http://www.dhanapalan.com/blog Freedom is the right of all sentient beings Sun, 15 Nov 2009 03:29:58 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Carla Schroder from Linux Today repeats a question that I've heard asked many times: "Here we go with another round of Linux Today reader comments. Let's start off with an issue that has been on my mind: Vendors who boast of the their Linux-based devices, but they only support Windows and ... http://www.dhanapalan.com/blog/2009/10/24/linux-support/ I'm not usually one for blog memes, but what the hell :) A downside of vrms is that it can only look at packages installed via the OS packaging system. I know I have the Adobe Flash Plug-in installed (manually) as well. Nevertheless, the result isn't too bad, and I think ... http://www.dhanapalan.com/blog/2009/09/15/vrms-meme/ An intriguing offer came through to the SLUG-chat mailing list a few weeks ago: an Australian version of Beauty and the Geek is in the works, and they're looking for geeks. I'll be honest and admit that I'm a fan of the US version of the show. The 'geeks' feel like ... http://www.dhanapalan.com/blog/2009/08/30/bimbo-and-the-nerd/ I was having a discussion at work, and it occurred to us that a simple way of improving our data security is to turn machines off (or suspend, hibernate, etc.) when they aren't required. Now this isn't exactly rocket science, but what I found most interesting is how this ties ... http://www.dhanapalan.com/blog/2009/07/21/energy-conservation-for-security/ The OpenJDK plug-in that comes with modern distros is usually very good at handling Java in Web pages, but some applets are just stubborn. Thankfully, Sun have finally (after over six years!) released a plug-in for x86_64 Web browsers. I managed to get the JDK version working on Fedora 11 and ... http://www.dhanapalan.com/blog/2009/07/13/install-64-bit-java-plug-in/ Apologies for pimping my employer, but I became the subject of the inaugural 'Meet the Team' portion of the BizCubed newsletter. It's a good feeling knowing that you work for a company that actually cares about open source and open standards. For example, we sponsored the Government 2.0 event in Canberra ... http://www.dhanapalan.com/blog/2009/07/06/a-bit-of-corporate-indulgence/ I live in a country where even buildings less than 100 years old can be protected as 'heritage'. Yet in India they can demolish a 700-year-old mosque without even batting an eyelid! http://www.dhanapalan.com/blog/2009/06/28/heritage-is-relative/ The ABC have a piece from National Library of Australia web archiving manager Paul Koerbin, about the importance of digital records preservation. Of equal importance, how can we be sure that we can actually read those archives in the future? Literacy of Egyptian Hieroglyphs was long-gone by the 18th century, and ... http://www.dhanapalan.com/blog/2009/05/09/will-it-be-domesday-or-doomsday-for-our-information/ The ability to run in a completely 64-bit environment is a major benefit of Linux over the competition. With everything open source, the community can port and compile applications to new architectures with ease. On Windows, you have to suffer from the fact that just about everything is proprietary. If there's ... http://www.dhanapalan.com/blog/2009/05/03/install-adobe-flash-10-and-reader-91-on-ubuntu-904-x86_64/ This is the most clever thing I have seen in a long time. The equation is simple: 2(cardboard box) + black paint + aluminium foil + acrylic cover = Kyoto BoxThere's an image of the final result over here. Attributes include: costs just $US 5 to produce amazingly simple to create completely solar powered: no ... http://www.dhanapalan.com/blog/2009/04/10/simply-ingenious/