I have been using Kubuntu Hardy for the last few years. It's all right but it's not quite as polished as the hordes of (K)Ubuntu fans would like to believe it is. I was a Mandriva user prior to that and Kubuntu has nothing on Mandriva in terms of polish, though it has community, support, and timely bug fixes (maybe) that Mandriva never has been able to achieve.

Windows and OS X users wonder why Linux users seem to make such a big fuss over "package management". On Windows, "Add/Remove Programs" attempts to provide a unified interface for installing or removing applications, though it does nothing to manage dependencies or upgrades. That means you can put your Windows machine in an inconsistent (read: broken) state simply by installing or removing an application. The Windows solution of system restore points treats the symptoms rather than the problem.

I complained about some of the annoyances that I find with OS X on a mailing list and predictably, one of the Mac fans rose to the defence of OS X and accused me of not being "fair and balanced" in my criticism. As an example of the purported superiority of OS X, he cited Exposé and said it wasn't available on Windows or Linux. I'm always amused by people who make claims out of ignorance.

Apparently, something like Exposé exists on Windows too.

On the Ubuntu users mailing list, someone asked for recommendations of a "simple" way to monitor his remote web server(s). When several people recommended various options, he dismissed them as too complicated. Someone suggested he run ping in a cron job and that if it failed, cron would send an email as notification of the failure. The original poster did not like that either.

At Dinamis, we've put to good use several ORM's in various worlds.

Personally, one thing I find is that they are not fully object oriented. There is an atmosphere in the community around these ORMs that seem to relegate Object orientation to Inheritance. Sure, inheritance is important ... but how much ?

What I believe is fundamentally more important in an ORM and which is sadly missing, is the idea that objects are entities and that they have relationships.

First, I describe the Foreign Key, which I believe is too low-level for an object world.

Here is the original code:

That would not play at all with IE6 or 7 but it played fine with Firefox, Konqueror, and Opera. After much digging, I found SWFObject which enabled me to embed the Flash player using JavaScript. Here is the revised code:

Add the Cooker main and contrib media sources.

urpmi freenx nxagent nxproxy nxviewer libnxX11_0-1.4.0-3mdk

Disable the Cooker media sources to avoid installing other packages from the Cooker repositories. Cooker repositories should only be used in the stable (official) distro when you are absolutely certain of what you are doing. In the case of freenx, there are very few dependencies and certainly none that require upgrading critical packages like rpm and urpmi so it is fairly safe to install from Cooker.

nxserver --adduser someuser
nxserver --passwd someuser

The following is applicable to Xen 2.0.6.

1. Do a minimal install of Mandriva 2005 LE + the following packages for the sake of convenience:
* wget
* screen
* openssh-server
* openssh-clients
* slocate
* lynx
* rsync
* traceroute
* vim-common
* vim-enhanced
* drakwizard
* drakxtools
* ncftp
* lsof

If you intend to use LVM backed VBDs (Virtual Block Devices) for domU, install the lvm2 package too.

2. Go to http://urpmi-addmedia.org and configure main, contribs, and updates urpmi media sources.

Over the last couple of weeks, I have had a few mysterious crashes with Mandrake 10.1 Community Edition. When the machine became non responsive, it would not accept ssh connections, typically failing with a "no route to host" response, or even pings. There would be no video on the console and even the Caps Lock key on the keyboard would not work. I would have no choice but to hit the Reset button on the machine. The logs did not yield any useful information.

When generating a PDF using ReportLab, watch the number of columns passed to a table object. If you pass fewer than what you have defined, you will get the "AttributeError: Table instance has no attribute '_cellvalues'".