s hard to keep up with technology as it changes at near light speed.

My daughter recently said she had saved some money and wanted to buy something expensive.  I said “How about a stereo.  When I was your age, I bought one with the money I saved…” I went to explain how big the speakers were and how it had two cassette tape decks and a phonograph on top, but no CD player because they had not come out yet.  She looked at me, tilted her head and said “Why would I want that? I have an iPOD. “  Oh yeah, mp3 files now.  Who needs cassette tapes, 45s and CDs.  I still have my hundreds of 45s somewhere in my basement.  Probably with my 100 or so cassette tapes.  The kids probably don’t even know what they are.

Someday I will have grandchildren and I bet they will look at the phone I have plugged into the wall and ask why my phone has a wire or ask why my television is so deep and not hanging on the wall.  Who knows though, maybe they will ask me why I haven’t purchased a transporter or tricorder yet.

In case you haven’t heard, today is the day Bill Gates will step down as being Microsoft’s chairman.  He and Paul Allen started the company back in the late seventies when they paid some kid $50,000 for a program called DOS, Disk Operating System.  I remember thinking in college that DOS was all that.  But one of my professors informed me that compared to UNIX or DB/2, DOS was small potatoes.  Not even registering on the radar.  But that was back in the days of mainframes and the PC revolution was just beginning.

Bill Gates is a genius, there is no doubt about it.  He built an empire but like all political empires, his computer empire was attacked and it seems may be slowly starting to fade as did the Roman empire.  Google is king in the search engine arena.  Mac and Linux are taking OS market shares and FireFox hands down kicks IE’s butt.

Whoever takes over for Microsoft has some shoes to fill that 12 men could probably not fill.  But they will try and Windows will still be the top selling operating system for now and along with that it will be the most attacked desktop operating system for many more years to come.  Maybe somewhere out there though, there is another pirate in the silicone valley looking for an unsuspecting programmer that he can purchase the next big breakthrough off of with little capital.  Until then, we will continue to love and hate windows.  But as for Bill, love or hate him, he has changed the world with his ideas.  Good Luck Mr. Gates, you’ve certainly earned the early retirement.