Saturday, May 30, 2009

D-Day in a few hours

It's 0235 now. I am sitting at the sofa trying my best to finish up my slides for tomorrow's SELinux in a Nutshell talk. Maybe I shouldn't agreed to do it in the first place. Ah well....so a moment of temporary insanity will cost me another sleepless night; nothing new there.

The MSC Open Source Conference will begin in a few hours. I will be manning the OpenSUSE install desk on the first day and will generally be doing everything OpenSUSE for the rest of the conference. Exiciting indeed. And man what a rush! So much effort has been made by MDEC for us community people. We are not exactly the easiest people to get along with; or perhaps we tick and dance to a different rhythm than what they are used to. The fact that MDEC, a "Windows-soaked" organisation is willing to engage us is nothing short of a worthy standing ovation.

Open source has always been unfairly made out to be a fringe movement, populated by narcissists and anti-social types. Somehow, there are many who feel that if you are not using Windows there must be something seriously wrong with you. A rebel without a cause.

Well, come tomorrow we are gonna knock their socks off with the sheer power of what the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) world has to offer. For perhaps the very first time, a Malaysian FOSS event was given a slot in a televised breakfast show and a radio interview. That's mainstream exposure. With MDEC spearheading the task of organising the conference, it adds "legitimacy" to FOSS. Suddenly if MDEC is looking at FOSS, then to the rest of the Windows dependent people, there must be something FOSS than meets the eye. They will begin to see it in a more deserving positive light. 

And now back to my slides. 

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Maybank2u.com a phishing site?

This is really rich. I got this warning message from Opera when I tried accessing Maybank2u.com.

So Malayisa's largest bank's web portal is registered as a potential phising site.

Hmm..Malaysia Boleh!

Friday, May 1, 2009

Resolving Display Driver issues with Ubuntu Jaunty with Envy

Alberto Milone's wonderful tool, Envy, makes installation of ATI and NVIDIA display drivers a breeze. I had a shock when I installed Ubuntu Jaunty Jakalope (9.04) and there was no prompt for me to install the NVIDIA drivers for my PC's 7800 card.

Got me wondering for a while, remembering kaeru's and GunbladeIV's issue with ATI cards; could Jaunty be broken for non-Intel videos? I mean, it installed well on my lappy's Intel 915.

An hour and numerous searches later yielded nothing. Then Envy popped up in one of the forum replies.

sudo apt-get -y install envy && sudo envy -t got my drivers installed correctly.

Remember to install the recommended driver.