That phone-talking, drinking, anti-depressant taking, mofo is coming to your town, SOON!!!

Get you tour On

I was pretty bummed when they whacked the Olivetti lab that was working on VNC, but some righteous Russian dude has picked up the slack AND added a boatload of features. Check it:

Local cursor handling
Efficient compression algorithms
Optional JPEG compression (Phat!)
Automatic SSH tunneling on Unix

I haven't tried it yet, but it looks great.

TightVNC: An Enhanced VNC Distribution

One of the better SF House DJ's Jeno has a Shoutcast stream: Radio Babylon.

Not really sure how to find those normally, but this link provides the "top" "classic" stations. Of which his seems to be @ #7 by listeners.

http://www.shoutcast.com/waradio.phtml?genre=Classic

Even though it's "classic house" I'm listening to what is playing now and well, it's definitely different. It's not straight up house. Not that Jeno ever played straight house to begin with. I think you will enjoy it. Listen up!

] "Recent software upgrades to certain WatchGuard VPN
] appliances gives customers the ability to pair the
] machines so they share packet processing, and if one
] device fails the other can pick up the entire load."

Geez....Finally!

WatchGuard rolls out high-availability upgrade

] "Sun this week is scheduled to introduce a bundle of its
] server hardware with Check Point Software technology to
] create firewall/VPN appliances that, at the high end, are
] suitable for protecting data centers.
] Dubbed the Sun LX50 VPN-Firewall Appliance Secured by
] Check Point Software, the gear comes with either one or
] two processors to offer a range of throughput up to a 2G
] bit/sec firewall or 640M bit/sec VPN encryption, fast
] enough to filter and encrypt traffic in and out of
] corporate data centers. "

Sun, Check Point join forces

] "X server performance will cease to be an issue. There is
] simply nothing that prevents X from being as fast or
] faster than the very best frame buffer systems. Nothing.
] I have old SGI machines with simply *excellent* X
] servers. They understood X and made it work to its best
] advantage. The result: 30 Mhz machines that are just as
] snappy as the machines of today. "

As much as I myself have been turned off of X, this X developer makes some compelling arguments for X, it's speed, and it's longevity.

They are the same arguments that apply for UNIX and it makes a huge amount of sense. Recommend you read the entire posting.

Regardless, it sounds like picoGUI has some distinct possibilities.

picoGUI: An X Alternative?

OK, this was posted on /. and I was very ho-hum about the whole discussion until found this posting by the author:

[ http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=45250&cid=4688670 ]

Since I'm the creator of PicoGUI, I thought I should elaborate a bit PicoGUI is designed with a lot of goals in mind, but for me the largest goal is scalability. I'd like to be able to run one app, with minimal code changes if any, on a PDA, desktop, cell phone, phone, toaster :)

There are also a lot of architectural decisions PicoGUI makes that lends itself to easy and consistent solutions for common problems other GUIs have to deal with. PicoGUI has a theme system that manages everything from drawing the widgets to laying out entire application UIs, all with surprisingly little code. It has a video driver architecture that handles raw framebuffers, accelerator cards, and even esoteric devices like ncurses rendering or text-mode LCDs. PicoGUI's widgets are designed with more of a UNIX philosophy- small but powerful widgets that can be combined in nifty ways.

I didn't originally intend PicoGUI to be a primary GUI for desktop computers. I started it for a PDA project I was working on. But, given how its architecture lends itself well to scalability, it could soon be a good GUI for desktops. Recently PicoGUI gained the ability to run in a "rootless" mode where it acts more like a widget toolkit than a complete GUI. Once PicoGUI has drivers for DirectFB or some other acceleration backend, and a way to run X apps in an emulation mode, it should be able to completely replace X.

In my opinion, the biggest stumbling block to replacing X on the desktop is having accelerated video drivers that work on other GUIs. I've talked to X developers about separating the video drivers into a layer that can be used directly by projects like PicoGUI, GGI, and Fresco, but they had no interest. From what I've seen of X developers, they want all the world to run in X.

Which I found very interesting. I'm pretty tired of both Windows and X. I'll found out how MacOSX is shortly....

PicoGUI - (News)

Analysis on number of systems still vulnerable to OpenSSL bug.

Many still vulnerable to OpenSSL bug

This isn't meme'ed yet. It needs to be.

One man's rant on how to fix poor development. A dry wit yields some tastey little chuckles.

The Peon's Guide To Secure System Development

In the grim future of hello kitty there is only war!

The Future is Now