I really feel sorry for AMD. In my personal opinion, they have really built a great processor. I feel that based on the way that programs and operating systems are built, they are not fair to the AMD.

The Phenom II is out now. Over at engadget they have the benchmarks up for the processor. This processor scores lower than the Intel of the same speed.

The speeds posted will not hold well for hard core gamer. These gamers will rip AMD to shreds about this. Now, I’m a gamer, and I also love AMD. I think that they took longer to make the first “True Quad Core” processor, because it was built to recover core failure.

In the AMD TQC you can have a core fail and you are left with the ability to keep running with 3 cores. I do not think that Intel offers such a feature. Also, looking at the way that Intel did their quad core, it does appear that much though went into the processor.

This can all be argued until people are blue in the face. it is also understandable why people would argue such a case. Back in the day when you had a quad processor computer, games didn’t run well on them. you loaded a gig of ram on the computer, if you were that lucky, and all 4 processors shared the same ram. Games were not built, and still are not built to take advantage of a TQC system, they are just not.

The hyper-transport was nicely built. Pairing that with 2 cores, as Intel did, was great as well. I jumped from a single core to a quad core. I can tell you that there is a difference. With at Intel did by sticking 2 dual cores on a single dye and calling it a quad-core, well it flat out is cheating and miss leading in my opinion.

Here is the problem. AMD gaming runs on 1 of the cores in the quad core system. This allows all of the systems processes to move off of that core to the other 3. You have a core just for the game. I can’t speak from experience on the Intel side, because I don’t have an Intel quad core. Maybe someone will comment about it.

With the game running on just one core, I’m able to do other things in the back ground. Music on a core, watch TV on another monitor while gaming, and sure there are other thing that you could be doing like compiling code and still killing your friend on CoD with out any lag. That is a major advantage if you ask me.

So when you look for a system that will function for more than just one thing I would go with AMD. I’m sure that in the future AMD will come out on top. Why? Because they have built something that can grow exponentially. I fear that Intel sold themselves short by taking a short cut. AMD in my opinion is high-end right now. There is just not much that supports what they built. There is Linux, Windows Server, and some of the software that is written for multi-CPU computers that will really take advantage of this type of setup.

I personally will continue to buy AMD, not because I like sub-par products, but because I feel that they are so much better than Intel in so many ways. I guess that makes me an AMD Fanboy.

I’m not sure how many people notice this, and it could just be me. Ubuntu seems to be getting worse over time. I have been using it for about 3 years now. Over that period of time I have installed, from scratch, and upgraded: CD and live.

It just seem that over time things start to get hairy. I hate to relate it to Microsoft, but it almost is. I have always done full install of Microsoft products. The main reason for this to to freshen up the file on the HD. There is no need to have in place old data that will not do you any good.

I know that dependentcies are needed for different files on Linux. You can’t cross some files with other that do close to the same thing, or the same thing. You also, at times, can’t have an old version that works with one program and a new version that work with another program. There are times with programmers just loc you into one version of a file, so it is impossible to upgrade your system if you wish to keep that program.

Auto clean up of old files needs to be done. I don’t feel that if the system says I don’t need it any more, that I should have to run sudo apt-get autoclean. I know that I’m going to say yes everytime. I don’t think that there would be a time where I would know that libcal-3.4.5.so is going to be attached to anything that i’m going to use. If it is, then I will just have to reinstall it later.

There is such a thing as WinRot on Microsoft computers. Over time the data on the disk gets degrigated. YOu ahve to do a reinstall, you don’t have a choice. This is mainly because of the way that Microsoft handles files on the drive. Reads and writes the file, even if there is no change in data. In Ubuntu, it just seems to get slower with time. I’m not sure why. Linux doesn’t handle the fiiles on the HD that way, so there should be less rot.

So far my experiences with Ubuntu have been great, other than this. My problem could be that I upgrade every 6 months or reinstall. Maybe i should stick with LTS versions if I would like to have a more stable OS. I’m not really sure. Could be the fact that I have an Raedon video card, or use AMD, not that I think that it is either one of those.

I guess I will have to see. I might try out Arch Linux for some time to see how I like it. I know that it is a little more advanced to use, but from my understanding it is extremely fast. So I might go there. maybe even get away from Gnome and try something else out for a while that is more light weight.

I really must say that the new dashboard in WP 2.7 is great. The dashboard is clean, and you have more abilities to move things around and get more organized.

I do wish the QuickPress had catigories on it though. As I’m writing from this I know that I will have to go back in and edit the catigory of this post. Gues it is something that I will be able to live with.

So far so good though. The upgrade went without a hitch as usual. keep up the great work over at wordpress. Thanks guys and gals.

The first time I ran into this issue I didn’t document it. I didn’t think that there was a need because I told myself I would remember what the fix was and I went on about my day.

The problem is that files were being created when a user was saving out an excel spread sheet. This would have happened with any document that was in the folder. The file that was created was a random, 8 alpha-numeric, and no extension.

So where did this issue come from? Permissions. Group A had access to the entire directory tree. With in that tree there was a fold that Group A didn’t need to have RW access to. So I check the boxes to deny them access. The dialog box pops up and states that deny will over write allowed access rights. All is good I though.

The junk files keep coming. I’m beating my head against the desk. Then it dawns on me. Why not just stop the inherited permissions and just copy them to the parent folder in the tree. I did that. then I deleted the special permissions for the deny access. Then I un-checked the allow delete permissions. So they are not allowed to delete, but they are not denied deleting either.

This worked like a champ. Forced replacing the permissions down the tree. Now Group A has permissions on all the other files and folders, but the do not have permission for this one directory and sub directories to delete files/folders.

Problem solved.

I take time out though out the day to try and read the collecting of articles about Linux on TuxMachines. I don’t normally like the site that go out and grab collections of articles from other blogs, mainly because they are just bots doing the work for humans. TuxMachines seems like a good source collection of what the buzz on Linux is. So check it out.

One of the articles that was listed today, or at least in the RSS feed, linked back to an article at the Free Software Foundation website, fsf.org.

This article mentioned about Microsoft and their rule of non-free software. Users that have no rights to the software that they run. They also stated that Microsoft had a hotline setup to check your software if you thought that it might be a fake. I thought that this was rich, and I decided to give them a call regarding this issue.

When I called up, I stated that someone on the street corner was handing out software that was just burned to a CD. I knew that this was wrong because all software cost money. I explained to he the that guy told me that the software was Ubuntu Linux and that I wanted to make sure I had a right to use the software as I didn’t want to go to jail.

The lady on the phone informed that that Linux she believed to be free, but I would need to check on it. She also stated that this was a Microsoft fraud hotline and didn’t do anything with Linux. I informed her that I just wanted to make sure I had a legit right to use the software, and that I couldn’t believe that it was free.

So I hung up the phone with her and had a good laugh. The phone number is (800) R-U-LEGIT.

VMware is made by, well, VMware. It has been around the longest that I can tell. It is by far the most popular of any of the Virtual Invironments (VI). VirtualBox is made by Sun. So lets see how they have stacked up in my usage.

VMware is a great. When I first started using it I was really happy that the player was free. I was able to use VMware images or drives that others had created with little effort. The problem I ran into was that I was unable to build an image from the ground up.

I found some blank images of HDs on the web. They has some configuration files that came along with them and I was able to build from scratch so to speak. I still needed to keep blank copies of the files and still had to edit the ini files so that I would be able to generate different images.

This worked great for all of my Linux builds on Windows. Just need a base config file to work with all most all distroes of Linux. My problem came when I wanted to make a Windows XP image. I was tired and I didn’t want to waste the time on the net to do the config file right and see what others had done. I was just being lazy, and when you are pressed for time, the lazy way is sometimes the best way as well. It is not a shortcut.

So I downloaded VirtualBox from Sun because I had been using it on my Linux box at the house. I also have used VMware on Linux but same issues occur there with building new images. Back on track.

I installed VirtualBox and opened it up. I was able to start the build of a new image right way. A wizzy-wig walked me though the process. I didn’t have an HD setup, VirtualBox walked me though creating a new drive for the install. When it was done with the drive it booted from the CD and I started the install as if it was a fresh computer install.

This made life easy, as I needed to get the image over to a co-worker so that he would have IE6 for testing websites. Don’t get me started there. The ease of use made me take a closer look at it when I got home. I have a different setup there and I like using programs that are cross-platform, which in this case VMware and VirtualBox both are.

The install on Ubuntu went well. I have ben wanting to try out some new spins of Linux OSs so I thought this to be the best way to do it. VirtualBox allows you to boot from ISO files as well, and prevents you from having to burn it to CD. I connected the ISO of a Linux distro I just downloaded though bittorrent from Linuxtracker.org. It went great. Worked like a charm.

Then I thought to myself, What about 64bit distributions? I have a 64bit proc with AMD-V technology. I should be able to make good use of this. Didn’t work. WTF? Looked on the site and VirtualBox said that 2.0 would work. Ubuntu doesn’t have 2.0 in the repoes. So I attached to Sun’s repoes for VirtualBox. Installed 2.0 and 64bit with AMD-V worked like a cham. I was able to install and run 32bit and 64bit Linux OSs in VirtualBox. With 4gigs of ram, I was more than please that it didn’t slow down my Ubuntu host OS even with 2 VirtualBox’s running and playing with Compiz-Fusion.

If I had my pick, and I do. I would take a good close look at VirtualBox for personal use. It might not be ready for commercial use yet. I don’t know, I didn’t use it in that fashion and therefore can’t really form an opinion on it. But, from what I can tell and in my usage, Virtualbox wins the race with me. The ability to build and install, without the time to configure each config file is well worth the trouble to do a simple install.

Open Office 3.0 has been released today. I have yet to get me a copy of it becuase the download server is slammed right now. I have not checked any other sites to see if someone has made a copy for DL as well.

This is a huge release for the OpenOffice.org folks. OOo 3.0 has built in support for Microsoft office 2007; Word, Excel, type applications. I have been using the Beta, RC2, RC3, and RC4 for a while and and have not seen any issues. I don’t use the a lot, but I don’t use Office style product a lot either.

From what I can tell with my usage, this is a very solid release from OOo. So if you can get though to the DL, let me know how it goes. I will keep trying myself.

I received an email today saying that OpenOffice suite 2009 had been released. I know that OOo RC4 is out and that they were working on getting it our the door. I didn’t think that they would call it Open Office 2009. So I clicked the link to check it out.

The site seemed to be updated and really legit. The I looked that the download page. It asked for information and then it wanted to charge me a yearly fee. DO NOT get caught by this. It is a scam from everything that I can tell. Even the address itself doesn’t belong to OOo.

Here is the link: http://daily-new–product.org/re.php?lnk=1203356060&e=mark@mouseclone.com it redirects to http://67.214.168.130/openoffice/index.asp?aff=001&camp=openoffice_espd&kbid=1587&sub=oo_espd&pop=1. So the first flag is that it is in IP form and not domain. The second would be asp. I don’t know of any Linux, or OpenSource people for that matter that write in asp for a website. I’m sure that there are some, that do, but I wouldn’t think many.

So, just don’t get caught by this. It got though my spam filter and looked more or less legit. It really helps to be informed.

You will pay for mistakes that you make in the shell. Even more so if you have root privileges. Let me explain what I’m talking about.

I had a problem with the Scalix server, the problem was really with Sendmail. Sendmail stopped sending out messages. The queue was backing up and we didn’t have a support contract with Scalix. Little to my knowledge Scalix would have bailed us out of this on the spot with out a contract just to get the server back up and running and we renewed our contract with Scalix the following Monday, this was a Friday evening. We know that now!

Moving right a long. I went home on Friday worried about the server and all of the email. I start Friday night and worked til about 3am. I couldn’t for the life of me figure it out. Saturday came along and I would work on it for a few hours and stop. Then the big day for messing things up.

Sunday came around and I was a little tired. I was stressing because Monday was around the corner and I really needed to have the server up and running. I did what I thought was a good thing. It was something that I had done before just not because of something like this.

I ran the command cp -R /var/opt/scalix/foo /var/opt/scalix/bar. The command in itself was not problem It did the copy. I don’t know why I did a copy instead of a move, I just did. As soon as the copy was done I deleted the directory, rm -rf /var/opt/scalix/foo. As soon as I did that, I got that sinking feeling in my gut. You know you just messed up big time when you get that feeling.

What had I done wrong? Scalix has permissions, hardlinks, and symlinks though out that directory. Files liking back to files and a database linking to files and so forth. I don’t understand the complexity of it all yet. Because I just did a simple cp -R it didn’t back up any permissions and set eveything to root. I don’t even know about the hardlinks that were involved. If I’m not mistaken, cp will copy the hardlink as a file and not a hardllink, that is bad.

In the past with moving the server, I always did an rsync -avH. This always gave me the copy of the files the way that I needed them. I should have done the same here instead of using copy, but only because I have used rsync before and I knew it would work. The cp command doesn’t seem to have a switch for hardlinks, so it might not have worked at all.

Lesson: Until you can find a proven way to do something better, then stick with what you know. Try your best to manage stress, as with mission critical applications, a mistake will cause you a lot of pain. Make sure your backup is done properly

I have more to write up on this, but I will have to save it for later. What happened to the mail store was just short of complete loss. It was a cluster. Scalix couldn’t even get all of it fixed after 3 days of working on it. So never ever just copy a Scalix mail repository without first making sure that you have the proper switches in place so that you can restore it back like it was.

I was able to recover about 98.5% of all mail, calendars and contacts. Very few things got missed. I still have a copy of the data. I only had 2 people say something about missing data, and for the most part it was personal stuff they shouldn’t have had at work in the first place.

It was a hard lesson learned. I don’t think that my recovery rate would have been as good if it was not for the time that the Scalix Support Team spent trying to fix it and running omscan and omcheck. I’m sure that the ran other things a number of times trying to get it fixed. Just there was so much to fix, it could have taken months to get it all done.

I will get the details of how I recovered the data out of the busted mail store and re imported it back into a new mail server at a later date and time. In the mean time if you have questions, please feel free to ask them in the comments below.

I must stand on a soap box once again. I talked about MS ads last time and the Mojave Project. This time I really want to hit something home to everyone in the computer world.

What is a PC. Apple stats that they are not PCs. The “Hi, I’m a MAC and I’m a PC” ads clearly point out that Apple is not a PC. But they are wrong. Apple also stats that PCs run Microsoft software. They are wrong on that point as well.

You also have others stating that Microsoft controls 90% of the PC market. That statement is wrong as well. It is impossible to a software company to control hardware. You might use Microsoft Windows OS on a PC, but Microsoft doesn’t control or dominate the PC market. That market is left up to Dell, HP, Apple, and other companies that make PCs.

Yes, you read that correctly and it wasn’t a miss type. Apple’s MACs are PCs. Every computer, unless it is a server or mainframe, is a PC. PC stands for Personal Computer. That means from the iPhone to the HCT Dream that is coming out, to the desktop or laptop. They are all PCs.

Personal Computers for you to use. You should have the right to run Microsoft OSs, Apple OSs, and Linux OSs on any hardware that is supported by these vendors.

A little recap. Microsoft does not equal PC. MACs equal PC. A PC is a set of hardware, an OS is an operating system on a PC that allows you to complete task. Education by media equals dumbness.