title: Furlough Post #1: A Windows Virus on Wine link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2009/10/27/furlough-post-1-a-windows-virus-on-wine/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 222 created: 2009/10/27 14:46:16 created_gmt: 2009/10/27 14:46:16 comment_status: open post_name: furlough-post-1-a-windows-virus-on-wine status: publish post_type: post

Furlough Post #1: A Windows Virus on Wine

In the idle time I have while watching my two H1N1 infected children deal with fevers, coughs and runny noses (Note: the fevers broke today), I’ve taken to randomly browsing the web and found some interesting and amusing stuff.

This officially 2nd day of a five-day furlough (or “unpaid leave”) from an employer that’s been hit as hard as anyone by the recession isn’t going quite as planned. By now I should have clocked at least 4 hours of walks on nearby nature trails while listening through a semester’s worth of OpenYale podcasts. Instead, I’m sitting in the kitchen surfing the Internet while the kids have Cartoon Network blaring in the family room.

As for the bit about Wine, the open source emulator layer that allows you to run Windows programs on a Linux machine (which in my opinion runs a pathetically short list of Windows software reliably after nearly a decade of development — through no fault of the developers, think “a house built on sand…”):

A virus run in Wine is akin to taking a ferocious tiger out of the jungle, paralyzing it, then hooking up all of its nerve endings to virtual jungle simulator. It’s not a perfect simulation, though, so the jungle maybe doesn’t look right, and plus there’s an omnipotent power that can change anything that goes on in the simulation, or even destroy it and the tiger’s consciousness with a few twitches of his fingers. Now that’s power.

Quote from the post I Can Haz Virus over on fsufitch’s blog. Just another “Windows virus vs. Linux” tale where the good guys win. Originally found the quote on another blog, Boycott Novell, which also has more than its share of entertaining, as well as informative, articles.

I found Boycott Novell while searching for some news on the apparent “close-sourcing” of multimedia content on the NASA web site. Apparently the suits over at NASA haven’t read The Memo that has given their brethren over at the Department of Defense new marching orders when it comes to open source (basically the word is… use it).

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