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27 July 2009

Arora Browser

Spent the weekend catching up on lots of reading that been hanging around (newfeeds etc) and was reading some of the Trolls blogs when I read of Arora.

Arora is a new web browser based on WebKit and Qt. The original was apparently written as a demo for the Qt 4.4 release but has sine been forked by it's creator (Benjamin C Meyer) and hosted on Google Code.

Now I have only been using it for a couple of days but it's speed has impressed me as much as Chrome has on Windows. To be honest had Google opted for a better UI (or a themable UI) I would dump FireFox and use Chrome the whole time but it's UI is a mess and I _am_ bothered about such things ;)

Other things that impressed me where the fact that Flash just worked, iPlayer just worked and the fact that it already has a decent set of options (very simular to FireFox).

Arora certainly seems a worthwhile project and one that is worth keeping an eye on.

23 July 2009

20 July 2009

Microsoft Hyper-V Drivers GPL'd

As reported by Greg Kroah-Hartman today "hell has frozen over". Microsoft has released code under GPL (v2) for inclusion in the Linux Kernel.

It would seem that Greg through his work on the excellent Linux Driver Project has been working with some of the developers from Microsoft to make this happen. Described by Microsoft as "a break from the ordinary", they have released their Hyper-V driver (around 20,000 SLOC). They state that they have done this to "enhance interoperabilty between Windows and Linux" and "to provide the choices our customers are asking for".

I seriously hope that this is a signal of what is to come. As stated in Tux Radars article "A few years ago, Microsoft was describing the GPL as cancerous, so this seems like a major U-turn for the software behemoth".

17 July 2009

Arch Conf File Update - .pacsave Files.

I have recently rebuilt Gonzo my Arch Thinkpad. Soon after I reinstalled Arch and updated my system I started to get a load of boot messages stating that certain /etc/*.conf files would need /etc/modprobe.d/ conf file and that the .pacsave file would need replacing.

I found that the following link stating that a newer version of module-init-tools moved the /etc/modprobe.conf file to /etc/modprobe.d/modprobe.conf. The update copies your /etc/modprobe.conf to /etc/modprobe.conf.pacsave and creates the /etc/modprobe.d/modprobe.conf. However, it does not copy over the contents of the old file to the new file. So to cure the issue just copy the contents of /etc/modprobe.conf.pacsave to the new /etc/modprobe.d/modprobe.conf and rename the old file (/etc/modprobe.conf.pacsave).

This cured half of my messages.

I found that I also had to the same for my /etc/frambuffer.conf (it had a /etc/framebuffer.conf.pacsave file created. I copied the contents to my new /etc/modprobe.d/framebuffer.conf and deleted the original).

This cured all of my boot messages.

11 July 2009

London Stock Exchange To Shut Down .Net Based Trading System.

This is an interesting post regarding the software on which the London Stock Exchange runs or rather is about to stop running on.

Obviously the article linked to is an opinion based article however, over the last few years I have been following the development of the system with an interested eye. Performance on .Net applications has always interested me as I have never found ways to make them as fast as a C++ program. When I read that the LSE wanted to develope a real time .Net based system I was interested to see if it could be done. I mean Microsoft developers worked on the system so you would expect if anyone could do it they would be able to. Thats not been the case by the look of it.