Microsoft COO Kevin Turner proclaimed
Vista today, post-Service Pack 2, which is now in the marketplace, is the safest, most reliable OS we’ve ever built. It’s also the most secure OS on the planet, including Linux and open source and Apple Leopard. It’s the safest and most secure OS on the planet today.
Sounds like a bunch of marketing hype. I’ll believe it when an indepent study or two verifies that information.
Twittering blog posts is something I do not understand. If I want to monitor somebody’s website I’ll grab their RSS feed. I don’t follow you on Twitter to see when you update your blog. Stop doing it! Can somebody please explain this to me! I follow you on Twitter to see what you’re doing, not to see what you’re blogging about.
I was recently at a Shell gas station near Hagerstown, Maryland that has video monitors above all the gas pumps. Once you activate the pump and begin pumping gas it starts playing commercials. You’ll get anything from commercials for upcoming TV shows to commercials for products or companies. Once you quit pumping it shuts back off.
Reminds me of the targeted billboards people joked about 5 years ago. I wonder if everybody gets the same ads or if it has some mechanism to target you via your credit card or car you drive. That’d be scary.
I got my new MSI Wind U100-432US on Friday. After starting it up and updating the BIOS, I installed Fedora 10. Since many netbooks don’t have CD/DVD drives and I already had a network server set up to do network installs from, I made a local copy of the Fedora 10 base repo via rsync before it arrived. I then found a utility called unetbootin to make a bootable USB drive that I could start the network install from and it worked great. I basically installed it and plugged in the USB drive, told it I wanted Fedora 10 i386 network install and selected my boot drive. unetbootin copied the image files from the Fedora repo and made my USB drive bootable. I then restarted and installed Fedora 10 in a matter of minutes over my local network.
After the install, everything seemed to be working except the wireless. I was able to find out that the wireless card was a RaLink card instead of RealTek like I had expected. That caused a change of plans. I was having trouble tracking down drivers for the RaLink card and was having issues trying to build from source with WPA support. In the end, I found a repo that had the drivers already there and it simplified things. My system was a mess after that so, alas, I booted from my USB drive again and did a clean install.
Here are the quick and easy steps to get wireless working on a MSI Wind U100-432US:
1. Install Fedora 10
2. Post install, run a yum upgrade to get your system up to date:
sudo yum upgrade
3. Once you’re up to date, install the RPM Fusion repos
sudo rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm
sudo rpm --import "http://rpmfusion.org/keys?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=RPM-GPG-KEY-rpmfusion-free-fedora"
sudo rpm --import "http://rpmfusion.org/keys?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=RPM-GPG-KEY-rpmfusion-nonfree-fedora"
4. Install the RaLink 2860 driver which is compatible with the RaLink 2790 installed in the MSI Wind U100-432US
sudo yum install kmod-rt2860
5. Reboot
After the reboot, if you click the Network Manager icon, you should see wireless options that were previously not there.
A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend Barcamp Philly. It was my first Barcamp and it was an enjoyable experience. I met up with some old friends, Owen and Skippy, both of which I have not seen in the past 2-3 years. Technically, that’s not true, I saw Owen three weeks prior at CPOSC.
There were some good discussions and thankfully it wasn’t all “social media” topics like I’ve heard rumors of from other Barcamps. Most of the discussions I went to were good, and as usual, there were a few I wish I had skipped and a few I wish I had attended. The big one I missed was the discussion by Comcast Interactive Media where they discussed the web technologies and back end hardware used to power comcast.net.
One of my other favorites was “Building Better Web Developers – What Should Colleges be Teaching?” by Jason Wertz. Jason is a teacher at Montgomery County Community College and was looking to rebuild his cirriculum. There were a lot of bright minds at this and a lot of good ideas thrown around. Topics discussed included how to develop skill sets, what subject matter can be skipped as well as what subject matter isn’t being taught, but should be reqiured. It was interesting to see people there with very different backgrounds too. Some had just graduated, some had graduated 20 years ago. Come people had Computer Science degrees, and others had degrees nowhere relating to Computer Science.
Overall it was a good experience and I hope to go back if it is ever held again. Unfortunately I live in central Pennsylvania and there aren’t as many tech related conferences and thriving meetups in the area. Philadelphia has plenty going on, but it’s a 2 hour drive for me which is a bit too long to make on a regular basis.
