Sean’s Obsessions

Red Hat 9 is out. Am I running it? No. I can’t even download it. Normally this is to be expected, it’s the first day. But Red Hat has been on a big campaign — “Become a RHN subscriber and get it a week early!” Now, yours truly isn’t an idiot and wouldn’t think about [...]

A few people have written asking for copies of old Linux newsletters. They’re all available at http://ertw.com/~sean/news/ I’ve also added links so you can download the whole shebang as one file (1.4M, MBOX format), or as individual .txt or .html pages. While I’m on the subject of the Linux news archives… I’m Lazy, in that [...]

Well, I probably didn’t put it in writing, but I’ve never trusted SCO/Caldera. Turns out they are suing IBM (/. article) over Unix IP. The UNIX IP and Trademarks have been passed around like a biker’s girlfriend, the latest holders being our friends at SCO. Seeing as they don’t have anything to offer themselves, they [...]

Combining my hobby of writing perl code for web automation, and my love of google: http://www.google.com/apis/ More to come

This article on Slashdot deals with Intel and Red Hat making some modifications to their licencing in order to be able to cooperate. Basically, Intel had some code that they wanted to be able to distribute without the requirements of GPL. Red Hat didn’t like it. They comprimised on the BSD licence. I agree with [...]

This article on Freshmeat goes over some myths about tuning performance in GCC, and some of the improvements in the later versions. I’ve seen it too… Turn on -O69 and your programs will fly, right? Nope. Even quoting some source code, the author walks through some of the performance optimizations and what they really mean, [...]

And, here it is, Red Hat and Oracle are going to get their software combination certified under EAL 2 first, and later on move to EAL 4. Oracle shouldn’t have a problem, they are already EAL 4 under NT and Solaris. Red Hat will need some work, though. Best of luck/

This article (Red Hat press release here)says that Red Hat Advanced Server just got COE certification. The first article also notes that another group is pushing toward Common Criteria certification. This is a great step forward for Linux, as it opens the door for Linux to be deployed in more mission critical applications. I should [...]

Tony, author of the Lockergnome Penguin Shell newsletter recently made some comments about Red Hat’s corporate strategy. Quoting this article, he infers that Red Hat is trying to drive the non paying customers away. There is another interpretation of the article, which I think is closer to the truth. Right now, you either download or [...]

A while back I had received a copy of Perl & LWP from O’Reilly for review. I read it and loved it. Unfortunately the review never was published on Cramsession. Since I got some positive feedback after publishing it in my LUG’s newsletter, here it is, hope it’s helpful. Short story — Great book if [...]