I've had a few problems over recent weeks on both Ubuntu karmic (9.10) and lucid (10.04) whereby web pages built on Flash player (such as ABC iView) would display a large error screen proclaiming that Flash player had crashed. I first saw it on my son's ThinkPad X31 which i had upgraded to lucid very shortly after it was released, and assumed that it was just part and parcel of the new release, and that the bug would be fixed shortly....

It seems that "customise and buy" for ThinkPad X series is too much to ask of Lenovo's web site at the moment... :-) ...

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has some interesting comments on the repercussions of Apple's iPad.  What seems ironic to me is that when Palm stopped innovating (shortly after their announcement that they were switching to Linux), the PDA market virtually died - smartphones virtually chewed up the market overnight.  Now, as a spinoff of Apple's entry into the smartphone market, the PDA market looks set to revive.

Whirlpool are running their yearly broadband survey for the month of January 2010.  If you're a broadband user, please participate in their survey - all broadband users in Australia benefit from Whirlpool's great efforts in this area.

I've just been asked to deploy some HP ProCurve 1810G-8 switches (J9449A) into a network environment containing a large number of managed and unmanaged ProCurve switches. This network has an existing ProCurve Manager installation which controls all policies for existing managed ProCurve switches. Whilst on paper the switch looks pretty good, it is not really an appropriate product for medium-sized business networks....

Project Honeypot just published a report of their experience in processing 1 billion spam messages.  Highlights for the impatient:

• For the past 5 years, spam "bots have grown at a compound annual growth rate of more than 378%. In other words, the number of bots has nearly quadrupled ever year."
• The top 5 countries which host bots are: China (11.4%), Brazil (9.2%), United States (7.5%), Turkey (6.3%), and Germany (6.0%).
  ...

Novell's SMT (Subscription Management Tool) is a software update tool for SUSE Linux Enterprise and openSUSE.  I've had the dubious honour of working with it over the last few months on a client site.  These notes were compiled as a result of installing SMT on three different servers, and interacting with various people in the Novell forums, especially the novell.support.sles.updates forum.

What's wrong with SMT?

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For a long time, i've told my clients and friends that the best way to make a password is to write a short sentence or phrase. A recent study linked from Slashdot IT reinforces this....

Richard Bliss recently blogged at Novell and on his personal blog with some great advice: don't click on e-cards from your friends, and think about asking them not to send them at all, since the risks of clicking on e-cards vastly outweigh the benefits....

Dave Rosenberg at cnet has pointed out that Apple junkies don't have a monopoly on crack-head fanboyism: Microsoft's video on how to host your Windows 7 launch party breaks new ground in this area. This makes us Linux fans seem positively normal in comparison! :-)