I was approached by our Dell rep about whether we use CRM and if we'd interested seeing "what they use". Seeing the good buddies Mike and Marc on stage at Dreamforce, I sorta knew what's coming, but a little in disbelief. Sure enough, the rep claimed that they are the only reseller right now. I was like "wow!" (silently), for now SFDC is in its Walmart phase - it's being carried in a virtual Walmart for IT stuff like Dell. Guess you can't get any more main-stream than that.
After some googling, it turns out that the deal was announced late 2009. Can't believe I missed that news... Three cheers for cloud computing!
Friday, January 22, 2010
Monday, December 21, 2009
Easy as pie - Flash plugin for Firefox on Ubuntu
It already is, if you just want it on the standard Firefox on the system. But what I needed was to have it on FF3.5 on Jaunty, which doesn't come by default. I have FF3.5 installed in my home directory. Turned out all I needed was to download the .tar.gz from Adobe, and put the .so file inside to the plugins directory. I was trying to symlink from the standard /usr/lib location to no avail.
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
apt-cacher bug in Jaunty
I ran into this one. Basically the apt-cacher in the Jaunty repository (1.6.4ubuntu4) throws some error messages - "Error reading from server - read (104 Connection reset by peer)" - for some item checks requested by clients. It's fixed in upstream Debian Squeeze (ver 1.6.9) as far as I can tell. I had to download .deb directly from Debian, then used "apt-get -f install" to fix some dependency issues to dpkg it.
Another interesting issue I found is that the parser for /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/01proxy file in apt-get apparently ignores the proxy address, if you forget a semicolon in the header - I did precisely that, so having Acquire::http:Proxy in there - then it just silently went out without using proxy. It drove me nuts since there's no error message, until I paid close attention to my typing. :)
UPDATE: Now I ran into another bug, which prevents me from upgrading machines to Lucid. So I had to remove Debian apt-cacher (even their newest 1.6.11 doesn't work), and put on 1.6.7ubuntu4, which still has the original bug. Lesser of the two evils. Why can't Ubuntu and Debian address both?
Another interesting issue I found is that the parser for /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/01proxy file in apt-get apparently ignores the proxy address, if you forget a semicolon in the header - I did precisely that, so having Acquire::http:Proxy in there - then it just silently went out without using proxy. It drove me nuts since there's no error message, until I paid close attention to my typing. :)
UPDATE: Now I ran into another bug, which prevents me from upgrading machines to Lucid. So I had to remove Debian apt-cacher (even their newest 1.6.11 doesn't work), and put on 1.6.7ubuntu4, which still has the original bug. Lesser of the two evils. Why can't Ubuntu and Debian address both?
Friday, November 20, 2009
VBox audio driver for Windows 7 x64
I downloaded it from here. It's a Realtek chip. Please note the driver is unsigned (not recognized by Windows 7).
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Live a Ubuntu life: burning DVDs
Today is the first time I had the need. I have a Win7 installation ISO I need to burn on to a physical disc. I right clicked the file and selected "Open with Disc Burner". That opened up Brasero, then I realized I didn't actually have a burner on the system.
No worries. I plugged into eSATA a Dell E-module I could find, and put in a DVD-R blank. The disc was spinning for a long time, and Brasero still said "no disc available". So I took a closer look at the drive - it's a DVD-ROM. What a dummy! Who keeps DVD-ROM drives around anymore these days?
I went looking again and found a Buffalo external Blu-ray burner. That oughta do it. Plugged in the power and USB, inserted the blank disc, and in a minute Brasero saw the disc and I was able to start burning. A few minutes later I got my Win7 install disc.
So, except for my own dumb act, it was an entirely smooth operation. A few years back, Linux desktop distros were still deemed too troublesome to use (by some I should say). Now it challenges the best experience Windows or OS X can offer, with only a fraction of the hardware vendor cooperation those guys got, not to mention billions of dollars wasted on copy right protection and marketing. That's what I call bang for the buck.
No worries. I plugged into eSATA a Dell E-module I could find, and put in a DVD-R blank. The disc was spinning for a long time, and Brasero still said "no disc available". So I took a closer look at the drive - it's a DVD-ROM. What a dummy! Who keeps DVD-ROM drives around anymore these days?
I went looking again and found a Buffalo external Blu-ray burner. That oughta do it. Plugged in the power and USB, inserted the blank disc, and in a minute Brasero saw the disc and I was able to start burning. A few minutes later I got my Win7 install disc.
So, except for my own dumb act, it was an entirely smooth operation. A few years back, Linux desktop distros were still deemed too troublesome to use (by some I should say). Now it challenges the best experience Windows or OS X can offer, with only a fraction of the hardware vendor cooperation those guys got, not to mention billions of dollars wasted on copy right protection and marketing. That's what I call bang for the buck.
"Gone Google"?
Saw this ads by Google on Network World:
"Over 60% of Fortune 1000 have gone Google".
Of course there's a fine print attached to such claims: "Gone Google means using one of the Google enterprise offerings, from Google Apps to Postini...".
Sounds like a typical way of making one sound more important than actually is. Using one of your stuff means they are now in your camp? Come on. In fact, if there's one company doesn't have to do that kind of cheap marketing hype, it's Google. Doing that is just ... cheap.
On the other hand, the true target audience may not be as dismissive as I am. There are surely going to be people who start to sweat on the claim. M$ anyone?
"Over 60% of Fortune 1000 have gone Google".
Of course there's a fine print attached to such claims: "Gone Google means using one of the Google enterprise offerings, from Google Apps to Postini...".
Sounds like a typical way of making one sound more important than actually is. Using one of your stuff means they are now in your camp? Come on. In fact, if there's one company doesn't have to do that kind of cheap marketing hype, it's Google. Doing that is just ... cheap.
On the other hand, the true target audience may not be as dismissive as I am. There are surely going to be people who start to sweat on the claim. M$ anyone?
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Live a Ubuntu life: KeePass on Mono
I used pcorral for password safe on Windows. It's a nifty little program that allows me to carry around my huge list of passwords safely on a USB stick. When moving to Ubuntu, I wanted to do even better - something that allows me to do it cross-platform. Eventually I picked KeePass, which is a .NET program, so it can be run easily on Windows and Linux.
KeePass requires Mono 2.2 or higher on Linux. Since Jaunty only has 2.0.1 (Karmic is on 2.4), I had to enable the PPA source (monoxide) to install the newer Mono build. After that's done, KeePass was up and running in a minute. Cool!
KeePass requires Mono 2.2 or higher on Linux. Since Jaunty only has 2.0.1 (Karmic is on 2.4), I had to enable the PPA source (monoxide) to install the newer Mono build. After that's done, KeePass was up and running in a minute. Cool!
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