The 6th incarnation of Elmer's blog
This is a private beta, with no date set for a more general public beta release.
Microsoft Delivers the ‘Other’ Longhorn Beta 1
“It’s not just the first beta of Windows client that is going to testers today. Microsoft also is delivering on Wednesday the first beta bits of its Longhorn Server product, due to ship in 2007.“
Looks like Microsoft is bringing Vista to beta a bit early. While the Vista homepage reports that the public beta will launch August 3, 2005, both Computerworld and Infotmation Week are reporting that a private relase of the beta will occur today, Wednesday July 27, 2005.
I’m a big fan of modifying your XP desktop to make it work better. The OSX route is one way to go. I prefer a complete shell replacement.
MAKE: Blog: Seven Steps to turn your PC into a Mac
“Instead of waiting for those Intel Macs to ship, you could just transform your XP PC in to a Mac, well- at least the look and feel. These are 7 steps to do just that. My pal Lenn did this awhile back, and people used to ask if his Sony laptop was some weird new Mac or something.”
Yeah, Sun open sourcing Solaris is old news, but in case you wondering there is a Freahmeat project for Solaris:
Good move for Yahoo! as it gives them direct access to the desktop on windows and Mac platforms. Expect a lot of little Yahoo!Widgets in the near future.
Macworld: News: Yahoo! acquires Konfabulator
“Yahoo! Inc. on Monday will announce the acquisition of Konfabulator, a Macintosh and Windows application that allows users to run mini files known as Widgets on their desktop — the same model used by Apple for its Dashboard application. Yahoo! company executives said they would also be giving Konfabulator away for free, completely doing away with the US$19.95 currently charged for the product.“
Slashdot | Full Debian ARM for Under $200
“With minor elbow grease, you can now set yourself up with a complete Debian ARM Linux box for under $200. This is thanks to Peter Korsgaard, who figured out a cool byteswapped kernel hack for the little $99 Linksys NSLU2. Add a $99 USB harddrive, and the tiny, cute, quiet ‘Slug’ can run any of about 16,000 Debian ARM packages, 24×7, for pennies per month worth of electricity, since ARM is still orders of magnitude more power-efficient than anything x86. Serve files, music, web pages, printers, backups, kernel images, webcams/motion detection, firewalls/routers, wireless access point… or whatever. Oh, did I mention you can overclock the Slug?“
Resuscitating Microsoft Exchange 5.5 with Linux – OSNews.com
“What we will be doing is running NT4/Exchange inside the Linux OS via a virtual machine, VMWare is the vm recommend for its ease of use and stability. We will use a more secure MTA, such as Postfix and we will receive mail via an Imap server, such as Cyrus. Exchange 5.5 will not connect to the Internet at all, and all mail will be filtered through the more secure systems before Exchange has to deal with it. We can even have Exchange 5.5 forgo all mail handling, and only perform address book and calendar sharing.“
Article provides a quick, non-detailed howto on getting Exchange 5.5 running on VMWare using Linux as the host OS. This provides a good way to secure Exchange from the outside world and is less disruptive to end users. It is interesting to note that VMWare can be used to run virtually any MSFT apps on a Linux host in a more secure environment.
SourceForge.net: File Release Notes and Changelog
“After a long and delicate development path, this is the final release of version 2.0. Now the editor is even more stable. Lots of key bugs have been fixed and a few and exiting new features has been added like native Flash support.”
I’m especially looking forward to Mozilla/Firefox support:)
NewsForge | MySQL migration: MyISAM to InnoDB
“The MySQL database is unique in that it offers multiple storage engines. The SQL parser and front end interfaces are separate from the storage engines, so you can choose among nine low-level table formats the one that suits your application best. I recently needed to convert a production application from the default indexed sequential format, MyISAM, to InnoDB.“
This excellent HOWTO on the MAKE blog is a great HOWTO on creating enhanced podcasts for iTunes 4.9 and iPod Color. There are some potential uses here in a lot of areas in the education arena. Think lectures with slides and links to notes. Biggest drawback right now: tools to create these are Mac only:(
MAKE: Blog: HOW TO make Enhanced Podcasts (images, links and more with audio)
“Apple’s new iTunes 4.9, iPod color, allows you to view (and listen to) “enhanced podcasts” these are audio files that can have slideshows, URLs and some cool features we have discovered. Apple’s included documents and a Wiki was all I needed to make our MAKE enhanced podcasts, but I also wrote a how-to. Here’s how to get, make and all you need to know about enhanced podcasts! As a bonus, we put together some fun ideas we think many might use…“