Monthly Archives: June 2009

Can we trust The New Piratebay?

Technology, , ,

Earlier today it was annonced that The Piratebay might get sold to a Swedish company called Global Gaming Factory X (GGF) operated by Hans Pandeya, a man with a shady reputation (In Swedish).

For all we know, this might just be a PR stunt. But if so, it’s a bad one. I predict that if the sales go through, it will drive most of the users away and over to other file sharing sites. Just the idea of a corporation owning the TPB-user database is scary.

It’s been a nice 5-and-so years at The Piratebay, but I think I’ll go for a swim now, and I’m not sure if I ever will return. Also, this blows my “The Piratebay Preferred Partner”-joke I’ve been doing in the company for the last few years.

TweetDeck – My new favorite Twitter client.

Technology, , , ,

For the last few months I’ve been using  Twhirl to stay connected with the Twitter community, but my activity has of late  slowly been reduced next to nothing. Well, that’s until a good colleague of mine recommended TweetDeck last Friday. I’m back in the Twitter-sphere, and I’m loving it.

Both clients is written in Adobe AIR, which is a big bonus since it means I can run it both on my office Windows machine and my Linux machine at home. I think Adobe AIR is one of the most interesting technologies right now for web applications. Although all that come out of Adobe is slow and sluggish, it’s far better than the last “cross-platform” language that promised a trouble free world. Java. Java was also slow and sluggish, but unlike AIR, Java didn’t seem to work. If you got a application running on one machine, you could be sure it didn’t want to run on your next computer.

Back to the topic; Twitter is still going strong, and with the right tools it can continue to grow. The only question they have to sort out is how to make money. I don’t really see the Ad business as the right move right now. And as long as everyone can create a third-party client, such rubbish can easily be removed before it hits your eyes.

You may follow me on Twitter and read my rubbish. It’s mostly in Norwegian, but that might change.

Filesystem mounted as read-only during boot

Linux, , ,

Today I had a case where a server mounted the root filesystem as read-only during boot. To make a short story shorter, check /dev/null.

After doing some searching in the logs I found a few lines complaining about /dev/null also being read-only filesystem. So I checked the permission with ls -al /dev/null, and it turned out this had been changed into a regular file rather then the special file it’s supposed to be.

The fix is easy. Delete the file called /dev/null and re-create the special device with the command mknod -m 666 /dev/null c 1 3.

You can also read about how to create this special file by reading the man-pages. Command: man 4 null.