Side Niche’s Neighborhood

Well, the last order dates for the holidays have passed, and Santa's final sacks of festive MOOs are filling up fast. We're still taking new orders though, and we'll be shipping them out as fast as we can - so don't hesitate to order thank you cards for all your lovely pressies!

Just so you know, here's our warehouse and customer service closure dates over the holiday season.

Thursday 24th December - LIMITED HOURS: we'll be shipping orders in the morning, but going home in the afternoon to wrap presents.
Friday 25th December - CLOSED : we'll be at home feasting on mince pies and turkey.
Monday 28th December - UK CLOSED: we'll be buying new trousers to fit our expanded waistlines!! (please note this is a UK Holiday only).
Tuesday 29th December - OPEN: business as usual.
Wednesday 30th December - OPEN: business as usual.
Thursday 31st December - OPEN: business as usual.
Friday 1st January - CLOSED : we'll be trying out our New Year resolutions and nursing hangovers.
Monday 4th January - OPEN: that's it, holidays over, back to work!

It's also important to note that our StickerBook turnaround in the UK is severely delayed over the holidays. Any orders placed after the 20th December will not be dispatched until the week of the 4th January.

That's all for now - Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from the MOO Warehouse Crew!

Yesterday in London, UK Google launched a massive advertising campaign for the Google Chromium Chrome floss free libre open open-source browser project !

Chromium aims to build a safer, faster, and more stable way for all users to experience the web. The Chromium site contains design documents, architecture overviews, testing information, and more to help you learn to build and work with the Chromium source code.

STOP PRESS and now on the front page of The Stylist and The Shortlist too !

Nokia OVI already has 70m users and is aiming for 300m by the end of next year ! Now Vodafone is trying to get a slice of the mobile social media cake by launching Vodafone 360 !

I wonder which will be first to 500m members and when ?

frappr is now platial

Apparently the real Google Ubuntu Chromium OS is based on Ubuntu and not on OpenSuse ! And the official download is only available as sourcecode which you have to build-it-yourself ! So by implication any other ISO or VM downloads that claim to be Chromium OS are possibly spoofs or fakes !

• http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/building-chromium-os
  
• http://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/LinuxBuildInstructionsPrerequisites
• http://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/chromium-os/building-chromium-os/build-instructions
• http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chromiumos-design-docs
• http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/getting-dev-hardware/dev-hardware-list

Thanks to Alan Pope for alerting me to the spoof ISO i downloaded last week !

It's been almost one year, now, since I last posted any article on my blog...well, the going has not been easy and, of course, a lot has transpired. I will as usual track the most important events in my next articles and this will be done chronologically.
I hope that I will get regular visitors as well as comments, as it were.

With kind regards,
Rukundo.

the .eu domain is now supporting ACE Internationalised Domain Name (IDN) names which means that most european characters can now appear in the domain name part of URIs and URLs !

Examples:

• déjà.eu (or xn--dj-kia8a.eu)
• vis-à-vis.eu (or xn--vis--vis-2ya.eu)
  

Note : type the second (ACE encoded) version in brackets if your keyboard doesn't have a à character !

See also:

• http://www.domainmonster.com/domains/eu-idn/
• http://faq.domainmonster.com/domains/idn/what-is-an-ace-string/
• http://news.domainmonster.com/new-eu-idn-domain-name/
• http://www.domainmonster.com/domain-registration/eu-idn/
• http://faq.domainmonster.com/domains/eu/german-%C3%9F-in-my-eu-idn/

And if you're interested in Arabic or Russian domain names see:

• http://news.domainmonster.com/dec_2009/

According to http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/534 Intel initially chose not to extend their IA-32 processor family to 64 bits, preferring to promote their own but incompatible HP PA-RISC based IA-64 "Itanium" processor family !

but then Intel adopted AMD's 64-bit extensions into their IA-32 processor family, calling them "Intel 64" (aka IA-32e and EMT64). Final generation Pentium 4 & D, Celeron D, and Xeon processors and all "Core 2" based processors now include AMD compatible 64-bit extensions.

To add to the confusion https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ProcessorArch lists a few dozen Intel processors but doesn't make it clear which type a Pentium DualCore is ! Which is what my Compaq A900 notebook says it has in it !

I have 4G of RAM that I have only been able to access 3G of so far (with 4 different OS's)

Update :
It seems that my Pentium DualCore has PAE (?) support and when I install from the Xubuntu x86 (32-bit ?) CD I CAN see all 4G ! So what benefits if any would I get from using the Xubuntu 64-bit (AMD64) CD instead ?

My SONY PIII says it is:
$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor    : 0
vendor_id    : GenuineIntel
cpu family    : 6
model        : 13
model name    : Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1.50GHz
cpuid level    : 2
flags        : fpu vme de pse tsc msr mce cx8 sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss tm pbe up bts est tm2

My Compaq Pentium Dual Core says it is:
$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor    : 0
vendor_id    : GenuineIntel
cpu family    : 6
model        : 15
model name    : Intel(R) Pentium(R) Dual  CPU  T2390  @ 1.86GHz
cpuid level    : 10
flags        : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm lahf_lm