Sometimes it is hard to explain to non-technical people what the problem is with Microsoft software and why it is in Microsoft's best interest to omit certain features that benefits the majority of the people.

One such question is: Why is Microsoft not in favor of a single vendor-independent open document standard ?

Today I experienced a problem with Drupal's one time URL behaviour when resetting your password. I am a fan of the way Drupal does this, which I think is much better than most sites are handling password resets.

However in this particular case Drupal's solution failed to work. What happens is that the transparent proxy is making a connection to the URL (that I got by mail) and then does a second request that is actually going back to the browser. In a log, it looks like this:

Yes, resistance was futile. When everybody in my team at work had one, I could not be left behind.

So I bought myself a Wii. Plenty of Wii's still in the stores in Belgium, but it seems that most of the Wii-motes and Wii nunchucks are out of stock.

Playing with a Wii for the first time is very different. I would not be surprised if people in 20 years time still remember the first time they played a Wii (and against whom and if they won). It's those little facts of life that people cherish :-)

Few things are as frustrating as watching a DVD and suddenly the sound stops and the screen freezes. Well, the last few months we have been lucky in this area, but yesterday evening it was that time again.

VideoLAN on Windows yesterday skipped a lot of frames when I invoked it (no idea why?), so I went with PowerDVD to watch this rented DVD. We already watched two episodes of Desperate Housewives Season 3 disc 5 and suddenly playback froze.

The reasons for CentOS on your server seem compelling, but the same reasons apply for a desktop or your laptop. Especially for people that require a stable environment and have no need to a (bi-)yearly upgrade that may break or turn your world upside down.

As more people buy laptops instead of desktop systems, and because laptops come as a collection of hardware, it would be nice if we, the CentOS community, would actively start documenting our experience with CentOS on our laptops.

My sister's laptop harddisk crashed recently and turned the Windows laptop in a blue screen generating device. When reinstalling her system with the official Windows XP Professional CD, the installation process failed on what I think was a damaged CD.

Having no Windows media at home (I do not want to support a convicted monopolist and I fear the BSA raiding my home) I decided to put CentOS on it and return it like that. Everything installed fine on this Toshiba Satellite A10 laptop, even the wifi required a 'yum install madwifi' that pulled in DKMS nice and easy.

This weekend, after a few weeks of perl updates and fixing our perl SPEC file generator, I broke the perl dependencies and probably upset a few people along the way.

The good news is that we have some new tools for better automating and updating our perl RPM packages and the coming week I hope to finish updating the existing one.

The bad news is that your yum is broken by design. I wish apt was an option, but that possibility looks dimmer and dimmer. (Even though I am still an avid apt user)

On Linux it was never that easy to access your phone's memory, especially not using bluetooth. For a few years I had been using obexftp for this, but pushing files one by one was far from simple.

As a result if I needed a picture from my phone's memory, I either send it from the phone to my CentOS. This works fine for a single file, but is tiresome for a collection. Or (and this is the default at my place) let Brenda's thinkpad synchronize the new photos from my cellphone.

This is very convenient, because Brenda takes care of the photo-collection housekeeping anyway ! (thanks hon)

What did I do to win ? I just attended LinuxWorld NL :-) I don't know exactly if this was based on luck or whether I was subscribed to some of their presentations or whether I met Jo De Baer to thank him for his help on mrepo's youget. Maybe all three of them ?

But this is what I got in my mailbox last week:

The attached note below says:

Congratulations, you have won a book.

My periodic search for a Skype plugin for pidgin brought up the following link:

http://code.google.com/p/skype4pidgin/

Haven't figured out how to make it work, though. No documentation, little source-code and only a pre-built library to chew on.

Fabian pointed to an interesting article from a Red Hat engineer about CentOS and Red Hat's position. An interesting question popped up that I asked myself before: "Why is there no SLES alternative distribution ?". Given all the benefits a free Enterprise Linux brings to Red Hat, Novell must be eager to want to tap into this resource, right ?

One comment suggested that Novell did not release SRPMs and therefor it was impossible to create a free SLES clone. Reality seems a bit different: Novell does release SRPMs.

There are a few reasons why there is no Open Source SLES alternative.

A week ago I visited MediaMarkt looking for some money to spend (and in the same throw improve my own life). There was this amazing deal to buy 2x 1GB DDR2 laptop-memory for only 77€. Faster than my laptop needs, but it happens to work flawlessly.

I always felt that my laptop could use more memory since I have this bad habit to use Firefox tabs as permanent memory. If I stumble upon interesting information but have limited time to read it, I just open a new tab to continue surfing.

Ask any AIX system administrator and they will tell you that Linux is not ready for the real work. Many reasons are given, but one of recurring technical reasons is that there is no mksysb for Linux.

mksysb on AIX is a tool to do an (online) backup of your system in order to do a bare metal restore. It produces a bootable medium (tape, image, DVD) that restores the system partitioning/LVM configuration and restores the original filesystems for disaster recovery.

A month ago I reported my defeat in the Viagra showdown, but apparently nothing is set in stone because recently I defeated Viagra! Hah!

Next target is Arjan van de Ven :-)

Coming wednesday (31 october) there is a CentOS presentation (in Dutch) at the LinuxWorld Expo in Utrecht, NL.

If you happen to be there, drop by to say hello :)