Those who know me will instantly tell you that I’m a nVidia fan in the whole nVidia vs ATI debacle. So big was my surprise this morning when I couldn’t get a nVidia Quadro NVS 440 working by simply going “apt-get install nvidia-glx” on that ubuntu box …
nVidia bluez
March 10th, 2009A Growing Dislike for Binary-Only packages
February 22nd, 2009Ok. So I’m busy installing a commercial accounting package. Or rather, “upgrading” from the GPL version to the “supported” version. What a mess. I once again remember why I so dislike proprietary software. I run Gentoo Linux. This means that pretty much _all_ the versions of everything is in flux on my systems, in other words, I may have tcl-8.5 on my system, or I may not (I might well have some other version). Anyway, the point being that I’ve now got to _force_ versions of other packages to specific versions as _required_ by a single binary-only package on my system.
This is just not fair. I feel violated. Oh, and did I mention I spent more time already on making this binary-only set of packages work than what it took me to make the GPL version work? What a shame the GPL version is no longer … I’d personally pay for the privilege of being able to use the source to install from rather than the binaries.
VoIP Load Balancing over PPPoE links
February 15th, 2009I initially wanted to say over DSL, but then realized that that’s not quite appropriate since we’ve just actually completed the naïve approach making use of iBurst. So on my way back home … I churned some ideas that I’d like to share (And log, before I forget them). The ideas will build around the IAX/2 protocol as it’s much, much simpler, but the concepts should apply equally to SIP. Obviously the ideal is to just get a bigger pipe …
Bridged wireless
January 28th, 2009Ok, so I just spent 3 days hunting after a problem with my Linux configuration that turns out to be due to some “wireless expert” that configured a “wireless bridge” between three sites at one of my clients. They became my client about a week after the quote was accepted and no longer makes any network topology change without consulting with me first (at least, not as far as I know). Either way … if you want a prime example of why it doesn’t work, read on …
