Images of Chicago

Here’s the first few pics. They’re all drastically cut down to fit here!


Taken at North Michigan, from the river. The building in the foreground is the Wrigley Building. The background building is the Chicago Tribune Building. It’s famous for it’s unusual architecture! Thanks to Ark/#LUNI for the corrections and additional information.


This is the guy who gave us a tour last Sunday. As you can see, it was a beautiful day! Got quite windy out on the lake though! You can see the L (elevated train) travelling across the river in the background.


A lock seperates the Chicago River from Lake Michigan. This is the inner lock.


While waiting for the lock to close behind us I snapped these kids looking at the local wild fowl.


This is part of Navy Pier – a huge tourist attraction in Chicago.


A sailing ship approaches Chicago. You can see some of the downtown skyline, voted the second most beautiful skyline in the world (Sydney got first place). I think that’s the Sears Tower in-between the sails..

More pictures to come!

Rush hour horror: Woman dragged under train

Last night after work I walked down to Washington/Wells to catch the L home. At the station passengers were turned back by officials and told to go up to Merchandise Mart. No explanation was given as to why. Not being completely familiar with Chicago yet I walked north, following the train line and took a wrong turning. As I approached State/Clarke I saw a policeman directing traffic across the river, and noticed ambulances and that the road was blocked up ahead. I had the radio on (NPR – loud music after work irritates me!) and as I turned around I heard there had been a “pedestrian accident” on the L. I walked too far unfortunately, reaching the Green Line station at Clinton before consulting my map and turning back and north to Merchandise Mart. There we were told that no trains were heading south (back into town) but trains were running north. A train pulled in 5 minutes later, and everyone on the outbound side of the train station was told that the train was going north again. We all rushed over to the other side and headed home. I saw at least 3 south bound trains stopped on the brown line.
I heard on the train that a woman had been dragged under the L at a station, but I missed the news last night. Here’s the story from the Sun Times. Poor woman, really bad accident. 🙁

Linux Is Not Ready For the Enterprise

This opinion piece is so misleading I don’t know where to start! Luckily I don’t have to because a brief thread on LUNI has reasonable answers to this analyst’s questions and asertions.

It also seems that the MySQL client libraries are now released under the GPL. This causes a lot of problems for producers of non-GPL software and is an artifact of the license. This may even impact on PHP bundled support for MySQL as PHP 4 isn’t available under the GPL.

Forbes.com: What SCO Wants, SCO Gets

This story paints a scary picture of what SCO may be about. Sure, Linux users all over the world deride them and laugh, but how many of you cheered when they beat Microsoft over the DOS lawsuit? Now they’re coming after Unix and Linux with the exact same tactics. One might argue the open source and Free software is different, but if the big boys desert Linux then lots of development is going to slow or stop..

These guys in Utah are no dummies. The crunchies in the Linux community should be paying more attention.

ssh tip of the day

If you ssh to hosts beyond a firewall or from within a NATted network then you’ll have noticed that SSH sessions timeout and get disconnected. I found that setting the TMOUT variable to 0 helped when not going through a firewall, and it must have been the firewall disconnecting an idle session otherwise.
Add this line to the sshd_config of the server and restart sshd. This will send a keep alive signal to the client every 360 seconds.

ClientAliveInterval 360

man 5 sshd_config will give you more information about that. This works in OpenSSH. I’m not sure if it’ll work elsewhere.

Linux desktop wars – who's winning?

While searching for more post-it notes applications for Linux (sticky_notes doesn’t let you resize smaller if a sentence is the width of the window.. boo!) I tried a search for linux desktop and noticed a certain desktop environment was conspicious by it’s absence. That may change by the time you read this so don’t hang me if this post doesn’t make sense!