c0t0d0s0.org

Wow, i think Pixar wants to know it with Wall-E ... Jonathan Ive (you know, the Apple Design Guy) helped with the design of Eve, the female robot in the movie, and a few minutes ago, i´ve read that Peter Gabriel worked on parts of soundtrack.. Stunning.

Big Buck Bunny from Blender Foundation on Vimeo.

Ich bin ja letztes Jahr ueber Zuerich zu einem Kunden nach Sueddeutschland geflogen. Ich habe hier gerade einen Beitrag auf N.24 ueber die Tempokontrollen in der Schweiz in der Schweiz gesehen. Irgendwie kann ich da nur sagen : Glueck gehabt. Und ich muss mich wohl bei dem bedanken, der mich ausdruecklich vor zu eiliger Fahrweise gewarnt hat... ich frage mich gerade ob die dort die Strafe mit der Tachonadelabweichung nach oben in Bogenminuten mal 50 Rappen errechnen

This is another artitcle of the kind i do not really understand: FAA: Sun box disk failure caused NOTAM database crash. What do you think, when you read this article at first: Sun can´t develop storage? Bad, bad Sun ? Well, the cursory observer might think that.

But at the end it´s a story about the stuff, why Sun develops stuff like ZFS. It´s just doesn´t told this way. It´s a story of undetected silent data corruption, transmission of the data corruption to the backup system, the problem of damages/power outages while updating the data on the harddisks:

"What happened was the drive in an end-of-life Sun box failed in the middle of updating the information on the hard drive, so it screwed up the database," Davis said.

and

As the technicians were working to fix the database, they decided to go to the backup system. As they did that, they soon realized they had written the error over to the backup system and had corrupted that system as well, Davis said.

It sound like a perfect example why the industry needs a filesystem like ZFS. Harddisks fails, that is inevitable, and mostly they do not fail without a last scream. And that is independend of the brand of harddisks or the storage vendor.

So ... dear Computerworld, would you mind to use a less lurid headline next time?

At the moment Twitter is really annoying. It´s like sending SMS in the first minutes of the new year. But i see no rockets and drunken people on the street ...

With the last two million lines of code Sun reached the goal of open sourcing the Sun Cluster Framework (some months ahead of the goal). Now all parts of the suite are available under the CDDL license.

Interesting article about the spreading nuisance to generate Powerpoint Presentations consisting out of several slides for topics easily summarizeable in a few sentences: Toyota chief: refrain from using PowerPoint. The Toyota Motor Corporation CEO Katsuaki Watanabe got to this topic while talking about cost reductions:

Watanabe said that (in the good old days?) they used to use one piece of paper to make a clear point or proposal, or to summarize an issue, but now everything is in PowerPoint, he says, which uses many sheets of paper and expensive colors...but it's a waste.

In my personal opinion this slideuments waste something more precious than paper or printer colours. They are wasting time!

Virtualbox was downloaded 5 million times in one and a half year. At the moment Virtualbox 1.6 gets downloaded 10000 times a day. Virtualbox isn´t an everyday usage product like Openoffice. So it´s quite a number for a product like a hypervisor.

You need a good explanation for the word "mission critical" for you manager and an example, why redundancy is a good thing? Okay ... i have one ... ISS toilet fails to suck. The toilet on the International Space Station is out of order and - to add insult to injury - it´s the only one. Toilets are absolutly mission critical ... well, you can´t open the airlock to take a walk behind the next tree

The JET tutorial isn´t complete, but shorten the time a little bit for you, i wrote a tutorial about a small but nevertheless important topic - passwords:

• Part 1: Introduction
• Part 2: Using strong password hashing
• Part 3: Using a password policy
• Part 4: Conclusion

These are some simple tricks to make your system more secure, just by ensuring that the keys to your server are well-choosen and not simple ones. But as i stated before there is something you should keep in mind: Don´t make the passwords too hard to remember.

User have the habit to break any security policy. At least as long you don't enforce it. One of the most annoying habit from the view of the security people is the tendency to choose weak passwords, the name of the boy or girl friend, the prefered brand of cars, birthdays ... you name it. This passwords are everything but secure. But you can configure Solaris to check the new passwords.

Many people are unaware of the fact, that only the first eight characters of a password are used in the default configuration of Solaris. Don´t believe it? Let´s try it.

The password is the key to the system. When you know the username and the password, you can use the system. If not ... well ... go away. You can´t overemphasize the value of good passwords. There is something you can do as the admin at the system level to ensure such passwords: At first you can use stronger mechanisms to hash the passwords. And you can force the users of your system to use good password. This tutorial will explain both tasks.

There is a new update for MacOS X 10.5. You find the release notes for 10.5.3 in the Knowledge Base: About the Mac OS X 10.5.3 Update. And the release notes are looong ... Okay, you can download the combo update at Apples Download site. You just have to download 536 MB. In the case you already use 10.5.2 you can use the smaller Updater - just 420 MB