Fedora is a linux distribution sponsored by Red Hat and supported volunteers. The latest release is Fedora 9 (code named Sulphur) and was released on 13 May 2008. Fedora 9 contains a lot of feature improvements and is now more user friendly than ever! Fedora features the latest Linux kernel (2.6.25) and hence can run on latest hardware.
So what is new in Fedora 9 (Sulphur) ?
1. GNOME 2.22 - New version of GNOME brings a number of features which includes performance improvements. UI improvements include an enhanced world clock with multiple time zone displays. This version also includes an updated display manager with features such as power management on login screen.
2. Linux Kernel 2.6.25 - Latest Kernel support means a number of core enhancements such as improved virtualization support, CPU "group scheduling", USB authorization and new wireless configuration interface.
3. Persistent Live USB Support - Live USB support is not something new. Knoppix was one of the early distributions which could run from a Live CD. As USB capacity increased, live distributions started appearing on it. But what makes Fedora 9 unique is that now Live USB can store user preferences! This means that Live USB can be used a sort of portable Fedora 9 machine! Wherever you go, you can plugin in the USB, work on the Fedora 9 and then save data on it!
4. Seamless Upgrade - Fedora 9 features automated and seamless upgrade similar to Windows update. The latest preupgrade software can even be used to upgrade from Fedora 7 to Fedora 8!
5. Latest Software (Firefox 3 beta 5, Pidgin, Gimp etc.) - Fedora 9 Sulphur features all the latest software including Firefox 3. It also includes Pidgin, gEDIT, GIMP, Perl 5.10.0 etc.
Other new stuff in Fedora 9 include ext4 support, improved virtual machine support, bluetooth enhancements, PackageIt front-end to yum, Font improvements and built in support for encrypted file system.
Globat hosting suffered a major downtime on February 21st 2008. The primary network switch and backup switch completely failed and took down the entire network including globat website. This site was also down for about 12 hours! From the mail I have received,
Our primary network switch in our main datacenter in downtown Los Angeles failed completely and despite tremendous efforts by our technical emergency response team could not be brought back online. This switch is a major brand name piece of equipment and as such it contains internal redundancy. We were able to switch over to the back up circuitry and begin bringing the system back online at which time, for yet unknown reasons, the entire devise, including backup system, failed completely.
After a short deliberation we decided to rush a new switch from our vendor’s nearest warehouse to our data center. While waiting for the replacement we initiated a work around to at least get email service re-established. After several attempts all email systems finally went live and back to normal at approximately 10:00am Pacific Time.
When the new switch arrived we went through the installation and testing process and as a result were able to bring all our services back online, but not before we had suffered a 5-hour outage for e-mail services and an 8-hour outage for Web related services. In Globat’s entire 6 year history, we have never experienced anything even remotely like this! The outage was so severe
that it affected our own Web sites and all but one of our telephone lines so we were unable to communicate with our customers to update anybody about the status of the incident. We decided to ask some of our staff members to post updates on well known Internet forums, which helped a little in disseminating the information.
Recently Orkut is focusing more on the privacy options available for its users. They have announced a new feature while allows you to keep Orkut privacy options. This means that now you can ensure that your scraps, videos, feeds and photos are only visible to your friends!
To enable privacy option, go to your profile and click on "settings" link. Then click on "privacy" tab on the right top. Then restrict the access of your videos, scraps etc. to "friends" only.
But why do you need to take this precaution? The reason is this - Internet has shortage of stalkers and criminals. So it is very important that your personal information is kept private. Also ensure that you add only those people whom you know personally as friends. Otherwise turning on privacy will be of no use!
Many people tend to post private information such as email or phone numbers in the scrap. Some even go to the extend of publishing their address in scraps. So it is better to keep the scrapbook private.
According to YouGov poll (in which 2000 web users voted) following are the most hated words on the internet.
1. Folksonomy - Online classification system
2. Blogosphere - Blogging community
3. Blog - Online journals
4. Netiquette - Internet etiquette
5. Blook - A book based on a blog
6. Webinar - An online seminar
7. Vlog - A video blog
8. Social networking - Digg, Reddit etc. are some examples
9. Cookie - A text file used track user behavior in browsers
10. Wiki - Wikipedia is an example. A site which is collaborative in nature.
I think if they run a poll on most hated sentences, the top ones could be “all your base belongs to us” or “in soviet russia” etc. Also I wonder why the words like “WTF”, “n00b” or “LOL” doesn’t appear among top 10! In fact, this is the first time I came across “Folksonomy”. It also shows that a lot people are getting pi**ed off at the influence blogs have on internet.
This poll is not credible with just 2000 votes. To make some sense, a poll like this should have atleast 200,000 participants!
I happened to watch the Michael moore video “Sicko” which somebody had put up on Google Videos(It is now deleted). “Sicko” is Michael Moore at his best and you should never miss it (especially if you are an american).
Sicko is a documentary by Michael moore, which looks at american healthcare system. It is an open secret that american healthcare system is very expensive. So if you don’t have health insurance you are screwed. Moore uses the documentary medium to forcefully expose this fact and he has done an excellent job!
I am in India and I do have some experience of british healthcare system (NHS). Both are free and there are lot negative points about these systems. But when you compare them with the american system, they look very good! In India, you have a choice between government/private and charity hospitals and to me that is very important.
So why is this interesting to me if I am in India? Well, the problem is that we tend to copy many things from America. Also healthcare companies are getting powerful by day in India. Coupled with corruption, this may lead to a healthcare mafia worse than the american one.
Healthcare is fundamentally something which belongs to the government similar to police and fire department. Privatising it partially is ok, but full privatisation is a sure recipe for disaster.
Check out the following trailer of Sicko. Sicko is slated for release on 29th June 2007.
SiCKO is a comedy about 45 million people with no health care in the richest country on Earth.
Today (April 05) is the official CSS naked day. Don’t be confused, you are not getting naked. Instead you need to remove all of your CSS files (design) in your blog/website and leave just the content in place.
The idea is to promote Web standards. If your site conforms to Web standards, things should look just fine. You can check out more details here. More than 1500 Websites are taking part in this “prank”.
No, I have no plans of getting naked. Frankly I don’t know how it will look (It will not be pretty for sure!). Do you have any plans for getting naked?
This year fortune magazine had ranked Google as the best place to work for. It is no wonder that they are able to bulldoze the entire opposition including Yahoo and Microsoft when it comes to innovation!
Do you know that Google gets over 3000 job applications per day? Check out the following video to know more about the Google workplace and why they are number one!
Kerala Tips is currently running the Kerala Blogger Awards 2006. The total prize money is Rs. 10,000 and the winner will take home Rs. 6,000. The idea is to find the most popular Kerala Blog in 2006. There are even prizes for 2 lucky voters (Rs. 500 each).
Since there weren’t many nominations, all the blogs are put up for voting (35 blogs in total). I somehow hate the idea of blog jury. I think it is upto the readers to decide which is best!
The voting is open(a bit complicated) now and will close on March 16th. Please vote if you happen to be a reader of any of these blogs.
Disclosure: I am one of the sponsors for the event.
In this case, the localized portal of Yahoo ( based on Malayalam - an indian language) has stolen recipes from a blogger and posted it as their own. To quote from blogger,
Some of the posts from this blog are lifted word by word, without my consent and posted, in Yahoo, Malayalam (beta) , and shown as their copyrighted material. See a screenshot of both the pages, which clearly shows the content lifting (copyright infringement).
If anybody else, lifted content from this blog, and exhibited somewhere else, without my permission, please remove the same.
The blogger (who is known as Su in Malayalam blogging circles) says that he has already mailed Yahoo about the copyright violation. He is yet to get any response. Obviously he is unhappy that his posts are being copied without permission!
I guess this is done by the Yahoo’s Malayalam team who probably is working on tight schedules to generate content!
That is what New York senator, Carl Kruger thinks! He claims that three people in his Brooklyn district have been killed in traffic accident caused by usage of electronic devices.
So he plans to bring a legislation which will make it a crime to use iPod or any portable device while walking on the streets. The plan is to slap a fine of $100 on violating the ban.
What next? Why don’t they ban all the advertising boards displayed in New York? The sexy models on them can distract drivers and can cause loss of life, right?
Apple shipped 1,606,000 Macintosh® computers and 21,066,000 iPods during the quarter, representing 28 percent growth in Macs and 50 percent growth in iPods over the year-ago quarter.
Wow! More than 20 million iPods per quarter! Profits may again jump this year if iPhone sales pick up. If the current iPhone buzz is any indication, crossing 2 billion profits is not far!
Microsoft reports that IE 7 has crossed 100 million installations. It is also estimated that over 25% of Web visits in US are made using IE 7.0. That is a pretty good figure with all the Mozilla Firefox hype around!
Windows home server is an upcoming operating system announced by Microsoft at the 2007 CES. This is intended for homes with multiple PCs and will support file sharing, automatic backups, terabytes of storage(!) and connectivity to other devices such as Zune and Xbox.
Over at the Microsoft press tent at the Consumer Electronics (CES) Show, Microsoft is showing off a few protypes of its just-announced Windows Home Server product.
Although there were rumors circulating over the past month that Windows Home Server would be based on Windows Vista, that’s not the case, said product director Steven VanRoekel.
Do you wait till the last minute to renew your domain name? Well, here is a piece of news which will prompt you to renew your domain well in advance. Reuters reported that chinese Web users have lost 10,000 domain names since they were unable to renew it in time. This is was due to the internet disruption caused by earthquakes near Taiwan.
Liu Ningbo from HiChina Web Solutions Ltd (www.net.cn), China’s largest domain registration service provider, said the losses are only possible in “theory” but not in “reality”.
Internet users are reminded at least a month before their leased domain expires and the domain names are frozen and kept for one or two months after the expiry date, he said.
But anyway I am going to renew my domain well in advance. I don’t want to be the victim of “Act of God”!
The recently discovered Adobe Reader bug allows an attacker to inject JavaScript via a PDF which is hosted on a trusted domain. For example, assume that a user clicks on a link in site A (which is not very trusted) to go to a PDF on site B (which is a trusted site). Site A can inject JavaScript via the PDF link which will appear to be executed from site B! This is possible since additional commands can be sent to Reader when opening a file.
What makes this scary is that there is nothing site B can do to prevent this (of course, other than taking down all PDF documents)! But this flaw appears relatively harmless since only things that can be snooped are the cookies and session data. It won’t be able to format your machine or steal your local files.
Fedora is a linux distribution sponsored by Red Hat and supported volunteers. The latest release is Fedora 9 (code named Sulphur) and was released on 13 May 2008. Fedora 9 contains a lot of feature improvements and is now more user friendly than ever! Fedora features the latest Linux kernel (2.6.25) and hence can run on latest hardware.
I happened to watch the Michael moore video “Sicko” which somebody had put up on Google Videos(It is now deleted). “Sicko” is Michael Moore at his best and you should never miss it (especially if you are an american).
Today (April 05) is the official CSS naked day. Don’t be confused, you are not getting naked. Instead you need to remove all of your CSS files (design) in your blog/website and leave just the content in place.
That is what New York senator, Carl Kruger thinks! He claims that three people in his Brooklyn district have been killed in traffic accident caused by usage of electronic devices. 
Microsoft reports that 
Do you wait till the last minute to renew your domain name? Well, here is a
The