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Things have gone a bit wrong

[ General computing ]

Ok need to keep this short because I'm typing on the small keyboard of the acer aspire. Its ok for my fat fingers but certainly not like my lovely dell keyboard or even better my ibm keyboard at home.

So I tried to do a few things over the last few days, and maybe wrongly rushed them.

1. I did change the partition on my old dell using the live ubuntu 8.10 cd. Everything worked but i over wrote the master boot record and had to install grub again. My idea of booting into xbmc from the media direct button is put on hold for now.
2. I also somehow while playing with resolutions and multiple screens during a video conference call yesterday, killed my xorg.configue settings and can't seem to get them back to a state where I can actual login to ubuntu. So i'm currently backing everything up (something i should have done when doing the partitions really) ready for a clean install of ubuntu 8.10 tomorrow. This means little email, twittering, etc for the next few days sorry.
3. I decided to upgrade the ram on both the dell and acer. The dell now has 4gig and the acer 1.5gig. It took me 5mins to do the dell and a best part of a hour to do the Acer. I filmed it which I'll put on online later

So I bought one... Acer Aspire A110L

[ General computing ]

150 pounds from Comet in White City, Manchester. The box was opened so I got a discount. Otherwise the machine is brand new. Its the basic model with Linux, 8gig Solid state drive and only 512meg of Ram. I'm expecting once I do the 4gig upgrade on my Dell to pass on the memory to this machine, then maybe stick in a small bluetooth dongle. I'm also checking out how to get ubuntu or xubuntu on it. But generally I'm planning to use this device for im, rss reading, ebooks and general web use.

There's still life in the old laptop

[ General computing ]

So I've been thinking about getting a Netbook (or cloud terminal as I like to call them). Mainly because of weight and portability. The Acer Inspire really grabs me with its cheap price and solid state memory drive. But I started thinking I should invest in something a little more solid like the Dell Mini 9. But after some time I've come around to the fact my Dell XPS M1210, although one of the most heavy 12 inch laptops you can get, still has a lot of life inside of it.

Currently the 9 Cell battery is 2 years old and lasts 2.25 hours on usual operation. If I turn off Bluetooth and Wifi it can go up to 3 hours. But looking on ebay, replacement 9 cell batteries are about 50 pounds. Which means I can go back to enjoying 6-7 hour battery times again.

I choose the 120gig SATA harddrive and to be honest, only fill it up when I'm going somewhere and I pile on podcasts and films. Generally I gave 20gigs left at anytime. I also use to use my laptop for transfering stuff, but now I got the pacemaker with also 120gig of space and I'm only using 15% of that. So I usually have mass storage on me and don't need to use the laptop. But whats also weird is the way Dell partitioned the drive. The first partition is a FAT drive of less that a gig with Dell utils on it. Second partition use to be my data drive for Windows which I recently converted from NTFS to EXT3 and is about 100gigs big. Third partition is EXT3 and is where the root ubuntu install exists, its also about 10gig big. The last partition is 4.5gig and is currently where my swap file sits. Yes thats crazy, I hear your saying. I've only got 2gig of memory and to be fair the swap never gets used even with all the applications I have open at once. The problem with the last partition is it was where Dell MediaDirect use to be. Media direct is a media player which will start if you press the correct button on startup. Its useful if you want to just play a dvd or listen to music without booting up the operating system. Well as you can imagine I've used this option all of twice over 2 years. So what I need really is somehting like partition magic to shift everything around a little. Gpart and a couple other open source utils don't seem to be able to shift around stuff so easily. If anyone knows of something different which will please shout.

I've also been thinking it would be a good idea to replace the dell utils with xbmc, so I could boot into something actually useful even if my ubuntu was broken. I'm not totally sure how to do this yet but I'll have a try.

The last thing I think I need to do to my machine is give it 4gig of memory. Its fine with 2gig but I do sometimes wonder if ubuntu is living within that tight limit. 4gig means things like RSSOwl & Snackr which currently loads 400+ RSS feeds each can be stored in memory rather that cache surely? Eitherway, 4gig is now as low as 40 pounds for the 667mhz type, I opted for the 533mhz version when i was in the states last. Hopefully the extra bandwidth will also help with speed, although I got to say the dual core 2 processors are fast enough for most things I do on it. Even High-def encoding isn't out of the question. I was thinking also if I did get a acer ainspire one I could stick the old memory from the dell into the ainspire to boost its standard 512meg of memory.

Someone was saying to me, I should also clean install Ubuntu on the machine because I've upgrade it since Ubuntu 7.04 and although ubuntu and linux generally is good at cleaning up after its self. I could make all the changes I want and get rid of legacy config files, etc.

So in total the upgrades will be less that 100 pounds and quite a bit of my time. Seems worth it to me.

Upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10, thumbs up

[ General computing ]

I upgraded on my laptop with no problem using the network update. Since the upgrade I've noticed a couple of things. One the memory usage is much lower, things seem to be hovering around 1.2gig and I have Firefox 3.03 (28tabs), Evolution, Hamachi, Gossip, Specto, RSSOwl (400+ feeds), Gwibber, dropbox, rescuetime, etc all open and active.

Secondly 3g and phone support is much better. I plugged in the Nokia N80 today on the train and it picked it up and suggested using it as a 3g modem. The windows mobile phone is once again simply plug in and go. No settings needed. I've tried to do both over bluetooth but the Nokia ran out of battery (tipical) and Ubuntu for some reason does not see my Windows mobile phone.

Thridly things seem just faster and smoother. I'm using compiz-fusion and the community have added some nice effects which flow along smoothly using Open GL 2.0. But everything seems more responsive that before.

Its not only the upgrade which has made my laptop happy recently. I found a really good twitter client called Gwibber. It works with almost everything including Twitter, Jaiku, Indent.ca, Pownce, Digg, Flickr, etc. No Plurk, friendfeed or Ping.fm support however. But I was thinking if I look into it, I might be able to alter the flickr or digg option to support RSS feeds generally. Or alter one of the others to match the friendfeed api.

Glyn, sent me a email to finally solve my problem with there being no RSS screensaver. This Ubuntu forum has everything you need to get going, but basiclly you install xscreensaver then configure it for fliptext with the url option enable a rss feed. Its like the Tiger screensaver but with less style.

I've also just discovered Pidgin has tons of plugins including a Skype and Facebook one. The skype one only works if skype is also running and the facebook one does odd things to your contact list. For example if you have requests to be a friend it will throw up a alert for each one for you to accept or deny. This is painful when you  Its a nice idea but very buggy in practice.

Tesco direct have Acer Aspire One for 198 pounds

[ General computing ]

I have been considering getting a netbook or as I'm starting to call them cloud terminals for a while now. I've always wanted a replacement for reading ebooks on without dragging my quite heavy Dell XPS M1210 around with me everywhere. So at BarCampLondon5 either Tom Morris or Cristiano Betta suggested a session titled "bring your gadgets." So you can just imagine the things pulled out for the session. Sam from Orange showed off his Acer Aspire One. When I asked him about the price he said he had got his for 199 pounds from the PC World sale a while back. Now it seems Tesco have jumped in on the same game. It needs more more memory as the default had 512meg of memory to be honest, what more would you change? Oh thanks to James Cridland for the tip on the price point. I like the Dell mini-9 too but its the wrong end of the price bracket for me. I found this compare chart very useful, but there's nothing like feeling the keys of the machine its self. I learned I could use the Acer keys quickly without a problem unlike the Asus eeePC models. Oh is it payday already... And I actually do need to order food for the flat, question is if I order today will I get it before going to Berlin?

SockStress could make every TCP service vulnerable

[ General computing ]

I found this by listening to Security Now number 164, it sounds very dramatic and most of you will be thinking yeah yeah whatever but...this seems like the real deal. Rather than try and explain it, here's a subset from the notes of Security now. I did look at a couple other places, but Steve Gibson has the best non-packet hacker description of what's really going on.

“SockStress” (not publicly released) reportedly uses several new techniques to create a low-bandwidth (as low as ten packets per second) local resource depletion attack resulting in denial of service oS) by TCP servers (www, ftp, smtp, pop, etc.) running Windows, Linux, BSD, undisclosed routers, and other Internet appliances.

Although the researchers plan to demonstrate their techniques on October 17th, at the end of the second day of the forthcoming T2'08 conference in Helsinki, Finland, their 44 minute interview on September 30th, 2008 for the De Beveiligingsupdate site (see original and edited audio links below) provided far too much detail — enough so that any informed packetsmith who understands the TCP protocol would be able to easily recreate their attacks.

As a consequence, they effectively “went public” with their discovery of these vulnerabilities after informing other vendors only a few weeks beforehand

So generally the Finnish guys have found a way to mess with the TCP stack to the extend that you can cause a deinal of service on ANY server which uses TCP including web, ftp, etc. Using a very low amount of hardware and bandwidth. Not even IPv6 escapes this problem.

Windows finally respond to Mac vs PC adverts

[ General computing ]

Microsoft just killed the Mac vs PC adverts. You'll never be able to look at those Mac adverts in the same way again. However I still can't work out if the earlier jerry seinfeld & bill gates adverts were super clever or simply advertising suicide? Either Microsoft are playing a amazing poker game or playing crazy?

A couple of interesting features found recently

[ General computing ]

This little feature, submits the current song to last.fm and uses its unique database to recommend which tunes to play next. Its simple, effective and I've not seen anything like it anywhere else till itunes 8 introduced the genius feature.

This took me by surprise, I was sending a email and mentioning a attachment from a previous email but Evolution decided to ask me the above question. I got to say it was well received although it was wrong.

No choice but learn Python...

[ General computing ]

I was reading about the guy who started the Specto project and started reading through his blog. I came across this blog post mentioning how it all started out of frustrating because there was a lack of interest for person tracking system like Specto turned out to be.

I do want to spend sometime learning Python for this exact reason, theres a small tiny apps which I want to write to speed up/improve a task or too on my machine. But I'm not sure where to start and I'm starting to think I should just use Flex/Air as i can do that much quicker.Yes its bad news but what other alternatives are there for a non-progrmmer like myself? I had hoped Konfabulator might have offered a simlar thing but the linux alernatives are all writtern in Python anyway (screenlets, gdesklets, etc). Then my favorate application which i have yet to play with deeply Conduit is also written in Python and its add on are also in Python. And last of all the xbox media centre uses python for its scripting. So it time to get serious, and to be fair I did say I was going to start learning python in my new year resoultions.

So first point of call, what editor? I only got attached to XMLspy ages ago for writing large dense XSL and XSDs. So I can change easy enough. I thought I'd ask Mr Python, Simon Wilison but looking at his blog he was undecided in 2003 and who knows what he's using now (i did twitter too).

Jedit was in the comments and was one of the first I looked at. It runs on everything Java does, is GPL and support Python along with XSLT too. What also tops it off for me is Robin McKinnon uses it (i actually remember him showing me this). So I'm giving it a try and pull up some Python hello world type stuff to play with. I left the O'reilly Python book at home but when I get back I'll have a look through that. If you know anywhere else I should be looking, shout. I've not forgotten Uche's 4Suite.

Only Ubuntu left standing

[ General computing ]

Headline news, Mac users not as secure as they first imagined

A laptop running a fully patched version of Microsoft's Vista operating system was the second and final machine to fall in a hacking contest that pitted the security of Windows, OS X and Ubuntu Linux. With both a Windows and Mac machine felled, only the Linux box remained standing following the three-day competition.

Send to Flickr

[ General computing ]

Bahi sent around the call for testers a while ago and I thought actually Kflickr's and fspot's been ok but both very bloated for a simple uploader to flickr. So I thought I'd give send to flickr a try.

It does work as shown above but I've already got a few bits of feedback already.

• The icon on the gnome desktop does not scale to a size bigger that 32x32 it seems. It needs a scalable icon.
• There's no ability to rename the file names or set collections.
• I assume proxy support is done via gnome?
• It would be nice to have some little notification when its finished uploading or be able to have the uploading progress bar as a notification
• The whole application seems to disappear once the upload is finished. Need some confirmation of upload.
• Good call on the right click option.

BBC's Ashley Highfield joins the Gnu/linux geeks

[ General computing ]

Nope its not April 1st. Yesterday George Wright and Jono Bacon setup and installed Ubuntu 7.10 on Ashley Highfield's laptop. I was there with my camera to capture everything as it unfolded. Don't worry, people this isn't the end of the coverage. Expect blog even more blog posts, audio from the install fest and if Ashleys up for it, video in the near future. So thats 601 users now Ashley? No but seriously, good step, lets hope Ashley enjoys using Ubuntu and learns more about this mystery operating system which makes you really think differently...

Technorati Tags: ashleyhighfield, bbc, backstage, jonobacon, georgewright, ubuntu, gnu linux

Software I'm using on ubuntu

[ General computing ]

Since switching to Linux, I've been feeling my way through a bunch of different free and open software. Some of the software I've picked up from when I was using Windows, others have been replacements and even in some cases I've picked completely different software for things I've never imagined.

• QTM blog editor
• Hamachi VPN
• Liferea RSS reader
• Amarok music player/manager
• Skype
• Gossip and Gajim instant messengers
• Gnome Do launcher
• Blueman Bluetooth manager
• Blue Proximity scanner
• Conduit
• KeepassX password manager
• Screenlets widget framework
• Specto notification application
• Tomboy Notes personal wiki
• Inkscape
• Gimp
• Thunderbird and Evolution email clients
• Firefox browser
• Jungledisk
• Tellico collection manager
• Timevault backup manager
• OpenOffice
• Eclipse IDE
• Jungledisk
• Virtualbox
• Azureus
• icecast

I am missing a decent RSS reader like Particls but generally everything is covered.

Technorati Tags: software, computer, ubuntu, opensource, linux, gnu linux

eMail problems Fixed

[ General computing ]

If you have emailed me in the last 2 days, I may not have got it because I'm experiencing email issues at the moment. It should get fixed soon, but right now its best to ping me on one of my gmail addresses. End of public broadcast.

This has been fixed, and it wasn't my host's fault. Actually it was me forgetting to set remove the proxy settings. I wish Thunderbird and Firefox would support global/operating system wide proxy settings as its painful to change it multiple times when connecting to the BBC network.

Gnome Launchy

[ General computing ] | Tags: gnomedo  gnome  kde  plugins  quicksilver  launchy 

So I've wanted something like quicksilver for a while and I found launchy when I was on Windows but I couldn't find anything for gnu/linux. Till today when I found a few. Gnome-Do, Gnome launch box and Katapult.

I stuck with Gnome-Do because its smooth, the plugin support is pretty good and I love the blog of the developer (see quote later). I do kind of wish for the smaller box style of Launchy instead of the boxes of quicksilver but you can't have it all. Oh it would also be great if the background dimmed a little. You know add a little compiz-fusion power to the whole thing.

On a personal note, I have used Mac OS X, FreeBSD, and Linux exclusively for the last seven years. I don’t use Windows because it lowers my quality of life. I haven’t tried Vista. I recently made the switch from OS X to Ubuntu after realizing that all Steve Jobs wants is for you to shut up and buy a new iPod; don’t you dare criticize his taste or the way he treats third-party developers like dirt. Also, I’m fairly confident that propriety software has no future. Yes, I am aware that proprietary software has a multi-trillion dollar past and present, but this implies nothing about the future.

Nice!

Technorati Tags: gnomedo, gnome, kde, plugins, quicksilver, launchy

Which VPN questions?

[ General computing ]

So I've been using Hamachi for my VPN for a while now but since switching to Ubuntu, its felt a bit out of place. First of all installing Hamachi is painful - you must compile it, theres no debs or universe repository support. The basic version is command line only and some people have created a couple of gui's including YAHG, Ghamachi and quamachi. But to be honest even with the guis it sometimes doesn't work as expected. For example right now I'm at my parents house on a broadband connection but can only access one of my 3 machines I have acttached to my Hamachi network. Two of the machines before I left for Christmas failed to connect to the Hamachi Medation server for some reason. Another reason why I'm a little down on Hamachi is the propitery nature of it. I know its been looked at deeply but if there was something like Hamachi which was actually open, I would switch.

So I've looked around and come across quite a few technologies like PPTP, Open VPN, IPsec, FreeSwan and OpenSwan. After reading this very long entry, I started understanding some of the VPN technologies a lot better. So it seems to me that PPTP is Microsoft driven and there is a couple of server versions for Linux. PPTP seems to be old and insecure? IPSec seems to be better but not as good as L2TP with IPsec? FreeSwan has forked into OpenSwan and StrongSwan. I still don't understand the whole Open VPN thing, as it seems to be part of everything rather that a complete solution (do correct me if I'm wrong).

So I looked into OpenSwan and StrongSwan and choose OpenSwan because it gets more mentions online and hey it was clearly documentated on the site - apt-get install openswan. I know strongswan is the same but hey i needed to start somewhere and the windowsmobile tutorial seemed straight forward (if someone knows other reasons why I should use strong over open please do say). Anyway as Hamachi is, I restarted the server after installing openswan to find its not quite started up correctly and I can't remember my standard ip address to talk directly to my smoothwall server. So anyone with some good tips for small time VPN usage let me know.

Technorati Tags: openvpn, vpn, openswan, strongswan, linux, gnulinux, ipsec, hamachi

Ubuntu switch: If you ever want to sleep at night...

[ General computing ]

...don't try and create samba shares on top of NTFS formatted partitions.

Honestly it's been a ongoing problem for the last few months. My first lot of shares just worked on NTFS so I tried to duplicate the setup over other machines including my laptop and my ubuntu home server. Did it ever work? No. So I've finally juggled the data around and formatted all the drives in my ubuntu home server Ext3 (i was tempted with reiser3 but couldn't see the point) and now finally setup the shares. As expected, with some tweaking of my /etc/fstab file its all working correctly.

So hows the rest of my switch going? Well actually pretty well. I've not switched back into Windows for ages now. I actually deleted the virtualised image I had of Windows XP and although Wine is still installed, I have never really used it beyond seeing if particls will launch. Of course it didnt...

I'm now blogging using QTM and found a couple useful applications including Specto and Timevault. Timevault is like Timemachine on Mac OS 10.5 but without all the fancy crap and it can sync to a network drive. Yes this is very important and I realised after talking to Miles that Timemachine doesn't have this feature. Plus realisticlly Timemachine is actually just a app which allows unlimited undos, not really backup. Timevault on the other hand can back up to a local HD, Firewire drive or Network drive making it useful for real backup and with a VPN coonection very powerful.

My standby problems on my laptop are under control. I have a script which I can active via Natuitus Scripts to shutdown Gnome's Power manager control. Once the Gnome power manager is shutdown, the lid will put the machine to standby no problem. Sometimes I have to watch out because gnome will start the power manager again after a update. I had a problem a while back with my wireless card waking up afterwards but its all sorted now. I've also noticed my battery times have gone up again. Now I'm getting about 3.5 hours out of my 1 year old battery, so I'm not doing too bad. Maybe I'll get another battery later next year as a spare.

Another thing which got fixed recently was my calendaring solution. Now I'm using Google Calendar as a syncing tool between Mozilla lightning and Plaxo. My phone now talks directly to Plaxo and my work outlook calendar.

I'm glad I switched over and my next project is to get rsyncing working well with a couple of cron jobs. So for example my laptop will have the latest podcasts when I pick it up in the mornings. I'll also use it for backups in liu of amanda or bacula. I'm also still using Hamachi for my VPN solution and I'm finding it a pain on Linux, the gui version does crash a bit and the command line gives very little feedback. So I'm thinking about switching to OpenVPN as its got real Linux support and its highly recommended. Lastly I want to switch to Evolution and I need to upgrade my smoothwall server to version 3.0. Who knows a couple more late nights before Christmas and it might happen.

Technorati Tags: linux, samba, smb, fstab, ubuntu, switch, windows, plaxo, timevault, vpn, hamachi, gnome

Finally an half decent blogging app for Linux

[ General computing ]

So after much searching a decent native blogging application graces the Linux platform. Finally I can get rid of BloGTK and I've now switched to QTM. Its at least has technorati tag support and basic things like undo and redo. QTM is open source and can be made to run on every single platform including even Windows. If your serious about your blogging and don't want to blog in a browser window everyday, give QTM a try. Right time to start some serious blogging...

Technorati Tags: qtm, linux, ubuntu, blogging, bloGTK, blog

(Lazyweb) Can someone port over to Linux RSSsaver

[ General computing ]

For the love of god, mankind, whatever can someone please attempt to or help port over the almost open source project RSSsaver. Its killing me that there is no decent RSS screensaver for Linux and RSSsaver is getting quite mature now, hell even the owner of the project wants it ported and free software based.

Current state of Ubuntu switch over

[ General computing ]

Well to be honest it was going so well till I upgraded to Ubuntu 7.10. Now I can't put my laptop into standby/suspend or hibernate. This means I need to switch it off everytime I make a trip anywhere longer that a short walk. If I shut the lid, it locks up and I end up having to force the shutdown with the power button. I'm not the only one and there is an official bug been raised. George reckons I have 3 options... Live with it, downgrade or change kernal version. I prefer to keep 7.10 because I actually like some of the new features but hate not being able to suspend.

Another thing broke recently, Hamachi. It was working fine for ages then it broke. Problem is that it will launch as usual but hit the power button and I get a error saying could not log into Hamachi. Yes I have tried different Gui's and from the shell. Whats extra weird is my two other Ubuntu machines are running Hamachi without a problem now.

On the upside, Compiz graphics is seriously tuned now and you can really tweak the settings to your perfect taste now. Tomboy notes has webdav syncing now. I'm already thinking about syncing it with Exist DB (xmldb) which I'm going to run on my workstation in the near future. I have switched my windows home server over to Ubuntu 6.06.1 LTS because I wanted something rock solid. And to be honest its a dual Pentium 3 with tons of hard drive space and memory, it doesn't need 7.x.I Put Webmin on it and everythings working including Hamachi, SSH, Cups (printer server) and Samba. I'm trying out Amanda for backup again, so if anyone from Amanda wouldl like to help out, just comment.

Bluetooth support in 7.10 has come along a lot but the Bluetooth support in KDE seems a lot stronger again. George showed me the lock and unlock feature I've always wanted for my laptop. Unfortually it doesn't seem to see my windows mobile phone, I think maybe because its looking just for phones while my spv comes up as a computer on other scans. Also explains why it can see my work Nokia N80 all the time. Virtual Box is setup and running Windows XP SP3. I tried to run Virtual Dj and it does work but if you put it under any pressure it gets very slow and syncronisation of music becomes a joke. So for my digital djing, I'm going to have to switch back to Windows with a reboot. I've not attempted to put Particls on it but it might work virtualised.