elementary OS: T minus 9 hours and counting

if you've been to the elementary OS website lately, you've probably noticed it now consists of a countdown timer:http://elementaryos.org/it looks like it's counting down to midnight (00.00) april 1 (UTC), so I'm guessing that's when elementary OS will finally be released.I can't wait! with a slick, clean interface and many of the elementary team's apps that I've posted about before, this just might be good enough to replace Ubuntu. I know I'll definitely be checking it o...

heimdal 1.4 missing lib/otp/version-script.map

I was compiling Heimdal kerberos 1.4 on RHEL 5.6 and got the following error: /usr/bin/ld: cannot open linker script file ./version-script.map: No such file or directory After some poking around, it appears that lib/otp/version-script.map is missing from the 1.4 source, which is weird since I downloaded it right from the big "Download 1.4" link from their website (http://www.h5l.org/), which links to http://www.h5l.org/dist/src/heimdal-1.4.tar.gz. So, to fix the problem, you can download the missing file right from their git repo, here: https://github.com/heimdal/heimdal/raw/e3044663df2cfcafd5bf4e2ea6f2a1ba1503d8ea/lib/otp/version-script.map Just...

AT&T to purchase T-Mobile; corporations: 1 consumers: 0

With the recently announced purchase of T-Mobile USA by AT&T, it's evident that the only winners are going to be AT&T and T-Mobile themselves.There's nothing good in this for the consumers. T-Mobile is the cheapest out of the four major nationwide carriers in the US. They're definitely cheaper than AT&T. With them gone, US customers will be forced to pay higher rates. AT&T claims that by acquiring T-Mobile they can lower their costs, and supposedly (1) they're going to pass on some of that savings with the customers. Sure they...

Make free wifi/data calls on your android device

Update: I've blogged more recently on better ways to do this, so you might want to head here instead:  Free wifi/data calls on your smartphone, part 2 Note: this will only allow you to make calls to US numbers, excluding Alaska and Hawaii, as that's all the Whistle Phone service supports. See the last paragraph of this post for alternative options. Go to whistlephone.com, download their software to your desktop, and register for a...

windows woes

It's days like today that I'm grateful I'm only a minimal Windows user... I decided to reformat my Windows XP virtual machine today, and I've spent half my day installing updates, rebooting, installing more, over and over again. I literally don't think I can count on one hand the number of times I've had to reboot. Which seems crazy to me considering I started out with SP3.Then I get to deal with the frustration of downloading software that's bundled with other software I don't want. Take Adobe Reader, for example. First of all, it comes bundled...

python's only problem: concurrency

python has its naysayers, but that's what jealousy will do to you :) seriously though, python does have one major issue: concurrent/parallel programming. now I'm no engineer, and I'm sure this is an oversimplification, but three ways of accomplishing this are: using multiple threads using multiple processes event-based programmingthe main killer out of these three is trying to do multi-threaded programming in python. the short answer: don't. when Python was designed, it was given the philosophy that people using it should have to worry about...

Python and MySQL autocommit

Solution: If your MySQL database is using the InnoDB engine, commit your changes after database transactions: cursor.connection.commit() Or just turn on autocommit to automatically commit after every database transaction: cursor.connection.autocommit(True) Details: So I was using python's MySQLdb module to edit a mysql database, and I noticed that even though python was telling me my modifications were taking place, I wasn't seeing any changes. in addition, when I would log onto the database from something other than python and try to make...