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Blog -- It's not like anyone has asked for Windows XP to run on the Linux-powered One Laptop Per Child XO laptop, but Microsoft is getting ready to deliver it to us anyway.

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, will announce on Feb. 6 that it's making Parallels Workstation for Linux available to users through the Ubuntu Partner Repository.

Linspire, the company behind the commercial Linspire and the Freespire community desktop Linux, announced Jan. 31 that it was offering a new custom desktop Linux Build Service to its partners.

Asustek, the company behind the popular Xandros Linux-powered Asus Eee PC 4G ultramobile PC, knows it's got something good going on, and so it's going to push its Linux desktop PCs for all it's worth.

The really big problem in document formats is what's going to become the next office document format: Microsoft's proprietary Open XML or OpenOffice's ODF (Open Document Format).

The Linux desktop may be moving forward slowly in the United States, but it's a vastly different story in Europe.

Hewlett-Packard unveiled its first new thin clients since acquiring Linux thin client specialist Neoware last fall. Among the new products is a Debian-based "t5735" model featuring a CPU and GPU (graphics processor unit) from AMD, which acquired GPU specialist ATI recently.

With version 4.0 of the popular KDE Linux desktop released, the KDE team has set a roadmap for future releases of the technology.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Developers of KDE, the popular Linux desktop environment, are targeting Windows and enhanced Macintosh support.

Linux laptop users suffering from Apple MacBook Air envy now have a chic, hot laptop to call their own: the Dell XPS 1330n with pre-installed Ubuntu 7.10.

The mainstreaming of Linux-based PCs has taken another major step forward. Sears, via its Web store, is now offering a low-priced minitower PC that comes with pre-installed Freespire 2.0 Linux.

Opinion -- I remember when getting a decent PC would set you back at least a grand. Then it was $500. Now, it's $150!? That's the story that small vendor LinFX wants you to buy along with its PC with pre-installed Linux.

PC vendor Lenovo has promised ThinkPads with pre-installed Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 for some time now. Lenovo will deliver the goods the week of Jan. 14.

Blog: Well, you could do it the manly way and type in the source-code listings with vi-EMACS--we spit upon EMACS!--and then hand-compile the program yourself with gcc. Or you could use apt-get, not really a man's man way of doing it, but OK.

When the OLPC (One Laptop per Child) was first proposed, much was made of how impossible it was that there could ever be a $100 computer. Well, the naysayers were right. It turned out to be a $200 computer.

Opinion -- The calendar has switched over to 2008 and so far it has been anything but a happy new year for the One Laptop Per Child Project.

Opinion -- Can I be honest? Intel was never really interested in partnering with the One Laptop Per Child project. The marriage of Intel and OLPC was destined for divorce before the two ever walked down the aisle.

The day after Intel announced that it would leave the One Laptop Per Child board, the nonprofit organization shot back that the chip giant had contributed little to help the project during its six months with the group.

Every so often, Bob B. observed that his company's e-commerce site would crash-hard. No one had any clue as to why it happened, but everyone knew how to fix it. Restart both the IIS and SQL Server processes and, voilà, within a minute, the site was up and running again.

Like an old car with a few quirks, the company worried that tinkering with the application might make things worse. But after a few months and a handful of customer complaints, Bob was permitted to investigate the issue so long as he wasn't too intrusive.

Waiting for Failure
The first problem Bob encountered was with the home-grown logging module. Whenever the application crashed, it would crash too, leaving Bob with a log filled with "error occurred while logging an error" messages. A few weeks and a crash or two later, Bob fixed the logging code and deployed it to production.

It didn't take too long for another crash to occur. Bob dove right into the log files and saw the dreaded "Server Out Of Memory" error coming from SQL Server. A Google search revealed that a Service Pack installation would most certainly fix things. So, after cajoling the bosses to let him upgrade SQL Server, Bob had the service pack installed. Now it became a waiting game to see what the real problem was.

A tense few weeks passed with out a single crash reported, and Bob assumed the Service Pack had fixed the problem. Then the site crashed again with the same error message: "Server Out Of Memory." Bob started digging further and noticed that the server was, indeed, out of memory. The reason was pretty clear, too: there were nearly 2,000,000 active visitor sessions open.

For a niche e-commerce Web site with an average of a thousand shoppers a day, 2 million visitors were far out of the ordinary. Bob wondered about a Denial of Service (DoS) attack, but quickly ruled that out. No one would possibly bother to DoS their site.

Going Around in Circles
Bob started looking through IIS log files from around the time of the crash, but saw no promising leads. It looked like an everyday log file. After a half hour of reading line after line, Bob held the PageDown key while he tried to think of a better approach. And that's where he noticed a slew of requests from the same IP address. Checking other resources to see request headers, he saw the IP address belonged to an AOL user that seemed to be browsing from somewhere in Ohio.

66.77.93.50 - [08:34:29] "GET /access?action= _ _ forward&uri=%2Ferror.aspx HTTP/1.1" 302 - "-" "-" "-" 66.77.93.50 - [08:34:29] "GET /error.aspx _ _ HTTP/1.1" 302 - "-" "-" "-"

Pieces started coming together. Some Web surfer from Ohio got into an infinite redirect loop that was creating a new session with each iteration. Apparently, the AOL user was patient enough to let that loop continue for almost 11 hours.

By disabling cookies in his browser and typing in a specially crafted URL, Bob confirmed that he could trigger an endless loop of redirection as well. But the mystery was how the loop was initiated.

Bob dug until he found the first log entry from the user:

66.77.93.50 - [08:34:29] _ _ "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 302 - "-" "-" "-"

It was for the favicon, that small icon that appears next to the address browser. Even stranger, it was the Ohioan's first and, aside from the redirects, only request.

In the end, Bob figured out exactly how the problem had happened: some random visitor using an older version of AOL bookmarked their site. The user wasn't trying to visit the site, let alone waiting 11 hours for a page to come up. He or she just happened to have the AOL browser open, which would then periodically attempt to update the favicons for its bookmarked sites, and then diligently follow the endless redirects as ordered.

Bob quickly added a favicon.ico to the root folder and patched up the infinite redirection problem. The crashing problem went away and never returned. But, for some time, the company's Web site was at the mercy of the browsing habits of some random family living in Ohio.

TELECOM New Zealand is struggling with slow sales growth in its home market and serious problems moving its Australian customers to a new billing platform.