Contrary to all rumours – I AM NOT FOR SALE!!!
The game Secondlife has been struck by a virus according to this article. It manifested itself by glowy rings in the virual world, which multiplied everytime somebody touched them. By human nature these rings were touched by people and started to multiply exponentially leading to heavy database loads. Therefore Linden Labs (the company behind sencondlife) had to shut down access to the world to "clean" up the virus mess.
Are vitual worlds better because they can be shut down? Imagine how easy it would be to clean up the polution in the world!
I've been mentioning on different occasions that I'd re-organise my computer systems at home, and last weekend was the planned time for doing so. The plan was to take the "best" (read less old) bits from the 2 computers I had, and put them togther, and then install a dual boot system with windows and a linux distro. This is the Windows tale….
Section 1 took a Saturday afternoon.
Sections 2-9 took from 10AM to 11PM Sunday, due to several XP installation attemps as my XP cd was a bit dodgy and didn't work everytime. I couldn't find a new XP cd except for a sp2 cd which didn't accept my authentication code. Apparently sp2 and sp1 have different code systems, and I would only want a genuine Windows on my computer.
All hardware drivers were working, but I still hadn't got my email up and running. I got that the next evening!
The next challenge is the Linux challenge. I'll report back…
I noticed a new community for the Black Vastness boardgame here on RedGloo, and I liked the name, so I thought I'd google to see if anybody had named something else Black Vastness.
The top link was the RedGloo Black Vastness community. Even beating NASA, way to go 😉
So Novell has struck a deal with Microsoft. Microsoft makes a covenant not to sue Novell for patent infringment. You would have thought that Novell paid for this "service", but no Mircosoft is paying Novell for the right not to sue!!!!
Are we going to see a M$ patent campaign soon?
Will this "help" Microsofts campaign for software patents in Europe?
Has Novell sold its soul? (Novell doesn't even own the IP of most of the software ion SUSE anyway. It's GPL code from other open source projects…)
There seems to be a bug in the rss code. When a new rss feed is registered it and subscribed to it doesn't automatically get on the blog…
http://www.oster-lundqvist.com/karsten/blog/index.php?entry=/2006-11-06.txt
At the University of Reading we have a very effective proxy, which usually is a very nice a secure thing. But when you try to connect to the outer world from non-browser applications it all falls apart. Most applications follow the NTLM HTTP protocol for proxy authentication, but not the NTLM HTTP proxy protocol for proxy authentication (note the extra "proxy" between NTLM and authentication!) This is probably due to the fact that it is only descriped in 3 lines of appendix B of the NTLM documentation whereas standard HTTP protocol are given many lines.
This is for instance the reason that Ubuntu and Fedora won't update automatically from inside the University, even when using ntlmaps which according to Ubuntu should do the trick, but Ntlmaps doesn't support NTLM HTTP Proxy authentication!
I realised this while I had to get rss-feeds into a "learning landscape" we are organising for our first year students called RedGloo. In Ethereal I could see that the wrong protocol was followed. So I had to rewrite the php script used and it now succesfully gets the feeds through the proxy.
This will probably lead to a "home" project to make a NTLM HTTP Proxy protocol complient gateway, so that I can use Ubuntu inside the firewall. We'll see what time will allow…
The rss-feed is finally getting through the Uni proxy, and into the RedGloo database. It has been quite a struggle due to elgg-source code bugs and a too eager / efficient Uni proxy…
One thing we have to look at is the functionality surrounding the rss-feeds – I'm not quite sure whether I like / understand it, but that's up for discussion…
I did some plumbing, and by mistake turned the default blog state back to logged in. Sorry Phil 😉
We are now back to Public.
