This Old Blog

Remember just four years ago, when Novell entered into the now-infamous joint patent agreement with Microsoft? Remember the hue and cry that went up to boycott Novell? So that Novell would be driven out of business, and thus punished for entering into that "evil" agreement with the enemy? Well, guess what. It looks like all those righteous free software folks are going to get their wish. Novell entered into an agreement with Attachmate to be acquired by Attachmate for roughly $2.2 billion. And along the way it sold over 800 patents to a consortium led by Microsoft for an additional $450 million. Not bad for Novell. But not too good if you're wondering what impact this may have on Linux. You see, earlier this year the courts established that it was Novell, not SCOG, that owned the intellectual property to Unix. For all you free software elites, let that critical fact sink into your thick skulls for just a moment. You all decided to punish the very company that liter...

Normally you're supposed to finish a book before you write a review of it. Well, I've just started to read Mira Grant 's (a.k.a. Seanan McGuire ) "Feed", and I'm only up to chapter 4. It's a zombie book. I hate zombie books. Well, maybe hate is too strong a word. More like I try to avoid them. As I said I avoid zombie novels. It's fairly trivial to do so; I spot books with dark colored covers combined with garishly drawn zombies and/or zombie killer illustrations, and just automatically steer clear of them. But "Feed" is different. "Feed"'s cover is a dirty white, with the RSS feed symbol at the top, drawn in blood (well, printed to look like it's drawn in blood). That's what caught my attention, and then kept it. It didn't come across as your typical zombie book. The front cover alone got me curious enough to pick up the book and start reading the back cover. There wasn't much information there, and I would ...

Orlando Diary It's been two years since Lucy (a.k.a. Gertrude) walked through our front door and settled into the place. Since then Lucy has grown quite comfortable sharing a house with three adult humans (sometimes swelling to four), two Labs, and two other cats. She has, in particular, grown fond of me, a situation that based on my past experiences with cats I thought would never ever happen. But then here she is. She who must be obeyed. Lucy has all sorts of spots around the house where she likes to hang out, during various times, and depending on her whims. One habit she's developed is coming up to me in the evening and stretching out on my chest as I'm sitting and watching TV or just reading. She looks up at me with those big eyes of hers until my hand, almost of its own accord, drops down on her head and gives her rubs. Then she purrs like a little motor and snuggles down further until I get up and head to bed. Lucy sleeping on my overstuffed chair. She kn...

Orlando Diary It's been a long while since my last substantive post. A lot has happened, from dropping a large wad of cash on the house for a new roof to another wad for an air-conditioner replacement, through the mid-term elections and beyond. I've been busy with work as well, largely successfully. Re-roof The re-roofing job came about because of the age of the house's age (25 years) and the fact that the roof was a 15 year roof that was put on when the house was originally built. In spite of it's age the roof survived the big hurricane years of 2004 and 2005, with less than a dozen shingles damaged that needed replaceing. But roofs don't last forever, and one morning when I was headed to work I just happened to look back at the house, with the sunrise hitting it the right way, and saw just about every edge on every shingle curling up. Outside of a major leak, that's a sure sign you need new roof. I picked Fleming Brothers Roofing to replace the roof. I...

As part of my duties as the unofficial lab manager and general lab rat, I took a little time to update an installation of VirtualBox from 3.2.8 to 3.2.10. I've been busy and I haven't had the time to keep on top of every little thing. Besides, if it works, leave it alone. Unfortunately, I ran into an issue installing Fedora 14 (more below) that motivated me to install the latest VirtualBox (VB). And that's when I hit my second, far greater problem. It appears that VB 3.2.10 kernel modules will not install properly on the host version of Linux I run; RHEL 5.4 Workstation. Up to this point I've had no problems installing VB on RHEL (5.4 or 5.5), and the VMs created with VB have run with little or no problems. But this time I ran into problems when I attempted to start one of my VMs under the latest version of VB. A "guru meditation" problem. And this is what showed up in the syslog !!Assertion Failed!! Expression: RT_SUCCESS_NP(rc) Location : /home/v...