john.parnefjord.se Reflections & findings

Sun and Apple are both strong brands within different market sections. Sun is company- and serveroriented and Apple is niched towards consumers and desktop. Yes, I'm aware of that Apple sells server software and hardware and Sun has tried to enter the consumer-/desktopmarket by offering there own desktop OS and StarOffice, but these are not the markets where they are at best.

From my point of view they seem to complement each other quite well, one niched towards companies/servers and one towards consumers/desktops. Why not knit the pieces together?

This is how I solved my problems with Captcha functionality in Drupal. Read ahead if you have experienced problems with the standard Captcha and Riddler modules. 

A while ago I migrated to Drupal 5.1. It was a quite effortless and painfree experience, but on the other hand this site is not relying on that many extra modules. One functionality that I can't do without though is the captcha function in order to combat spambots.

Do you use Drupal and do you have wrestled with the somewhat cumbersum way of including ordinary images along with the text that you write? Well, so did I but I found the right  and easy way of doing it after some time.

What you will have to do is install the module TinyMCE according to installation description that comes along with the package. Then install the IMCE module. Activate both modules in the administration section.

Apple has released a gadget to be able to view movies from iTunes, of course downloaded to your Apple computer, on your TV. The piece is called AppleTV. What's interesting about it is that the machine has been hacked so that Mac OSX 10.4.8 can be run on the machine. The site www.appletvhacks.net has the whole story. As one can run an ordinary Mac OSX system on the AppleTV new opportunities arise..

Discovered this cool web site the other day that makes it very easy to install Debian without the need of burning any CD or DVD. The service is called Goodbye Microsoft and it assumes that you sit on a Windows box when starting the installer.

So if you are ready for the switch then just navigate to Goodbye Microsoft and press install.

If you happen to have a PS3 lying around you might be interested in installing Ubuntu on the box. How this is achieved can be read at https://help.ubuntu.com/. Even better would be clustering a couple of PS3 in order to achieve extreme computational power. The single cell processor is great for computation compared to ordinary processors.

I've been thinking for a while to switch to Python or Ruby as my primary programming language. I don't seem to be alone in the quest to adopt a new language. Of course the languages don't have to be used exlusivly, but it would be nice to have the main focus in one candidate. Here are some of the most important criterias:

1. international support, i.e. unicode
2. maintainability of code
3. available development tools
4. performance
5. scalability
6. active community
7. documentation

At the 8th of april Debian GNU/Linux 4.0, a.k.a. Etch, was officially released. The Debian project has worked for about 21 months with Etch and it contains some interesting features. Among the highlights for Etch are:

This site is great if you need some free samples to play with:

free sound project

You can add your own sound recordings as well.

Some days ago I noticed that ntpd wrote an error to the syslog. The message read:

Feb 13 12:11:06 servername ntpd[4415]: sendto(192.168.100.100) (fd=-1): Bad file descriptor

At first I believed there was an error in the configuration file, so I reinstalled the package to be sure that I hadn't misconfigured anything. Looking at the running processes I noticed that there were two ntp daemons running. So I stopped the ntpd using

/etc/init.d/ntp stop