Around The Geek World – Jan 2009

Around The Geek World is a monthly summary of interesting articles and news around the geek world with my brief comments.

• Red Hat 5.3 Released – There are some good enhancements on Virtualization and Disk encryption. Refer to this release notes for more details.
• Oracle 11g for Dummies – This new dummies book will give you an excellent jumpstart on the latest Oracle 11g. It is interesting to note there is a dummies book for both 9i and 11g. But, there is no dummies book for 10g.
• Should you migrate from MyISAM to InnoDB? – You may be using MyISAM for your MySQL Database. For most part it is OK to stay on MyISAM, as it works great with the default settings. However, if you have DBA skill-set, it is preferred to migrate to InnoDB, as it can perform better if tuned properly.
• Sacked IT admin sentenced for hacking ex-employer – Causing any kind of damage to an ex-employer after getting sacked is completely unethical. Apart from being unethical, it may put you in jail.
• MD5 collision creates rogue certification. – Using several Playstation 3 system, reseachers were able to create a bogus certificate that looks like a trusted CA. MD5 Hack Interesting, But Not Threatening
• Xobni gets $7M from Cisco – Xobni, the word “inbox” spelled backwards is an excellent add-on for microsoft outlook that will help you search, organize and naviagate your email effectively. Cisco has invested $7 Million in Xobni, which indicates that Xobni is heading in the right direction.
• Top 10 Scientific Breakthroughs of 2008 – This is a very interesting list that covers everything from “Turning water into fuel” to “Finding ice on Mars”.
• It is amazing to see how NASA rovers survived five years on Mars and exceeded scientists expectations.
• Ubuntu Causes Girl To Drop Out of College – Another story about an ignorant microsoft user saying some lame stuff about Linux.  More than the story, the comments by digg users are very interesting and entertaining.
• Super fast Ext4 filesystem arrives in Ubuntu 9.04 – The IOzone benchmark on ext4 filesystem provides very promising results.
• Analytics Toolbox: 50+ More Ways to Track Website Traffic – Most of you may already be aware of Google Analytics. This article gives a big list of all analytics tools that will help you perform some serious analysis on your website.
• The top 10 things we hate about the BlackBerry – If you are a blackberry user (like me), you can definitely relate to few of the items mentioned in this list.  The trackball becoming unreliable after heavy usage is my big complaint about blackberry.