42

Stephen Fry gets it

From  Stephen Fry » Deliver us from Microsoft.

The two great pillars of Open Source are the GNU project and Linux. I shan’t burden you with too much detail, I’ll just make the outrageous claim that your computer will be running some descendant of those two within the next five years and that your life will be better and happier as a result.

The wonders of Thin Client Computing

On Saturday I ran a computer training course for the Nene Valley Methodist Circuit. Late on Friday I wrote a little about how it was going to fit into a hectic schedule (42: Another quiet weekend).

Now that it has happened and was well received I want to reflect on how Sun Ray thin clients helped.

I have run many IT training courses over the years, some of them in out of the way places using rented PC's (Cyprus, Nairobi, Bangalore, Miami, Copenhagen, middle of nowhere in Norway, Reading [UK]).

I have run courses on PC's running MsDos and on Windows 3.1 through Windows XP (Also including some using Desqview, OS/2 and Windows NT). Networks have included nothing, Novell Networks (mostly 2.x and 3.x) with both coax and cat 5 cabling, Linux servers running Samba and Windows NT Server.

This time was different.

I used our home server (a Sun Fire V20z, 2 x 64 bit Opteron processors, 4gb ram, running Ubuntu 6.10 and Sun Ray Server Software 3.1). Connected to that I had 11 Sun Ray 1G's with a wide variety of monitors (all I could scrounge) one of which was a data projector.

All the Sun Ray 1G's were in their original unopened packaging (2 boxes each, one for the 1G and the other for the keyboard/mouse/power cables).

From a starting point of everything in the training room, still in boxes or piles where it came out of the car to the course starting with 11 people logging in was just under two hours. That included getting tables out of storage as well as connecting and setting up broadband router, firewall, wifi router (for my laptop), server, network printer, 11 Sun Ray's (including 2 monitors and 1 projector that I had never used with a Sun ray before). I had one person to help with the Sun Ray connections (he had never seen a Sun Ray before so I connected one and said copy that while I get all the others out of their boxes), other than that I was on my own (oh yes someone else got the chairs out).

The course ran from 10am til 4pm with 11 people using their Sun Rays continuously except for an hour for  lunch when we connected a Wii to the projector and did some bowling and tennis.

During the 5 hours of use nothing crashed, nothing failed and nothing needed restarting.

It was only at the point when they all logged in that I realised that late the previous night I had not added one person as a user, so that delayed his login for about a minute while I created him from my terminal. That was made easy because I stayed logged in with a course login on the Sun Ray with no smart card inserted, but could insert my smart card at any time to switch to my normal login with administrative rights (of course I could have opened a terminal window and via su used the command line, but the GUI is easy and works fine).

The Church Hall where we held the event turned out to not have any electrical sockets except on the stage. So we had to run all the Sun Ray's, 1 network switch, the printer and the projector off 3 sockets using reel extension cables - two of which have automatic cut off's if a load of 5 amps is exceeded. I don't think that would have been possible with PC's.

None of the participants had ever used Linux before, none had used OpenOffice and I think 2 had used Firefox - but none of these caused them any problems and did not cause any frustration.

One feature I liked was when we were looking at web page creation, as an example I installed Nvu, using the Synaptic package manager. It downloaded and installed faster than I could explain that it was one of 2800 application available for free and of course instantly and automatically appeared on everyone's application menu.

For noise purposes I had the firewall and server running in a separate room with just two network cables coming into the hall (to printer and to network switch). That meant we only had 3 fans running (projector, switch and printer) - that was hugely better than the noise of 11 PC's on a hard floor.

This was definitely the quickest, least stressful and most effective IT solution I have ever been able to set up for a training course. Next time it will be even quicker as I won't have all the fiddly packaging to remove from the power cables, keyboards and mice.

Of course for people doing a lot of training the low extra cost & time of adding extra terminals compared to PC's is fantastic as is the minimal space needed to store Sun Ray's between courses.

In summary awesome!

Ban Windows Vista, Office 2007 from British Schools

From: Windows Vista, Office 2007 Expelled From British Schools: InformationWeek.

The agency that governs educational technology in the United Kingdom has advised schools in the country to keep Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)'s Windows Vista operating system and its Office 2007 software out of the classroom and administrative offices.

"Upgrading existing ICT systems to Microsoft Vista or Office 2007 is not recommended," said the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, also known as Becta, in a report issued this week.

Becta officials said a study the group commissioned found that upgrading school systems from Windows XP to Vista and Office 2007 would increase costs and create software compatibility problems while providing little benefit.

"Our advice is to be sure there is a strong business case for upgrading to these products as the costs are significant and the benefits remain unclear," said Stephen Lucy, Becta's executive director of strategic technologies, in a statement.

Hat tip: Slashdot | Britain Advises Against Vista, Office 2007 for Schools.

Ubuntu games

If you family are using a proper operating system (and are quite young) then these will be useful. Also if you are not yet using a proper operating system and want a further incentive to save money (on hardware and software):

• 10 Games from the Ubuntu Universe
• 10 More Games from the Ubuntu Universe.

The problem with book suggestions

We decided to sign up with Amazon Prime (free next day deliveries for a year for £49). Of course the problem is that it is even more dangerous to read blogs that comment on books, even if they include lots of other good things: Slash7 with Amy Hoy - Food for thought.

Big facebook privacy issue

The new Facebook beacon advertising system has huge privacy issues for us all.

If you use Firefox as your web browser then here are instructions to project your privacy Block Facebook Beacon (also has details of the problem). More details at Facebook Beacon: Two Weeks Later.

There is a demo showing the problem.

There is a facebook group you can join to protest: Petition: Facebook, stop invading my privacy!

hat tip: Phil Windley's Technometria | Facebook Beacon Demo.

For our kids

This is what I ought to be sorting out on an old PC for the kids The Perfect Desktop.

More on software licenses

I wrote about a new software license in 42: copyrighteous called the  Affero General Public License or AGPL.

I felt very positive about it (and still do) of course not everyone always agrees with me (if you have not been here much you may not be aware of that).

So for balance here is someone who entirely disagrees with me about the AGPL: Elzeviro » And AGPL it is.

Of course my interest is for entirely different situations. I believe AGPL is a good fit for web applications being built for free or by small companies. Suppose you create a Church administration web application and release it under the GPL. Maybe you want to make some money through hosting it.

However, a company comes along, makes some changes are starts offering hosting. Maybe they are better at marketing or maybe their improvements are great. Under the GPL there is nothing to ensure that their users benefit from the GPL freedoms. They cannot be sure they can get anyone else to host their data (which may have been stored in a slightly different format) So the freedoms you were trying to ensure with the got lost.

For me the AGPL is not about protecting companies or developers, it is about protecting users.

Oh and I really don't think the requirements are too difficult. Just make your deployment script package the code so that running the application makes it's code available. It makes your own hosting easier anyway, you always have the deployed source available with the application.

So I still think the AGPL is a good license for web applications, not for everything but for that.

Ruby stuff

I have been using InstantRails for RubyOnRails development on my laptop (running windows) but that is no longer being developed so I am going to track BitNami :: RubyStack as a replacement.

Really it is just laziness, I can't find the passwords for configuring the wifi hub, therefore I can't setup Ubuntu on the laptop to get to the network. Of course it does not take very long to cold reset the wifi hub and then do the configuration again but I have not bothered to get around to it.

I started using the latest Netbeans with excellent Ruby support as my RubyOnRails editor and liked it a lot.

I have also registered myself and a project on launchpad.net, just got to get myself sorted with bazaar and I can put the first code up there.

Hopefully that is enough jargon to mystify all the theology folks who like to spend the rest of the time confusing the rest of us :-)

Eco Media Player Cranks up the volume

I think Stephen Fry is both extremely funny and very intelligent, not to mention a wiz with the English language. So I have been enjoying his new blog and this post caught my attention as a jolly good thing (tm) “Eco Media Player Cranks up the volume”.

All that was missing was a link to the product page so here it is: The Eco-Media Player, from Trevor Baylis Brands plc. Price currently under £135 if you shop around.