The 21th century business and personal finance blog

NFO for Facebook News Feed Optimization: get the facts straight!

2011-06-21T09:22:00.000-07:00

Did you ever wonder why some facebook users shares received huge popularity among the facebook community while others users shares (yours?) received very little or no attention at all?

This is where something called the "Edgerank" comes to play a huge role in what is starting to be called "facebook news feed optimization"!
In this article you will learn some key factors that the facebook engine uses to attribute importance and authority to the users shares.

Basically what the Edgerank is all about, is a method that facebook uses to determine your authority by calculating a factor based on your number of shares that received good amounts of "likes", "reshares", and comments in the past, Vs the total number of shares, besides afinity to the friends to which the shares should be made visible, plus a time decay factor and a few more small indicators.

Facebook needs to know if your share is likely to be important to the other friends or not, and the good news is that you can do something about that! Welcome to the world of facebook newsfeed optimization ;)
The first thing to do to optimize your profile or page NFO-wise is to start initiating interactions with your friends/fans that they are likely to be responding to (quality content shares, polls, questions, personal messages .. etc).
Second thing is to look after your share frequency Vs. quality! if you share stuff of little importance too often, your shares get less attention by facebook and you lose authority.
One more thing you can do is to give incentives to your audience to take positive actions, such as asking your close friends to like your links and share them, or running a fan-only contest, .. you can also mass message your friends or members of your group and ask them directly to like your stuff ..

This post is based on the very little information that is available today on facebook news feed optimization and the Edgerank algorithme, I hope you found some of it useful, if I happen to uncover any new facts I will comeback to this page and post it here, so if you can keep a link back to me in your blog, it will help me spread the word more easily!

Payment processing

2011-05-10T09:36:00.000-07:00

Are you trying too hard to find a credit card processing system that integrates perfectly well to your business? Are you looking for a payment processor that will provide you the exqct type of solutions that you are looking for? Do you want to offer your customers the possibility to make payments directly from your website? You may have just found the exact payment service that you are looking for!

This company serves already all kinds of business in different industries (automotive, e-commerce, attorneys, lodging, petroleum, restaurants, retail, telephone, ..) and much more!

By signing up to America processing, you make sure to get the best secure payment solution that you may possibly find in the internet.

Merchant Banking Credit Card Services

2011-04-29T10:36:00.000-07:00

Electronic payment processing is a crucial part of any online business or retail shop, doing it wrong can either mean a higher risk to your customers or higher costs to you!

Lately I have come accross a good merchant banking and credit card services vendor that has helped many businesses (high and low risk activities) get their best foot forward and kick into their business using its wide range of payment processing solutions

If you are a retail shop, website, international company, or travel agency, I believe that you should check this company out! their representative will be happy to answer any of your answers and will help you get your payment services up and running very easily.

8 Keys to success as seen on TED

2010-11-21T20:30:00.000-08:00

Here's an amazing TED video that shows how success can be achieved with 8 key elements.

Let's watch the video first and then discuss in the comments!

How to import from china

2010-11-20T22:53:00.000-08:00

Importing from china can save you a lot of money for sure, either if you manifacture your own goods in china or it you buy from china and then import all over the world.

However, it is not a simple business and many constraints need to be dealt with carefully! the first and most evident one is the delay in delivery (several months by sea), so it is clearly not for everyone.

This said, if you know how to do it, you can still make huge profits out of this business. you just need to learn how to trade with the chinese and do business with them and then how to ship your containers (I assume big volumes) to your homeland or distribution market.

Starting up in this business of import from china will require you to put your best foot forward and seek advices from those who have done it over and over successfully.

An e-book has been released in this question to help you setup your Chinese supply chain without losses, I personnally recommend getting it and understanding all its content before you import anything from china.

You can get a copy of this electronic book here.

How to import a car from Japan

2010-11-20T21:59:00.000-08:00

Importing a car from Japan can be a tough matter if you don't know what you're doing but it offers a much larger choice of cars (some good cars are never imported to the western world) and cheaper prices too.

Actually some used cars in japan can be sold for half their price in the west but if you don't know how to by cars from Japan and import them you cannot make any profit from these car sales.

At last, a complete step by step guide had been released to help you import your car from Japan without trouble. I immediately thought I should share this with my readers so that they can benefit from it to get their next car at a fair price direct from Japan.

You can get this special report from here

How to hack the stock market?

2010-11-20T07:48:00.000-08:00

Have you ever dreamed of a perfect strategy that would allow you to make incredible profits on the stock market? I think you need to check this stuff out! someone seems to have shared just what you are looking for!

The site first evaluates your knowledge of the financial market by asking you a few questions on trading strategy and then introduces you to this amazing new trading system.

To find more information, Click Here!

Google wave has failed!

2010-07-13T10:39:00.000-07:00

I have officially ceased yesterday support of the Google Wave service via my google wave lab blog.

To my sens, google wave has terribly failed to become the next massive communication tool for humanity as it was intended by its creators to be.

I was one of the first people to rush to google wave and request a developper preview account, and I had seriously wanted to be one of the first people to develop for this new platform, but the fact is that Google wave has failed, and it had failed very bad. It is now time to discard it once and for all, sorry Google!

Linux Party à l'EMI le 6 et le 7 février 2010

2010-01-27T14:41:00.001-08:00

L'Ecole Mohammedia des Ingénieurs (EMI) (Agdal : Rabat)organise le 6 et 7 Février 2010 la dixième édition de la Linux Party sous le thème "L'open source, bilan, ouvertures, et horizons".

La team Ubuntu Marocaine sera représentée dans cet évènement par une conférence et un atelier technique sur le cloud computing avec Ubuntu et Eucalyptus annimés par moi même.

L'entrée est libre.

Vous trouverez plus d'informations sur cet évènement à la page suivante: http://www.emi.ac.ma/linuxparty/

Electric guitar pickups design guidelines disclosed online

2009-11-26T17:01:00.000-08:00

Electric guitars pickups is one of those "mystery" areas in the guitar technology world where not many things are known, the secret seems to have been well guarded for a so long time.
But guess what? not anymore! personal experimentation (guitar pickups building) and knowledge exchange with other (few) amateurs has led to a fair amount of information to be gathered.
This information has just been uncovered by an article of mine that I have just made online! the article is a compilation of the most influential electric guitar pickup design factors on the tone of the pickups that I personnally know.
Heres a link for my guitar pickups design bible.

Funny road runner clip

2009-09-30T06:12:00.000-07:00

ROAD RUNNER FUNNY CLIP - More amazing video clips are a click away
Check out this funny road runner clip!

How to control a county in three easy steps:

2009-09-28T19:10:00.000-07:00

You send economic hitmen, then chacals, then the military, watch the video!

Le Nouvel Ordre Mondial (7/10)
par Mecanopolis

Richard Stallman in Marrakech - Morocco (old story)

2009-09-10T07:36:00.000-07:00

Many of us didn't know that Richard Stallman has been to Morocco in 2004, but truly a few people have read the blog entry in the fsf website where he talks about his journey in Marrakech, it is a funny reading, I invite you to read the whole story here: http://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/entry-20050105

Nextma celebrates Software freedom's day

2009-09-05T20:33:00.000-07:00

The OpenMorocco team and Nextma (FOSS service company) organise a free software party in Casablanca Morocco, Saturday, September, 19th, 2009.

The activities will start at 10 Am and finish at 3 Pm (Ramadan time!), and will vary from presentations, tech talks, installs, to open debates and discussions.

Access is free upon prior request (http://www.openmorocco.com/inscriptions/).

Everyone is welcome.

A young Moroccan developer offers the XO OLPC 3D abilities for the first time.

2009-07-17T04:15:00.000-07:00

As reported in OLPC news, young free software enthousiast Ahmed Mansour, has just succeeded in porting the first 3D application to the XO OLPC in history.
The major difficulty with the XO is that it has relatively poor performance, and no hardware 3D acceleration at all. The only way to do 3D on it was then through software rendering, this led Ahmed Mansour (aka. Atphalix) to pick up an old 3D game (Quake 1) and heavily modify it to run smoothly on the XO, and this is was has been done to achieve the final result.
Now the developer along with the community sees this as a first proof of concept, and further work must be now done in this direction to provide the XO with a proper 3D library with optimized software rendering, and then to be able to develop nice educational 3D games for the kids.
The next step in the project of Ahmed Mansour (Alias Atphalix) is to transform the Quake1 and turn it into a real educational game called Abcube, by taking away all the violence, and the guns, and subtituting them with new things with nice graphics.

Note: Ahmed Mansour is also my brother, he is at this exact moment in another room of the house designing some objects with blender for his 3D game.

Buy a Djinn on ebay. Unbeliavable ebay guide reviews Djinn as a merchandise!

2009-07-06T21:14:00.000-07:00

I was astonished to come across this unbelievable ebay guide that presented and reviewed Djinn (jnoun,spiritual beings aka ghosts) as a mere merchandise, the article writer says he bought many djinns and that they're changing his life,..
This is not all !! a quick search on ebay, showed that many people were selling captive djinns, haunted wishing rings, and more, ..
I am totally astonished, I don't know what is going on out there on ebay, and wether people are actually buying this bullshit or not, I prefer to leave commenting this for you.

95% of the traffic that comes to this blog is generated by a single post!

2009-07-06T19:44:00.000-07:00

My stats indicate that 95% of total traffic that comes to this blog is generated by the sole old post that resolves a MySQL install issue (see history), so how did that happen? that was spontaneous, I had found a solution to a common problem that hundreds of people were experiencing every day, I published the solution on my blog, and posted links to it on the MySQL official forums and on a few other places on the Internet. Direct result to this action: a massive rush to my website from those unique places, to the point that I even added a link bellow the article to my cat food recipes blog, and that I generate a fair amount of daily clics from there!
Unfortunately, techy floks like you don't clic on adsense ads, otherwise I may have become a richer man, but the quality of my content allows me to build interest on other good websites of mine, and this is a nice thing too.
Now a question to you! what if you had a non-techy blog or website, and if ALL your posts/articles were benefiting from a similar targetted rush? how much money would you be earning monthly? I am not questionning your ambition, but I'm just trying to inspire you of some amazing ways for your website to get noticed, more on that is to come, hold on ;)

In case you'd like to discover my other dog food recipes blog, it goes here.

Video shows launch of world's largest amateur rocket

2009-04-29T21:54:00.000-07:00

Amateur Rocket builder makes a 1/10th scale model of the NASA Saturn V rocket and launches it with amazing success on Saturday, becoming largest amateur rocket ever to take off and be safely recovered. The feat could herald the arrival of the first amateur rockets to reach orbit.
Read the article on rocketryplanet

Oracle buys SUN!

2009-04-28T18:50:00.000-07:00

"On April 20, 2009, Sun and Oracle announced a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun's cash and debt. The proposed transaction is subject to Sun stockholder approval, certain regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions. Until the deal closes, each company will continue to operate independently, and it is business as usual."

This was quoted text from sun microsystems website
My personal comment is that this is the worse thing that could ever strike the IT industry second to Microsoft acquiring SUN xD, Oracle is actually not very different from Microsoft afaic.
The question now is what will happen to MySQL? and to the other open source projects held by sun.
Will sun continue to support open source and easy licencing of valuable pieces of software to small businesses and personals for free? or will it concentrate on providing premium integrated solutions to big Oracle customers?
If you are interested, you can partake in the related discussion on Slashdot.

General Electric announces 500 Gb optical disc !

2009-04-28T12:49:00.000-07:00

This is the latest announcement from General Electric! the development of a new generation of optical (micro-holographic) discs to store up to 500 Gb of data.
This huge technological breakthrough is intended for the professional storage market but General Electric says it can land in the consumer market as well, portable players will even be compatible with existing DVD and Blu-ray discs!

This new technology relies on the three dimensional storage of information on the disc instead of tradition on-surface disc burning, this allows the reach of unprecedented data density on the disc.

The amount of data (500Gb) that this monster optical disc is capable of storing is equivalent, to a thousand CDs, a hundred DVDs, or 20 Blu-rays!!

A critical challenge for the research team, which has been working hard on this project since 2003, has been to find the right materials and techniques so that smaller holograms reflect enough light for their data patterns to be detected and retrieved..

More infos on this remarkable breakthrough can be found in this New York Times page.

Capof's Space:

2009-04-24T09:57:00.001-07:00

This is the name of the new Moroccan IT blog that I discovered today :) , this is a wonderful place where you can find news, and infos about anything regarding free software and Linux in particular, since the author seems to be a huge fan of anything Linux related, and that just couldn't suit me better.
In case you can't read french, the blog has a feature that enables you to view the content in the language of your choice, I think you should bookmark this one now!

can i register a domain name myself ?

2009-04-22T10:34:00.000-07:00

Whether you can register your own domain name yourself or not is a very popular question that keeps coming back again and again, so I decided to put some light into it ..

If you want a quick answer then NO, you MUST go through a "domain registrar", domain names are universal, then one can't just go register anything anywhere, this means that domain names management is centralized in the ICANN (Internet corporation for assigned names and numbers), ..

Some companies will be allowed by ICANN to sell domains to you, these companies will have to sign the Registrar Acreditation Agreement, other (smaller) companies will register a domain for you via an accredited registrar and resell it to you, that means to charge you extra fees.

The ICANN is a non-profit organization with members from all over the world and its main purpose is to keep the Internet secure and stable for everyone.

Although the ICANN doesn't make any profits from this business, The management of heavy loads of domain names induces considerable costs. For this reason, registration fees are due, this means your Internet registrar doesn't take all the money you pay them for themselves, they only earn a portion of it and give the rest away to the ICANN.

So all in all, you cannot register your own domain name yourself! I hope this helps.

Adsense stats not updating today ! (April 20'th 2009)

2009-04-20T09:47:00.000-07:00

Yes, and don't worry, your Google Adsense stats are freezing today, Google seems to be having a problem updating adsense stats, this has happened before (in 2004, 2006, and 2008 as far as i know), and this is normal, ads will continue to be served, and everything will be updated soon, Google engineers must be taking care of that a the moment.

Icepick: the wired house

2009-04-19T03:44:00.000-07:00

Their dark looking website shows supposedly logs of all what happens in the house, they claim to be running since 1998, we do know if all that is true or just a hoax, they don't say a word about their claimed technology.

I suggest you take a look at the website and tell us what you think about it.

5,25 GHz overlocking (World record)

2009-04-18T08:44:00.000-07:00

The question that this video raises the most for me at the moment is how could IBM attain the 5Ghz in its power6 processors (multi-cores !!!) with simple water cooling, while as this video shows, the 5 Ghz could hardly be attained using liquid nitrogen ! on a single core! processor? this is so weired, could IBM own an extremely advanced technology? to this point?

IBM Launches Hydro-Cluster Supercomputer

2009-04-18T08:11:00.000-07:00

This supercomputer uses the fastest processor in the world, that's the IBM power 6 (5Ghz), this processor achieves this speed thanks to a new on-chip water cooling technology, I strongly suggest that you watch this video:

Tour of new IBM Power 595

2009-04-18T06:31:00.000-07:00

IBM launches a huge server to meet requirements of continually demanding high end market, take a look.

The Pirate Bay founders in Jail for illegal media sharing

2009-04-17T07:25:00.000-07:00

Popular torrent tracker website the pirate bay suited in a sweden court has been declared guilty of providing free access to copyrighted materials, the four founders of the website will have to spend one year in jail and pay a lot of dollars to companies like: MGM Pictures, Columbia Pictures Industries, Twentieth Century Fox Film, Sony BMG, Universal, and EMI.
Piratebay founders Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg. Carl Lundström said they cannot and they will not pay the $3.6 million fine.
One of the four young men called the verdict in a video bizarre and unreal.
Full story can be found here.

Tema Networks to handle +1000 queries/second using MySQL

2009-04-12T19:27:00.000-07:00

Sun Microsystems announced that Tema Networks (Finland) would "deploy sun's MySQL Embedded Server to meet to its demanding database requirements" wich are higher than a thousand queries/second and tens of gigabytes of data!!
Tero Heinonen, CEO of Tema Networks Ltd. says the pricing model of MySQL is very attractive and saves one of their clients nearly 1 million euros (that must be Oracle! No doubt hahaha).
Full story can be found here.

How to be an expert on Anything

2009-04-12T19:19:00.000-07:00

Stephen Colbert has dedicated his career to passing himself off as an expert on anything, in this wired article he explains in a very funny way how he's done that over the time and how one can do that as well.
Among Colbert's advices is to pick a field that can't be verified, choose a subject that is actually secret, get your own entry in an encyclopedia, use a lot of abbreviations, .. and much more xD

I strongly suggest that you take a look there, it's very funny! :)

Yet another moroccan IT blog!

2009-04-12T17:24:00.000-07:00

I wonder how many of you can read French, but I thought I'd absolutely share this Moroccan IT blog with you, as you may already know there are not so many people in Morocco who blog about IT and are pro Free Software and share it with the world, so when you are Moroccan and you come across one of these blogs, it must be like some fresh air to you, ..

Hoax slayer true e-mails wonderful section.

2009-04-11T19:06:00.000-07:00

In a response to increasingly annoying scam e-mails since the early 2000's, a website has been especially designed to help people find out whether the e-mails they receive are scam or real information, and if the e-mail that you received is not listed in the hoax-slayer website you have the ability to submit it for an extensive review.
However, some of the received e-mails may have scam properties and appearance but may sometimes hold actual true information, a very interesting section of the website has been put in place to hold links to these e-mails.
Then why am I bothering you with that? well, the fact is that this true e-mails section contains some of the most wonderful stories that I have ever heard of in my life! (so wonderful that people doubted it was true!), I suggest that you immediately take a look there :)

what is meant by a dry sense of humour

2009-04-09T19:35:00.000-07:00

According to Google at least 103 people everyday don't know what is meant by a dry sense of humour and search for that, surprisingly none of the first results that you get (for text between quotations) is relevant, so I thought I'd write a definition of that since I am getting an increasingly growing traffic to this blog, it may help so many people.
So what is meant by a dry sense of humour, or when you say that someone has a dry sense of humour that means that this person doesn't beg for a laugh and instead offers a simple observation or other statement that proves to be funny.
That means that the person with a dry sense of humour can tell jokes and don't laugh at all, or at least don't expect or require you to laugh .. that's what is meant by a dry sense of humour :-)

We will not go down "New shocking Video clip" Song for Gaza

2009-04-08T12:30:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E14b_9wStUU

if else statement syntax queries mysql php examples

2009-04-07T23:27:00.000-07:00

What is that bullshit? this is the worse title I have ever written for a post, but again believe it or not! 29 people are typing this exact text in google every day ( if else statement syntax queries MySQL PHP examples ) and of course get no results.
I know I am getting a lot of traffic to this blog from the MySQL forums, so I don't want the experienced people to be laughing at me now, I just feel like I should help those 29 people out.

So, first thing there's no such thing as "if else" in MySQL since MySQL doesn't have a procedural extention (like Oracle's PL/SQL), this flow control job is usually done withing your programming language (that's not the SQL!!), If you are interested to MySQL, chances are that you are learning/using PHP, the syntaxe to do that in php is the following:
if (condition) { Instructions (may include the execution of SQL statements or anything..) ;}
else { other instructions;}
refer to your php documentation/book for more information.
I hope this helps :)

web based point of sale system using mysql

2009-04-07T23:06:00.000-07:00

Maybe this title doesn't tell a lot to you, but surprisingly according to wordtracker at least 23 people every day are searching for this exact text (" web based point of sale system using mysql "), even more surprisingly NO RESULTS in google were relevant to this search!! (until this post was written) , anyway if you are one of those people who search a web based point of sale that uses MySQL (and were led here by a search engine), first thing I want to tell you is that is NOT AN EFFICIENT WAY to search for that, you could at least say "point of sale php" (3,490,000 results in google!), since we already know that more than 90% of available php applications are written for MySQL ..
This time I will satisfy your need for a point of sale to 100%!! since I have a killer opensource app for you! so check this out: http://www.phppointofsale.com/
Don't forget to check my other posts, might help you as well ;)

How to Migrate your MySQL server from Windows to *nix (Linux, FreeBSD, OpenSolaris, ...etc)

2009-04-07T18:15:00.000-07:00

There are many reasons why a serious sys admin / webmaster would like to migrate their MySQL server to a superior operating environment such as GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, or OpenSolaris, ... etc, this is usually wanted either for security, performance, stability, and reliability.

I believe the "how to?" for that is a simple question that still keeps coming back over and over, so the first thing I should say is that your data don't see the OS, so if you just copy the /data folder and paste it in the new *nix data folder it should work just fine.

If you want to do your things the cleaner way, it is always possible to backup your data as sql code and just run it as such in your new *nix server, no big deals.

I hope this helps.

Ultimate SEO memo!

2009-04-06T14:21:00.000-07:00

The internet is sure full of SEO (search engine optimisation) websites where you can get valuable information from, but if you ever wanted a working plan to get started out, the following is likely to help you, .. I originally had written this as a brainstorming, but I finally thought it would help you too, so here's the plan to build a successful website from scratch:

1 - Pick a good website template/design/engine.
2 - Write good to extremely good and original content.
3 - Optimise your website for indexation by the search engines according to your keywords.
4 - submit your website in the major directories and listings.
5 - Buzz about your website in the online communities and in the blog comments.
6 - Include your URL in your signature for any forum where you go.
7 - Have some popular blogs publish reviews about your website (IRC channels can help with that).
8 - Have some people exchange links with you, and if possible see if they can give you one way links.
9 - Evolve the content of the website in two directions:
9 - 1 - Main business keywords (long term reward).
9 - 2 - Long tail keywords (short run reward, fast reach, and long term build-up).
10 - Promote conversion and enhance monetization.
11 - Have some real word activities/ads or advertise on other websites.
12 - Give it some time ;)

Ubuntu outperforms Windows 7 In Benchmarks

2009-04-06T07:31:00.000-07:00

"The average GNU/Linux user is now getting better absolute performance from their computer as well as better value than the average Windows user" this is the conclusion of this new benchmark (just in case you didn't know already), one thing that has not been stated however, is that Windows Vista/7/.. is already that bad WITHOUT an ANTIVIRUS! I wonder what this comparison would look like if Norton Antivirus was installed and if some spywares were doing their jobs too, .. let alone the filesystem that gets fragmented as hell after a while and slows down the whole thing! I am pretty sure the performace loss exceede 700%
Further comments on this benchmark can be found here.

IBM Withdraws $7B Offer For Sun Microsystems, Says NYT

2009-04-06T07:06:00.000-07:00

The New York Times says:
"I.B.M., after months of negotiations, withdrew its $7 billion bid for Sun Microsystems on Sunday, one day after Sun's board balked at a slightly reduced offer, according to a person close to the talks. The deal's collapse raises questions about Sun's next step, since the I.B.M. offer was far above the value of the Silicon Valley company's shares when news of the I.B.M. offer first surfaced last month. .. Since last year, Sun executives had been meeting with potential buyers. I.B.M. stepped up, seeing an opportunity to add to its large software business, acquire valuable researchers and consolidate the market for larger, so-called server computers that corporations use in their data centers. ... Now, Sun is free to pursue other suitors, including I.B.M. rivals like Hewlett-Packard and Cisco Systems. Cisco recently entered the market for server computers."

Remarkable comments on this story from Slashdot include:

by segfaultcoredump (226031) on Sunday April 05, @08:08PM (#27469851)
Cisco + Sun would make more sense. Mostly because there is very little overlap in their actual products but their two lines constantly need to work together. (Our sun servers are connected to Cisco ethernet switches, our SunRays vpn into Cisco vpn concentrators, our Sun Storage is connected to Cisco MDS switches, etc). It would also give Cisco the biggest, baddest InfiniBand switch on the market (and at 110Tbps, its switching capacity totally trashes anything cisco has ever produced).
The biggest problem with the Sun+IBM deal was that there was so much overlap, customers would be left to wonder which product lines would get discontinued. (glassfish vs websphere, solaris vs aix, sparc vs power, sun's servers vs ibm's, storage, tape, etc, etc, etc. )

by Smackintosh (1009941) on Sunday April 05, @10:42PM (#27471139)
If true.And I say that for three very important reasons:a) IBM was sure to 'consolidate' a great number of things. And I'm sure any remnants of Sun left after this process would have been IBM-ized. And I do say that with a great deal of negative connotation. IBM has a habit of having some great tech, but in many cases doing very dumb things to it to make it annoying to work with. (Exhibit #1 = AIX boxen)b) Our choices for 'iron' and 'OS' variety in the IT space would have been reduced as I'm sure overalpping server lines would disappear, as well as perhaps an OS (AIX vs. Solaris). Some variety in the I.T. space is most definitely to our advantage as I.T. folks. Of course, pricing competition between rivals is always a good thing, too.c) Lastly, the most important thing, is that we'd have lost one of the most innovative enterprise I.T. companies ever. Say what you will about their ability to turn it into large $$$, but Sun has come up with some of the most innovative ideas the server-related I.T industry has seen since their inception....and they continue to do so. I think many people lose sight of this as they like to whine about Sun simply because they're a big corporation.

by melted (227442) on Monday April 06, @03:21AM (#27472829) Homepage
I only hope that someone company with good management buys them out. There are very few of those, but they do exist.
Sun could have OWNED the entire server side, the way Microsoft owns the desktop, if only they played their Java deck of cards as well as Microsoft is playing .NET. Young uns don't remember it now, but there was a time when Microsoft was scared shitless of Java, and rightfully so. You install a runtime and the OS sorta doesn't matter anymore - that goes to the core of their entire strategy and rips it apart.
The problem was (and is) that Sun's software strategy was sorta like a chicken running with its head cut off - it went from the web to embedded to desktop to servers and everywhere in between without getting particularly good at anything (at least not thanks to Sun's efforts - community saved their server story, but that's about it).
What they should have done is they should have absolutely nailed desktop and server, and done so in late 90's before their cash cow hardware and support business started drying up.
McNealy is single handedly responsible for Sun's demise. Instead of building Java platform into a formidable weapon that would let them take over the world pretty much, he spent much of the late 90's trying to screw with Microsoft, when it wasn't even seriously in the enterprise server business - Sun's core market.
There was NOTHING Microsoft could do to stave off Java except for two things:1. Brain dead reliance on bytecode interpreter in early Java VMs (compare that to unconditional JIT on first call in .NET).2. McNealy's preoccupation with secondary issues, like keeping Java pure on MS platform. What he should have been thinking of is how to make it BETTER than MS implementation. Microsoft VM blew the doors off Sun's own at the time, its UI controls looked native (they WERE native), it had much faster startup time. The situation with lack of portability would have rectified itself had Sun's stack been superior to Microsoft's - people would just develop for Sun's version and ship a JRE on CDs, no big deal.
The only thing I want from them (or whoever buys them in the end) at this point is release ZFS under GPL. It's seriously difficult to get me excited with anything computer related these days, and ZFS is one of those things I want really bad on my Linux boxes (I know there's FUSE version, but I want production quality code).
After they do that, they can just fold up the tent and go out of business. I wouldn't care.

An ice bridge linking a shelf of ice the size of Jamaica to two islands in Antarctica has snapped.

2009-04-06T06:46:00.000-07:00

Scientists say the collapse could mean the Wilkins Ice Shelf is on the brink of breaking away, and provides further evidence of rapid change in the region. Sited on the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula, the Wilkins shelf has been retreating since the 1990s. Researchers regarded the ice bridge as an important barrier, holding the remnant shelf structure in place. Its removal will allow ice to move more freely between Charcot and Latady islands, into the open ocean."

Prepare your own cat food at home.

2009-04-04T17:19:00.000-07:00

Now you can use my recipes to prepare your own homemade cat food, we have 3 kitten at home and a pregnant cat, it was high time I create a blog to share tips and good recipes with cat owners out there.. I hope you will enjoy my blog, and as always, if you like it, please link to it :)

TuxFamily Adopts the HADOPI french law

2009-04-02T08:27:00.000-07:00

This is the e-mail that I received yesterday from tuxfamily.com :

"Hi,

While the discussion about the HADOPI law continues, we decided to move
forward. Thus, TuxFamily volunteered as an experimental hosting service
to test the application and the deployment of the HADOPI concepts,
beginning by filtering any suspicious content for any potential
copyright holder. The government approved our idea and decided to cheer
us by hosting their VAlbanel project[1] on TuxFamily's servers.

VAlbanel for Virtual Albanel, is a software designed to check if your
computer is clean against the HADOPI law, for those who don't understand
why "Albanel", Mrs. Christine Albanel is the spearhead of this wonderful
project. Currently under heavy tests, this software will be run on all
download directories and web areas of our web hosting facility. Also in
the spirit of open source, which is not incompatible with HADOPI, you
can download the sources of VAlbanel. This is a .tar.gz archive[2]
fetched from the developer when the first executions of VAlbanel have
deleted the original sources. So, we strongly recommend you to download
and execute VAlbanel on your computer.

Finally, to prevent the upload of illegal content which might not be
seen by VAlbanel, we will modify our FAQ on some points. Thus, we now
invite our hosted artists to contact the government to get a licence for
their work instead of relying on a free license.

Keep an eye on your files in the next days in order to see if you had
unlawful files.

Your beloved admin. "

But just after I written a harsh reply saying that I would delete my tuxfamily account ... I noticed the date of the day! it was April the 1'st :-D lol, that only was tuxfamily's April the 1'st hoax :D

To have further information on the Hadopi project of law, you can follow this link: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loi_Hadopi (only available in french for the moment, any volunteer?)

Google's 2009 April the 1'st Hoaxes :)

2009-04-01T16:28:00.000-07:00

As they traditionally do every year, Google releases quite natural-sounding and almost believable hoaxes, one of the most popular Google April hoax was in 2007 when they claimed Google would offer free and high speed internet connectivity through the toilet pipes network xD.

To find a listing of this year's Google hoaxes you can check this amazing Wikipedia article,

It is also to mention that Google's marketing wants to include every year real new projects/products with the hoaxes so that people think they are hoaxes and spread the word and then be surprised that Google will actually do it! one of the most remarkable announcements of this kind was the release of gmail in 2004, shortly before midnight on March 31, 2004, Google announced^[14] the launch of Gmail. Many people believed it was a hoax, because free web-based e-mail with one gigabyte of storage was unheard of at the time, in 2005 Google even increased the storage to 2Gb.

13 meters long monster fossil snake found!

2009-04-01T10:58:00.000-07:00

Scientists have recently unearthed in Columbia a giant snake which they believe has lived between 58 and 60 million years ago.

The giant snake would have weighed 1,140 kilograms (2,500 pounds) and measured 13 meters (42.7 feet).

"At its greatest width, the snake would have come up to about your hips. The size is pretty amazing," Geologist David Polly, who identified the position of the fossil, said in a statement.

This is the first time that such biggest snake has been found in the earth.

The size of the monster snake suggests that it would devour dozens of animals a day.

Is Facebook growing up too fast?

2009-03-28T16:52:00.000-07:00

Only 8 months ago (in august) the world biggest social network was celebrating its 100 Millionth user, now Facebook says it expects its 200 Millionth member to register very soon!
Although doubling the number of users in only 8 months means Facebook has definitely won over any other form of competition and has become the absolute world leading social network, reaching this size that fast can also be a big performance issue, and further raises big questions:

- Was Facebook well designed in the first place to handle this huge traffic?

- Was PHP and MySQL good technological choices in the first place? (wouldn't a J2EE based architecture have been faster?) we know Facebook to have started in a small harvard student's garage, did they ever expect to get that big?

- What kind of hardware configuration is Facebook actually running on? is there any upgrade limiting factors? does Facebook have a good expansion policy in terms of processing power, storage capacity, and network connection bandwidth?

Last question (but not the least!): What if it fails to handle it? too many people around the world actually rely on Facebook to connect to each other, share ideas, photos, opinions, and keep in touch with their friends, Facebook performance is already worsening, .. if it ever fails to handle increasing demand that would be the biggest crash in the IT history.

Find further information on this subject in this cnet article

FreeBSD emmerging as the ultimate platform for building clusters!

2009-03-28T09:15:00.000-07:00

As popular Linux based clustering solutions such as OpenMosix and others have officially closed and ceased development, the FreeBSD operating system emerges more than any time before as the ultimate platform for building powerful and effective kernel level production clusters.
Clustering multiple computers is putting them to work in parallel through a network (usually a LAN)as a one big computer, in most high demand server applications clustering can be a very cost effective alternative to buying expensive large servers and mainframes.
The only Linux based solutions available today (such as PVM and MPICH2 are user-level and have a too heavy overhead, some people even write their own application-specific clustering software for Linux to avoid that, while this can be a very enriching educational experience, this is not productive at all, except for real large and specific applications, for instance Google is known to have traditionally clustered a large number of Linux entry-level servers in this fashion.
To avoid all trouble, more and more people use alternative OS's to Linux such as FreeBSD, installation is quite simple, and performance is fantastic, this tutorial can give you useful instructions on how to build such a cluster in FreeBSD, ... If you would prefer to see a video on how things work, i suggest you watch to following:

To do build the same cluster as described in this video please follow this link.

Ass still sells very well, here's the proof!

2009-03-28T08:41:00.000-07:00

Fidel to its habits and philosophy, "Agent Provocateur" comes up/back again with an excellent hot advertisment, mainly male oriented, to remind men that they should not forget valentine's day. This video proves once again that sex still sells very well! Enjoy!

Valentine Agent Provocateur
by laurentec

The MySQL/Windows install Head Ache, now solved!!

2009-03-25T10:24:00.000-07:00

I have recently had to install MySQL in a windows box (see the irony ! xD).. Everything seemed to install well except that when I ran the MySQL instance configuration wizard it was surprised it couldn't create the service and said: Cannot create Windows service MySQL. Error 0.
When I looked around in the internet i found that plenty of other people had the exact same problem while no helpful solution seemed to be provided by MySQL.com .. I had myself to install and deinstall the server plenty of times with extensive cleaning until I figured out what the problem really was thanks to thourough trial, investigation, and failiure xD , some posts in some forums also helped me a lot.

So what happens with that is that you previously had a MySQL install, and you happened to uninstall it without stopping the windows service first, this prevented it from being removed, when you reinstalled the server a previous instance of the windows service was already in the registry and had the previous install directory as a target.

What you need to do to resolve the problem is to deinstall your current MySQL instance, then run Regedit (start menu, run: "regedit") and remove the mysql service entry in the windows
registery that you will find here: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Services

At this point your machine looks like it has never seen MySQL at all, you can then install it again and it will work without problems, actuallt when retrying with MySQL 5.1 I ran into another problem, the mysqld daemon is launched but it crashed unexpectedly, don't worry about that if it happens, this is a bug and it's not yout fault! I have grabbed an old 4.1 installer from mysql website and it worked wonders, if you are using MySQL for a casual work (expl: running wordpress, joomla, phpbb, ...etc) and if your work is not critical (if you are using windows, sure it is not hahaha) then i suggest you do the same as I did.

If this solves your problem, please link against me to help others get around that as well :)

I also invite you to check out my free homemade cat food recipes blog and my homemade pet food website, these two websites are a huge collection of my best pet food recipes ever, I am sure you will like them a lot.

Host your website in your own machine with no-ip.org

2009-03-23T08:23:00.000-07:00

Most of you techy folks know that anyone can host their own web server in their bedroom, given that the machine stays up most of the time (or never goes down at all), the only annoying part about it is that most of us poor ISP customers only have a dynamically attributed IP adress that changes at every single connection, it is less than practical to bind such an IP to a domain name!
The PERFECT solution for that is to use the no-ip service from http://no-ip.org , this allows you to have an address that looks like: http://oxydon.no-ip.org or .zapto.org or whatever, you only need to install a small utility that connects to DNS server and updates your IP address every time it changes :)
The service is offered in a free of charge formula and a premium (paid for) one, I use the free offer some time now with no problems at all, and I benefit from the huge advantage of having TOTAL control over my machine, I can install whatever software I want, i can have Giga Bytes of data, I can share my multimedia files, I can stream audio if I want, I can install just as many databases as I want, I can even share load with my second computer, .. If you want no limits, gotta go with no-ip!

PS: This is not an advertisement! I am just a regular user of this service and I have no professional Links with no-ip.org, this is just a way to thank this company for their generosity and to share the opportunity with you.

New system crash causes dramatic personal data losses - But lessons are learned!

2009-03-16T06:19:00.000-07:00

This is primary an effect of using a not so good third party ATI graphics card driver in my Debian GNU/Linux box, my brothers had to use an OpenGL Quake map editor in the computer that caused the Kernel to crash every now and then, .. The only way to get back up was to hard-reboot the computer by pressing the reset button, doing this over and over caused the defective driver one time to crash over the Ext file system driver and caused a permanent unrecoverable data loss of the whole content of my /home Ext2 partition.

This data loss includes most significantly the soure code of the GroundOS hobby operation system on wich i have been working more that 6 months now! and wich i will have to rewrite from scratch, other losses include (but are not limited to) technical documents, personal photos, personnal writings, software packages and sources, source codes and small projects i have been working on these last months, ...

One first lesson that is to be learned here, is to upgrade from Ext2!! this historical file system has proved over the time very poor recovery and self-healing abilities, .. one other thing is to use a safe kernel/drivers whenever available .. or you use a better operating system than Linux (yes there are!), another thing to be learned is to avoid running ANY piece of software that you know may compromise your kernel integrity! hard rebooting is evil, it only is your LAST escape when every other thing fails!

If you are in a professional envioronment or if you can afford buying more hard drives, raid can turn out to be a god send too! if you don't but you still desire to invest some ressources in protecting your data and having more undo options and a time slider, you may want to try the state of the art ZFS filesystem (only available today in Solaris/OpenSolaris, and FreeBSD).

Last but not least, ALWAYS BACK-UP your sensitive data!
I hope this helps.

Edit: here's a video I had made to tal about that:

Bran's Kernel tutorial

2008-10-16T17:46:00.001-07:00

A very interesting ressource can be found at: http://www.osdever.net , it's called the Bran's Kernel tutorial, and it aims to give you a step by step introduction into writing your own operating system kernel, it starts pretty much from the very beginning and walks you through the major steps of designing a DIY kernel from scratch.
I have myself followed the first steps of the tutorial (still going), i found a few errors in the provided code, when i corrected them it compiled with no problem, then i assembled the startup routine (in assembly) and linked everything in one single file called kernel.bin, wich should be the executable image file of my kernel, however this image file has not been recognised as a valid kernel by the Grub boot loader, it must be a configuration problem with Grub, i will try to fix this up soon, if it doesn't work i will send an e-mail to the author, ...
I strongly recommend this website as a reference for anyone who wants to get started with custom kernel development.
If you are particularly interested in the Linux kernel or if you want to take it as a guide line, there is also a generic collection of ressources that can help you, here's the link: http://jungla.dit.upm.es/~jmseyas/linux/kernel/hackers-docs.html
have fun.

System crash causes new release of Adaptube to be delayed.

2008-10-11T20:10:00.000-07:00

Not exactly a crash but there are no words to describe the horrible action of installing (by error) the GNU/Linux distribution (Elive) on top of my main Free BSD system, i have done that by selecting the wrong partition as an installation target for Elive.
The direct consequence of this accident is the delay to release the next stable release of the Adaptube guitar amplifier simulator, having lost the latest sources, i will have to work out the changes from the ground up (based on the previous version), this will take some time before a new package can be seen in the sourceforge page of the project.
Anyway, the learned lesson is: NEVER make several partitions of the same size!! when every thing else fails, the size of a partition can be the only reliable indicator of its identity, ... there is nothing worse than losing dozens (hundreds?) of hours of work in a no-time because of a small mistake.

How to set up sound in Debian

2008-10-11T17:47:00.001-07:00

You are so many to have had the bad surprise of getting no sound after your fresh Debian Installation, when you search the net you find many topics in the forums that are mostly answered anyhow or to fit a particular situation, so here is the general case and all what you should do to have your machine wonderfully play sound:
- The FIRST thing is to install ALSA, as root type:
apt-get install alsa-base
apt-get install alsa-utils
then you run alsaconf
alsaconf will guide you through the process of setting up your audio configuration.
after that you need to add yourself to the "audio" user group by doing:
adduser your_name audio
then you need to modify the access rights to /dev/dsp to be able to use it,
still as root you do:
chmod o-w /dev/dsp
chmod o-w /dev/mixer
Now you should install an audio player and run it, there are many good players out there such as vlc, xmms, mplayer, xine, noatun, totem, ...etc
apt-get any of them and plug your favourite CD ;)
I hope this helps, feel free to modify this document and post it anywhere with no restrictions.

L'Association Marocaine des Jeunes Musiciens bientôt en ligne!

2008-04-01T07:20:00.000-07:00

L'Association Marocaine des Jeunes Musiciens (AMJM) se dotte d'un site web qui sera lancé la semaine prochaine, le site est déjà hébérgé sur un serveur temporaire mais le nom de dommaine définitif sera: www.amjm.net ce site est sensé constituer une grande avancée pour la scène de musiques des jeunes au maroc en manque depuis plusieurs mois d'un site web portail, ... à suivre.