Minds Eye

Firstly it has been far too long in between posts. I blame nothing but me :-(, although work has been busy and many late nights as well as weekends away on family holidays.

Couple of things I want to mention. I have installed (tri-booting now) OpenSUSE 11.0, Fedora 9 and Ubuntu Hardy 8.04. All 64bit versions on my primary work/production laptop and have been flicking between them for about 3 weeks on random almost daily basis. I have been using a combination of shared home drives and soft links between separate distros depending on which distro I set up the various components I use. By this I mean that Ubuntu was the first to have all my music copied onto it and therefore became the default location to point all music players, whereas Fedora was the place I copied a lot of home movies for editing to, so that became the default Kino and editing partition. Get the idea?

This has been an awesome time for comparisons and learning about the pros and cons of each. I am not writing a review and will not be going into depth on anything here, but to mention a couple of new apps which I have been using and think are improving to the point of being well above and "leaner" than other non-mentioned competing distros.

Banshee-1 is absolutley awesome. It is faster to read in new library locations, has great podacst and videocast support and also includes iPod support which makes the entire music, podcast, video experience seamless and brainless. Well done the Banshee developers on this one.

OO 2.4.1 across all three loads faster and has not crashed across any distro.

Firefox v3 is now standard in all 3 distros and that just makes browsing a pleasure.

I have been monitoring other features like suspend and hibernate. Hibernate works flawlessly across all 3 distros, but suspend works on OpenSUSE11 and Ubuntu but has a weird quirk on Fedora where it works the first time and then hangs on resume during the second attempt??? I have no idea there and have not had the time to look into it.

That being said the laptop support of wireless and suspend/hibernate has progressed a long way in the last 2 years.

I have had another play with Xen which has had its ups and downs across the three distros and the most success on Fedora.

As far as package management goes Ubuntu comes out well in front followed by Fedora and finally OpenSUSE. Not to be down on OpenSUSE's YaST, I just found it slower and more cumbersome than the other two. It was also the only package manager to crash when selecting packages to install which was rather off putting.

All in all I am not sure which I would recommend? For me as someone who can get the source of the problems pretty quickly and sort them out just as quickly I still lean towards Fedora, although for the new convert and no brainer install and usage I may lean towards Ubuntu. I will continue to use the three as regularly as is practical and just see what else crops up as worth mentioning.

How long until these distros (or their enterprise big brothers) are ready for the enterprise? Not long for the average user, the only thing holding them back will be integration into corporate and enterprise proprietary systems. Both of which will be changing over time as providers move to web based and more standards compliant solutions.

I know I am just reporting on other news sites articles, but these couple are a bit exciting. I tried out Funambol a couple of months back and was pretty damn impressed on the services that it provided and the ease with which it allowed me to integrate and synchronise my emails, calendar and contacts between multiple platforms, clients and devices.

Now the project has earned itself the interest and captial investment from Nexit Ventures as reported in ComputerWorld.

In similar vein it was interesting to see that Nokia are attempting to combat the lull in business device releases that would compete against the recently released iPhone. They are promoting the E71 (successor to the E61) and the E66 (to the untrained eye looks like the N95). Unfortunately neither of them are listed on the Australian Nokia site, but here's hoping that they make there way here soon.

The Nokia devices article has again been reported on the CompterWorld site.

How do you manage the daily backups of your company. Do you rely on tapes which are rotated daily, or contain series of incremental backups from a monthly/weekly master?

How quickly can you restore from these backups? Do you need to restore the master and then incrementals from this point? Are the backups taken off-site regularly or are they done over the Internet to a remote site to start with?

Are you using a remote office site to store replica data sets on and how often are they synchronised or replicated?

If they are off-site, either remotely via the Internet or physically via some medium, how quickly can you restore from these backups to get a business up and running which had been totally burnt to the ground?

All questions which I ask myself when I am trying to answer and overcome the problem of data storage explosions and the expectation that everything is backed up and immediately recoverable.

I am currently using a set of external hard disk drives which are rotated through sets of daily and weekly units and provide daily backups for a fortnight and weeklies which will span 2 months. Is this enough for our company who have (a moderately small at) 300Gb requirements of data which needs to be restoreable for disaster recovery?

What is the best practice used for these scenarios?? We do not need tape libraries and I do not see the need for this amount of data backup to grow beyaond 500Gb in the next 5 years.

Thoughts and suggestions welcome.

I have recently signed up to Twitter and Gmail to try out the services and see how they all actually work. I already have a long standing Yahoo email account and am still using that.

I have also installed Funambol to sync Gmail and Yahoo with my mobile phone and Thunderbird/Lightning/Sunbird/Evolution which is all working almost perfectly - there are some apps which partly sync, but with errors at the moment, I am sure I will iron them out if I continue using them.

I installed Abiro Jitter on my mobile phone to keep up with the people I am following on Twitter. I installed the Funambol email client which I am big fan of over the default IMAP interface (easier to read the text and the like) but takes more memory (JAVA app) to run and when I can sync using the built in sync utils over SyncML to the Funambol server really seems like bloatware when running 5 or more apps at once.

I then signed up for a Google Apps Premier account to see what they are offering over and above the default apps which are available to the average Joe Blow on the web. So far it appears that it is mainly about the hosting of a domain email system, some default calendar and contact integration between members of the same Premier account, email client uptime and that is about it.

So what is it I am trying to achieve by signing up to all these, apart from trying it all out? I am not quite sure, but it has opened my eyes to a much larger audience of high volume Internet users and contributors. These people and groups are contributing in many personal and professional ways and some almost appear to live their lives on the Internet. All interactions and arrangements are done and managed via the Internet. Gmail, Twitter and Yahoo just facilitate all of this. Food for thought there - where are we heading with the "Information Super Highway" and where will it all lead??

Other things on my radar include HDD encrytion for laptops, including hardware and software based solutions, VoIP (as always), wireless network bridging and the latest RC of Ubuntu......

I use RSS feeds to stay on top of the *news* relating to topics that I am interested in. I use Liferea on my laptop and desktop and have an RSS reader buily into my phone that I use when I am on the run.

I may have the concept completely wrong here, but when I read the feeds I expect to read the whole article/content. I would not expect that I be forced to then open up a full blown browser session to read the entire entry. If that was the case then why bother with the RSS in the first place.

I understand that there are some feeds  syndicating "articles" which may be reviews or commentaries spanning multiple *pages* when you visit the web site and I accept that teasers for these sites will require you to follow the link back to get the full story. For the majority of blog RSS feeds though I really so no need to visit the site for 600 or so words.

Why do basic blog sites suffer this fate. I use RSS so I do not have to visit 50 sites individually to get the news. If your RSS gives me nothing and I have to click through to the site, then why provide the RSS.

My ranting thoughts...any other views out there?

Just recently GMail users have been granted IMAP access to their GMail accounts. I believe at no cost and as part of the standard feature set for all users.

I have had a search around the Yahoo blogs and service info sites and found that there was such a service for Yahoo users. The settings are not working for me now, and others are saying that it no longer works for them.

Now obviously Yahoo did offer this service and did it before the big G. Don't get m e wrong here Yahoo I am a big fan, I have an active Yahoo email account and regularly use the Yahoo search before using Google (if at all).

So Yahoo, what is the go here? If you were offering the service then what happened to make you drop it? If you were offering this service shouldn't everyone have had it by default or is there something else going on here. If you are serious about competing with GMail and to boot you have just purchased Zimbra then why no IMAP access?

I would certainly use it from home, work and on my phone!!!

My rant for the day......

I have been pretty happy with the new phone I have for work use, the Nokia E61i. I won't go into to detail but the reason for this phone was primarily as a pilot to test functionality and usage against the Blackberry 8800 which is the latest standard device being used where I work. I have been looking for alternatives to the apparent lock in to Blackberry devices, which is not really that hard once you start to look.

To cut to the chase - I have been watching pretty closely the Google mobile apps and particularly the Google earth for mobiles which now can provide a fairly accurate location without the use of GPS. It just uses the mobile tower connections to determine (within around 1-2kms) where you are.

Today on the way home I decided to try it out. While travelling along I fired up the Google earth app and started requesting updates to my current location. Now to my surprise the thing was pretty accurate. When I say pretty accurate, I mean the closest approximation it got was 1300m, and the furthest was 2400m. I know there is a bit of variance in there, but that is still pretty cool for a first release and using nothing but mobile phone tower connection information.

On top of all this it is around a 700kb download, provides execllent searching, is smaller than the Nokia supplied "Nokia Maps", runs faster than the Nokia Maps app and has more features.

Just another cool and geeky feature which puts this device above the standard Blackberry for much less wallet damage.

Each to there own!!!