VMWare recently released a freeware called VMWare Player that can play a pre-built virtual machine file. A virtual machine is an OS bundled with whatever the virtual machine creator put there. This is perfect for people to test-drive various operating systems and software, without going through the hassle of installing themselves. VMWare currently provides virtual machines preloaded with RedHat, Novell Suse, ubuntu, Oracle, MySql, and Bea, among others.

Memory used to be a bottleneck for virtualization software to take off. However, on the hardware side of things, both Intel and AMD are pushing 64-bit processors pretty aggressively now. With 64-bit architecture, the memory space the operating system can access increases exponentially (from 2^32 to 2^64). With the push towards 64-bit and the emergence of virtualization technology, I wonder what kind of impact this will have …

The Linux Format magazine is having it’s annual reader awards in a number of categories.

These include (I’ve include my picks after each category):

• Best Desktop Application (Gnome)
• Best Distro (CentOS 4.2)
• Best Development Tool (Eclipse 3.1)
• Best Hardware Support (NVidia for my Dell Laptop)
• Free Software Project of the Year (Gaim)
• Embedded Linux Award
• Best Server Software (MySQL 5.0)
• Best Office Software (Open Office …

The year started in January (obviously ;-) with the publication of my first book, "Professionelle Softwareentwicklung mit PHP 5".

In February I joined the Gentoo Linux development team, attended the Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting (FOSDEM), and launched a new website for PHPUnit.

In March I gave a …

Does anyone know if MySQL runs on pebble? I believe that a) it's based on Debian and b) Metrix delivers their devices pre-installed with a pebble variant. (Correct me if I'm wrong, Matt - ed: thank you. Metrix Pebble is their name for their distribution.)

I'd love to see MySQL installed and distributed with the devices that are being sold by this company because a) it's currently one of the few groups that manage and make use of the Seattle Wireless Network (SWN), and b) Metrix will be managing installation and maintenance of the SWN's Mesh Node located on UPN Tower, on Capitol Hill's …

• Back in the land of small bosoms and pretentious girls. For a good greeting, I got massively sick - flowing nose, sneezing, tearing eyes. Its hard to believe I was born here, and yet I get all these complications everytime I rock up here.
• Oh, and Streamyx, in both my houses, suck. Its so slow in comparison to what I’m used to sitting at home via cable. And look, their QoS is hopeless too. Sigh. Flickr uploads are slow, at best. And I’m supposed to have at least 256/384kbps upload speeds here.
• Spent some time fighting the VPN, and it eventually succumbed. OpenVPN on Linux is a breeze (go Fedora!), but Tunnelblick took a bit more massaging to get working.
• I have also fixed my VoIP, so you can now reach me …

• Back in the land of small bosoms and pretentious girls. For a good greeting, I got massively sick - flowing nose, sneezing, tearing eyes. Its hard to believe I was born here, and yet I get all these complications everytime I rock up here.
• Oh, and Streamyx, in both my houses, suck. Its so slow in comparison to what I’m used to sitting at home via cable. And look, their QoS is hopeless too. Sigh. Flickr uploads are slow, at best. And I’m supposed to have at least 256/384kbps upload speeds here.
• Spent some time fighting the VPN, and it eventually succumbed. OpenVPN on Linux is a breeze (go Fedora!), but Tunnelblick took a bit more massaging to get working.
• I have also fixed my VoIP, so you can now reach me …

This site had been unstable for the last couple of weeks, due to my hosting company’s issues with servers. My Apache and MySql database have both been moved to a different server. Hopefully things will be stable from now on.

During the troubleshooting time, I used a few commands to find out the uptime of both server and MySql database. I thought these would be helpful to other people so here they are.

To find out the uptime of your Linux server, any one of the following commands will do:
w
uptime
top

To find out the uptime of your mysql demon, log into the server using mysql command line, then issue the following command:
\s

I am sure there is a way to find out how long Apache has been running, but I just don’t know. Can anybody enlighten me? Thanks.

IE More Secure Than Mozilla? Just reading this thread on our favorite unbiased source of “news” for nerds. The poster would like us to examine some valid points, namely IE’s integration with the OS, and the higher “caliber” if you want to use that term, of bugs or flaws. Secondly, the point about the ability to uninstall firefox. He goes on to say that the report uses extremely flawed logic, and that Symantec is shilling for MS. I’d say a little bit of both is happening, and it’s happening by Symantec AND the poster.

My beef, I guess is with the statement that because it’s open source, the large number of eyeballs will make the code more secure. Sure, for the next version.. but who will upgrade ? How do you force someone to upgrade ? Sure, the latest and greatest is secure, but I have to routinely upgrade FF for my friends and …

IE More Secure Than Mozilla? Just reading this thread on our favorite unbiased source of "news" for nerds. The poster would like us to examine some valid points, namely IE's integration with the OS, and the higher "caliber" if you want to use that term, of bugs or flaws. Secondly, the point about the ability to uninstall firefox. He goes on to say that the report uses extremely flawed logic, and that Symantec is shilling for MS. I'd say a little bit of both is happening, and it's happening by Symantec AND the poster.

My beef, I guess is with the statement that because it's open source, the large number of eyeballs will make the code more secure. Sure, for the next version.. but who will upgrade ? How do you force someone to upgrade ? Sure, the latest and greatest is secure, but I have to routinely upgrade FF for my friends and family all the time. …