NYSE depends on Linux

Posted on October 1, 2008
Filed Under Open Source | Leave a Comment

The New York Stock Exchange depends on Red Hat Linux to perform. They use Linux for trading systems and they purchase support from Redhat. Key fetures looked for are:

Speed
Reliability
Cost
Flexibility

Another day in the office !

Posted on September 11, 2008
Filed Under Humor | Leave a Comment

The Great Office War from Runawaybox on Vimeo.

Magento Open Source Ecommerce

Posted on September 4, 2008
Filed Under Open Source | Leave a Comment

I have recently come across a very promising ecommerce product called Magento. The current version is 1.14. At the time of writing this post, Magento is just over 1 year old. It is still a very young product and show’s great promise. It is designed using current PHP coding standards, and is based around the Zend PHP development framework. It also has a very clean user interface which makes it very nice to use.

The code and the user front end are separated from each other, this makes template development so much easier. Some of key areas still need development.

Performance can be a problem, and a dedicated host with a PHP bytecode cache is ideal
No support file based down-loadable products like software or music
Poor support for bulk importing of products, if you have product set of several thousand products, It can take several hours to import data

I actually quite like the product and will be watching it mature. In fact when I get more time , I would like to contribute to it’s development. However as it is now, I would not recommended for a very busy or a site with a large product set.

http://www.magentocommerce.com/

Using LVM with a Ubuntu Live CD

Posted on September 4, 2008
Filed Under IT Solutions | Leave a Comment

When you boot from a Ubuntu Live CD, you do not get access to your LVM volumes. LVM is a storage arrangement which allows you to create a file system across multiple discs. For example If you have 2 500GB discs, You can make a file system 1TB in size… Be aware that without a RAID storage system, this will not be fault tolerant.

Once booted into the Ubuntu Live CD, Open a terminal session, and enter the following commands
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo su -
This will give you root access
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ modprobe dm-mod
Installs the LVM modules into the kernel so you can see your Volumes
root@ubuntu:/dev# apt-get install lvm2 Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following NEW packages will be installed: lvm2 0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 1 not upgraded. Need to get 325kB of archives. After this operation, 918kB of additional disk space will be used. Get:1 http://archive.ubuntu.com hardy/main lvm2 2.02.26-1ubuntu9 [325kB] Fetched 325kB in 0s (726kB/s) Selecting previously deselected package lvm2. (Reading database ... 98423 files and directories currently installed.) Unpacking lvm2 (from .../lvm2_2.02.26-1ubuntu9_i386.deb) ... Setting up lvm2 (2.02.26-1ubuntu9) ... Backing up any LVM2 metadata that may exist...done. update-initramfs is disabled since running on a live CD

root@ubuntu:/dev# lvs LV VG Attr LSize Origin Snap% Move Log Copy% san vol1 -wi--- 467.00G root@ubuntu:/dev# lvchange -a y san Volume group "san" not found root@ubuntu:/dev# lvchange -a y vol1

The rest of this code activates the LVM Volume ( Mine is called VOL1 in this case). You now have access to your LVM volumes.

You do have a choice !

Posted on July 11, 2008
Filed Under General | Leave a Comment

Over the past few months quite a my friends and associates have been
complaining about the latest windows operating system, Windows Vista.

The complaints range from the fact that they perceive windows vista to be
slow, or certain hardware devices or programs have stopped working since
installing Vista. Some problems have been so hard to overcome some of my
associates have “downgraded” to Windows XP.

People often resent the fact they eventually have to migrate to the newest
Windows operating system if the current one meets their needs. Microsoft
provides a limited life cycle for windows versions. It will stop supporting
versions of Windows as technology evolves and as hardware performance and
capacity increases. They do quite a good job in maintaining all the
different applications and operating systems; however they have to draw the
line at some point. Therefore Windows versions will eventually become
obsolete. To have your computer supported, you should upgrade to a current
supported operating system.

With this in mind, the point of this article is to highlight the fact that
people do have viable alternatives to Windows. As windows has evolved, so
have the alternatives.

The two most popular alternatives to windows are OSX running on Macintosh
computers & Linux. Linux has the advantage that it runs on a wider range of
computers. Linux has improved vastly over the past few years. Linux is a
operating system which has its roots in an operating system called UNIX. It
was mostly used on servers rather than on desktops computers. Over the past
few year’s companies have invested large sums of money into making Linux
function within a desktop environment. Mark Shuttleworth a South African
billionaire who made his fortune because of technology he created using
Linux, has invested large sums of money into Ubuntu Linux. This investment
has created a very stable desktop environment.

So rather than feel forced into a particular direction, lift your head up
and look around. There are alternatives. Examine how you use your computer
and what is important to you, and look around; you will be surprised at
what you may find.

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