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.
Me on TodayFM
Woo! I was listening to Today FM (Irish radio station, available on todayfm.com) and the dj read out an email from an Irish person in Chicago! I immediately popped an email out to him and got a mention 10 minutes later! /me’s happy now!
Nothing for sale on eBay
literally – nothing for sale!
Daragh in Monaco
Nah, I’m not jealous, no sirree! Not a bit of it that you were in Monaco and driving along the circuit F1 drivers take. Good thing I’m not a fan of F1 or I might get upset and cranky but I’m not so I won’t and I won’t mention this again. *grin*
Must post pics of Chicago soon!
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!
Clouds and the Moon Move to Block the Sun
Having just turned 5 “Astronomy Picture of the Day” presents another great photo for you to feast your eyes on. At first I thought the moon had flipped on it’s side but it’s a very unusual solar eclipse!
Sticky Notes
Does Gnome comes with a standard sticky notes app? KDE does, but when I restart it in a Gnome environment it blanks out the screen and one of the notes gets corrupted and called “data”. I found this Sticky Notes app through Google for Gnome. It looks nice. I’ll road test it for a few days.