JDPFu.com 2025

In my previous entry Easy Software Updates and Patches, I explained how FANTASTIC Linux and apt-get are at maintaining system, configuration and application files. Maintaining with the latest version, automatic updates or completely manually controlled.

I think the scope of this coverage and excellence was lost on a few readers. So, let’s use some exact numbers to make the point. All data will come from my personal, currently running desktop Ubuntu 8.0.4.3 system – Ubuntu 8.04.3 LTS, kernel 2.6.24-24-generic

Total Number of Available Packages: 25,221 <— these are all free packages for this OS

Total Number of Installed Packages: 1291 <— these are installed. OpenOffice, Apache, Firefox, Thunderbird, Pidgin, VLC, FreeMind, Notebook+ …. and over 1200 others. All free. Most are GPL licensed.

Total Broken: 0

Total to Install/Upgrade: 0 <—- usually about 1-10 packages are updated weekly. 1 click to get the list, 1 more click to upgrade them all. I could setup completely automatic updates, if I wanted.

Total Used Disk Space: 5.5GB used. <— At installation, I gave it a 10GB disk about a year ago

Don’t miss this part

25,221 applications, all free, most are GPL, GNU Public Licensed.

Isn’t this worth checking into? The price is … er…. free.

According to the Washington Post security guy, Facebook applications have been hacked. This isn’t the first time and it won’t be the last time.

If you are using Facebook or MySpace, I have to ask, “Why?”

I’ve attempted to create both video and audio webcasts. None of my attempts have turned out well. They didn’t turn out badly, but I’m unwilling to share since I’m not proud of them either. Primarily, my issue is with a complete lack of talent for this medium. It is what it is.

However, as an end user of both video and audio webcasts, there are a few things that providers should do that they often don’t do to make the consumers happier. Boooo.

What media providers should do:

1. Use RSS feeds to share the last 5-50 webcasts.
2. Use standard formats to share all content.
3. Allow the widest possible viewership by allowing downloads of the content
4. Always provide a patent-free format
5. Provide transcripts – for text searching later, not as the primary format for incompatible media formats

RSS makes life easy for your viewers/listeners. Other aggregators are find too, like iTunes, but you don’t want to prevent some people who wanted your content by preventing, YES, PREVENTING them from using some service they elect not to use. Not everyone wishes the use aggregators, the reasons do not matter.

Use standard formats for the content. Standard formats are those supported by 99% of the viewer / listener devices. These formats exist.

1. For audio, there are a few acceptable formats. MP3, WAV, and OGG are it. All other formats are proprietary and need to be avoided.
2. For video, there are a few more acceptable formats. FLV, MPEG2, MPEG4, xvid, MKV container with . Perhaps it is easier to point out unacceptable video formats: MOV, RM, WMV, QT, SilverLight and browser only formats are all unacceptable. RealMedia and QuickTime formats are worse than Microsoft. Microsoft’s older formats are small, efficient. RealPlayer and QT formats require heavy apps to use which behave like viruses. Have you tried to remove realplayer or quicktime from your system? It isn’t easy. Unacceptable. Don’t make users download a plugin either. If an old version (0.98 or earlier) of VLC plays the video, it is probably fine for distribution. VLC should be the content format test, period.

Allow the widest possible viewership. This means you need to allow people access to the content in the way THEY choose. Many people place audio and video casts on portable devices to listen and watch during their commute times. Millions of people do this every day.

Why use a patent-free format? Some of the most vocal people insist on completely free access. I’m not one of those people. It is fairly trivial to create patent-free formats on-demand. You don’t need to keep those formats around, just allow the user to select them.

So, if you are providing video or audio casts, please make them available to the largest possible audience by following the guidelines outlined above. Please.

What brought this on? I visited a website where I PAY for the content and some of that content is video-casts. I was unable to view or even hear it. Unacceptable. It seemed they went out of their way to make it so I couldn’t gain access to the content either. They are a big company, so my request for compatible formats will probably go unsolved. Their website is extremely complex and fancy. For the most part, it works extremely well, even from an old Linux machine.

Which content providers drive you crazy?

This question has been asked thousands of time. Is Programming Art or Engineering?

The answer depends on whether you program

• for fun or work
• for yourself or for someone else
• something you need or to specifications
• for games or productivity
• because you love programming or to pay the bills

My first professional programming experience was 90% engineering and 10% art. We weren’t allowed to be too creative because maintainability and easy to understand were critical requirements of our code. Real-time avionics code shouldn’t be inspired very often. Once, I had to make a complex calculation run in 1 cycle when it was over running the allowed cycle time. Real-time code has stringent time requirements. That meant significant optimization was needed to fit the longer calculations into the allowable time. The cost was maintainability and I think only 1 other person out of 8 reviewers actually validated the complex equations used. A few months later, 512 test cases validated the results perfectly. Due to the nature of this code, everything was performed following stringent processes.

Later, I worked with a very talented team were we’d whiteboard a design then made it happen. This was 80% art and 20% engineering. Occasionally, we’d create a UML diagram and work on some new stuff that had never been done before. Very interesting work with very little process.

Next I worked in a 20 person company producing database access software. Blah. Boring. I think the boring part made it more engineering than art. When I started there, they had ZERO process and had trouble reproducing the code, much less predicting when a new feature or bug would be ready for use. I introduced process to help predictability. Since we created the requirements and the designs, it was higher art. Perhaps 30% and 70% engineering.

I hack some code for fun now, no professional programming anymore. That hacking is to solve a problem, an itch, as it
were. Most of the time, these are 10-30 line scripts and not really very complex. 100% engineering. Every once in a while, there is a new problem that I’ve never seen or solved before. When the solution comes to me, there’s a little happiness … call it art or inspired. Those are 90% art and 10% engineering. I have a process, but it isn’t formal.

So, you see there really isn’t a single answer to whether programming is art or engineering. There appears to be a correlation between the amount of process involved and the amount of art that I assign to the effort. Perhaps this differentiates between art and engineering?

Does the programming language make a difference? Is Ruby art, but Java engineering? PHP? Perl? Shell? Fortran?

What do you think? Drop some feeback.

Don’t recall where I came across this link to smart company logos, but is was interesting enough to publish here.

I’ll be relocating since I’ve won the lottery. All my contact info will change, so don’t be worried if you don’t hear from me for a few months … or years. See!

Dear Winner,

You have been awarded the sum of USD$1,500:000 which was won by your
E-MAIL Address in our Euro Millones International Lottery. The following particulars are attached to your lotto payment order:

(I) Batch No: BDC/MTW/STN
(ii) Ticket No : 45-46-52-58-68
(iii ) Lucky No : 5 -7-9-10-38
(iv) Ref No: PLC/LAC/076/TCC.

Do get back to this office with your name & address and the above mentioned particulars via; (ruralagencia@aim.com)

Best Regards,
Mr, Jose Vinals
Tel:  +34 603 111 071.

I have a feeling that if you send your information to the same emal address, you may have won too!

Obviously, this is spam. It is the first real spam that I’ve gotten in years, so I’m excited. The first email server it hit was listed as Ono network in whole Spain which appears to be a cable ISP.

Oh, so I won’t be disappearing. So sorry.

Fantastic is the only word I can use. Windows7 x86 memory use is FANTASTIC (meaning low). I’ve done a little optimization using Vista System Optimizer after installing Win7 on my laptop – here are the results:

Win7 = Host OS

Ubuntu = Client VM – 1224MB allocated

The total system memory used with VirtualBox, Ubuntu and Windows Media Player playing a TV show is 1.75GB. 1.2GB of that is allocated to the client VM.

Under Vista-64, this same config would use 2.5GB.

Running another VM, WinXP, with 1GB of use, will bring the total memory used to 2.75GB.

Win7 = Host OS

Ubuntu = Client VM – 1224MB allocated

WinXP = Client VM – 1024MB allocated.

This would use almost 4GB in Vista-64.

Even with the 32-bit limitation of 3.5GB of RAM, on my system, I actually gain more usable RAM with 32-bit Win7 over 64-bit Vista and isn’t giving more RAM to client VMs the goal?

Stop Poaching our Whales. You’ve been warned.

We all keep every computer we have patched and current, right? Every application. Every web browser and every OS library – fully patched, right?

Well, … er … probably not.

Why not? Because it isn’t easy. Keeping just the OS patched is easy. Apple, Microsoft and Linux distributions have made it even easier the last 5 years. But the OS patches are only 10% of the problem. We need to patch the browser, plug-ins, email, office-apps, and every other application on the machine in a timely manner. Are you up to that task? I’m not.

There’s a simple solution. Linux patch management.

Ubuntu Linux distributions include thousands of free applications and make patching all of them trivial. They are updated just as easily as the OS patches. Let me explain.

Desktop Ubuntu Patching

In the upper right-hand corner of the desktop, Ubuntu places an Update Manager notifier. It is unobtrusive, but clear.

• The notifier is a red ! in color; it automatically updates package information daily.
• If any package installed on your system using the Synaptic program has an update, the notifier will be displayed, red. Just click the icon to start the process (get more information). If there are no updates, the notifier isn’t displayed.
• Applying patches usually doesn’t require you to stop doing whatever you are already doing.
• Applying patches usually doesn’t require a reboot, unless there is a kernel update.
• Applying patches usually doesn’t require any manual configuration file changes. Any changes are usually handled by the installation package.
• Any application installed using the GUI package manager ( specifically, any debian-based package depot), will be maintained and updated through the same interface.
• Whether an update to a package is available or not is automated.

Server Ubuntu Patching

I’m certain there’s a way to determine when patches are available, but I never check. I simply update the local package depot list and update all installed packages.
Old way:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

2014 update:

sudo aptitude update

sudo aptitude dist-upgrade

I prefer aptitude for a few reasons, but that isn’t critical. The dist-upgrade option will load newer kernels – don’t worry that too much new software will be installed. That isn’t what happens. Been using the 2nd set of commands for a few years without any issues.

Yes, it really is that simple. BTW, these commands work on desktop Ubuntu too. In fact, every Saturday morning, I run a script from a laptop that remotely connects to all the other Ubuntu machines and runs both of those commands.

There are other options of patching Linux, but 95% of the time, these commands are all that you need to know.

Wouldn’t it be nice if other computer vendors made software updates that easy?

This article brings up what I’ve said for years about Cloud Computing. Know how you get your data out so you can fire them for another service. If you don’t know how to get your data out, don’t use it.

SaaS

If you use forceSales.com (or any of the other Cloud Computing providers) – how do you transfer your data to a different solution? If you use IaaS, Infrastructure As A Service, like Amazon E2C, you probably don’t really have a problem, since your team will know all the tools being used. SaaS providers really need to be carefully considered, however.

Lease Car analogy.

This question is sorta like asking someone who leases a new car every 2-3 years, how much do you pay for a vehicle over your lifetime? They won’t know, but they will think it isn’t very much. When you point out they are spending 3x or more than people who purchase a vehicle pay in total, then they get it. Similarly, they will be angry that you pointed out the wasted money. I’ve run into the same issue when discussing cloud computing with current users. They don’t want to worry about it, the cost is fine, and they don’t have any idea how to get the data out.

Delete the Data

Finally, are you certain that when you take your data and close your accounts, that the provider doesn’t retain it?

Be careful out here.