Raspberry Pi: Alpha boards in manufacture

Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced that alpha boards for a $25 ARM mini system are in manufacture and that they still expect to ship before end of 2011. Their intention is to "promote the study of computer science and related topics, especially at school level, and to put the fun back into learning computing." like in earlier days BBC did with their BBC Micro. It is amazing that it even is possible to produce such a device at that size and such a price. Intel really should worry about their portfolio with it's too power hungry Atom derivatives.

Key LulzSec figure nabbed as new attack on PayPal launched

Ars Technica has the news that Lulzsec now launched a legal attack against Paypal. In the mean time officials claim to have arrested a key figure of Lulzsec which is highly unlikely. Of course officials have a lot of resources to their account but the core of Lulzsec has shown skills that are a rare breed in any government related organisation. More likely they got some unskilled scriptkiddies who took part in the DDOS-attacks against Paypal with their own ip-address.

Closing your Paypalaccount by the way is not a bad idea: besides their boycot of Wikileaks donations, they also change their terms of services at a regular basis. And they always change in the advantage of Paypal not to their customers. Apparently they have grown that big that they do not need more customers.

Facebook: Tilera Boosts Memcached Efficiency

Data Center Knowledgehas a topic about Facebook testing a Tilera system with Tile processors for utilizing Memcached the caching system used bij Facebook and other very big webserverfarms. The Tile processor is a multicore design, with the cores communicating via a mesh architecture, called iMesh. It is intended to scale to hundreds of cores on a single chip. The system tested performed better in terms of performance-per-watt then X86 systems. Overall performance of the Tile processor is questionable though and just this niche in the servermarket alone is hardly financially interesting. That and it's incompability with X86 architecture makes it a ideal takeover by one of the other big fabs: Intel or Chinese Godson.

Big Content's latest antipiracy weapon: extradition

Ars Technica reveals the latest anti-piracy weapon from the big media corporations: requesting extradition. It is a quite alarming trend that criminal charges are used for something that in reality is a civil matter. The accused Richard O'Dwyer is not a citizen of the USA, does not have servers in the USA and did not do anything illegal in the UK. But the power from this big corps is challenging the leftover pieces of civil liberties and apparently nothing is gonna stop them. Which also has been shown with a other piece on Ars Technica about Peter Adekey which has been arrested in Canada and requested for extradition based on falsified evidence. Which happen to be a friendly service to Cisco from the NSA. Cisco wanted to influence a civil suit from Adekey against Cisco about maintenance contracts. Both cases seem to be a landmark that we now are officially living in a global plutocracy.

X2GO open source terminal server project: a nice surprise!

After a long, very long night struggling with NoMachine NX Free Edition for Linux on a Ubuntu 10.04 LTS server. And after that NeatX which has it's own problems, I searched for a alternative for remote desktop use with a Linux desktop.

And I did find X2GO an open source terminalserver project which borrowed some of the sourcecode of NeatX but is a real development on it's own. With a lot of enhancements the Free NX version or NeatX does not have so far. But what I like the most is after installation it's working instantly! And of course they have a lot of desktop clients too, including a Maemo client and a PXE-boot thin client.

One caveat of NX is its use of an authorizationscheme beneath the standard ssh daemon. Default it will allow anyone who has access to ssh but will add another user/password scheme to it. This because it can also be used isolated from any system user besides the nx user. My problem with server/node/client version 3.5.0-4/3.5.0-3/3.5.0-7 was that I could login to ssh, I could login to nx with ssh and NX's public DSA key but not with the NX-client software self. It was bugging me about a public key authorisation error and would not start even when in the logs I could see that my userid already had been authorized. I searched the net endlessly to no avail every solution I already tried. At 3.00 AM in the morning I quite pissed decided it had been enough and I removed NX totally from the server.

This morning I tried NeatX but this did not work either out of the box and removed it too. Maybe to quick and maybe there is a easy way to fix it but I did not intend to spend another day in searching. In my search yesterday for a solution for NX someone mentioned X2GO as a replacement and I though WTH let's give it a try. The only small problem I had were the PGP keyserver not being online so my installed version was not verified by a PGP key. Anything else went well and worked out of the box. The client offers the possibility to login with a username/password or a username/RSA key or a username/DSA key combination. As a bonus it is very fast too, faster then NX as far I can see. Recommended!

IIS 7, rewritemod2 and Drupal

Last time I have been tinkering with a Drupal installation on a Windows system with IIS 7 on it. Drupal 7 will not install when the fixed rewritemod2 for IIS 7 is not installed and informs you about it. Because I do not shutdown a production system easily I opted for Drupal 6.22 which installs without much problems. That 's to say it does not work correctly but you will not notice untill you try to create some contents or install some contributed modules.

Exactly those partial functioning installs drives you crazy and I wasted quite some time on this one. But today I had some maintenance to do on the server so I also installed rewritemod2 from the official IIS-site with the intention to install Drupal 7. But surprise, surprise after the install Drupal 6.22 now also works as supposed to.

Belgian newspapers: Google blocking us on searches

The Associated Press tells the story that you should be carefull to what you wish for. Some time ago Belgian publishers of French and German speaking newspapers won a lawsuit against Google about the indexing of their news on Google News. The court order states that Google should remove all links to articles and images of foresaid newspapers from all their sites and Google complied with that. They did this that well that when you search on Google you will not find any link to this newspapers anymore. Of course the Belgian cry foul but the court order is quite clear in it's objective it states all sites and cache of Google. It's quite silly after all the publishers could have had it their way by simply using the right rules in their robot.txt file without any court order now they have nothing.