Starting up a new business.

Im starting up a new business, but not in computing. I will do that later on but not right now. In spirit of open source i will make it run Linux throughout from top to bottom. Everything from wifi access to book keeping.

If, and a big if, i get the time i will write about it here.

My Google Nexus One so far.

I got my Nexus One recently and i must say, im pretty impressed. The biggest difference to my old HTC Magic was the camera. The camera on the Nexus is much better and finally HTC is getting it as good as Nokias cameras in picture quality. The photos taken are pretty good even in dark conditions (with the flash on).

This picture was taken in complete darkness and i think its pretty ok considering its a mobile phone and there is not a single light helping out anywhere since the picture is taken in a basement.

Surfing is much faster thanks to the faster CPU and so are most other apps and the UI. The only time my phone lags is when i have loads of applications running in the background. Note that when it lags its not wait periods but flickering when changing home screen etc.

All in all its a very nice phone and i like the hardware very much, its a perfect complement to Android. Having Google branding it feels secure also since there will be no questions about upgrades etc being released on time.

Just ordered a Google Nexus One

Dang it, couldnt help myself. Just ordered a new phone while still very pleased with the one i have. The HTC magic is the best phone ive ever owned and that includes a whole lot of phones over the years. Ive gone through most brands and tried many various models, even an OpenMoko i hacked away on. I really wanted to try a Maemo phone but im so darn pleased with Android.

This year are going to be a very interesting and fun year. Microsoft hacking away like feverish beavers on WinMo7, Nokia and Intel bashing Maemo into shape, Palm hopefully getting some traction, Samsung Bada and all the rest who works like madmen to churn out better phones.

I would love to see this level of competition in the OS field. Come to think of it, whats stopping the next big thing on mobile to seep into home computers? Instead of our phones becoming complex, insecure attention whores what if our computers becomes easier, more secure and simpler? Imagine for a second having a computer you just use? No fiddling with strange settings, no anti-this and anti-that, no defrags, no strange errors happening every other full moon etc?

Your doing it wrong, CPU/GPU cooling should be passive!

One thing that i cant understand is why on earth the CPU is still situated inside the computer case. The same goes for the GPU but atleast some of the graphic card manufacturers have understood that its a good thing to atleast vent the hot air from the heatsink outside the case.

If you would put the hot parts of a computer on the opposite side of the motherboard it would be very easy to use passive cooling instead of using fans. A large heatsink sitting in room temperature can take away much more heat than a fan blown heatsink sitting in 35-50 degree celsius. Another plus side is that all the other parts in the computer can operate in much lower temps. Power consumption will also be much lower because no fans need to be running.

That not one single motherboard manufacturer or computer manufacturer has tried passive cooling is pretty sad. Its perfectly possible to build a high performance workstation that at the same time is dead silent without spending a fortune.

Google not under investigation, a lie and PR-trickery.

Apparently Google is not under investigation of the European Commision. Rather its standard procedure to make an inquiry when someone complains. An investigation is a whole other matter and much more serious than an inquiry.

We have some more info on ejustice.fr and from what i can read the man is very lost in the world of pagerank. Dominique Barella is the man to avoid if you want to learn SEO. "He complained that Google told him, not in writing but verbally, that Google would index eJustice's search results if eJustice could provide them in a manner accessible via Google's algorithms."

Well, duh? I cant provide my pages encrypted in wet sponge by truck and get them indexed by Google? How rude!

http://www.betanews.com/article/EU-denies-Google-is-under-investigation-early-evidence-appears-weak/1267034000

The complaint against Google is wrong but antitrust regulation is good.

I want to make clear that i have nothing at all against the European Commision doing an investigation on Google, what im against is the way it all happens and who initiates it. Google and the other big corps must be kept in check keeping the playing field level but it should be the EU that initiates the investigations, not a companies biggest competitor of all times.

In a market economy its important that we have the same rules for all the companies. By tailoring these rules we can make the corporations compete in a way that benefits society, consumers and corporations at the same time. The rules should punish competition by dirty tricks and backhand deals that dont in any way improve price, quality or service. For example, it is not acceptable to make a deal that takes away choice from consumers artificially keeping a competitor out of the question.

Without rules the market will premiere the tactics that gives the most money. Sadly the best way to get high returns involves having no competitors or teaming up against newcomers. As such, antitrust regulations are the most important bit of a free market.

Problem is, antitrust regulation is slow, easy to manipulate and often very political. There are numerous questions about a bunch of questions i would like to be answered long before the EU even think about regulating Google. The biggest one is how suddenly over night the choice of a Linux powered Asus eeePC disappeared, despite very good sales. This happened to coincide with Asus and Microsoft teaming up which is very strange. If Microsoft sweetened the deal in return for Asus stop selling computers with Linux its a serious offense that should be looked into right away.

The same goes for Microsoft running around telling people to license Linux related patents without specifying WHAT patents we are talking about so that Linux can avoid those or challange them. Talk about racketeering and coercing in its ugliest form. Its like saying, -"pretty car manufacturing you got there, wanna take my i-wont-sue-your-customers-to-pieces-insurance?"

I think all Microsofts OEM deals should be controlled and checked out, especially the marketing deals. If they in any way punish an OEM for also selling Linux or any other OS it should be severely punished.

My point is, yes Google needs to know they are under constant checking but there are much bigger fish to fry long before that.

My tinfoil hat suspicion is that much of this is Microsoft wanting to have something to point at in their quest to purport Google as the new Microsoft. Up until now Microsoft have found pretty much nothing as ammo against Google, which in itself is pretty calming. If they and their PR corps cant find dirt, Google is probably behaving pretty well for now.

Microsoft and the case against Google.

Microsoft have initiated a probe into Googles search rankings on Google search. The reason they say is that Google push competing companies down in the results.

This is utter bullshit to be frank and its not in any way proven or even plausible that Google push for eg. Foundem down. First of all its an aggregator that pulls content from all over and does not bring much of original content. Those are always ranked lower than the original content. Second the site in question is technically a howto about how not to make your site SEO friendly. Third, its not a popular site which itself makes it rank low when people who get it up as a result in their searches click something else instead. This link has a rebuttal for Foundem.

Foundem are a member of Microsoft founded ICOMP and CIAO! are owned by Microsoft Bing. It stinks and it stinks bad. The french legal search engine ejustice.fr have also filed a complaint but i fail to see where they compete with Google.

Most important of all, Googles search algoritm is very well explained and is well understood. Its hard to manipulate with SEO and is partly based on what users are clicking on. Even if you manage to get your site to show up high with SEO tricks if its not what people search for it will fall down in the results when its not what they was out to find.

The french ejustice.fr complaint is pretty strange. If i search for "legal search france" on bing i dont find it at all in the first 40 results. On altavista i just gave up after 60 results and the only way to find it was to use "ejustice" but that didnt put it better than place 7 in the results. One thing i learned was that there are tons and tons of legal search engines.

It seems ejustice.fr for starters wont show up in other search engines either and secondly have stiff competition from other identical services. It seems right now as if their complaint are that Google does not rank it much much higher than any other search engine.

CIAO! is complaining about standard terms and conditions which is funny. Read an Microsoft EULA from top to bottom, get help translating it into human language and think for a minute, how on earth could you do any worse than that? Then compare it with Googles terms and conditions. It will be an eye opening experience, i promise.

Some links for the interested ones:

DNA about the complaint

econsultancy about the same

A character assasination on a journalist.

Img courtesy of Juen.


Devil Mountain Software recently publicized numbers from their vast network of performance monitors that suggested Windows 7 has some of the same performance issues that Windows Vista has. A problem with how Windows 7 handles virtual memory seems to make the computers consume to much memory and not releasing it properly, thus resulting in sluggish trashing of the hard drives.


The research in question was overwhelmed by astroturfers crying out loud about anything they could think of but none of them managed to rebut the facts gathered. On many machines, Windows 7 is just as sluggish as Windows Vista. Its really not possible to argue about this, anyone can look at someones computer with less than 4 Gb ram and see it for themselves or look one with some heavy applications on. This research only supported that, yes, this seems to be the case for many computers. It proved what many of us has already seen for ourselves wasn't isolated happenings.

Now Microsoft has gone out and made an all out character assassination on Randall C. Kennedy because he had written under a pseudonym as Craig Barth. Writing like this under a different name is not exactly unheard of or even contested. 


Still even if it was bad not using your real name, the timing of the outing is all to convenient to be a coincidence.  From my understanding Windows 7 is really just Vista with some tweaks, twists and bugs fixed and as such has inherited much of the problems Vista was released with. Microsoft do not want that perception to leak out to the general public. They want people to think Windows 7 is much faster than XP, more secure and better in any way.


My belief is that Randall C. Kennedy hit a little to close to comfort and set the Microsoft PR-machinery into full action. If they hadn't found this, it would have been just about anything that could drag his name in the dirt.


The message is pretty clear, dont you dare write anything even remotely critical about Microsoft or their products. Sit journalist sit!

Been trying chrome OS out.

I have been trying Google Chrome OS out this weekend. I think it can be a success really because i dont feel as restrained as i thought i would. There are an explosion happening online with webapps sprouting up like wildfire.

If Google gets the security and manageless functions working as intended, this is THE computer for people who are either tired of messing about with updates, viruses, defrags and all the problem people associate with computers today.

if i think about that its just a rough snapshot  im sitting on it feels like its going to be very interesting to see what the end result looks like. This year is going to be very interesting indeed.

I hope that Googles ventures into the OS market will make other big companies like HP, Dell etc grow some balls and dare to challange Microsoft at this. We need development to start again in the OS market after 20 years of stalemate. There has been no progress at all on the deeper levels. Mostly its internet that has happened but not much else. Well, woopdedo, when was it the internet was started did you say?

Some games for my 4 year old Girl.

I have been checking around today for some games for my little linuxgirl today. Recently she has been wanting to sit at the computer and write randomly. She almost has the mouse covered so i thought it could be time to get some apps for her to play with.

I have downloaded a bunch and i will use her as a test subject. Well see what works and not later on.


Later on i think i should try  Qimo, a distribution based on Ubuntu for kids. Looks very interesting.

Very nice way of connecting your Linux desktop to your server with SSHFS.

One thing i have always struggled with is howto connect my desktop to my Linux servers or another Linux desktop. I have used SCP, SMB, FTP, NFS and various other ways but they have not been that optimal for my needs.

• I want my traffic to be encrypted or atleast the login to be. 
• Using the remote files should be transparent, both to me and all my applications.
• I want enough speed to be able to watch movies directly from files off of the remote computer.
• I want to have the same read/write permissions as the account i setup on the remote server.

SSHFS does all this in a very easy way. You mount your remote machine onto a normal user accounts home directory on its own folder. In my case i mount it to /home/username/Desktop/servername and get all my remote files right there on my desktop in the servername folder.

First you have to install FUSE if you dont already have support for it.

fuselink http://fuse.sourceforge.net/sshfs.html

Then make sure your user is in the fuse group so you have permission to use fuse at all.

Make sure the fuse module is loaded and then try it out.

The command for me is this:

 sshfs root@server:/folder/ /home/username/Desktop/servername/



If you want to make all this transparent, put the sshfs command in your autostart. Then export your keys to the remote server with ssh-copy-id.  See this excellent guide for more info about autostart.  Here you can learn howto login with ssh keys instead of passwords.

I realize it looks hard but its very much worth the hassle. Once done you have transparent access to your remote files over an encrypted tunnel.

A GUI managing this would make Linux to Linux file interaction be a lot easier and above all much safer than most other systems. Copying SMB is a huge step backwars in my opinion.

You think Google is bad? Think again.

Microsofts recently started a campaign against Google that in some ways are pretty funny. The result arent really optimal as the worst i have heard is "Google will become Microsoft one day". If all you can do is making your opponent looking as bad as you, your PR firms aren't really worth their money. I also find it pretty amusing that people think the worst thing that could happen a competing company would be if they turned into a new Microsoft. Your customer confidence rating must be pretty low for that to happen.

That said, while Google no doubt has flaws its nowhere near Microsoft. First of all, Google are not a convicted for anything illegal yet. Its history is clean as a babys bottom. This while Microsoft has seen more courtrooms than most Judges. I also have a hard time appointing someone the next successor in line before they actually does something pretty bad.

Google could in theory do criminal  but so could you, or your mother, spouse or kids. That doesn't mean you run around calling them criminals if they have behaved good up until now. A military or hunter isn't a murderer just because they possess a weapon. You need intent and malice for the crime to be committed, not just the weapon.

Microsoft on the other hand do have a criminal record. They have countless successful suits against them. Evidence are in abundance for anyone to read and review. Much of their email correspondence is out in the open from various trials. If in doubt i recommend reading at least some of it just so you don't think its all some conspiracy theory. Its real, it has happened and its thoroughly documented.

    Microsoft timeline
    Suits against MS, other legal issues. 

Now that you have read Microsoft's history you know they did not start all nice and cuddly. They started out bad  to the bone and it has paid off, handsomely.

Google on the other hand is a counter reaction to this. In ways its an experiment, can you make a successful company by being nice? Is it possible to compete against adversaries like Microsoft even if you play fair?

Take a look at the google critisizm page over at Wikipedia. Its at best a description of what possibilities Google have should they turn "evil" tomorrow. I tried searching for more criticism in Microsoft Bing but it didn't turn up much at all. Its all about potential privacy issues should Google go bad.

I'm really not defending Google, i just want to put things into perspective. As i said before, Google has its flaws but compared to most of the competition in the IT world they are very trivial and insignificant so far. Compared to Microsoft, Larry Page and Sergey Brin should have angel wings and rings over their heads.

This could change but there is absolutely nothing pointing at that direction today.

Hackers release fix for XP crashing BSOD problem.

The authors of the TDSS/Tidserv/TDL3 rootkit has released an update that eliminates the problems with Microsofts MS10-015 update. It seems as if the MS10-015 patch conflicts with the rootkit installed in many computers. The update downloads and install itself in the background. No user intervention is needed at all.

Am i the only one finding this event hysterically funny? At the same time its disturbing that so many Windows computers have rootkits on them.

Read more at Zdnet

Chrome OS is starting to gain momentum.

With the new version of Chromium OS distilled and packed by hexxeh things is really looking as if they are taking off. Chromium OS is the open source version of Google Chrome OS. While its not Googles official version its very nice to see the development of the OS in almost realtime. 

I could rant all day long about the new version of hexxeh's Chromium build but i just toss the links here for anyone to read.

Hexxeh Chromium build
Hexxeh Blog

HP Airlife 100, a real netbook.

I have read about the HP Airlife 100 on various sites and by the look of it, this is the type of portable computer i have been waiting for. If priced right this is something that can be to HP what the eeePC was to Asus. The revolutionary isn't the size, software or hardware. The really interesting bit is that its very power efficient thanks to its mobile phone roots.

How about 12 hours of  active use or 10 ! days of standby? Note that having this computer in standby is nothing like having a laptop in power saving mode, especially with android. You still get notifications about incoming events, mail and other things.

It also sports a GPS receiver, Ndrive turn by turn GPS software and anything you can download from Android Market.

I can truly say, i want one of those really bad. HP is totally nuts that dont market this worldwide right now. Its a "must have fsck food for a month" kind of product.

PS. Oh, and i forgot, it has a touchscreen. DS.

Original spanish HP announcement
English translation of the original HP announcement.
Slashgear has some purdy pictures of the little gem.

Image courtesy of openclipart.org

Mark Shuttleworth is a bit naive.

Saw an excellent blog-post from TheOpenSourcerer  and then Marks answer. Then TheOpenSourcerer made a followup.

In essence TheOpenSourcerer  begs the question, is canonical slipping towards Microsoft and away from the free software goals?

I would rather say Shuttleworth is setting himself up to be knocked down by being all to nice to a predatory company.

One comment made by Shuttleworth is very alarming:

"But I'm not here to punish Microsoft, or hate them, I'm here to build a better way, if I can. It will be hard, but we can. And in the cases where we have common cause, I am happy to work with Microsoft. That may be a hard concept for people who think that life is easier to understand if you have an enemy to make your own cause right, but I find that attitude leads to bigotry and bad results, and makes it impossible to get past the wrongs of the past."

If Mark Shuttleworth takes a quick gander backwards he will see a ton of wreckege. A pileup of past companies that had the same view on Microsoft lies there in rumbles. History is a good indicator of what lies ahead and ignoring it will never lead to success. Its good to be looking forward but you cant just close your eyes and pretend some things never happened.

The reason you never work with Microsoft has nothing to do with hate, its about survival. The concept of cooperation just isn't in their vocabulary.

Calling these protests about mono and yahoo Microsoft-hate is wrong. We want canonical to survive but not as a vehicle for Microsoft to destroy Linux. Internal email from Microsoft clearly states Linux is Microsofts biggest enemy. The Halloween documents still apply inside Microsoft. Your dilusional if you think MS want to play all nice and clean this time when it has never happened before.

Mark writes:

"Nor were we willing to accept Microsoft's terms of IP licensing, as Novell did. But if there are constructive places where we can work with Microsoft, or Oracle, or IBM, all of whom ship quite a lot of proprietary software, we certainly will engage openly and in good faith. And I believe we do so with the full support of the leaders of the Ubuntu community."

Canonical has clearly accepted Microsofts licensing of the patents in mono and all the loose ends about it.

About working with Microsoft in good faith, again, its only possible if the other side does the same. Why would you go in knowing the other side uses every possible cheat in the book?

The leaders of the Ubuntu community? Since when was Linux about some leaders telling users and developers what to do? Its a grassroots movement, not some kind of pyramid. This is the statement that disturbs me the most. What about the users? I read this as a "end of discussion!", that canonical lost the argument and decided they know best and just ignore the little guys.

Remove mono from Ubuntu.

I really think Canonical should think again about including mono in Ubuntu default installation. Its one thing being able to install it if you need it but its really not good that you need it on your default installation. Every single mono app, from banshee to Novells services on Mono i work with all day have a single common denominator, they suck. Memory, performance and stability are nowhere to be found.

Mono could be tossed out on technical merits alone. But thats not where the problem lies. First of all, what application are we getting that we miss in the vast free software world today? I dont know of anything i miss and im very sure the same goes for most users. If you need a Windows application your chances are far greater if you use Wine than someone being able to get a dotnet app working in mono. Im still waiting for someone getting a dotnet app working reliably in Windows (a real one where more than the interface is written in dotnet).

Second of all, why should Linux be the enabler for Microsfts lies about cross platform compability? If Microsoft wants dotnet on Linux, let them make a runtime of their own just like SUN, Adobe or anyone else. That way any compability issue, patent problem or other IP rights are Microsofts own problem.

Putting Mono in Ubuntu is a timebomb waiting to explode and gives the community nothing while it gives Microsoft all the ammo they could ever wish for.

Ask yourself, why are the biggest astroturfers also the most enthusiastic proponents of Mono on Linux? Shouldnt they want Linux to miss this "excellent" technology?

Linux users have proven themselves very picky before and migrated in droves from popular projects and distributions over night. Ubuntu is no exception and if Canonical dont start to listen to their users they could find themselves obsolete very fast.

If canonical wants money, sell something, anything and ill buy. I dont need support but i would gladly pay for other stuff. An app store with games, movies, music, anything.

One thing i would gladly pay for as well would be turn key ready solutions like ebox on the server side. 

Embracing open source and then censoring it?

I find it very disturbing that Gnome has seen an influx of Microsoft tendencies past year. People like Miquel De Icaza and Philip Van Hoof censor any and all who will post any critic about Microsoft or their technologies. Its bad enough that they are sucking Microsofts tits and implementing inferior buggy infrastructure like dotnet in Linux.

Read this link for more background

Open source are supposed to build on open discussion. Reaching a common conclusion isnt the important part. The crucial thing is having an open honest discussion.

The good part is that people all over starts to realize, you cant play nice with Microsoft. Even if you have good intentions, Microsoft never has and never will. Ask Novell and Yahoo, the latest companies going down the drain just after teaming up with MS.

The Free Software Foundation is more important than ever because open source without them is just being able to read obfuscated code under an NDA. If i would want that i could just as well sit down with a decompiler and a Windows disk.

How Google could take a hefty piece of the SMB market.

No matter how you build a network you sooner or later want to login to something locally. It may be a printer, a firewall, NAC, intranet or a wireless network.

With Google Apps all your accounts are in the "cloud" and there arent any easy way accessing them from a local network, especially before you have been connecterd to the net.

Google could in theory put together a key-turn server where the accounts in Google Apps are synced to a local server that handles nothing more fancy than LDAP and Radius.

This way a  new company could easily use Google apps and this LDAP server as the foundation for other services that are local. Im currently working on implementing Google Apps myself and this is what i lack. I dont want to run a Novell, Microsoft or SUN server, i just want a simple way of having local access to the accounts in the cloud.

I manage to setup my own LDAP/Radius but most SMB dont. Bring this missing key and i think many more companies will consider Google Apps.

Miquel is working hard for his money.

Our favourite OSS poser Miguel de Icaza is at it again. This time spreading his usual lies about ODF. His goal has always seemed being about getting employment at Microsoft (he was turned down once) and im beginning to realize he must already have gotten it.

I was about to write it up but Roy has an excellent aggregate of all the surrounding facts.

http://boycottnovell.com/2010/02/12/msft-gameplay-vs-odf/

I guess it all comes down to the fact that denmark has chosen ODF. A couple of countries more and Microsofts strangehold on Office suites are but a memory of the past. For the new people in this saga i can tell that ODF is something that scares Microsoft. Its a common format for document exchange so that it doesnt matter what office suite you use.

Remind yourself again, why do you use MS Office really. Is it because you cant exchange documents with others if you dont? Your systems only work with .doc, .xls etc?