The people at Ars technica has written a good introduction to the future shell for Windows systems: MSH (if I remember correctly it will not be launched with Vista but with a future Windows Server release). It looks that Microsoft is really taking into account that the GUI is not good for everything and that the CLI is a better solution for some problems.

MSH has a few interesting improvements over the known shells, but a new shell will not give you everything you need to do CLI based administration tasks, you need that the installed software provides a CLI interface, a big problem on the Windows world where everything is done with a GUI.

Another problem is security, the ars technica introduction says the truth, any shell can do damage, but the problem on Windows is that I am sure those msh scripts will be associated with an extension and a simple double click will execute them, on Unix like systems you do not trust a file extension to tell if the file is executable or not, you must explicitly mark them, for example with:

chmod +x script.sh

or any graphical file browser like Nautilus or Konqueror. That means you require direct user intervention to be able to say that a shell script is executable.

After struggling with making my site looks good again on the brain dead browser that is Internet Explorer, I asked for a friend to test it on his Mac using Safari, in order to confirm it still looks good. This problems are frequent with IE, and each time It works perfectly on any other major browser on earth. Take a look of my site on Safari: (click to enlarge the image):

I have fallen in love with a CG character from Final Fantasy VII Advent Children: Tifa :-)

Good movie with a good history, but if you have not played Final Fantasy VII you will not understand all of it, it is the closure of the history of one of the characters Cloud, that in the game was left as an exercise to the viewer.

I have been disconnected recently from many internet related activities, the reason is that we have been a lot busy at work, so this weekend i will take a few days off. I will go to the beach, to an uncle house in Chichiriviche.

Ohhh and now I am running a 64bits desktop at work, running Fedora Core 4 (for 64bits AMD/Intel cpus). I only wait for the day when IBM/Lenovo will be able to sell me a Thinkpad with a 64 bits CPU, and for the money too :-P.

Output from uname -a:

Linux localhost.localdomain 2.6.13-1.1526_FC4smp #1 SMP Wed Sep 28 19:28:24 EDT 2005 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Output from cat /proc/cpuinfo:

processor       : 0
vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
cpu family      : 15
model           : 4
model name      :               Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz
stepping        : 1
cpu MHz         : 3000.145
cache size      : 1024 KB
physical id     : 0
siblings        : 2
core id         : 0
cpu cores       : 1
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 5
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm syscall nx lm constant_tsc pni monitor ds_cpl cid cx16 xtpr
bogomips        : 6009.70
clflush size    : 64
cache_alignment : 128
address sizes   : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:

processor       : 1
vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
cpu family      : 15
model           : 4
model name      :               Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz
stepping        : 1
cpu MHz         : 3000.145
cache size      : 1024 KB
physical id     : 0
siblings        : 2
core id         : 0
cpu cores       : 1
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 5
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm syscall nx lm constant_tsc pni monitor ds_cpl cid cx16 xtpr
bogomips        : 6000.42
clflush size    : 64
cache_alignment : 128
address sizes   : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:

I find the definition of GNOME in the Uncyclopedia very funny, false, but funny. Now the real thing as explained in Wikipedia.