Terminal Addict

My Last Weblog
I tried! [Read More]

Digg does not allow disposable email addresses
Have been hearing a lot of good things about Digg.COM lately, so I decided to go check it out. The site looked interesting and I thought I'd register and give it a shot. As always, I created a disposable email address for Digg.COM at Sneakemail.COM, my favourite disposable email service. Everything was fine until I tried to register and Digg threw up this message:

That email cannot be used. Please enter another address.

Just to make sure this is not a mistake, I tried with another disposable email address, this time from SpamGourmet.COM. Same results. Hmm.. interesting. Maybe I'm just suspicious, but why would a website care if I'm using a disposable address? The only reason I can think of is the one services like Sneakemail and SpamGourmet are designed to thwart.. businesses selling my email address. Digg's privacy policy has this interesting nugget:

Business Transfers:
In some cases, we may choose to buy or sell assets. In these types
of transactions, user information is typically one of the business
assets that is transferred. Moreover, if Digg, or substantially all
of its assets, were acquired, user information would be one of the
assets that is transferred.

I can understand user information being transferred if Digg is bought over, but I'm not sure I'm comfortable with user information being typically one of the business assets that is transferred in case Digg decides to sell some assets. I'm not a lawyer, but wouldn't a spammer offering money for Digg's email address database qualify as a "business transfer" where Digg could choose to sell user information assets? Quite infra digg, if you ask me. I guess I'm just paranoid, but I won't be registering with Digg anytime soon.

IBM warms to Opteron
Came across this interesting news article just now:
IBM warms to AMD Opteron servers Have been expecting this for some time. Now, Dell is the only big server vendor still avoiding AMD Opterons. Will be interesting to see how long they hold out.

Here we go again...
After a couple of false starts, here I am trying to start my weblog yet again. For a technology early adopter (I bought Motorola's first Linux PDA phone so early they didn't even have time to debug it), I have been extremely slow in getting on the weblog bandwagon. Couldn't be just because I hate the word "blog", though I do think it sounds very ugly. Anyway, here goes... My name is Venky and I work in the Solaris sustaining team at Sun in Bangalore, India. Have been working on some form of UNIX or Linux for well over 10 years now, starting from my early SCO UNIX days through Slackware and Red Hat to my present day passions -- Solaris and Gentoo Linux. Severely addicted to scripting languages (Korn shell, Perl, Ruby), I have a sneaking suspicion I spend more time writing scripts than actually using them. Until very recently, my webserver was a reasonably small shell script. I am also addicted to the terminal window (hence the name of this weblog) and pretty much every application I use (editor, mail client, web browser) runs within one. Should be enough for the first post. I have no idea what I'll be writing about in this weblog of mine. Stay tuned, just in case I figure out!