JDPFu.com 2025

Many people run Windows (*any version) because it came with their PC and for no other reason. They have a copy of Windows to run games or business applications because that is the platform where those programs run.

The Question

Imagine an ideal world where Windows or MacOS or Linux or any other OS didn’t matter, programs just worked regardless of the OS.

Which OS would you run if all your programs actually ran perfectly regardless of OS?

1. Windows-Something ($147)
2. MacOS – OSX ($28)
3. Linux-Something ($ Free)
4. Other (*BSD, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, VMS, MVS, etc).

I’m curious. Please take a second and enter your choice. No registration is needed.

Why do I ask? Well, it is tax time here in the States and all the tax programs run under Windows. Further, I can download a version for much less money than going to a store and buying it, but the download tool only supports Windows. I’d prefer Linux for downloads and running the program, but that isn’t an option – even under an emulator like WINE. So while it appears to the software vendor that I’ve chosen the Windows version, that really isn’t the case. I don’t have any choice. Are you like me?

I watch lots of cloud computing articles. If you follow this blog, you know that I’m not a fan of outside cloud computing, but I love internal virtualization, an internal enterprise cloud, if you will.

Let’s look at some real-world pricing.

A brilliant article Everything I Ever Needed to Know About Being a System Admin, I Learned from Superman-

If you are an admin, remember that with great power comes great responsibility. I like Spiderman too. ;)

Here’s a little program that automates Video Redo Plus Quick Stream Fix, QSF, processing.

The behavior of Samba network shares changed with a recent patch. There was a security issue where unix extensions and softlinks created undefined behavior. I use softlinks, perhaps more than I should, for convenience.

Anyway, after I completely my normal weekly system patching today, I noticed that my samba shares weren’t working below a softlink from my HOME directory. I keep most things down this link since it points to the external RAID5 array, huge and fast. Fortunately, the security announcement included the settings to make it work again.

Just add

unix extensions = no

to the [Global] section of your smb.conf file.

Worked for me.

Here’s an insightful article at the Boston Review on How Software as a Service Takes Away Your Freedom. SaaS has been hyped as the way to deploy solutions quickly, pay for only what you need, when you need it, and avoid all the infrastructure costs. There are some important things that the hype leaves out.

I use comskip to locate commercials in mpeg2 TV recordings. It is a fairly heavy CPU user, enough that I can feel the system slow down when it is used. Of the multiple systems I’ve run it on (the exact same binary), they each show different frame rates that I thought to share today.

About 100 people attended Outerz0ne Con yesterday in south Atlanta (near the airport). This was my first hacker conference ever though I have attended DC404 and other industry meetings. It appeared that many people had a really good time without attending many of the talks. Below I’ll provide my impressions and key things learned from some of the more technical talks. The last talk contained extremely helpful information for anyone running a web site.

You can download the Free PDF version of the Ubuntu Pocket Guide

CPAN, the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, contains 10,000+ different Perl modules. All of these work just about the same to get installed on a system. That’s because Perl programmers use a standard package for distributing software that includes the code, tests, and manual. Below I’ll show the general way to build and install most perl modules, including those with external, non-perl, dependencies. Then I’ll show how to automate this with CPAN.