Bad, bad Apple!

My apologies to the owners of this site but it’s going under “Humour” here. Read the following extract and you’ll see why!

Take for example Apple Computers, makers of the popular Macintosh line of computers. The real operating system hiding under the newest version of the Macintosh operating system (MacOS X) is called… Darwin! That’s right, new Macs are based on Darwinism! While they currently don’t advertise this fact to consumers, it is well known among the computer elite, who are mostly Atheists and Pagans. Furthermore, the Darwin OS is released under an “Open Source” license, which is just another name for Communism. They try to hide all of this under a facade of shiny, “lickable” buttons, but the truth has finally come out: Apple Computers promote Godless Darwinism and Communism.

(via jofny_ on #LUNI in Chicago)

My Settop Box – Easy Linux PVR

This project looks promising. It’s an attempt to make MythTV easier to install by supplying it with Knoppix. AFAICT you install the backend on your server and it’s even possible to run the frontend from the Knoppix CD on a different machine. Unfortunately the recommended hardware spec is well beyond any of the machines I own. That said, I’ve downloaded the ISO so I’ll certainly give it a go!

Data Recovery from a Hard Disk

Some of you may remember my bad luck with hard disks during the summer. One was a Fujitsu drive that died hours after I plugged it in when I got home. I lost a month’s worth of photographs from Chicago and that was obviously upsetting. Of course, after the rest of what’s happened it’s small change in terms of the bad year that 2003 was for me!
Anyway, it’s 2004 and there’s a possible solution to the drive problem!
Here at work another Fujitsu HD died yesterday morning but this time I had more success recovering data from it. I asked on , the ILUG IRC channel, and Christian suggested Parted, while Liam suggested using Gpart. Gpart is on the ILUG BBC and a quick search found this description of how to use it!
I can happily say that gpart worked perfectly! It detected the partition table and I was able to write it to the drive again. A quick reboot and I was able to copy off the important data! Other stuff can wait but gpart turned out to be a life saver here. 🙂
Of course, this is only usefui if your BIOS and Linux/*BSD can see your HD.
I have my fingers crossed that I can do the same on the HD at home. There’s a lot of photos I want to recover!

Morning Ireland piece on MyDoom virus

In a radio interview (realaudio link) this morning an “expert” told the nation that the DDOS attack on SCO was orchestrated by “people who are promoting a thing called open system software where by you can have competitors for the Microsoft products which are essentially free.” Peter Aherne provided a brief transcript of the interview and it looks shocking in it’s ignorance of the facts!
There’s a lengthy thread on the ILUG about it including links to articles debunking the interview.
The serious accusations in this interview need an answer and sooner rather than later!
Update! Nils posted a cleaned up transcript of the interview, and Gavin McCullagh posted one too.

Netcraft: www.sco.com is a weapon of mass destruction

This is so funny! 🙂 Go read it and wait and see if SCO slashdots Slashdot!

Much of the commentary on the SCO distributed denial of service scenario, including our own, has been based on the premise that SCO badly wants to keep their web site running. This may not be the case: unlike Microsoft, which has a real business to run and a real need to keep its web site operational, SCO Executives may not strongly care about the availability of www.sco.com. After all, Michael Doyle’s half a billion dollar patent win against Microsoft scarcely hinged on the response times of the Eolas web site.

In fact, the author of the MyDoom virus has delegated control of the most enormous volume of http traffic that the Internet has yet seen to hostmaster@sco.com. On a whim, SCO can direct that Tsunami at an object of their choosing, simply by changing an A record in named.conf in time for the change to propagate by Sunday.

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