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Another BlogPress dump

SMALLER, smaller, sm

Everything is getting smaller. Smaller salaries smaller serving sizes, smaller houses, smaller silicon, smaller laptops, little cars, little phones, tiny mp3 players. When will we start to see smaller ego's?

Testing SMS post

If Oracle purchases Redhat...

...I quit.

Seriously, nothing good comes out of Oracle acquisitions. Larry Ellison and the Oracle monstrosity should stick with the database that made them so popular. In my opinion, Oracle has completely failed to integrate any open-source technology successfully. Talk to any middle-ware administrator and ask their opinion on OAS vs. others and you will likely find very few who would choose OAS over any of the latter. Oracle is trying to make moves too quickly in this space. They should put some real strategy together and give it time to grow, similar to what Sun Microsystems has done with open source technologies. If this acquisition does happen, it will be absolute zero kelvin for Redhat innovation. Not that Redhat had much going for it since they spun off as the Redhat Empire with the Fedora slave in tow, and ruined a great thing.

They will erase the trademark... Over the past few years many organizations have migrated to a Redhat platform, due primarily licensing to costs. Oracle is interested in buying it's customers back at a discounted price. There is nothing innovative about this. This is about growth, stock price and customer base. Oh, well, the writing was on the wall when Redhat went public anyway. Bye, it was fun...

iPhone 3G hacks - wasting ur tim3

The group of coders who hang out around the iphone-dev corner store have released code that jail breaks iPhone 2.0 firmware. The current version is PwnageTool 2.0.1. Don't waste your time hacking up your 3G unless your a tech junkie who like to smash things. Even with this successfully installed on the 3G iPhone your still stuck with AT&T. There are no SIM lock hacks for the current base-band firmware to remove the requirement to use a contract-bound carrier. However, you can use this firmware 2.0 hack on the iPhone 2G running 2.0 firmware. SIM hacks are readily available for this platform. I think, once the dust settles, the 2G iPhone will make a nice tech-junkie toy that you can pick up cheap on e-bay ;)

Don't waste your time. Be patient, and don't take the risk! The iPhone 3G will be available for direct purchase without a contract soon enough. Not to mention, no one I know actually complains about being an AT&T customer while toting an iPhone. 6 months from now you will be able to pick one up at a fraction of the total cost of ownership. Meanwhile, I'll continue to chuckle when I see new iPhone 3G users...

silly tech-junkie.

UPDATE 12 jan 09: hmmm, several months and still no word of carrier free iphones... maybe it would be worth it afterall?

UPDATE: Well, that took a long time, AT&T announced the availability of contract free iPhones, you're still bound to AT&T service, unless you pick up a factory unlocked 3G like those showing up on e-bay . (Watch out for the scams).

TrueCrypt 5.0 for Mac ...Finally, but bring some bug spray.

Truecrypt 5.0 for the mac has been released. I encountered an issue with permissions on the default install under leopard/intel. If you try to run it from finder as a normal user it spits out an "unsupported architecture" error. A quick work around is to set the binary to setuid:

sudo chmod u+s /Applications/TrueCrypt.app/Contents/MacOS/TrueCrypt

I'm not sure how to work in the Leopard privilege controls (still researching, they may fix it first) and I can make no guarantee that this is a "secure" means of running the software. i.e. if there are vulnerabilities in the TrueCrypt binary one could exploit the fact that it is setuid and take control of the system...

You would need to be local to the machine to do that.

The Windows XP/Vista full disk encryption works like a charm so far. Easy to use in a single partition/boot configuration. I have not used it under multi-boot or along side grub/lilo. Happy encrypting...

Also: checkout http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?p=1177223 since the TrueCrypt forums seem to be down ...like forever. There are some bugs in 5.0, maybe the dev team should have put out a beta for testing and while they were at it, fix their forums...

UPDATE: (2-8-8): Forums are back online. Thanks guys.

The Mac moves in..

Has anyone been to an Apple store lately? It's getting crowded in there...

Why are Macbooks, ipods and iphones gaining so much momentum these days? It wasn't too long ago when Apple product consumers were limited to the art crowd. At some point it spilled over to the main stream consumer. It's interesting to watch the progression of a trend or fab. I think their ad campaign is cheese though... specifically their whole PC vs. MAC guys on the white backdrop, cool dude with a not-so cool dude... come on, we're all geeks. Getting into a geek class system is insane and quite pretentious. And not to mention, we're comparing apples (pun intended) and oranges. Apple is a hardware/software package, Micro$oft typically is not. I have to admit, however, that I think this Apple surge will be a long standing mode of operation for technology consumers. This surge is based on good solid design principles with the help of popular culture, and when those two get together, they stick around for a long time. Take the mountain bike crowd for a comparable example...