Recently I had some installation problems and it turned out be because of compatibility issues of some

export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.19

(or 2.2.5) and SUSE Linux 10.1. Same installer worked on SUSE 9.0. After some tests and googling I found out a reason. It seems that 10.1 does not contain certain older libraries (glibc) which 9.0 used to have and therefore it fails.

I came up with couple ways to fix:

Modify installation script and remove those conflicting lines.

If the installer happens to be in binary form, it might still possible to do search and replace. Copy original installer to installer.old and

cat installer.old |

 sed "s/export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL/#xport LD_ASSUME_KERNEL/" > installer 

Install right version of glibc and hope it did not conflict.

Change shell to something else than bash as in it export is built-in command and cannot be replaced. For example zsh allows it. Disable original built-in export, create wrapper for export command which handles LD_ASSUME_KERNEL and forwards rest.

It has not bothered me that much but after seeing some blogs with more descriptive URLs than itemid=134 I began to search way to add such feature to this blog. I found right plugin in not time and it was really easy to install. What NP_FancierURL2 does is that it creates search engine optimized URLs for Nucleus items.

When a blog starts to get more attention it is good idea to have some protection against comment spam. I found nice plugin for that from Nucleus plugin list and after changing default questions it seems to be good enough. Anyways, it will be interesting to see how much more visits this URL change brings.

Today Apple and EMI Music announced that Apple's iTunes store will start selling songs without digital rights management (DRM). This means in practice that you are free to copy those songs on any device you happen to have and burn unlimited CDs for your own use. Something like this was expected as Steve Jobs wrote his public letter about DRM some time ago but still it came as a surprise.

DRM has been dead idea for all its existence. As human needs to see and hear digital content like movies and songs in analog format (light&sound waves) there is no way to prevent copying. Quality of the copy can be slightly worse but it did not prevent people copying VHS movies. And making a copy of DRM protected content is just a matter of time there is no real need to harass ordinary customer.

Apple and EMI Music were not first ones to announce such idea. There are already several online music stores operating with similar basis. However, this announcement is the first one from major players and it is worth of noticing that Apple has some foothold on movie industry, too. Unless Apple and EMI Music fail miserably with this idea, which is unlikely, there will be other companies following them.

It is hard to find real losers with this trend. Consumers are winning and those music producers and distributors implementing this are winning. However, companies developing and applying annoying DRM features are losing and I do not feel sorry.

EMI Music's press release