http://www.ComputerBob.com/journal_archive/2008/05.php .
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Anyone who's spent any time with us Linux users knows that some of us are really, really good at getting Windows users to hate Linux. But I wonder how many Linux users realize that one of the best ways to get them to love Linux is to help them disinfect and protect their Windows computers. That's just one of the good ideas that you'll find in
How To Make People Love Linux.
Sometimes, it's hard for me to believe that in just a couple of decades, the Internet has grown from the incredibly slow file-transfer medium that I used back in the late 1980s to its current iteration as a worldwide, world-changing, real-time, multimedia phenomenon that encompasses an estimated 165 million different web sites. I think it's just as incredible that the guy who "invented" the worldwide web now says that
it's still in its infancy.
If you know anything about domain tasting and front running, you're going to be happy to hear that the ICANN board has voted to finally
do something to solve those problems. Maybe.
Despite all of my years of tech support, teaching and management experience, I recently applied for a local Help Desk position. Why would I do that when it's generally accepted among IT people that Help Desk positions are dead-end jobs? Because, depending on how you approach it, a Help Desk position can be a dead end, or it can be
a launchpad to better things.
Fair-minded folks have known for years that Microsoft regularly and repeatedly uses FUDD to try to scare people away from switching to its competitors' more capable operating systems and applications. Unfortunately, those unethical tactics have been an arguably effective method of fooling many computer users who don't know any better. Now one Linux pundit claims to know Why Microsoft Will Dump Their Anti-Linux Rhetoric. From his mouth to Steve Ballmer's ear...
It's been 44 years since two professors at Dartmouth College ran the very first program
in the BASIC language. Sixteen years later, I ran my first BASIC program, after saving it onto a cassette recorder — a process that took about 4 minutes. And BASIC still survives to this day, in a few different iterations. BASIC taught me the important lesson that I continue to repeat to my own students: Computers don't do what you want them to do — they do what you tell them to do.
100 Print "Hello"
200 Goto 100
When I was a kid, I needed glasses for at least few years before my parents finally realized it. My dismal couple of summers as the completely inept right fielder on my Little League baseball team — everyone who hit the ball to me got a guaranteed home run — taught me that lesson. Back then, I somehow discovered that I could see the world more sharply if I peered through a tiny space between my fingers. That's why I really appreciate this story: "A proposed space telescope would focus light primarily with
a patterned sheet of metal rather than a large mirror or lens."
Serving as a sort of technological Holy Grail, the $10 million Automotive X Prize may finally be on the verge of being claimed. For the exciting details, see
Top 10 Early Contenders For The Automotive X Prize.
Today is my wife's and my wedding anniversary. We were just kids when we got married, and I always expected that we would grow old together, but I've been surprised by how quickly that seems to be happening — I feel like I'm only a few years older than I was when we first said our vows. We're going on a date to a nature preserve in a little while, and then tonight, I have an appreciation dinner/meeting for the greyhound rescue charity whose web site I maintain. Then we'll probably go out for dinner together tomorrow night.
As of yesterday afternoon, our dream home's attic is super-insulated. Our local electric company recommends an attic
R-value of between R-19 and R-30, but our home was built back in 1964, so it only had about R-10. Happily, the company that I contracted to do the work generously gave us much, much more blown-in fiberglass insulation than the R-30 that we had paid for, so our entire attic ended up being insulated to somewhere between R-60 and R-90. I anticipate that, from now on, our heating/cooling electric bills are probably going to be less than half of what they've been in the past, and the new insulation will have probably paid for itself before the end of this coming Summer.
When we first bought this house 4 years ago, we had a new roof installed within a couple of weeks. A few weeks later, we had the entire front porch rebuilt. Later, we took down the giant palm tree that split the fence in our back yard. Two years ago, we had the whole house professionally painted. Several weeks ago, we got new hurricane-rated garage and side doors, along with new hurricane shutters, bringing our entire home up to the most stringent Miami-Dade standards for hurricane resistance. Then we took down the huge dead tree in our front yard after it dropped a branch that took out the electrical wires for our entire block's street lights. Then I built an inside storage area for the hurricane shutters, added several suspended storage areas to our garage, and built a new outside storage area for our lawn mower. Now that our attic is insulated, I'm all done with all of the big jobs that this house needed to have done. That's a great, great feeling, and one that I've never felt before — when we lived in the Frostbite State, my home-improvement "to-do" list was 1 1/2 pages long soon after we bought our house. After ten years of work, it was even longer.
This past week, I cleaned about half of our home's wall-to-wall carpeting. Unlike in the past, when I rented a carpet-cleaning machine from a local grocery store, this time I bought one. After researching the heck out of my options, I bought a
Hoover SteamVac upright carpet cleaner at WalMart. It does a great job of cleaning, it leaves the carpets almost completely dry, and it cleans a bigger area than the rental machines do before it has to be emptied and refilled. Instead of buying harsh and expensive carpet cleaning chemicals, I bought a gallon of non-toxic
Simple Green carpet cleaner. It works great in my SteamVac.
Last night's greyhound rescue charity appreciation dinner next door was excellent. But even better than the food was the news that my excellent next-door neighbors Mike and Annamarie's latest foster greyhound, Teela, is going to be a permanent member of their family. Teela is a very special fawn-colored female with a very gentle, very happy and very loving personality who "retired" from the dog track a few months ago when she broke a leg during a race. The first time I met Teela several weeks ago, she ran to me and started kissing me like she had known me for years. I'm really glad that they decided to keep her.
I was awake until about 4:00 AM this morning, researching several possible online photo printing service options for the photo gallery that I created on the greyhound rescue charity's web site a couple of weeks ago. After getting a few hours sleep, I decided to go with
DigiBug, using its API on our existing photo gallery. DigiBug will let me set my own prices for people to be able to order copies of the photos, plus photo-enhanced gift items like calendars, t-shirts, mugs, mousepads, etc. DigiBug will handle all of the shopping carts, orders, credit card processing, shipping, etc. The charity will get a monthly check for 80% of the profits from all sales while DigiBug will keep the other 20% as its only fee. As I write this, I'm in the process of opening a new account on the DigiBug site. It will probably be a few days before I activate DigiBug's services on the charity site though — it's going to take me a long time to re-upload my hundreds of photos to the charity site in their full-size, full-resolution version, to ensure that DigiBug will print them at their highest quality.
Whether you're a full-time Linux user like me, a Linux dabbler, or a Windows user who's curious about Linux, you'll want to read
Linux Shootout: 7 Desktop Distros Compared. Was your favorite one of the seven? If so, how did it stack up against the others?
If you're reading this, you have had to deal with spam — taking steps to prevent it, taking steps to filter it out of your email and taking steps to delete it. After years and years of it, we're all pretty much used to dealing with normal spam, but something that's much more psychologically jarring (and is currently increasing) is
backscatter.
It used to be that "bugs" in your system meant that there were things that kept things from working correctly. But by the end of this year, bugs in the military's systems might
save some lives.
Years ago, I was a big fan of the TV show, so I'm interested in the news that it looks like there's going to be
a MacGyver movie. Insert your own collection of lame jokes here, involving the building of a nuclear device out of duct tape, dishwashing detergent and chewing gum.
Wow, it's almost 4:00 in the afternoon, and I'm finally getting a chance to write today's Journal entry. I'm completely wiped out. Last night was another one of my marathon web site sessions, in which I spent 4-5 hours working on the greyhound adoption charity's web site, followed by 8 hours (all night long) of re-uploading all of my hundreds of charity event photographs to that site in their biggest file sizes and highest resolutions. Then, after getting less than 3 hours of sleep, I spent another 7 hours coaxing the photo gallery's DigiBug plugin to recognize the new photo files, re-entering all of their descriptions, locking down the entire photo gallery's security, and creating a price sheet for people to order copies of photos and several types of photo gifts from the charity's web site. Finally, about an hour ago, I made the new photo gallery store "go live" on the charity's site. Then I wrote simple step-by-step ordering instructions that now appear at the bottom of every page in the entire gallery. I'm not exactly thinking clearly right now, but off the top of my head, I think I've gotten less than 3 hours of sleep in at least the past 33 hours. And if I remember correctly, I got only 3 or 4 hours of sleep the night before last, due to a different marathon session. It might keep me from getting a restful sleep tonight, but I think I'd better go try to catch a one-hour nap.
If your email message is sitting in my Inbox, rest assured that I'll write back to you as soon as I can.
Are you a true believer? Have you always been one or did you have a conversion experience at some point? Here's a guy who was surprised when a fellow church member thanked him for
converting him.
Speaking of conversions, here's a guy who was such an evangelistic believer that he
converted his boss.
It's an extremely dubious anniversary. In fact, it's too bad that it wasn't eradicated long ago. But what's even worse is that
it's even worse than it was many years ago.
From the John Travolta Is A Big Hypocrite Department comes news that
John Travolta is a big hypocrite, and so are several other popular stars and celebrities. Is anyone surprised?
When I was using Mepis Linux, I installed the konq-kim utilities, which added several batch digital photo processing commands to my right-click menu. That made it very fast and easy to convert a whole batch of full-size digital images to a smaller size before displaying them on web pages. When I switched to Debian Linux this past December, I discovered that the konq-kim utilities weren't in the Debian Etch repositories. When I tried to install them anyway, as I described in My Debian Adventure, I wasn't able to get them to work properly. Since then, every time I've needed to batch process a bunch of digital photos, I've rebooted my computer back into my old version of Mepis Linux and used its old konq-kim utilities. That has worked well, but it's been an inconvenient way to do things.
Yesterday, by doing some online searches, I found Phatch, a powerful, GUI-based, feature-filled, digital photo batch-processing solution that reportedly works in Debian Etch. Yesterday, I used the Phatch site's "Ubuntu/Debian" instructions to try to install its .deb file, but I got several installation error messages. Apparently, the online instructions assume that everyone is running the GNOME desktop environment, which I'm not (I run only KDE). So I figured out my own instructions for installing it by combining Phatch's Ubuntu/Debian installation instructions with Phatch's generic Linux instructions. Since then, I've started it up and looked around its GUI interface a few times, and so far, it appears to be working. I'll know for sure once I use it to try to add watermark text to a few hundred digital photos some time in the next few days.
If you'd like to know how I installed Phatch, I documented it in My Debian Adventure.
I think it's really funny what different people think is funny. Many years ago, I had a close friend named Farhood who was from Iran. One time I showed him a very funny comic from
The Far Side, and he laughed and laughed at it. But something about the way he laughed made me curious, so I asked him what he thought was funny about it. As he explained what he saw in it, it was obvious that he had completely missed the original intent of the comic, but I didn't tell him that, because he had found great humor in it anyway — humor that was a direct reflection of the Iranian culture in which he had been raised.
I thought of Farhood when I read For gorsake, stop laughing, this is Linux!
Sure, it sounds really easy, and it pays well, but how are you going to explain
this job on your resume?
If you enjoy slightly smug, slightly elitist descriptions of Linux's advantages over Windows, you're going to love
Top Ten Reasons For A Linux Laptop.
Within a few hours of its release, Windows XP Service Pack 3 began causing a storm of controversy. Apparently, XP SP3 confirms that if there's one thing you can say about Microsoft's operating systems, it's that they are
predictable.
Finally, a little bit of good news for Net Neutrality proponents: "Two Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives have introduced a bill that would subject broadband providers to antitrust violations if they block or slow Internet traffic." Let's hope that this bill does better than a similar one that was defeated in 2006.
It's a pretty safe bet that all of us have dealt with botnets — either by having our Windows PCs knowingly or unknowingly infected by them — a non-issue for us Linux users — or by being recipients of their insidious, ubiquitous spam messages. If you're curious about how botnets work, take a look at
What A Botnet Looks Like.
This possibility has come up so many times in the past — always with disappointing results — that
I'll believe it when I see it.
It's been another one of those really, really busy couple of days. Yesterday, our central air conditioning stopped working — its compressor was coated with 2 inches of ice, just like it was two years ago. And it turned out to be the same problem as last time. Two years ago, the cap that covers the freon intake valve was loose and our system was really low on freon. Yesterday, that same cap was completely gone, and our system was 2 pounds short of its normal freon charge. I hate to think that someone removed that protective cap and "huffed" the freon to get high, but my friend the air conditioning repair guy tightened it up really well two years ago, and he says that they don't vibrate loose by themselves. He's going to come back in the near future, to see if our freon level is low again — if so, that would indicate that there's a leak somewhere in the system. In the meantime, our air conditioning is working great again, and I put some Loctite on the threads of the new protective cap, to make sure that if anyone tries to remove it again, they're going to need to use a pair of pliers.
I spent most of today running new wires to move two telephones — one in our living room and one in our kitchen. You might think that it would be a simple job, but it's not, especially when your home is made of very sturdy cinder block and there's no room in your attic to crawl around. I ended up avoiding the attic completely by drilling two strategically placed holes in the cinder block walls. You can bet that I measured the location of each hole at least 8 times before I did any drilling. I finished the job about 30 minutes ago, and now I'm taking a little break before I clean up and put away my tools.
Most businesses use Microsoft Windows, probably without even seriously considering any alternatives. But every once in awhile, you hear about a very smart businessperson who is
Running A Business On Desktop Linux.
It sounds like someone at Microsoft's going to have "some 'splainin' to do" about this one: "Despite all the controversy over Microsoft using Silverlight to take over the rich internet market from Adobe Flash, the software giant seems to be not even trying. In fact, even
most Microsoft web sites are using Flash instead of Silverlight."
Is it a valid concern or a "sky-is-falling" overreaction? Read
the article and decide for yourself. Personally, I think that the photograph of the kid playing the video game is as disturbing as anything that the article itself says.
Anyone who has ever installed a Linux operating system knows that it generally goes better if you do a little bit of prior thinking and planning. For some help with that task, regular Journal reader and Guest Author, malspa, tipped me off to
Considerations Before You Install.
The NSA recently did some serious hacking, to try to break into Navy, Air Force, and Coast Guard computer networks —
for their own good.
If your laptop was stolen, would you be able to use its own technology to recover it and catch its thief? You could,
if it was a Macintosh.
Those of us who have worked in IT tech support know that some of your most valuable tools are bootable CDs that contain troubleshooting and repair utilities. And one of the very best for Windows, Linux and Macs is the
SystemRescueCD.
Although the Biblical references to the existence of guardian angels are ambiguous at best, there's one thing I know for sure — I would not want one
in my cell phone.
It's not an attack on her opponent — it's just the truth.
It can be a bargain for people who make a lot of long distance phone calls, but now that
I'm no longer helping the elderly widow who lives an hour away, my wife and I don't need Verizon's unlimited long distance service any more. So, last night, just like I've done many times in the past, I went to
SaveOnPhone.com, to compare several different long distance providers. And just like I've done before, I chose ECG as the best provider for our current needs. Then, the first thing this morning, I called both Verizon and ECG and made the changes. Our ECG 2.5 cents/minute long distance will be activated within the next 48 hours, and will probably save us at least $30/month (USD) compared to the cost of the Verizon plan. As always, I'll continue to keep my eyes open for the best deal that fits our long distance needs.
I was a full-time Windows user, trainer and tech support provider for many years. Now I've been a full-time Linux user for almost the past 2 years. Knowing what I know now, I just have to laugh when Windows users claim that Linux is "too hard" to use on their desktops. To be perfectly frank, when I first started using Linux, it took a few months before I felt comfortable and confident with it. But once I reached that point, I never looked back, and Linux has never, ever caused me any problems like
this latest one in Windows XP SP3.
To me, the choice is clear: you can either do some "up-front" work to learn how to install, configure and use Linux so that you won't have any more security and stability problems, or you can keep using Windows — which you already know how to use — but which will you know will continue to cause problems for you as long as you keep using it. I made my choice 2 years ago, and like I said, I've never looked back.
I don't use Gmail or any other free webmail provider because I've always thought that there were a lot of good reasons to not trust them with my private email messages, personal data and address books. I trust them even less, now that "A 'serious security flaw' in Gmail turns Google's e-mail service
into a spamming machine, according to a recent security report."
Clean-burning, non-polluting hydrogen-powered cars sound like a really good idea to a lot of people. But some experts say that
it's going to take 40 years for hydrogen to reduce the world's dependence on oil and gas and help reduce global warming — and we can't afford to wait that long.
It's a fact that most people use Windows on their computers. Far fewer use Macs instead of PCs. And even fewer use one of the many Linux distros. Which is "best?" It depends on several factors, including your budget, your needs, you level of experience, your willingness to learn and others. A few of those are discussed in
Best Computing Solutions: Windows vs. Linux - Part I. See what you think.
I keep it installed in my Firefox browser, and I've used it several times in the past, but I've only ever used a small subset of its features. Firebug is very powerful, very handy "must have" for anyone who creates or maintains web pages.
It looks to me like they've taken lessons from Redmond: Under the guise of creating an "enhanced user experience," Charter plans to spy on its customers so that it can do a better job of targeting advertisements to them. Of course, Slashdot's readers have
some strong opinions about that idea.
I've mentioned before that years ago, I used free, open source phpBB forum on this site, but I gave up on it when it had something like 22 updates in a row that did nothing except plug gaping holes in its security that repeatedly allowed script kiddies to deface and hijack phpBB forums all over the world. Well, here it is, several years later, but it appears that phpBB's reputation for being insecure
is still valid.
When our dream home was built in the mid-1960's, its furnace had only two small (12" x 18") filtered return air vents. Two years ago, to improve the whole system's air circulation and efficiency, I removed those two vents, enlarged their openings, and replaced them with two 20" x 20" filtered return air vents. Still, it bothered me that both return air vents were just a few inches from the floor. That works great for returning cold air to the heat pump to be heated during the couple of weeks that we need to heat the house in the winter time. The problem is that from June until November — when we're using air conditioning all of the time — having the return air vents near the floor leaves all of the hottest air that's inside the house inside the house. So yesterday, I cut a new opening in the wall near the ceiling for the return air vent that's in our hallway. Then I moved the vent to that new opening and sealed up the old opening with 3/4" drywall (yes, our home's walls were built with incredible strong and hard 3/4" drywall). The new vent location is only a few inches from the heat pump's 12" round return air duct in the attic, so the vent's entire 20" x 20" area of returned air has a straight shot right into that duct instead of having to be sucked all the way up from the floor level, through the narrow air space between the double-wall construction.
Here's how it looks. So far, I've noticed the new return air vent placement is making three big differences:
I expect that this improvement is also going to increase the efficiency of the whole system, save us some money on our air-conditioning costs, and make the whole house feel more comfortable.
What's it like to install Debian Linux? From everything that I had read about Debian, I thought that installing and configuring it would be much harder than it was. Still, I'm glad that I didn't try it until I had already gained some Linux troubleshooting experience through using Mepis Linux. If you're curious about Debian but you're not ready to delve into the technical details of My Debian Adventure yet, you can get a good overview of the Debian installation process by reading
Installing Debian Etch.
Do you use a Tivo or some other sort of DVR? Whatever your main reasons for using it are, you might be surprised to learn which group is most likely to use a DVR
to skip past advertisements.
Popcorn is one of my favorite healthy snacks. For decades, I've popped it in a metal pan on my stovetop, with a little bit of canola oil. But last week, I read some very negative things about canola oil and decided that I'd rather not use it any more. After doing some research on alternative oils, I finally decided that no matter what type of oil I might use, it adds extra calories to my popcorn that I don't want. So, this past weekend, I bought a
Presto PopLite Hot Air Popcorn Popper. It works really quickly, making 18 cups of popcorn from just 1/2 cup of cheap generic popping corn in about 2 minutes, with no messy clean-up afterward. The only criticism I've ever read about air-popped popcorn is that it's so dry that salt doesn't stick to it. So as the popcorn quickly cascades from the popper, I spray it with
Smart Balance Buttery Spray, — which tastes great and is very healthy and nutritious — before I salt it with fine-grained popcorn salt. Mmmmm — delicious!
If you were doing $141 billion worth of transactions every day, which operating system would you trust to run your whole system?
NYSE Euronext has chosen to use Linux. I'm certainly not going to argue with that decision.
If you still use Windows and you're looking for ways to avoid using Windows Vista as long as possible (or altogether), you'll want to read
Keep XP Fresh Until Windows 7 Arrives.
Are IT workers happy? Would they recommend their line of work to their children? You might be surprised at the results of
a recent survey.
Is he a genius inventor — or a future recipient of a
Darwin Award? I'm guessing that
he might be both.
Regular readers of this Journal know that I've been using Linux full-time instead of Windows for almost two years. Though I've never claimed that Linux is the best choice for everyone, I truly believe that a free and open source Linux distro would be a smart choice for many savvy Windows users. So does the author of
Linux Offers One Alternative To Microsoft's Windows.
A few days ago, I praised the free and open source, bootable SystemRescueCD. Now here's a tutorial that describes a few things that you can do with it:
Become A System Rescue Guru With Linux, Part 1 — SystemRescueCD, The Ultimate Rescue Power Tool.
For the past several months, I've used Debian Linux's KDE Konqueror instead of separate FTP software. It works, but it isn't as easy to configure or use as I'd like, so now I'm trying
FireFTP. FireFTP is a free, open source Firefox extension for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux that adds FTP features to that popular browser. My first impressions were that it was very fast and easy to get FireFTP to connect to my web server, and I was able to configure its settings to my preferences without reading any documentation. Time will tell if I end up preferring FireFTP to Konqueror.
It's not very well-acted, but its premise is funny. I'm guessing that the creators of
this video are fans of old movies, as well as keen observers of the state of the current U.S. national political melodrama.
My buddy the air conditioning repair guy called me today to tell me about a problem he had when he upgraded 3 PCs to Windows XP SP3 the other day. Two of them upgraded just fine, but the third one had a problem. Like me, he and his girlfriend always use the free and open source Firefox browser for their own personal browsing, but she is required to use Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser to access specific things for the computer programming classes that she's taking. After the SP3 upgrade, every time she tried to go to any web site in the newly upgraded Internet Explorer 8, IE asked her for a password, and refused to go to the site without it. It told her something about needing the password in order to change her browser security policies. And it even gave her a "hint" that the password had something to do with "lucky." That was a mystery, since neither my buddy nor his girlfriend had ever created any browser policies or passwords in the past. My buddy did some searching online and found a web site that instructed him to use RegEdit to manually remove a browser policy line from his Windows Registry. He did that, and now IE8 appears to be working normally.
I've mentioned problems with the new SP3 upgrade here before, but I had never heard of anyone running into that particular problem before. Have you run into it? Have you even heard of it before? If so, please let me know what you know about it, so I can tell my buddy.
This Journal entry is now a separate article, My Debian Adventure, Part 2: Lenny. You can find it it this site's CB Guides section.
I'm now using Debian Lenny full-time instead of Debian Etch. On a related note, I have converted yesterday's Journal entry about my switch into a separate article,
My Debian Adventure, Part 2: Lenny. You can find it it this site's CB Guides section.
Three days ago, I told you that I was trying FireFTP, a Firefox extension that adds FTP capabilities to that browser. Today, I discovered that even if I enable FireFTP's "view hidden files" feature, it doesn't show me my .htaccess file on my remote web server. That's a deal-breaker for me, since I often edit that remote file and then drag a copy of it to my local computer. So I uninstalled FireFTP and I've gone back to using KDE's Konqueror in split-screen mode for my FTP needs.
Several years ago, I tried several Linux distros, looking for something to replace Windows 98 for my full-time usage. I ended up being very disappointed at being able to find a distro that fully recognized my standard PC hardware and was friendly enough for me to install, configure and use. While lamenting my failure to find a suitable distro, I wrote something like "I'll be ready for Linux when Linux is ready for me."
Since then, both Linux and I have come a long, long way. Regular readers of this Journal know that I've been very happily using Linux full-time instead of Windows since July, 2006. That's why, for almost two years, I've thought that It's Time To Retire "Ready For The Desktop."
If you use — or are thinking of using — Microsoft's Windows Vista Media Center, you should be aware that "Microsoft has put the requirements of broadcasters
above what consumers want." Please don't tell me you're surprised.
This may not surprise you, but I hope it bothers you. If you carry a cell phone, shopping centers now have the ability to
monitor and track every move you make.
Just like I do every day, I really tried to find a mixture of different types of stories today, but all of the most important ones I found ended up being pretty much bad news.
Do you remember the big laughs we all shared last year, when a Microsoft executive bragged that Windows Vista was so secure that his grade-school child was perfectly safe using Vista without any firewall or anti-virus software? I bet he's never going to live that down, especially since, "According to analysis from the Australian company's ThreatFire user base, 58,000 PCs running Vista were compromised by at least one piece of malware over the six months to May 2008, equivalent to
27 percent of all Vista machines probed."
So who is to blame, now that Windows Vista is reportedly less secure than Windows 2000? If you're a Vista user, Microsoft says
it's your fault.
As though PC users don't have enough security concerns to think about, now there's a new one that's even more dangerous that its predecessors: "You don't have to take an ax to a piece of hardware to perform a so-called
permanent denial-of-service (PDOS) attack. A researcher this week will demonstrate a PDOS attack that can take place remotely."
I've said it many times in the past: I don't use any of the major web-based email systems because I've seen plenty of reasons to not trust them with my personal messages, private data and address books. That's why I can hardly believe that Google had the audacity to develop
this new service.
I have used only Firefox, the free and open source browser (a.k.a. Iceweasel in Debian Linux) for the past several years, but I will stop using it if the Mozilla Foundation starts using its
"Data" project.
Over the years, we've all seen countless articles describing the best software, the best freeware, the best browser, etc., but sometimes it's good to try to figure out which software we should try to avoid using. That's when it's a good idea to look at things like
Annoying Software: A Rogues' Gallery.
I'm writing this Journal entry late on Tuesday night, because I won't be home most of the day on Wednesday. My wife and I will be waking up very early and driving a long way to try to get into a special event that's happening on Wednesday morning. If it all works out, I'll tell you more about it in Thursday's Journal entry.
Things are continuing to go really well for me in Debian Lenny. I'm still using Debian Etch (on a separate partition), but only as a maintenance and troubleshooting distro, the same way I used Mepis Linux 6.5 for the past 5 months. For example, I edited Etch's /etc/fstab so that I can use KwikDisk to manually mount my backup partition from within Etch. Then I installed Partimage in Etch, mounted my backup partition and used Partimage to make a compressed image of Lenny's completely installed-and-configured root partition onto my backup partition. I'm pretty much done tweaking Lenny to look and work exactly the way I want. I haven't had time to look at My Debian Adventure yet, to see if there's anything I've forgotten, but right now, I think the only thing left on my Lenny to-do list is to install and configure my rsync backup script, to make regular backups of Lenny's home partition and my data. For the whole story, see My Debian Adventure, Part 2: Lenny.
If you're a Windows user who has been curious about Linux, but you've been waiting for a really easy way to give it a try, you're going to want to read
Linux Installation Guide: So Easy, Even Your Grandmother Could Do It! That's pretty impressive, especially since my grandmother died several years ago.
In case you didn't already know it,
Chicks Love Linux. Yeah, man — Linux is really groovy.
He's made billions in the oil business. But now he's investing in
something completely different. I wish him well.
Today's Journal entry is now a separate article,
I Want To Believe. You can find it in this site's Personal Stuff section.
Yesterday's Journal entry is now a separate article,
I Want To Believe. You can find it in this site's Personal Stuff section.
I'm already very settled-in and comfortable with my new Debian Lenny installation. As of this writing, I've been using Lenny full-time ever since I first installed it a few days ago, but I still have both Debian Etch and Mepis Linux 6.5 installed onto other partitions. When I was using Etch full-time, I used Mepis as my "maintenance distro," because it was much faster to use Mepis installed on my hard drive than to boot up with a LiveCD whenever I wanted to do maintenance tasks on Etch that required Etch to not be running (like using rsync or Partimage to make backups/clones of it). But now that I have Lenny and Etch, I'm quickly getting to the point where I probably won't need Mepis any more. In fact, I might not even need Etch any more — if all continues to go well with my current setup, I might delete both Mepis and Etch, and then use a clone of my Lenny installation on a separate partition to do maintenance tasks on my "full-time" Lenny installation. The adventure continues in My Debian Adventure, Part 2: Lenny.
Last week, I pointed you to an article that described some ways to use the free, bootable SystemRestoreCD to perform maintenance and repair tasks. If you found that article to be helpful, you're going to want to read
Become A System Rescue Guru With Linux, Part 2.
The problems with Windows XP Service Pack 3
continue to pile up.
A few days ago, I called it a dubious idea that Google wants to store your personal medical records for you.
I was right.
Speaking of dubious ideas, Cisco's chief security officer says that antivirus software is
a complete waste of money.
You know that guy who brags that his company's identity theft protection service is so effective that he tells everyone his Social Security number in all of his commercials and advertisements? Well guess whose identity has been stolen? I'll give you a clue: it's the same guy whose company is now being sued by people in at least three states.
Microsoft's Windows Vista is selling really well — in fact, incredibly well — at least that's what Microsoft CEO
Steve Ballmer says. Personally, I think Steve should audition for
this TV show.
You know how Microsoft recently used its influence to "buy" a "fast track" approval of its flawed OOXML document format standard from the ISO? Well, now South Africa
has filed an official appeal, thereby throwing a significant monkey wrench into the entire discredited approval process. It's about time.
Most people know that discarded plastic items take hundreds of years to finally biodegrade in landfills. Wouldn't it be great if someone would finally figure out how to speed up that process? Well
someone has, and he's only
16 years old. That's one kid with a very bright future — who's undoubtedly going to brighten the future for us all.
It's very odd looking. And very fast. But I wonder if anyone would be able to afford to buy drivers insurance for
a wearable Yamaha motorcycle.
Live and learn — that's what the old saying says. And over the years, I've probably made more than my share of mistakes, while "living and learning." I always tell my students that most of what I know about computers, I learned through trial and error — Mostly error. The older I get, the more I think that I've probably also learned most of what I know about life through trial and error — Mostly error.
Since this past December, I've done a lot of trial and error with NTP time-synchronization. In fact, I've probably spent more than 30 hours getting automatic time synchronization to work on my PC several different times. If you've read My Debian Adventure, then you know what I'm talking about. Anyway, yesterday, I installed Ntpdate on my Debian Lenny PC, to automatically synchronize its clock to online time servers each time I boot it up. But this morning, after I booted my PC, I checked /var/log/syslog and discovered that Ntpdate wasn't working correctly. Instead of spending a lot of time trying to figure out why, I uninstalled Ntpdate, installed NTP, and then spent a few more hours getting NTP to work correctly. After finally getting it to work, I decided to sit down and write myself a step-by-step guide for future reference, so that in the future, I won't have to go looking through my 30 or 40 NTP browser bookmarks any more. Once I finished writing that guide for myself, I expanded it into a longer guide for all Debian Linux users, to save them the trouble of having to figure out how to get NTP to work on their PCs. I'm guessing that my guide might also work for people who use Ubuntu, Mepis, and other Debian-based Linux distros.
You can find Guide To Using NTP On A Debian PC in this site's
CB Guides section, along with many other guides. It's about time.
In the very near future, I hope to add an important new service to this web site — one that I hope will help a lot of people all over the world. After my first choice for the new service's software wouldn't allow me to configure it the way I wanted, I began testing my second choice. So far, it's looking like it might work. Stay tuned for more details.
If you're a university with a limited IT budget but a creative IT staff, you may decide to install Linux on an X-Box and use it as a web server. It's a great idea, and you can expect that X-Box to do its job for several years —
unless you hire new IT management.
Those of us who have worked for multinational corporations have experienced it for at least the past 15 years, but other people might not be aware of it: If you think that the personal email messages that you send from work are private,
think again.
If I'm looking for something to watch on TV and I find a car race, I change the channel. Same with a baseball game, a golf tournament or a basketball game. They all bore me. But I was intrigued by
this glory-to-disgrace scandal that happened because of one smart guy working in a copy center in Italy.
I'm still working on adding a new service to this web site. After I wasn't able to configure my first software choice the way I wanted, I replaced it with my second choice. Now, after spending several hours configuring my second choice and learning all about it, I don't like how complicated it is to administer. And now I think maybe I know how I might be able to get my first choice to work the way I wanted it to work after all. So I'm going to leave my second choice installed and reinstall my first choice (in a different folder) so that I can try it again.
Yesterday, after giving it some thought — and after I found it too unnecessarily difficult to administer my second choice of software for the new service that I'm working to add to this site — I reinstalled my first choice, so that I could try again to configure it the way I wanted. Unfortunately, the new idea that I had thought of to try to get my first choice to work didn't work, so that left me with two choices: either keep trying to get my first choice to work, or settle for my second choice, which worked, but which was difficult to administer. Well, you know me — I'm a pit bull when it comes to problem solving. I chose to keep trying to get my first choice to work.
What I was trying to do was add PHP Includes and HTML code to about 9 different places within an existing PHP script that is hundreds of lines long. But no matter what syntax I used when I added my stuff to that PHP script, I got parsing errors with cryptic explanations every time I tried to run it. What was especially frustrating was that I could insert a line of code into one place in the script and it would run just fine, but when I added that exact same line of code to another place in the script, I got parsing errors. Looking back at the problem now, I'm sure that any PHP programmer could have solved my problem for me in 5 minutes. Unfortunately, I'm not a PHP programmer, I don't know any PHP programmers, and I couldn't find any references to the problem anywhere on the Internet, so I had to rely on my trusty old friend, trial and error. By adding only one line of HTML code or one PHP Include at a time and then re-running the script to see its results, I gradually taught myself the correct syntax for PHP programming. It took me 5 hours of trial and error, but in the end, I figured out that all of my HTML code had to be nested inside of "echo" blocks, but all of my PHP Includes had to be outside of "echo" blocks. What made things a lot more complicated is that my PHP Includes are surrounded by my HTML codes. When the light finally went on over my head, I realized that I had to repeatedly start an "echo" block, insert some HTML code into it, end that echo block, then insert a PHP Include, then start a new echo block and insert some more HTML code into it, etc., etc., etc.
So it took me 3 full days of trial and error altogether, but in the end, I finally got my first software choice configured the way that I wanted. Like I said — I'm a pit bull. Grrr! Now I have to set it all up for this site's users to be able to use it securely. I hope to have it all ready for everyone to use before this site gets its one-millionth visitor in a few days. Stay tuned.
Late last night, I finished setting up and securing this site's new service, using my first software choice. Then this morning, I downloaded a backup of the entire setup to my PC — and then deleted it from my remote web server.
Why? Because there's a newer version of that software, and I decided to give it a try. Even though it's still being beta tested, I discovered that many large web sites have already been using it for the past few months because it has several new administration features and greatly improved security. So, instead of using the old version that I had just finished installing, configuring and securing, and then having to do a major upgrade to it and its database when the newer version hits its final release in a few months, I went ahead and started using the newer version right now. I'm happy to report that my experience with installing and configuring the old version for the past few days allowed me to install, configure and secure the newer version to a workable state in just a few hours. In the past few days, I've done extensive testing of both the old version and now the newer version, and I really like both of them better than my second software choice. Looking back, I'm convinced that I made the right decision to spend the time to figure out how to get my first choice to work, instead of settling for my second choice.
In the next day or two, I hope to:
I'm finally seeing this project's light at the end of the tunnel. I'm already using the new service to try it out, and it works great. It won't be long before you'll be able to use it, too. I really hope that you will. Stay tuned.
Many of us who use Linux have noticed that even though most Linux-based operating systems are totally free and include hundreds of totally free software applications, many new PCs that come with Linux preinstalled on them cost more than their exact counterparts that come preinstalled with expensive Windows operating systems and only bare-bones software applications. So a lot of us who want a new PC with Linux on it just buy a PC with Windows on it and then delete Windows and install Linux on it. That makes sense to me, but here's why
we shouldn't do that.
If you're a Windows XP user, you're going to want to know all about the latest XP Service Pack 3
problem du jour.
According to Microsoft, a future version of Windows will support alternatives to the mouse, including
a touch-screen. Insert your own lame joke here, about Windows and fingerprints.
Brazil has joined South Africa by
filing an appeal to the ISO's recent approval of Microsoft's OOXML document standard. Not exactly a mandate, but it at least raises the possibility that the ISO could take action to try to redeem its reputation, which was descredited by the sloppy, non-standard, biased and possibly illegal manner in which that governing body rushed that recent approval through its system.
After many weeks of planning and several days of behind-the-scenes preparation, I am very happy to announce the opening of my highly anticipated new Survivors Forum. What is the Survivors Forum? It's a safe place where survivors can help and support each other; where anyone who has survived difficult things can help others get through them. If you're still alive, you're a survivor. Please join my Survivors Forum and tell us how you did it.
