Yusuf Goolamabbas

A while back, a cousin of my wife asked me what type of music I liked. I said “80’s music”

I’m a child of the 80s and I take great pride in it.

Recently I came across an 80’s classic, Stevie B’s ‘Spring Love‘

The video can be funny to those used to the slick production of today

Recently I found out that ‘Spring Love’ was remixed into the New Millennium ‘Spring Love 2007′ in a collaboration between Pitbull and Stevie B

I’ll take the original over the innovation any day

Technorati Tags : freestyle stevieb pitbull miami

David Pogue of the Missing Manual fame has compiled a list of frequently asked questions (FAQ) about the Apple iPhone

FAQ is available at David’s blog

In a recent survey of global courtesy, Readers Digest found Bombay — now officially called Mumbai — to be the rudest city on earth.

Funny, reading through various blogs and online news report, one would think that there was an immediate transplant of residents from some other place.

Maybe this sounds selfish, but I hope that none of your loved ones were hurt, and that nobody you know personally was hurt. Obviously everyone was somebody’s loved one, and for them I am sorrowful.

One may be far away from Bombay but you can never take the Bombayite out of you

Technorati Tags:
Bombay

I hope SABDFL Mark Shuttleworth managed to retain a few of his ex-Thawte colleagues. Whilst looking at the Ubuntu download page I clicked upon the release notes which were behind this SSL link.

The certificate had expired on January 2006 and this resulted in lots of warnings from Camino. Personally, I don’t see why the release notes had to behind https unless Canonical is using this to test out the SSL offload capabilities of the Niagara.

Technorati Tags:
Ubuntu, Linux

I came across this very interesting viral marketing campaign run by MacZot (think of it as the Woot for Mac users) for SubEthaEdit from Coding Monkeys (the collaborative text editor)

MacZOT and TheCodingMonkeys will award $105,000 in Mac software

This is how they are doing it

BlogZOT 2.0 on MacZot

BlogZOT! uses the power of blogs to create value for all Mac users. In today’s example: Each qualified blog entry reduces the price of SubEthaEdit from $30.00 to $0.00 by $0.05 per entry. For each entry, that’s $166+ given back to the Mac community.

BlogZOT instructions. Please READ them as we won’t have time to answer emails about BlogZOT until after it’s over.

1. You can purchase SubEthaEdit on MacZOT.com at anytime today using the Buy button above at the current price.
2. If you’d rather pay less, you can help by getting bloggers to post a comment about SubEthaEdit being the BlogZOT 2.0 on MacZOT.com
3. BlogZOT 2.0 will run until the end of the day 11:59 pm in California or until 3,000 copies of SubEthaEdit have been awarded to BlogZOT participants.
4. Bloggers who participate and enter a working email will receive a SubEthaEdit registration if the goal of reducing the price to $0.00 is accomplished.

I’ve been using SubEthaEdit 2.2 on and off. This is the last version which was free for non-commercial use. It’s a nice text editor but I really haven’t had the chance to play with the collaborative side of things. I think this viral marketing campaign will go a long way in improving SubEthaEdit’s reach

Slashdot can be disastrous to your keyboard and monitor. Some comments definitely need some Surgeon General like warning

Before IDF, CPU choices particularly if you were looking for performance and reasonably good thermal envelope was easy. The AMD64 in all its variant pretty much ruled the roost.

Now, 2006 is looking to be a very interesting year particularly if you are looking at a hardware refresh in the second or third quarter. As detailed in this RealWorldTech post by David Kanter, Intel’s new Core Architecture is shaping up to be a strong contender.

Combine this with Apple’s switch to Intel and the possibility of combining good hardware from Intel with the slickness of MacOSX will be very compelling.

With virtualization support native to the CPU, it will be uber-cool if somebody like VMWare came up with VMWare for OSX. That would make MacOSX/Intel the platform of choice for developers particularly in the web space (test Firefox/IE/Safari from one box).

There have been lots of blog posts about the new Intel Core Duo based iMac and MacBook Pro released at Macworld San Francisco yesterday. Personally I think that iLife ‘06 is a very significant upgrade and people might be underestimating how many users will finally get to effectively use their digital cameras, digital video cameras. I’ve ordered my copy and look forward to playing with it

Technorati Tags:
MacWorld, iLife

Been reading a lot of blogs about ZFS . It’s mind blowing. Take a look at the screencasts done by Dan Price .

Sun currently uses the tag line “ZFS: The last word in filesystems”. From what I read and saw, I immediately felt that sysadmins who start their career with zfs will never understand the pain felt by people who’ve gone through volume management, fsck, moving filesystems around. A lot of sysadmins have missed crucial moments with their loved ones because they were fighting fires. ZFS makes that a bad dream

I feel Sun Marketing should market ZFS as

“ZFS: Because your family deserves it”

Congratulations to team ZFS and particularly to Jeff Bonwick who had the vision and courage to “think different”

A shout out to our friends at Sun Beijing, there are a truckload of installations running Linux/BSD boxes using 3ware. Get a 3ware/Areca/Qstor driver in Solaris 10 at the earliest and Solaris/ZFS becomes the NAS OS of choice.

I cut my teeth with SunOS/Solaris. With the recent release of Studio 11, it’s going to be very compelling. I hope the Solaris hackers can put some love into the installer and provide some update tools like yum,apt-get.

utorrent a Windows bittorrent client has been getting rave reviews amongst its early adopters. It’s only 94KB in size and its typical memory usage is around 4MB

With the upcoming release of Firefox 1.5, I think the Mozilla crew should start publicising this bittorrent client so that more people use Bittorrent as a mechanism to help spread Firefox

According to this news report at Internet News, Skype supposedly has licensed video codecs from On2 technologies whose previous codec VP3 is the basis for the open source Theora codec.

Public beta is thought to be scheduled for end-of-August. Will be very interesting to see how video conferencing takes off with this.

Pair Networks which is a very fine webhost and is well known as a FreeBSD shop contributed US$ 14,000 to support Andre Opperman for his TCP/IP optimization work.

Pair had previously donated a sizable amoount for Poul Henning Kamp’s work on buffer cache cleanup and optmisation and now are doing the same for the tcp/ip stack.

I really think this is a very fine gesture.

The blogosphere is abuzz about the news that Apple plans to ditch IBM and move to Intel . WWDC just got a whole lot more interesting.

I am still ambivalent about this news. Whilst part of me wants to believe that Apple will “switch”, this type of news has come up far too often that it would seem like a ploy to get Apple some leverage with IBM.

Will need to seek some rumor sites who are going to transcribe the keynote in real-time.

My previous post made me think about some sacred cows in the community project I am associated with. A friend identified 4 options

1. Maintain status quo
2. Build a new team to learn infrastructure
3. Don’t be hung up on the existing toolchains, if need be completely change the toolchain if people are available with skill sets in the new toolchain
4. Outsource the infrastructure

• Option 1 is a non-starter since its obvious that status quo is not working
• Option 2 is only possible if the new team hits the ground running and doesn’t need to take any resources from existing players.
  Training the new team is not an option since that itself takes a massive time commitment
  Anybody who says otherwise has never worked in the trenches
• Option 3 is conceptually similar to Option 4. People who like to do backseat driving would feel uncomfortable with this since it represents a change but its obvious that they have no clue to the cost of option 1 and 2. For them, I can only say
  

  Change is the only constant

However, I would like to challenge a “sacred cow” which is

Should this community project exist at all today ?

The circumstances in which the project was initiated and the circumstances today are very different. Its possible that resources of the ‘community’ are better utilised by disbanding the current project and having the alumni of the project move to other projects which have more ground support and mindshare.

Thanks to the cool Dashboard in the Wordpress 1.5 series, I found out about the 1.5.1.2 security release. The fix was very quick though I would really like the Wordpress team to change their release mechanism. The tarball should be named
wordpress-version.tar.gz and it should untar to wordpress-version. Currently they use latest.tar.gz and it untars to a ‘wordpress’ subdir

Also, via Richard Brown of VIA marketing I got to know about the VIA C7 (Esther core) launch. There has been a lot of print on its low power,low cost and how VIA plan to make a big buzz in laptops and price sensitive countries. In my humble opinion, I think VIA should highlight the work OpenBSD has done on supporting the crypto hardware onboard the C7. In June 2004, Theo De Raadt of OpenBSD fame mentioned that he was getting 800 RSA signs/sec on what I guess would be pre-production hardware.

VIA should look at the availability of the ‘NX’ bit and the fast crypto command to create buzz for both WindowsXP support for NX and reduced risk of viruses as well target the infrastructure operator and suggest that OpenBSD+C7 boxen can become SSL proxy boxes for different services.

Ali informed me that he was not able to trackback to my last post. A bit of googling indicated that there was some issues with trackback particularly on hosts which disable fopen which is what my webhost Dreamhost seems to be doing.

So a few more google searches later, I figure that it shouldn’t be that difficult to upgrade Wordpress to version 1.5.1.1. I plunged ahead and voila, a shiny new look which I kinda like, trackback works and Ali says that I generate cache-friendly headers.

A big thank you to the Wordpress gang

For a long time I have assisted a community in building out some infrastructure so that they would have an online prescence. Over time, focus has shifted to generating content and publishing that whilst the number of volunteers working in the trenches has diminished substantially. It could be my fault that I was not able to attract a core of people who believe in the value of infrastructure. I’ll accept it as my weakness but unfortunately it puts a lot of burden on me and I no longer find the motivation to work on this.

Some of this lack of motivation has to do with differing views with various key players, some volunteers who have great heart but don’t bring anything substantial in expertise to the table, others who want to morph the vision so that it is “politically correct” . A lot also has to do with the nature of communication, it’s very rare to meet other volunteers face to face and timezone differences make it difficult to do voice communication though I have tried often to call people instead of emailing them. Sadly this isn’t done by other old-timers.

It seems that there is an illusion that the infrastructure is more capable than it appears and since things have been working for a while, people’s attitude have been “No point in working in the trenches, It’s not something end-user visible”

It’s a struggle working with people who know the value of everything but the cost of nothing. I just don’t have the energy to do this anymore.

He has said it in a way that just says “wow”

Been busy with work related things hence the quietness on the blog front. I need to spend some time figuring out the best way to upgrade my Wordpress installation.

I had access to a Sun v40z Quad Opteron box in the office for some time. Very nicely engineered box, noisy as hell (12 fans I think). Ran some of my workloads on CentOS 4.0 and Fedora Core 3. Wanted to install Solaris 10 but ran out of time. I also have a socket 754 AMD64 box (MSI K8MM-V). The mobo is very nice and compact and runs very quiet. It’s running FC3 for now. I plan to install FC4 on it soon and see if there is any perf improvement with the toolchain compiled with gcc4

The AMD64 box with 1GB RAM and 2×120GB SATA cost around HK$ 3500 (US$ 450).

After a long break, got back into playing with Cherokee . Alvaro’s been doing a great job on it. He’s got event ports support now, epoll works more reliably now and I am very grateful that he took my suggestion and enabled O_NOATIME support in it. I think Cherokee needs some online documentation and then some evangalism to get more users using it.

According to the South China Morning Post SCMP (subscription required) , two more mobile phone operators launched third-generation (3G)services on Tuesday - but only for customers who had already ordered handsets. Anyone going into a CSL or SmarTone shop hoping to sign up on the first day of service was asked to put down a deposit on handsets - for delivery after Christmas.

Users are complaining that handsets they offered were still expensive and their multimedia content not attractive enough.
Looks like the market might appreciate the rumored iPhone from Apple

As to lack of content, my previous post mentions the need for Apple Hong Kong to get more aggressive in evangalizing Quicktime