consolidating blogs

rm -rf * will no longer be updated. this is the end.

readers, if you like to read more about what i've got to say technology-wise, please point your browsers to my weblog: big mango.

Gut Wrenching Pain

Boards across the Internet are burning up for a few hours now!

iPhone has already passed several of its required certification tests and is on schedule to ship in late June as planned. We can’t wait until customers get their hands (and fingers) on it and experience what a revolutionary and magical product it is. However, iPhone contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price — we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned. While Leopard's features will be complete by then, we cannot deliver the quality release that we and our customers expect from us. We now plan to show our developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship Leopard in October. We think it will be well worth the wait. Life often presents tradeoffs, and in this case we're sure we've made the right ones. [Apr 12, 2007] (from apple.com)

I'll wait until you can catch your breath.

Got it back? Okay.

With Apple's announcement, frankly the Faithful everywhere can feel this gut wrenching pain--- but it makes perfect sense. iPhone represents billions of dollars of revenue for the Cupertino-based computer maker. Whereas a new release of OSX can potentially give a few million dollars of revenue, it can wait. Apple needs to ship the iPhone as soon as possible and if it takes developers away from all other resources then so be it.

Leopard represents the next phase of Apple's flagship Operating System. A few months delay in making sure it is fit to run Macs everywhere is good enough to know. Our disappointment is huge, but the payback is even greater later on. It is nice to know that the boys and girls running things at Apple have their priorities set right. A few more months waiting for perhaps the best operating system since Tiger is well worth the wait.

OctaMac: Raw Power

Have you ever wondered what raw POWER feels like? The 8-Core Mac has arrived.

This baby sports a pair of Quad Intel Xeon Processors, running at 3Ghz, each. Pump in at least 4GB of RAM and plug-in the full 3 terabytes of storage, and you've got one hell of a Machine.

The 8-Core Mac Pro is the Ferrari of the Computing World.

Mac Pro: Raw Processing Muscle.
details can be found at Apple's site.

war journal 16: sabayon and beryl

fifteen year-old upstart Linux is the programming geek's idea of an operating system. freely available for download, installation and distribution, since its inception in the early 1990s, Linux's popularity has skyrocketed. One could say, Linux's story is the computing world's version of rags to riches. yet, its road to world dominance has hit a bit of a snag, it remains far from being a viable desktop alternative for the everyman.

The world has embraced the penguin. there is no doubt that much of the Internet's infrastructure uses Linux boxes. Enterprise and backrooms of companies everywhere are on Linux. If there was any doubt of the power and capability of Linux, one just has to look at the prestigious list of the Top 500 supercomputers in the world, where Linux is the obvious choice of scientists and researchers everywhere.

in spite of all this, Linux has not breached the desktop. is it because linux has had the reputation of being bland?

Sabayon Linux is one of many linux distributions that is getting eye candy. This video isn't my desktop. i picked it up off youTube to feature the beauty that is sabayon linux.

I've just finished reinstalling my linux box and moved from gentoo to sabayon, the latter is based on the former, much like ubuntu is based on debian. Sabayon Linux has one thing going for it: sabayon runs beryl out of the box.

So whats the big deal? Getting Beryl to run is more of a hit and miss mission. I should know, the past month has been dedicated to getting beryl to run on my gentoo-driven amd64 box. at one point, I was so desperate that i even reformatted the drive and installed ubuntu 7 (feisty) just to get it to work. The farthest i've reach using gentoo had been to get linux to run 3d rendering on my ati 9250 video card.

Sabayon solved my need. it ran aiglx right off the livecd installation. in fact it was the first thing it asked going through the installation. though i've had problems getting it to connect to my dsl modem (my linux box is the router which connects my internal network to the internet). it took a bit of work, and a bit of a hack via the good old gentoo installer: i chrooted to my installed sabayon and updated its rp-pppoe setup. it was the only way to make it happen.

Sabayon, Ubuntu Feisty are just some of the distros that give linux the eye candy and hopefully will attract the attention of people. Yet i must say this: Linux has a long way to go before it can be an excellent Desktop box. More on that for my next post.

war journal 15: what the bloody heck is wrong!?!

i've been spending the better part of the day installing gentoo@home.

i wanted to scrap my current gentoo install which uses reiserfs because i've been having problems with it. i use this box as a backup/file server. i upload all my os x dmg (disk image files) to linux. i upload videos and music there as well. so its typical to find 100MB to 2GB files.
reseirfs corrupted one of those files.

i wanted to switch to jfs.

no i have a gentoo livecd of amd64. i wanted to use the binary packages. no big right? should be a straight forward process. in my opinion should take bout an hour. 2 at the most.

i started at 8am. its now 3pm. i've hacked my way through the installed partition because the livecd install failed to compile the kernel.

no big, right? its also easy to recover... chroot to the partition and run emerge from there to build the broken packages.

what typically shouldn't be a major problem has turned to a disaster.

rsync keeps failing.

now i can't seem to install the pppoe daemon which is required to connect to the adsl because my rsync keeps failing (equivalent to update repository sa ubuntu). this box also serves as my router see, why i need pppoe.

what the bloody heck is wrong!?!