B. Mann Consulting

I recently decommissioned a Linux (e-smith, to be exact) server at home. Its main job was to store pictures, and now that I'm using Flickr, there was no need to have it sitting in our living room.

But, there are a ton of pictures on there that still needed to be taken off. Gigs of pictures. Which are just generally a pain to transfer over the network.

I have an external Firewire enclosure for IDE hard drives, so I thought I would experiment in trying to get the Linux file system (EXT2) mounted on Mac OS X. Long story short, after much Googling, I found ext2fsx. Like many Mac applications, it "just worked" and is really user friendly.

I last wrote about Axentra when they had changed their name from OEOne back in October 2003. Marc Benglia, the CEO of Axentra, came by and left a comment on that post, so I went and checked out their new products.

Marc had specifically pointed out their Net-Box Home Series, which are two server appliances targetted at home network use. The entry level model is $499US -- much too expensive in my opinion, but I still understand the lure of having a full-featured server on your own network.

I'm in the process of getting rid of my local Linux server. Obviously I'm not the target market for these products, nor is anyone that can build their own server. But I think that Axentra is going to have trouble explaining the benefits -- and making it easy enough -- for the average end user.

A comment posted points to what I had been talking about, Knoppix + Asterisk == Knopsterisk (their slogan being "PC to PBX in 4 minutes").

Currently being sold by mail order, the company also does custom configurations.

The DarwinPorts Project's main goal is to provide an easy way to install various open-source software products on a Darwin, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, or Linux system.
DarwinPorts Home

I haven't even installed the developer tools on this laptop yet. Once I start mucking about installing command-line "stuff", I'm going to pick a ports system like this or fink and stick with it. One package manager to rule them all…

I'm in the process of evaluating several weblog solutions for building a corporate weblogs farm. In other words, I'm looking for a solution that would allow a company, with a simple (if not single) software installment on its existing web platform, to host any number of internal and/or external weblogs.

…

I ended up comparing Six Apart's Movable Type 3 and pMachine's ExpressionEngine 1.0. The following is not a full fledged comparison of both products, but I thought it might be of interest for other people as I came out with some interesting differences that might help someone else make their mind about them.

padawan.info: Movable Type vs. ExpressionEngine — A comparison

A good overview of MT vs. EE, in this case for their usefulness in a corporate setting. pMachine was my first true weblog system. I had been using phpWebSite for my tech news, but found that I was posting more often (almost exclusively) to this little pMachine-driven section. I also remember talking to Rick Ellis about a pMachine hosting platform, but he was in the midst of setting up his company and planning for EE. The rest of the story is well-known — I use Drupal and think it's a great platform, and it works great for corporate needs.

Even though I no longer do a lot of IT stuff, I'm still interested by many of the problems. Contacts, calendaring, and groupware that isn't Microsoft Exchange continues to be an interesting space.

Scalix the Linux based e-mail and calendaring software developer has secure another 6 million. Scalix is an interesting alternative to the security flawed MS Exchange platform.
TJ's Weblog: Scalix with second round

Microsoft's biggest global competitors are exactly as they were on Thursday: Nokia and Sony, two companies whose core revenues don't derive from Windows and who can set global standards. (IBM has every motivation to fund Linux development, which Redmond really doesn't like at all, but IBM doesn't have the inclination to set standards elsewhere and can't dictate consensus in the OSS space). Not that it's any consolation on Sun's Blackest Friday, but if Mankind had to be represented in an Independence Day scenario, most people would rather it was Sun engineers downloading the Trojan onto the alien's computers, and not Microsoft engineers.
The Register: Why Sun threw in the towel in Mankind vs. Microsoft

Increasingly, The Register makes me laugh, but they do have a few good points as well. As per the title, it looks like "mankind" lost.

The battle over desktops has long since been fought and lost. In case you didn't get the memo, most people are still going to be running Windows. But…

End users are looking for stable software. But the Mozilla organization makes it clear to say: "We make binary versions of Mozilla available for testing purposes only!"

The intention of WaMCom.org is to produce web browser and mail client software that is more stable and more correct than the test releases produced by the Mozilla.org organization, in the hope it is suitable for end users. In order to achieve that, stable Mozilla releases are extended with correctness fixes.

In addition it contains some security and cryptography enhancements.

VLC (initially VideoLAN Client) is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, ...) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.

MySettopBox.tv has made it really, really simple to get MythTV running. They've created KnoppMyth, a distribution that combines Knoppix with MythTV so that a MythTV install can run directly off a CD.

Read on for the scoop why this is very useful.