Andart: Warning Signs for Tomorrow

Over at Andart today I spotted a great list of Warning Signs for Tomorrow.

Everything from Antimatter and Self-Replicating Devices to Lack of Internet and Motivation Hazards are covered in a simple, iconic manner.

Perian - A swiss-army knife for QuickTime

With Perian installed, any OS X application that uses QuickTime can now use these additional media types:

• Divx, XviD, FLV, AVI

• MS-MPEG4 v1, MS-MPEG4 v2, MS-MPEG4 v3, DivX 3.11 alpha, 3ivX, Sorenson H.263, Flash Screen Video, Truemotion VP6

These formats can be used when they are inside an AVI:
• h.264, mpeg4, AAC, AC3 Audio, and VBR MP3.

<http://perian.org/>

Sun's smpatch

I had a problem with smpatch where it seemed to just hang when downloading patches - it didn't look like it was doing anything and it had created a temp file in /var/sadm/spool, which in my case was 122856-02.jar.tmp

Stopping and restarting the process then ended up with a second temp file - 122911-02.jar.tmp and once again, it wasn't looking like it was doing anything.
I deleted both these temp files and downloaded the signed versions of the patches manually, copied them over to the /var/sadm/spool directory and kicked off the whole process again.

Now it looks like it's going along properly, validating the new downloads and generally behaving itself...

Patching on Solaris

Finally, patching on Solaris is as easy as it should always have been =)

If you work with any solaris boxes these days, and if you've got Solaris 10 on them, you owe it to yourself to check out the Sun Update Connection.

It's a much more sensible method of getting patches onto your system than downloading clusters and hoping for the best, or going over everything by hand and making sure you're up to date.

It's as easy as this:

make a registration file, containing your free my sun login called, say, registrationprofile.properties:

userName=kai.howells

password=password

hostName=

subscriptionKey=

portalEnabled=false

proxyHostName=

proxyPort=

proxyUserName=

proxyPassword=

chown the file to root and chmod it 400

then:

[kai@helios ~]$ sudo sconadm register -a -r registrationprofile.properties

sconadm is running

Authenticating user ...

finish registration!

(this process took a few minutes, so be patient!)

Next, analyse your system, like so:

[kai@helios ~]$ sudo smpatch analyze

121430-11 SunOS 5.8 5.9 5.10: Live Upgrade Patch

121308-07 SunOS 5.10: Solaris Management Console Patch

119963-07 SunOS 5.10: Shared library patch for C++

118833-24 SunOS 5.10: kernel patch

<[snip]>

119903-02 OpenWindows 3.7.3: Xview Patch

119059-18 X11 6.6.2: Xsun patch

Once everything is analysed, patch the biaché:

[kai@helios ~]$ sudo smpatch update

121430-11 has been validated.

121308-07 has been validated.

122525-02 has been validated.

<[snip]>

etc...

AllOfMP3.com "at the top of the 'notorious markets' list"

MP3's, MP3's - get 'em while they're hot.

The US are (still) trying to shut down allofmp3.com - one of the best online music stores...

I get my music from there because I can get it in my choice of format, choice of bitrate and there's no copy protection/DRM making the files difficult or impossible to use on other devices, such as the CD/MP3 player in my car...

Anyway, log on, chalk up some credit on the site and download to your heart's content, while you still can.

More info at ars.