Joe Wein’s blog

Last month I upgraded my notebook from Ubuntu 7.10 to 8.04 (”Hardy Heron”). Since then, whenever I tried tried to install the up to 133 updates that had become available, the Update Manager would hang indefinitely instead of prompting me for the user password.
If you’re in the same situation, the following tips might help you. […]

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Two weeks ago, Infoworld magazine launched a “Save Windows XP!” campaign. Within 5 days, over 164,000 people signed it, demanding that Microsoft do not end OEM and shrinkwrapped sales of Windows XP on 30 June 2008 as announced, but keep it on the market indefinitely. Microsoft did not seem impressed, as the following quote in […]

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The latest version of Ubuntu, the most popular desktop version of Linux on the market, was released on Thursday, 24 April 2008.
New versions are released every six months and labelled after the release year and month, therefore the latest will be known as 8.04, replacing 7.10. The “LTS” suffix stands for “Long Term Support”, […]

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You may have noticed emails from Yahoo accounts recently that include the string “between 0000-00-00 and 9999-99-99″ at the bottom of the email. Apparently it gets added to outbound email only on new emails that were composed.
It’s a bug in Yahoo which crept in on April 15 during an upgrade. It’s an issue related to […]

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Last week I was on a business trip to the USA and decided it was finally time for me to buy a new notebook computer. Here in Japan it’s difficult to get machines with US keyboards.
My previous one was a 650 MHz Pentium III whose RAM was maxed out at 512 MB while my […]

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From November 9 to November 19 two of our domains were unter attack by cyber-criminals. Due to a Distributed Denial-of-Service attack (DDoS) involving thousands of remote controlled zombie computers directed from a secret control centre, some of our sites were inaccessible for several days.
First we received an automated warning email from our webhost, which […]

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When Google introduced it’s free email service it offered 1 GB of space, much more than the competition at the time. Later the limit was doubled to 2 GB. It has been increasing on a counter since: As you watched you could see the KB figure of the limit steadily increase.
Two GB for email […]

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Several of the main sites dedicated to fighting online scams are currently inaccessible because of a “Denial of service” (DoS) attack.
Fraudwatchers.com, aa419.org, 419eater.com and occassionally thescambaiter.com have been offline. Thescambaiter.com and 419eater.com are two of the oldest sites that fight “419″ scams (named of the section in the Nigerian penal code that prohibits fraud). […]

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If you’re interested in the history of personal computers and the software industry, Robert Scoble’s one hour show on “How Bill Gates beat Gary Kildall in OS war” is well worth watching. In an interview Tom Rolander, who worked with Gary Kildall when IBM came to talk about an operating system for their yet unannounced […]

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CrossLoop, a secure screen sharing utility for anyone who uses a computer with a broadband connection, is now in beta testing. If you use computers you sooner or later encounter problems where you need somebody’s help to solve them. Often it can be difficult to describe the symptoms or the solution. Whether it’s helping a […]

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