Club Linux Coffs Harbour

Co-oincidental to research I'm presently doing on creating control and monitoring systems with web interfaces, I came across an incredible array of miniature computers running Linux or other tinier open source operating systems.

Of general interest, I think to pretty well everyone, would be the Sheeeva Plug, at an amazing US$99 with Linux, 1.2G processor and 512M RAM, together with 512M Flash RAM for website or other storage space. It's also "green" as it consumes less than 5W power.

It seems that variations of recent worms have been successfully infesting that other operating system!

Downadup, also know as Conficker, apparently has 'boticised' perhaps 9 million Windows Computers, with up to a million being added daily!

Decent web hosting at a price is difficult. There's no shortage of competition on price, but the 'decent' bit seems quite a bit harder.

Low priced hosting is shared hosting. That means you get, typically, a share of an Apache server, usually with quite a few other people, maybe hundreds.

First of all, a big HELLO to all of you at Club Linux! It's great to still receive the monthly meeting notices and get and idea of what you're up to, and if I'm ever back over that way, like a bad smell I'm sure to turn up again. :)

It's been a while, I know, but you see I've been busy...

I've always been annoyed by slow websites, and even more annoyed by full page refreshes in the browser just to get something you didn't really want to see anyway. So, out with the AJAX!

A bit over a year ago now, I started a project to get my openPC Labs website improved before updating it. I'm afraid it's still not updated because in the process things developed into something much bigger.

I wanted to use AJAX techniques for the site to get the responsiveness I yearned for. I also wanted to fix up the navigation so that the location bar, history and bookmarks would work.

At the time, there was very little support for browser navigation in AJAX. I stumbled on one system called Really Simple History. It was open source, but a bit buggy and a bit too slow for me, I just didn't feel comfortable with the way it was done.

So I started to roll my own..... BIG mistake.... just over a year later I might be able to start updating openPC Labs!

To cut a long story short, Xanjax and xanjax.org were born.

A recent phone call to Peru cost us about $1-20 for half an hour, just a little cheaper than using the cheapest phone-card we know about.

We used Linux, Skype, and a FreeTalk PenDrive USB phone. According to my wife Roxy, who was talking to her family, the voice quality was very good, and there was no delay or echo. She said her father could hear some background noise of some sort - may well have been the traffic noise in our shop.

So what was necessary to use Linux like this. Well, as it turns out, very little.

Skype was already installed as I had anticipated using it. I had simply used "Smart" software installer at the time to install Skype, however it came from the "commercial repository" which I have access to as a Mandriva Club member. Skype is available free, directly from Skype and should work with most Linux distributions.