http://www.ComputerBob.com/journal_archive/2005/03.php .
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In the past several days, I've learned most of what I wanted to learn from almost all of the Linux CDs that I burned last week. Fortunately, almost all of them are Live CDs that allow me to boot up my computer from the CD and try out Linux without having to install it permanently on my hard drive.
The Live CD of Ubuntu Linux (Hoary) seemed really stark and unfriendly to me, with only a CD icon on the desktop, and very few software packages in its menus, compared to other Linux distros. And it apparently didn't see my PC's Windows hard drives. Plus, while I was able to get my external modem to connect to my ISP, I couldn't browse or even ping any Web sites, and I couldn't even find anything that would tell me what my connection speed was. I spent a few hours trying to figure out how to set Ubuntu's security settings to allow me access to the Internet, but I just couldn't do it.
The Live CD version of Knoppix Linux appeared to run fine on my PC, but from what I understand, it is quite a pain to install Knoppix to run permanently off of a hard drive, instead of running off the Live CD. Plus, Knoppix is not Debian-based, so it would be more difficult to upgrade its software packages in the future, compared to upgrading the software packages that come in Debian-based Linux distros.
The Live CD of SimplyMepis Linux comes with tons of software, including a firewall and a full-featured CD burner. Plus, users in the "Newbie Help" section of its Mepis Lovers support forums have been very helpful to me -- to see what I'm getting help with, look for my name as the originator of 2 threads in there so far.
After downloading it, I learned that ProMepis is really the same thing as SimplyMepis, but with the addition of server and development tools that I don't need, so I didn't bother to try out ProMepis.
I haven't tried Xandros Desktop 3 OCE Linux yet, mainly because it isn't a Live CD, so the only way I'll be able to try it will be to install it permanently on my hard drive. Plus, I've read several reviews that say that Xandros OCE -- a very user-friendly, free-but-crippled version of the commercial Xandros package -- comes without a firewall and with a speed-restricted CD burner.
Bottom, line: at this point, it looks like SimplyMepis Linux has the best chance to eventually take the place of Windows 98 SE on my
main computer. Only time will tell, and I won't make that switch until I've found a HTML/GUI Web editor that is powerful and
friendly enough to replace my Windows version of Dreamweaver 4. So far, it looks like
Nvu (N-view) might eventually fill that spot, but at
this pre-release stage of its development, I'm not sure it has all the features I will need, and even if it did, I would have to
test it for awhile before I'd be confident to switch this entire 600+ page Web site away from Dreamweaver.
The other day, someone said to me, "the whole world is out of whack." That made me think. How come no one ever says that anything is "in whack?" Maybe because, deep down inside, we all sense that nothing is ever exactly the way we think it should be.
Yesterday was the birthday of my wonderful twin cousins, Micki and LuAnne. I know that other things have kept you from using it up until now, but yesterday, I renewed your domain name for you for another year.
Today would have been my little brother's birthday.
Do you have trouble waking up every morning? Do you press your alarm clock's snooze button over and over? If so, then maybe
you need
Clocky.
I got home last night, after being out of town for the past several days, doing important work that I'm not at liberty to discuss. Whenever I'm out of town, I continue to check and reply to my email several times each day, but I usually don't update this Journal, because I don't want to have to keep track of each file that I've changed and then have to remember to do a remote-to-local file synchronization when I get home.
Last night, I made some security changes to this Web site, using the tips that I found in Google and The Wayback Machine -- Disabling Your Site Security; plus I added a META tag to 594 of this site's pages, to remove them from Google's caches; plus I added a few lines to my Robots.txt file, to prevent any of this site's images from being cached by search engines, as described in Remove Content From Google's Index.
While I was out of town, I had free access to a high-speed Internet connection, so I went to DistroWatch, where I downloaded and burned CDs of several of the most popular (and free) Debian-based Linux distributions. When I have time, I'll try out each distro and see if any of them could eventually replace Windows 98 SE on my main computer.
My wife works at a local church. Last week, she called a local Staples store and ordered a sign for the office door of the church's new choir director. She carefully spelled the woman's name out, letter by letter, to make sure there wouldn't be any mistakes. When the sign arrived, the new employee's name was spelled perfectly, but the store had still managed to make a big mistake.
Last night, my wife and I went out for dinner with Jim and Linda at a salad buffet place. At the head of the buffet line, there was a large sign, welcoming the restaurant's guests. At the bottom of the sign, it said, "Please consume all food on the premises." Linda read that line out loud and then said, "I don't think I can eat that much."
This morning, I removed another 60 buds from Angelo D'Tangelo. That means that if I hadn't been removing his buds, my little
4-foot-tall tangelo tree would be in the process of making over 130 tangelos, whose combined weight would probably have
eventually snapped off his tiny branches.
Eleven days ago, I wrote that I had removed about a dozen little buds from Angelo D'Tangelo. Yesterday, I removed 59 more.
It looks like Angelo will be eager to give us plenty of sweet juicy tangelos in a few years, when he's big and
strong.
Have you been looking for a free, fast and easy way to help protect your Windows computer from tracking cookies, web bugs, hijackers, and other bad stuff? Blocking Unwanted Parasites With A Hosts File provides the solution. The description on that site is sort of "geek-speak," but here's what it means: Every Web site on the Internet has a numerical address (called an IP address) that is used by other computers on the Internet to find that site. For example, IBM.com's IP address is "129.42.17.99". That means that instead of typing "http://www.IBM.com" into your browser's address bar, you could type "http://129.42.17.99" (without the quotes) and your browser would still take you to IBM.com. In fact, in the early days of the World Wide Web, the only way you could view a Web site was to type its IP address into your browser. Because that was extremely inconvenient, the DNS (Domain Name Service) was invented. With the DNS worldwide networked database, companies and individuals are allowed to register domain names (like IBM.com) and the DNS keeps track of each domain name (i.e. IBM.com) along with its corresponding IP address (i.e. 129.42.17.99). So, instead of having to remember to type "http://129.42.17.99" into your browser, you just type "http://www.IBM.com" and the online DNS system automatically looks up IBM.com's IP address (129.42.17.99) and uses that to find the IBM.com Web site for you.
Here's the great part: you can create a text file (called Hosts) on your computer that Windows will automatically use like it's your own private DNS system. You create entries in that file that tell your computer what IP addresses belong to what domain names. There's really no advantage to creating a Hosts file for the Web sites that you want to visit, because the online DNS system itself is very, very fast. The big advantage of using a Hosts file is to prevent your computer from going to "bad" Web sites. The way you do that is to make a list of the domain names of "bad" Web sites in your Hosts file, and instead of listing each of them with its real IP address, you list each of them with the IP address "127.0.0.1", which is your computer's IP address for itself. In other words, you create a Hosts file that fools your computer into thinking that all of those "bad" Web sites are running right on your own computer itself. From then on, every time your computer tries to go to one of those "bad" sites, it ignores the online DNS, and instead reads your Hosts file. That causes it to try to find the "bad" site on your computer itself, and when it fails to find it, it tells you that it can't find it.
All of that would be great except that, in order to create a useful Hosts file, you would have to know the domain names of
all of
those "bad" Web sites. That's where "Blocking Unwanted Parasites With A Hosts File" comes in. They've already created a huge
Hosts file with the domain names of thousands of "bad" sites, and their Hosts file tells your computer that all of those
"bad" sites can be found at IP address "127.0.0.1". All you
have to do is download their Hosts file and copy it to the correct folder on your computer's hard drive. If you don't want to
download and place their Hosts file on your computer manually, they provide free software that will do it for you
automatically. Brilliant!
If you have a Web site, and you're thinking of signing up for the new GotLinks free link exchange service, don't bother. Regular readers of this Journal know that I often take on the role of "Mr. Consumer Reporter," generally researching the heck out of things before I buy, use, or recommend them. Well, my research on GotLinks revealed it to be a big disappointment. I signed up yesterday, when GotLinks was claiming to have over 900 members. After I added the GotLinks link exchange code to my Web site, and after I confirmed that links to nearly all 900+ GotLinks members sites were appearing on my site, my GotLinks admin center's "Sites Linked To You" screen showed me a list of 778 GotLinks member sites that it said currently contained an exchange link back to my site. I felt good about that, but I would've felt better if it had said that all 900+ member sites contained an exchange link to my site. Unfortunately, when I randomly checked more than 30 of those 778 "Sites Linked To You" -- something that many GotLink members probably wouldn't bother to do -- I discovered that none of them had an exchange link back to my site. I wrote to GotLinks to complain, and they wrote back and admitted that there were actually fewer than 200 GotLinks member sites that were linking back to my site, not 778. They also sent me the URLs of 5 of those sites as proof, which did nothing to convince me that there were more than 5 sites that linked to mine. I replied and told them that I had no reason to believe them that there were nearly 200 sites that link to mine, because they had already lied to me when they had told me that 778 member sites were linking to mine. I asked them to cancel my GotLinks account because I don't do business with companies that lie to me. Besides, I see no point in having my site promote more than 900 GotLinks member sites when, even at best, fewer than 200 of those sites (and possibly only 5 of them) promote my site in return. I doubt that many GotLinks members will do all of the work that I did to discover that only a fraction of the GotLinks member sites actually provide exchange links.
The GotLinks site contains a very convincing, but apparently mostly fictional page,
Top 10 Reasons To Use GotLinks.com. That
page says that GotLinks monitors every member site every day, and it drops members who don't provide the required
exchange links. That's obviously not true. Apparently, GotLinks is trying to get as many new members as possible, so it isn't
bothering to monitor its member sites, probably because it doesn't want to cancel the accounts of all the freeloaders who
enjoy the benefits of sites like mine linking to them, while failing to provide any exchange links. As of this writing,
GotLinks claims to have 1258 members. I sure hope they're not counting me.
Yesterday, we drove with Jim and Linda, to a coastal power plant a couple of hours
away. There, we shared a picnic lunch right by the water, and then spent a couple of hours watching a few dozen
manatees,
which congregate in the heated, clear-green waters around the power plant each year during these
cooler months. It was very difficult to photograph them, because they mostly stayed a few feet under the surface of the water,
and only popped their nostrils out to breathe for a couple of seconds at a time, a process that I called
"snouting." Right before we left, I shot a good 10-second video of a manatee
snouting about 10 feet away. We also saw several long tarpon fish, hanging out in long, straight rows, and close to a dozen
stingrays, a couple of hundred feet away. It's always a pleasure to spend time with Jim and Linda, but yesterday was especially
fun.
If you live in the U.S., the April 15 deadline for filing your federal and state income taxes is just around the corner. It
hasn't been publicized very much, but this year, the I.R.S. is giving taxpayers several choices for preparing and filing their
federal taxes electronically, free of charge, using
online services
provided by TaxACT, H&R Block, TurboTax, and several other companies. Most of the companies also offer low-cost online
preparation and filing of state income taxes.
In the past several days, I've read many people's opinions about a controversial new feature, called AutoLink, that Google is currently testing in their Google Toolbar 3.0 Beta. AutoLink has the ability to modify any page on the Web, adding hyperlinks that take the user to free or commercial sites of Google's choosing, without the Google-modified-Web-site owner's knowledge or permission. Plus, Google does not provide a way for Web site owners to "opt-out" of AutoLink. Plus, once a user turns on the Google AutoLink feature, they cannot tell which hyperlinks were put there by the content's author, and which hyperlinks were added to the Web page by Google. Plus, Google has made it clear that it plans to expand AutoLink's features in the future. Not only that, but AutoLink acts like spyware on the user's computer: the Google Toolbar Privacy Policy states, "We understand and respect that you are concerned about your privacy. That's why we want you to know that if you choose to enable the Google Toolbar's advanced features (e.g., viewing the PageRank of web pages), the URLs of the sites you visit will automatically be forwarded to Google."
I agree with the many webmasters who see the AutoLink feature as a violation of their copyrights, and as the first step on a slippery slope that, if it is not opposed, will eventually give Google the power to modify anyone's Web sites in any way that it sees fit. Though SearchGuild has created a JavaScript that webmasters can add to their Web pages to prevent AutoLink from adding hyperlinks to those pages, and though I have added that JavaScript to this site's pages, I believe that solution wrongly puts the burden on webmasters to add that JavaScript to every single one of their Web pages in order to prevent Google from violating their copyrights. It also doesn't stop AutoLink from doing its dirty business when a user has disabled JavaScript in their browser, like many users do for security reasons. The way I see it, Google is the one who wants to profit from violating others' copyrights, so the burden should be on Google, to not mess with anyone's Web site without the Web site owner's permission, rather than the burden being on everyone else to have to add code to their Web sites to try to stop Google from violating their copyrights. A few years ago, Microsoft tried to get away with modifying others' Web sites through their Smart Tags feature, but there was such a public outcry against Smart Tags that MS had to scrap that idea. The Google Toolbar's feedback page needs to hear that same public outcry right now. Please take a minute and tell Google to remove the AutoLink feature from the Google Toolbar.
Bottom line: This is my Web site. I'm the only one who has put more than 5,800 hours of my own time into creating it. I'm
the only one who has spent thousands of dollars of my own money hosting it over the years. I'm the only one who owns the
copyrights to my site. No one has the right
to mess with my site's content, functionality, or coding without prior express written consent from me. I just updated this
site's
Terms of Use to make that abundantly clear.
My little tangelo tree, Angelo D'Tangelo, appears to be doing great. About a month
ago, I sprayed him with bug killer, to kill the large white scale insects that were eating and sliming his leaves. Now, his
leaves are all green and full again, and he's been trying to grow some fruit. A couple of days ago, I removed about a dozen
tiny white buds, to force Angelo to put his strength into growing up big and strong,
instead of trying to make fruit while he's so little. When I squeezed one of the buds, a half-drop of Angelo's very first, bright
orange, completely flavorless "tangelo juice" came out of it. How cute!
If you're extremely observant, you may have noticed the new hyperlink at the bottom of this site's pages, titled
Fight Spammers!
As many of you know, spammers often use email-collecting robot software that automatically browses the Web, follows every
hyperlink that it finds on every Web site, and adds every email address that it finds to the spammers' mailing lists. The
hyperlink that I just added to the bottom of my pages will cause spambots to go to the Spam Poison Web site. There, according to
that site, "E-mail collecting robots will be sent in an infinite loop and will get dynamically
generated fake e-mail addresses, adding enormous quantities of bogus data to the databases of the spammers, thus poisoning those
files so badly that they become essentially useless." I decided to try using Spam Poison after I read
several positive comments and a few negative comments about it, so we'll see how it goes.
One of my favorite quotes of all time is from comedian Groucho Marx, who said, "Time flies
like an eagle. Fruit flies like a banana." I just wonder where time goes, and why it's always in such a hurry to get there. I can
hardly believe that I've lived in the Sunshine State for over 14 months; my mother has been living with us for over 7 months;
March is already here; and we're already several years into the 21st century. I have the sneaking suspicion that, before I know
it, I'm gonna be really old. Then I'm gonna be dead. And I haven't even finished cleaning out the garage yet.
