port7 – co – uk

I have just come across the announcement of Ubuntu Landscape, which is apparently is a web-based system for managing large numbers of Ubuntu desktops.

Some of you may be aware that I helped to put together a large Ubuntu desktop deployment myself in a previous life, so Ubuntu (well most Debian based distro’s) are well suited to. So I would be interested to see how this compares.

A simple Google search also reveals that there is a client that presumably goes onto the desktops being managed, even if it’s an empty package!

Shame it’s for support subscription people only as I would love to have a play with it. Does anyone else know much about Landscape? I would love to see it in action and have a poke. How about a LUG tour people?

Does anyone know what Kernels were available for SLES8? I have a bunch of SLES8 machines, with Kernel 2.4.21, that I would like to move to a later Kernel (the more recent the better) but don’t want to have to go up to SLES9 or 10.

Thanks

I wrote this a few weeks ago intending to post it then, but life has moved on and its not really cutting news now. But still it might be of interest to some.

So I have been joining in the excitement of the developments over at Eolous One and the revolutionary work and development that they are doing with SL / RL integration (I even managed to become an extra in a Machinima by Suzi). Anyway myself along with others feel that this is great leap forward, and is the start of some real cool developments in SL and Virtual Worlds in general. Though talking to other people I get the feeling that they don’t truly grasp the significance of the development, and so I have been thinking of some parallels to illustrate the point.

The easiest one for me to grasp is likening it to the Web, back in the early 90′s when the web was in it’s infancy, most websites were html based affairs. A few sites had some cgi-bin scripting (usually in Perl) that allowed people to submit forms, etc. And while it still provided for a leap forward from Gopher and the BBS systems people were used to, looking back on our perspective now with Web 2.0 and everything it was pretty basic and un-exiting. Then a few sites started linking websites to backed databases with scripting languages such as PHP, ASP, Perl etc. This greatly revolutionized the web with sophisticated websites that could change content dynamically based on what the database has on you. They then progressed to becoming front ends for various tools such as E-Mail systems, Network Monitoring, Business Intelligence, and with the advent of Web 2.0 productivity apps like Spreadsheets and Wordprocesors. This was a evolution from the old world where websites were websites, client – server apps were client – server apps, and men were men.

This is what the next generation of SL build will take us, the maturing of the 3d internet. I remember reading William Gibsons cyberpunk books years ago and remember imagining what it would be like. I think SL is the closest thing we have to that vision.

I see FSF Europe have weighed in on the National Archive / Microsoft / Open Standards discussion. They are mirroring my thoughts of basically ‘thats rich coming from Microsoft‘, albeit in a much more eloquent way.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6291124.stm

Good response from them, if a little long and wordy…

Just got back from Lugradio Live 2007, I was only there for today (Sunday 8th), so a few highlights for me

• The chance to catch up with old friends, great to see you all!
• Pablo’s talk on the migration to a Linux Desktop by a Spanish Savings Bank, as an Enterprise Architect in RL, its good to see how other people approach these things
• Neuro’s bit in the Hour of Power around SL, and it was cool to chat to him about his thoughts on SL
• The Neuros Audio thing was very cool. I may take up the offer of a Lugradio Discount
• Some KDE bits, it has given me the push needed to give KDE another go

All in all it was a great day, I only wish I could have been there for the whole weekend! So a big hand to the Lugradio team and all the people who made it possible!

As mentioned in a previous post I created a petition to the Prime Minister to make the PCI: DSS standards a legal requirement. This has now been approved, so I ask everyone to sign it and get others to do the same, the petition can be found at…

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/pci-dss-legal/

There is an interesting article over on the BBC News Technology website. It about Microsoft and the British Library warning us of a ‘digital black hole’ because of the amount of data that is stored in old proprietary formats. And how we need to move to Open Standards such as Microsoft’s ‘Open XML‘

I thought thats rich coming from Microsoft, who would like nothing more than for the whole world to be storing data in formats dictated by Microsoft. For those that don’t know a few years ago a new format for office data files was created by a independent group of companies and organizations called the OpenDocument format. This standard was eventually made a ISO standard format. And since then various companies, organisations and goverments round the world have declared that they will be moving to this format as their standard.

In response to this, Microsoft came up with an alternative ‘standard’ called the Open XML format, and have since been pushing to get that adopted, it has not yet got ISO accreditation, but I understand they are working towards that.

So as the BBC article states, why couldn’t they just have adopted OpenDocument? Maybe they think that it would not be in their commercial interests? I don’t know, but they didn’t and they are now trying to defeat the adoption of OpenDocument wherever they can.

Working on PCI: DSS at work atm, and I getting frustrated with the wishy-washy statements from our QSA and the PCI Council, that really don’t help me in convincing the exec that we need to take this seriously. They are under the impression that the PCI Council don’t really have any ‘teeth’ and so can’t really justify the spend to become PCI compliant, and in a way I agree.

So I decided to submit a petition on the petition website to ask that the government make it a legal requirement that companies become PCI compliant.

I don’t know if it will do anything but its worth a go, so when it gets approved and I get the URL, I will let you know what it is so you can sign it

So at a ‘geek meet’ in SL tonight and I thought that I would have a look at what sort of network trafic that SL creates. And so here it is….

It show’s me and my SL client, and also a program called ‘EtherApe’ that shows all network connections. So it appears that for SL there is one connection to util.agni.secondlife.com and another connection to .agni.secondlife.com, where is something like sim1234. The port it uses is some UDP port, didn’t get that info at the time.

And trafic increases when ‘rezzing’ is going on.

Interesting….

Asus have announced a new tiny PC (7″ Screen), ultraportable thingy. It apparently can run Windows XP or Linux. They are calling it the Eee PC.