After enjoying taking apart Microsoft’s “cloud” Office 365 for the numerous shortcomings of its installation process, having to do the same for my favorite Linux distro – openSUSE – is rather upsetting. OpenSUSE installation routine went from nearly-flawless in 11.1 to mildly annoying in 11.3, arriving to moderately obnoxious in 11.4. What happened? Same as with Microsoft, poor installation workflow is to blame. One can always feel when desktop support people take over workflow tasks from server admins.

To much fanfare Microsoft launched its first “cloud” version of the Office – the Office 365. Silly name, I know, but I still decided to give it a shot. Call me an optimist, but sometimes I feel there is a chance Microsoft will come out with a product more useful than Xbox 360. For the sake of brevity, let me just say that Office 365 was not that product. I can’t really tell you how good or bad it is, because I never got past the convoluted installation procedure. My many years of experience as a sysadmin did not help.

Just a quick alert: the latest version (v. 3.0.3.3) of the popular Shadowbox JS plugin for WordPress has a serious bug that exposes your WordPress installation to a major security risk. Incorrectly coded handling of the “player” tag causes all of your NexGEN Gallery images to be displayed on any page that also has single images embedded via WordPress “Add an Image” function.

Staring with version 3.1.3, WordPress introduced X-FRAME-OPTIONS support for the admin and login pages. This is a simple defensive measure against sneaky characters trying to encapsulate your blog within their own Web sites using iframes. So this new security was a welcome addition to WP for most users. I was not one of those users.

Useful iPhone apps? Really? Yeah, there are a few. These may not be the best-written apps, or the easiest to use, or the most aesthetically appealing, but they perform a function that benefits your bottom line. And what else can you want from computer software if not that? So let me get started in no particular order.

Some of today’s cell phones feature camera resolution that rivals digital SLRs from two year ago. An 8-megapixel cell phone camera is no longer a novelty. Unfortunately, high resolution is the only good thing cell phone cameras have to offer and it does not translate into better pictures. If you compare photos taken with the most advanced cell phone camera to those taken with a $200 point-and-shoot digital camera, the cell phone invariably loses.

After upgrading to the latest stable WordPress version 3.0.4 I ran into an old issue I haven’t see for almost two years. Clicking “Publish” or “Save Draft” when writing a new post seems to remove some custom fields. If you re-add the custom field and click “Update”, the entry stays. But it goes away again once you use the “Save Draft” or “Publish”.

If you are using XBMC as your video player, you might have encountered a problem playing 1080i AVCHD (*.ts or *.m2ts) videos. When playing such files, you may see just a gray screen with some …

I had to power-cycle my Windows 7 64-bit laptop. The bootup sequence looked normal and reached a point where I could see the black screen with the mouse cursor. After this stage my desktop would usually appears, but not this time. I could move the mouse and I could even establish a remote desktop connection to my laptop. But I could not log in. Every time it would reach the same point – the black screen with the mouse cursor – and it would stop.

Ignoring my own advice to never install latest WordPress releases as soon as they come out, I upgraded my installation to WP 3.0 and shortly after to 3.0.1. Doing so broke a few things. Automatic plugin updates or installs seem to hang and so does automatic WordPress upgrade. Let me illustrate. According to this screenshot, I need to update one of the plugins.

How do you know if your computer has a virus? Is it connected to the Internet? Then it has a virus. Many computer viruses and other malicious applications are very resilient and will actively resist any attempts to deactivate and remove them. Some viruses can even delete your antivirus application or prevent it from working properly. Many viruses cannot be effectively removed once they are loaded in memory and active.

Recently I upgraded a client’s Vista computer (Toshiba Qosmio, 4Gb, Intel Core Duo P7350, 7200-RPM 200-Gb disk) from Vista Ultimate 64-bit to Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit. Being a Unix sysadmin this is not something I usually do. How did the experience compare to upgrading HP-UX, Solaris or SLES? In a nutshell: I’d rather walk around all day in wet underwear than attempt to upgrade Vista ever again.

NetBackup is an enterprise-level distributed backup and recovery application. The environment consists of the master server, media server, storage library, networking hardware, and client agents. NetBackup supports a wide variety of Unix, Linux, VMS, and Windows systems. The original backup solution was developed by Control Data Corp., later acquired by Openvision, which gave the product its “NetBackup” name. NetBackup was then bought by Veritas and is currently owned and supported (poorly) by Symantec.

I am sure this will sound familiar: you are copying a large amount of data – either locally or over the network – and you are wondering how long it will take and if there is a way to make things go faster.You may be surprised, but it does matter what type of files you are copying: 1Gb-worth of many small files will take considerably longer to copy than two 500Mb files. The hardware you are using is an important consideration, but it’s not the only factor limiting data transfer speed.

Ever wanted to build a kick-ass home theater computer? Here we have some highly detailed instructions for putting together just such a device. It is not a DVR like TiVo or your Verizon HDTV box. …

The following document explains how to configure your SuSE or SLES system to be able to print to a remote printer shared from a Windows server. The first step is to install Unix print support …

Below is the SQL script that will attempt to identify and remove duplicate posts in your WordPress database. This script can be useful for autoblogging. If you use plugins like WP-o-Matic to pull full-text RSS …

Whenever a new WordPress version comes out, I get an itch to upgrade as quickly as possible. Generally, this is not a good idea, unless you enjoy working out new software bugs and dealing with …

The php.ini is the primary configuration file for the PHP – a popular scripting language used for Web development. Most Web hosting providers offer preinstalled PHP on their servers. However, not many hosting providers explain …

This is the second part of my review of iPhone apps unworthy of your ninety nine cents. You can read the first part here.
Certain applications are well-written and might have been quite useful, if …

Oh quit your whining, you will say, they are just a couple bucks each, so no big loss if some iPhone apps turn out to be trash. True, but they are so addictive. My first …

Whenever you upgrade your WordPress installation or do development work, it is always a good idea to be working on a copy of your main site and not on the real thing. Copying WordPress installation …