Julian Dunn's Journal … don't call it a "blog" …

Regular visitors to this site will notice that I’ve substantially changed the look and feel here. As my wife says, anything with a dark burgundy background looks dated and I definitely felt that way about the old theme I was using.

The changes are more than just cosmetic. I’m going charting a different course: one that veers away from purely IT topics. There will, of course, still be some in-depth articles on technology. But I’m shifting the focus to using the other side of my brain — the creative side. » more

Every so often I hear criticism from CBC’s audience that we choose "proprietary codecs" for the distribution of our audio and video material. The arguments usually go something along the lines of:

1. CBC is a publicly-funded organization
2. CBC shouldn’t be beholden to proprietary technologies as it limits accessibility
3. Therefore CBC should stream audio and video in completely open formats (e.g. Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Theora, etc.)

Nobody wants to be accused of limiting accessibility, and CBC certainly doesn’t start with a position like, "hey, we should be jerks and just lock out anyone who’s using FreeBSD/Linux/OpenSolaris/HP-UX/etc. from watching/listening to our material!" But many moving parts in the encoding and distribution ecosystem prevent us from being completely open, as I’ll explain in this article. » more

Before Clay Shirky was courting controversy by claiming that women don’t get ahead because they aren’t arrogant, self-aggrandizing jerks, he wrote a book called Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. In this book, he performs an eloquent and well-thought-out analysis of social organization in the 21st century, leading to the unsurprising conclusion that the dramatically lower costs for self-organizing are bound to have a serious, disruptive effect on our society and the power structures that govern it. » more

My Christmas break project was to build a Hackintosh out of a Dell Mini 10v. The Mini 10v is a $299 NetBook that, I swear, is deliberately manufactured with on-board parts suitable for creating a Hackintosh.

There are tons of guides out there with conflicting instructions on how to create a Hackintosh on a Mini 10v. I’ll just share with you what worked for me, in a really brief way, because I know you’re busy and want to get working on your new Hackintosh! » more

Novell ships Groupwise Messenger for Linux clients only for SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. If you apply this diff to the binary nvlmsgr.bin, it will permit it to be installed on Fedora Core 11 too:

— nvlsmgr.bin.head 2009-11-12 15:29:05.000000000 -0500
+++ nvlsmgr.bin.fc11.head 2009-11-12 15:29:13.000000000 -0500
@@ -18,7 +18,7 @@
# Extract the tarball
echo -n “Extracting files, please wait…”
mkdir -p $TMP_DIR
-tail +$SKIP $0 | tar xz -C $TMP_DIR
+tail –lines=+$SKIP $0 | tar xz -C $TMP_DIR

# Run the install
if [ -d ${TMP_DIR}/nmclient ] ; then

Novell provides Groupwise clients only for SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. Here’s how to get those RPMs to install on a Fedora Core 11 system. » more

I recently attended a panel on the future of journalism with Clay Shirky and Andrew Keen, which spurred me to read and review Keen’s book entitled “The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture”.
» more

I apologize for the lack of updates on the journal recently; things have been quite busy at $WORK and I’m also trying to kick off some extracurricular creative projects.

Our corporate e-mail system is Novell Groupwise and I am continually amazed at all its unnecessary features, while lamenting the fact that really useful features are nonexistent. This feature imbalance makes me think that the entire system was designed by senior marketing executives at Novell and targeted solely at C-level executives who have secretaries and don’t actually know how to use computers. » more

(with apologies to Pete Seeger for the headline)

It used to be that back in the day, Canadian websites under the .ca umbrella had to be further categorized by a provincial subdomain. For example, the City of Toronto’s website used to be at city.toronto.on.ca, the Toronto Public Library at tpl.toronto.on.ca, and so on.

If I recall correctly, these registration rules (associating the geographic scope of the organization with the domain hierarchy they were allowed to register in) were abandoned in about 1995, at least in Canada. I remember this because my Internet Service Provider at the time was Intranet Technologies of Ottawa, which went from being intranet.on.ca to intranet.ca. (Only later did I reflect on the stupidity of naming an Internet service provider “Intranet”.)

It’s a curious footnote to history, I guess, that most of these province-and-city level sub-domains have fallen by the wayside and most organizations do not use them any more for their canonical website address. However, they reflect a time when the Internet was more rigid and organized according to some sort of taxonomy, and for that, I’m somewhat wistful.

Getting back to more tactical things, I’ve been hacking on some Java code recently for the first time in a long while. I’m trying to grab some data from a vendor’s SOAP interface for trending in Cacti, and having had problems with Perl’s SOAP::Lite library, I switched to using Apache Axis in Java. However, this post isn’t really about my web service client: it’s about how much SSL in Java stinks. » more