Archive for July, 2009

SSH (and tunnel) In One Click of a Mouse

I can’t believe I haven’t seen this tool before. Worse yet, I can’t believe how much time I must have wasted SSH’ing to hosts. Tonight I discovered SSHMenu for Gnome.

I’m a systems administrator on a mostly Linux network (but with a few Windows hosts). Given that, I rely on SSH a lot. A lot, as in you probably wouldn’t catch me not SSH’d into something at any moment during my work day.

SSHMenu

SSHMenu

I do find that I tend to SSH into the same machines over and over again as well as have a few ports that I forward through the firewall that are not exposed to the outside of our DMZ. With SSHMenu, I can not only save a set of the machines that I log into often, but I can also pass options like port forwarding and others.

To get SSHMenu, you’re just a sudo apt-get install away:
sudo apt-get install sshmenu-gnome

To enable it, you’ll need to add it to your Gnome panel by right clicking on the panel and going to the “Add to panel..” window.

Add to panel window

Add to panel window

You can then begin adding hosts in the SSHMenu preferences. The program passes the options you include in the hostname field into the SSH utilitiy so you can insert things like usernames and options as you please. For me, I setup my tunnels so I don’t have to type them in all the time. The one that I saved went a little something like this (with hostnames modified to protect the innocent):
user@host.domain.com -L 8888:windowshost.domain.com:3389

With a couple of clicks of a button I can be not only SSH’d in, but have a tunnel setup to connect via my RDP client (for my example).

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (4) : Jul 15th, 2009

Just What Is Google Doing with Two OS’s?

I just got done reading TechFlash’s account of Steve Ballmer‘s comments regarding the newly announced Google Chrome OS project and he raised some good questions. Now, I have about as high opinion of Ballmer as the next open source person, but when the CEO of the largest operating system maker in the world speaks, you better at least entertain what he has to say. You can view the webcast here, but here’s the money quote:

The last time I checked you don’t need two client operating systems. We tried it before. Windows 95 and Windows NT. It’s good to have one. So I can’t.. I don’t really know what’s up at Google.

Obviously Steve knows about as much as the rest of us about Chrome and if he knows any more, he’s not saying. He calls into question Google’s strategy with building two different products with a bit of overlap on netbooks. He has a good point there. Microsoft’s tried it and failed with having a home and professional edition. But, what about Windows CE, Windows Mobile, and Windows Vista? You can’t tell me that those are the exact same code base. Two of those run on embedded devices that have processors measured in Megahertz and memory measured in Megabytes. Vista barely runs on a machine with 2 Gigabytes of RAM, a fairly new processor, and has a minimum of 15 GB of hard drive space.

Okay, so Microsoft is doing the same thing, just much more quietly. But why would Google? It’s quite simple, really. They were built for different purposes. Of course, I can only speculate, but I’m guessing that since the two are meant to serve two completely different needs, it would be a waste for them both to contain code that’s not shared. A waste of hard drive space, memory, and processing time. Each of those will contribute to a slower-running OS. Chrome is supposed to be built as an OS for web-applications, not for local applications. Cell phones are a world of local apps that utilize web services, especially in a world where network connectivity isn’t always all that fast on cell phone networks.

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Filed under News, Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Jul 15th, 2009

YouTube Dropping Support for IE6, But Will it Help Drop IE6 Usage?

News has broken out on the web today that support for IE6 on YouTube is going away. It seems that other sites will be soon to follow as well. A fairly certain one is digg.com. As Digg reports, a small chunk of their traffic is still IE6, but very few actual diggs are coming from IE6 users. While I’m certainly not going to suggest that dropping support for IE6 is a bad thing (let the poor thing die), but I am fairly certain that it won’t have the effect that people are wanting. Unless sites besides social networking sites are going to drop support for IE6, we won’t see a mass exodus from the browser.

Digg released the results of its survey a few days ago about why their users aren’t leaving IE6. Guess what? Most of the users are using IE6 because they have to. According to the results, 32% of IE6 users say that they haven’t upgraded because they are told they can’t and 37% haven’t because they don’t have administrative access to their PCs. That means that 69% of IE6 users are using it because they have to.

Why are these users being forced to use IE6? That’s a question that has several answers, but I will tell you this: I wouldn’t expect the lack of support for YouTube or Digg at work to do anything for IE6 users in their fight to get an upgraded browser in their workplace. I can see that conversation going horribly wrong for any employee requesting a browser upgrade so they can watch YouTube videos at work.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Jul 14th, 2009

Are We Going to See a Dogfight in the Web Docs Clouds?

Microsoft has finally announced formally something that we’ve all been speculating would happen for some time. Office 2010 will have not only an online version, but both paid and (the big news) a free version on the web. Microsoft is, of course, dominating the traditional ‘brick-and-mortar’ desktop-based office productivity software with their Office product already. They are entering the online document market with competitors Google and Zoho already with a decent foothold on the online market. Unfortunately for Google, Zoho, and others, Microsoft has a pretty good reputation from its Office client and anything with the Office label is probably going to be accepted by consumers.

As Matt Asay points out in Microsoft’s strategy in the virtualization market, ‘good enough’ and convenience sometimes are plenty to take over a market. Microsoft has something that Google and Zoho do not: desktop operating system market share. Just like Microsoft has done in the browser market to take over most of the market until Firefox came around (they still hold the majority), they essentially have a ‘botnet’ of users in Windows users. If the integration with Windows 7 and Office online is ‘good enough’ and integrated in the OS already, users may be drawn to it out of simplicity. Often consumers don’t care about what technology is better. In fact, I would argue that most of the time they don’t care about what’s better. They just care about what is easily available and the quickest. If Office online can meet their needs in a pinch, they probably won’t explore other options.

On the flip side of that, Google and Zoho do have a pretty good foothold in the web-based docs market. Google Docs or Zoho just might be ‘good enough’ to keep users already using their services. Plus, services like these often don’t integrate with others, so they tend to be somewhat viral in nature since collaboration with others requires those users to sign up for those services. As OS X and Linux start to become more popular alternatives to Windows, Microsoft’s advantages in integrating its OS may start to diminish, but their marketshare is still pretty high.

We still have to see exactly what Microsoft has up its sleeves for features in Office Web. Microsoft is calling their Office Web apps an “online companion” to its desktop applications, so we will see what they offer in features. Promised features so far are the ability to create documents and do basic editing, something that both Google and Zoho can blow out of the water. Only time will tell what will happen, but Google and Zoho seem to have finally brought Microsoft out of its fortified position on the ground with Office to do battle in the clouds.

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Filed under Uncategorized : Comments (0) : Jul 14th, 2009

Why I left my RSS reader for Twitter

Okay, so Twitter and RSS are not in any way competing technologies or services, but I’ve used Twitter to replace my RSS reader. While I can’t fully replace an RSS reader with Twitter since some blogs have Twitter, but almost all have an RSS feed, I have been able to get a majority of the ones I care about. If you have a blog and a Twitter account, but don’t have them merged, I’d highly suggest you do. There are plenty of tools out there like the Twitter plugin for WordPress.

While I have given up a bit of freedom in not being able to get feeds to every blog, I do gain in being able to also see posts that the author of a blog that I follow also finds interesting, but didn’t necessarily want to write a blog entry about (i.e., microblogging :) ). It also allows me to see updates from my friends as well as updates from blogs, sites, or organizations that I am interested in without having to go to several different places around the web. It also helps to have a desktop application for Twitter so you get notifications when there’s new activity. I use Tweetie on my MacBook and really like it for its simplicity, but there plenty of others to choose from.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Jul 13th, 2009

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