The new Dell XPS 600

ELL are trying to lure more customers using superficiality of looks. Dell have recently seen a sharp drop in earnings, particularly due to hardware repairs.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Dell Inc. is trying to spice up its image — and turn around lagging sales growth — by shaking Apple Computer Inc.’s hold on hipness, but it may be tough to match its smaller rival’s flair.

OR several years I have retained one spreadsheet on my Palm handheld. This was, in fact, a crude timesheet which was needed for work. Several months ago I decided to migrate everything to OpenOffice and access that spreadsheet using SSH from virtually any connected Linux box. This sounded reasonable at first, but frequent updates made this rather impractical and cumbersome.

Later on, I decided to export all data from OpenOffice as plain HTML tables and then repeatedly modify the HTML files on my Web server. This was rather time-consuming, so I sought alternatives which I knew existed.

I wound up using a Web-based spreadsheet application that is very light and retains all data as comma-separated values (thus no database needed). That powerful tool was Open Source, as always.

phpWebSheet has powerful and advanced (from a Web-based point-of-view) features such as tabular copy-and-paste, Wiki-styled formatting, and support for formulas/functions. In my perception, it is yet another winning application for PHP. There are many similar free applications at freshmeat.net, but I only investigated two which appeared better-suited for the purpose and rather mature too.

Spreadsheets are of course password-protected, but can still be accessed rapidly from everywhere at any time. All in all, the transition was a rewarding one. I sometimes wonder if I should have just stuck to the Palm PDA rather than make a progressive 3-step transition (as outlined above).

Spreadsheets have been on my Palm for years, virtually seconds away at pocket’s distance. Nonetheless, Being a Web technologies fanatic, I am always enthusiastic about ‘Webward’ transitions. On that same batch of installations, I set up phpshell which enables me to obtain shell access to my shared Web server. I can even see what the administrators are up to. This does not require a cron job hack as I once described.

Access to so many free packages (roughly a dozen of them on my domain already) is why I love Linux and the GNU ideaology.

I stumbled upon free OpenOffice training videos in a variety of news sources this morning. Although the videos demonstrate the recently-released OpenOffice 2 in a Windows environment, these are just as relevant to Linux users.

As a public service for Commonwealth of Massachusetts employees (and everyone else), NewsForge is presenting — absolutely free of charge — 11 OpenOffice.org training videos as part of this article.

Plenty of Web traffic and computer power drained in vain

OMBIE attacks on this site have persisted for over a month and have shown no sign of abatement. In fact, it only gets worse as more diverse locations get targetted for the puspose of referrer spam injection.

I have ultimately grown tired of these attacks rather than become accustomed to them. Each day, over 1,000 attacks are launched against my domain (2 of them actually) by hijacked Windows-powered machines. To remain kind to all genuine visitors, thus far I have re-directed suspicious page requests internally, displaying a forbidden (error 403) page. This has gotten me nowhere as the attackers are not deterred by any of this. Only more and more Windows computer get hijacked and ‘puppeteered’, so brute-force is never an issue.

Yesterday I became slightly more emotional and perhaps courageous enough to forward all of these leeches to microsoft.com/this-is-YOUR-zombie-NOT-mine. Let us wait and see how Microsoft handles nearly 50,000 of these zombie attacks per month. In my defence, all I do is merely pass on the zombies to the domain which I find responsible for their misfortunate existence. I look forward to some form of response from Microsoft with great anticipation.

A week back I enquired in nntp://uk.legal as to whether Microsoft could be held accountable directly for these attacks, which are due to major loopholes in their flagship O/S. Opinions which I received in response were mixed, but no doubt Microsoft’s faulty product, which allows computers to be used as weapons, ought to take at least part of the blame. I previously explained more on that stance of mine and arguments regarding liability.

An older Web-based presentation (April 2005, London)

received some encouraging news last night. My submission to the MIAS-IRC annual symposium has been accepted for an oral presentation. To make matters even better, a paper of my colleague, in which I am among the authors, has been accepted as well.

This maintains a good record of consecutive oral presetations (rather than posters). At the moment I continue working towards two looming deadlines for international conferences. I have also begun to prepare the upcoming presentation, the Ph.D. thesis and I foresee the possibility of supercomputing in the near future.

Season of the playful penguins from Oyonale

Microsoft released a report that is very damaging to the image of their operating system. As Paul Murphy from ZDNet put it, ‘Unix beats Windows’ – says Microsoft!.

What’s noteworthy about it is that Microsoft compared Singularity to FreeBSD and Linux as well as Windows/XP – and almost every result shows Windows losing to the two Unix variants. For example, they show the number of CPU cycles needed to “create and start a process” as 1,032,000 for FreeBSD, 719,000 for Linux, and 5,376,000 for Windows/XP.”

Microsoft are still trying to defend their new operating system called Singularity, but in the process they lead to public confusion and doubt. As we approach the release of Windows Vista (due next year), the Gartner group suggests that Vista should be ignored until 2008.

Companies shouldn’t rush to upgrade to Microsoft Windows Vista, according to analysts at Gartner, who believe most firms could safely hold back until 2008.

The majority of improvements in Vista will be security-related and most of this functionality “is available via third-party products today”, Gartner claimed in a research note published on Friday.

Believe it or not, Microsoft decided to include Linux equipment in their network environmernt, as was reported last week.

The next time Bill Gates sends an e-mail through Microsoft’s shiny new Wireless LAN it will be passed through a behind-the-scenes Linux-based network appliance.

[...]

Pandey’s (senior director of Microsoft IT) appraisal of Aruba’s technology is in stark contrast to Microsoft’s “Get the Facts” rhetoric which places Windows as a more secure, and higher-performing choice over Linux.

I decided to take this a step further and compose a pseudo BBC article on Bill Gates’ full migration to Linux. Notice that the URL clearly contains the word ¨Amusement¨, which gives context and clarifies that all is cynicism, I hope.

“Me loves me penguin…”