I’m still recovering from dinner. At two in the morning. That’s either really good or really bad. I’m going to stick with really good. We had deep fried turkey at a friend’s place. I really wish I had some kind of digital camera because the frying kit was really an impressive piece of equipment especially after the first bird came out and there was a ring of peanut oil singes around it. Although the Mr. Wizard stuff was fascinating the turkey itself is pretty good stuff. I’ve not usually fan because it’s invariably dry after spending tortuous hours in the dry heat of an oven but the fried bird is anything but dry. The moonshine still like appearance of the operation is a bonus although we didn’t have a copy of Dueling Banjoes to play for the full effect.

The most interesting thing I’ve seen this week is right here. I’ve always wanted to hack up some kind of digital signature plugin for Moveable Type and someone has gone and done it. Paul’s implementation actually concerns the identity of people leaving comments (whereas I was thinking more of an authentication scheme for people posting entries) and is pretty nice. It doesn’t seem finished yet and doesn’t actually do all that much other than parse some text but I’m glad that other people are thinking about this stuff. It basically hides the ugliness of plaintext signatures (all that ascii armored crap) from casual readers but makes the crap available for those who are actually concerned with it. It’s a pretty realistic feature instead of the completely insane idea that I had. I guess that’s the big difference between me and people who actually plug this stuff out. Well, that and I’m really sick of my dumbass hacks continually breaking MT.

I actually have Phoenix properly installed via apt-get via these soon to be official packages: deb http://people.debian.org/~eric/debian/i386 ./ This is good stuff and doesn’t seem to crash nearly as much as the earlier unofficial packages. Since Mozilla has been all buggy and annoying I’ve been really giving more attention to the alternative browsers which are all based on the Gecko engine anyway. Phoenix is nice although they’re going to need to change names really soon due to dumb motherfuckers mailing the folks at Phoenix.com asking where the r3a11y l33t web browser download link is. There’s some issue of copyright there since the corporate Phoenix types actually deal in a browser of some sort. Bleh. Anyhow, if you’ve been wanting a real installation of the browser soon to be formerly known as Phoenix and are sick of that huge file sitting in your home directory…

The semester is rapidly coming to a close and white knuckles abound. I’m feeling more stressed out and disconnected than usual. The combination of full time work and full time school is nearly fatal. I came home after work today and just crashed for four hours or so and I still feel worn out. Maybe because it’s three in the morning… I unexpectedly made quite a bit of headway on a paper so it’s time to goof off for a little bit.

We had a power outage at work today which took out the entire network for close to an hour. The back up power came up but the servers came down anyway as a precaution since my department is more concerned with toying around with voice over IP than making sure the backup power is sufficient. Per usual the idiots are in charge and pushy as hell. I spent a lot of time today trying to unfux0r a crashed Western Digital hard drive that Win 2000 decided to eat alive. The partitions are still there but without labels and the table is unreadable. I hope no one was planning on graduating this semester because the machine in question belongs to some high up in the registar’s office. Oops. It turns out that very little of the important stuff was stored locally so it isn’t as disastrous as it could’ve been.

I noticed this commentary at the bottom of the page (no permalink or any of that fanciness) at Penguin Shell about the relative speed and bloat of modern distributions:

“Just for fun I installed red-hat 5.0 on a 486 dx2-66 with 16 MB of RAM and a 500Mb disk. It took all of 15 minutes including X windows. The system boots in just about 25 seconds and though the gui is a bit slow it seems pretty fast for a 486. The install took up all of 130 MB.

“Looking at current distros, this seems like what Linux should remain like. lean and mean. The current distributions go into gigabytes of disk space and tons of utilities that are not needed at all. After I installed red hat 7.3, it took me another day to weed out unnecessary programs and services. Even rh7.1 seems blazingly fast as compared to 7.3 and upwards. I want my Linux to be fast!”

I think it’s interesting that Red Hat is the litmus for the state of Linux when there are so many projects focused on optimization (whether it’s a placebo or not) and maximum configurability. I’m guessing (pessimistically of course) that this has a lot to do with what’s visible on store shelves. Anyone who harbors illusions about doing full installations with X on a 486 is in for a dose of 2002 because although the kernel will run happily on everything short of bare metal and binder clips you really can’t expect click and drool on that hardware. I know I harp on this subject way too often but people really do expect way too much out of Linux on ultra low end hardware. How many “reviews” or straight out complaints have I read from people trying to install one of the desktop geared distributions on whatever extra horror they’ve had moldering in their attic for the last eight years. Linux is a best effort endeavor not an outright flouting of time and space. Until we live in a magical world your hardware is going to dictate your performance no matter how badly you misinterpret the minimum requirements printed on the box.

Kdirstat is pretty cool. I’ve been using it to tarball directories I want to back up. Since it could give a shit less whether directories are local or remote the application really functions the right way and is more than a glorified Konqueror extension. Good job!

I added Apt-Get.org to the sidebar. It’s a better version of the listing of unofficial apt sources that lives here and hasn’t really been maintained. The part I really like about this site is the fact that all the sources are marked verified or not and there is some effort to give a little information on each one. We’ve needed this site for a long while and I’m glad someone has stepped up to the plate and done it.

It’s scary because this comparison has already bugged me. I guess I need to stop fixating on the decaying remains of 80′s hair metal. This is especially true since I haven’t actually heard much of it. I just look at them funny pitchers…

Tired of all the usual ways that IE breaks stylesheets, refuses to render non-proprietary “standards” and what not but tired of all the security problems and EULAs? Try Boxplorer for all the mangled goodness that you’ve missed since sagely switching to Mozilla or one of its derivatives.

This only yields cool results if you visit a site with more than two colors (read: not here) in the layout and a couple of elements besides the usual top, side, and content layouts. I don’t have much time today to play with it but I’m going to give a whirl with a Windows box when I get to work.

It seems like I’ve seen irregardless in print five or six times today. I’m no linguist but that is not a real word. Uh, actually WordNet says:

irregardless
adv : (informal) regardless; a combination of irrespective and
regardless sometimes used humorously

but it still sounds like hillybilly double negative abuse to me.

I just noticed an old but still very relevant and helpful rsync tutorial over at Tux PPC of all places. I’m trying to get together a list of good Debian resources for PPC architecture. There are actually quite a few people who use it but not as much documentation specific to that chipset out there. I’d love to see an equivalent to Debian Help for non-x86 archs. I don’t even know where to start with most of them. I’ve actually done a PPC install before which was nightmarish and hellish because I didn’t really understand how the MBR equivalent works for PPC and ignored the installation guide. This is something I will never do again. Yaboot is your friend but will fuck you up quick if you don’t pay attention. Actually I just noticed on the project page for Yaboot that Debian and Yellow Dog (sort of the Red Hat of the the PPC world) have correctly built versions of Yaboot in their distributions. Ouch. They recommend rebuilding from source which is probably kind of a shock if you’re accustomed to the Mac OS. “Oh, you have to compile your bootloader before your machine will function correctly.” It doesn’t seem like the recipe for happy customers.

Somehow sextractor seemed like a more interesting package before I read the description. I was thinking of some unholy union of Leisure Suit Larry and Excitebike (gives me a headache just thinking about it) or something. Stupid oblivious scientists…

There’s also some more GPL violation debate raging over Lindows and the weird ass misconceptions about Lindows article over at OS News. Man for a publically posted and continually referenced document, the GPL is not particularly well understood. Is Lindows in violation? Probably. Oh, and Eugenia is retiring from OS News to do other stuff. I don’t agree with her most of the time but I certainly respect the energy she put into OS News. Hopefully this ruefully messed up Lindows story isn’t indicative of the future direction of the site. I keep accidentally following links to the Lindows site and I’ve gotta wonder how much of the start up cash was spent buying out the assets of Chess King to clothe Michael Robertson. Wait. That’s mean…

In between writing papers about my dead grandmother and the usual end of the semester nonsense I managed to add a little bit of functionality. This makes me the last person in the entire world to implement trackback on my site. I also added in that word count thing just for the hell of it. It’s mainly for me as a reminder that I’m not writing for a class and expressing ideas in less than a thousand words is not only acceptable but more polite. Yeah, stuff.

There’s a review of Xandros over at OS News that actually brought up a couple of really good points that hadn’t occurred to me before. One, users transitioning over from Windows enviroments like to see feedback when they’ve launched an application (the symptom of this disease is clicking on things endlessly until fifteen instances of it explode onto the screen at once) which is something I agree with. Something the size of Open Office does take more than a couple of seconds (OK, five, I just timed it on my machine) to write something to the screen. Paired with the usual apprension about single as opposed to double clicking (which I think Xandros dispatches by default although once you get used to it clicking twice on things is really irritating) it can make the first introduction to a Linux desktop a little rought although simply eliminating the stupid icons on the desktop thing can solve that problem before it happens. Ditto for the attached application icon to the launch feedback. That’s just annoying as the reviewer states that it probably will be to most users. Sometimes I take short vacations into Candyland (KDE) and I have all of those feedback/animation settings all the way off.

I am annoyed by the lack of boot messages.I like to see what’s going on at boot time (which isn’t very often) and hiding it behind things irritates like little else possibly could. Like my aborted attempt to install Lycoris I have no use for a distribution that doesn’t allow me to troubleshoot my own woes. In the case of Lycoris, I know full well that my laptop sound card is a proprietary piece of shit that there are simply no drivers for. I can deal with that but the installer cannot and just stalls out instead of letting me know what’s going on or even giving me the option of ignoring sound configuration altogether. I haven’t worked on a Xandros box in front of me so I can’t say anything in regards to their insistence on configuration wizards. Admittedly clicking a few buttons to configure some hardware or a service is kinda nice sometimes but what happens if you pass the wizard some options it can’t handle? You end up trashing the install and putting Debian back on the box like god intended. Well, that’s what I do but I imagine others blow the linux partitions out and go right back to Windows. Not much of a conversion factor there kids. This is an intended feature that will become a bug.

The direct comparison to Windows is probably fair in this case since Xandros models their desktop very closely to the Windows desktop. Usually this is an annoying method but apt in this case.

Chances are that you’re not buying this for the enormous world of options that are available with Linux and open source, rather you’re buying it because that daunting world has been trimmed down and edited for you. It’s important to note that this is a distribution for Windows users and at this time it’s only meant to be a desktop replacement option for a Windows desktop.

Like the nice man says…

Interesting discussion going on over at /. about this whole Anti-Leech software. I hardly need to say that this is pretty asinine but the site is a nice little hacking exercise. I’ve figured out how to bypass every single one of their toys and only needed to resort to using a text based browser once. Pretty sad that such hightly touted software is so easy to circumvent.

The big issue here is, of course, calling people who block ads thieves. This said I managed to get an ad-free version of their site in under a minute. On the upside at least the software seems to distinguish between text and graphical browsers so that blind folks aren’t automatically blocked. That was my first concern and the only browser that freaks out is w3m and that is the w3-el for emacs. I like the fact that we’re free to put words into their mouths. I’m wondering who exactly would be sincerely attracted to this piece of software. Adding this degree of complication to a site dependent on advertising seems a little ridiculous. Hmmm… My browser isn’t compatible with this site, looks like I’ll need to take the drastic step of Google-ing for something that is. Not very bright. Maybe we should mail the man responsible every couple of seconds and see if he doesn’t get upset and creat some mail filters.

t’s not possible to offer 100% protection for the content you want to display openly to everyone on the Internet. Thanks to our service you will however be able to stop most thieves and leechers. We estimate that our system can protect you in 98% of all cases and in the other 2% make it a lot harder for anyone to copy your content.

If you use our system you will not only protect your content. You will also get detailed stats over the amount of downloads, visitors and more depending on what service you use. All actions are also logged, so you can catch everyone trying to break through the defense.

Oh crap. I’m going to be totally busted, dude.

I tend to think of it as a metafilter of sorts for total assholes since obviously no browser I use is ever going to make it through. I simply don’t do pop-ups and although making my agent field read Netscape 2.2 or something would be trivial as hell I’m going to use this to my own advantage. Presume that your precious content is too valuable to display in simple terms and you will find yourself on a lonely desert island populated with people trying to sell you viagra and spy cams by thrusting pictures of them in your face ever couple of seconds.

Meanwhile, back at the laboratory, I’m sure that at least ten different people have concocted a hack to circumvent this sort of shit. That is one the most postive outcomes of something being ./ed that I can think of.

If you haven’t already done so go register your ass on the Debian Users World Domination Map because it is just too cool and likely to be misconstrued as just one more reason to distrust the cult-like activities of Debian users. I’m more surprised than I should be by the thick concentration of folks in Europe and how few I see in the United States.

Gnome2 is working again. Doesn’t seem like there’s an upstream solution right now but just plain working is good enough for me.

While I’m on this tangent — for some stupid reason I got a really nasty email from some little shit about selling Debian CDs. His rationale (which is really pushing the definition of that term) is that Debian is a free operating system. Luckily, the About page of the Debian site addresses this politely. As I’ve said a million times, more people (assuming that you’ve got 40 or so gigs of drive space to dedicate to storing ISOs) should be doing this. Really. I sell a lot of unstable sets. There are ten (eleven counting the necessary stable bootable CD) CDs. Do the math because I’m not going to do it for you. Free does not mean free like from your mom.

Normally I’m not a huge fan of the post to link a single article with no commentary of my own. Self importance, blah blah blah but this is too too much like something The Onion would make up.

Has anyone else noticed that mainstream newspapers have become progressively more difficult to discern from the Onion since September 11? Maybe it was always that way and I was just too busy reading news about tech or something. It just seems to be spiralling downward more quickly than ever before but then, like I said, I’m pretty oblivious so it’s probably just me.

Speaking of not so bright…

Man, if you ever want to piss me off (other than the innumerable ways that this is possible without trying) just barge into any discussion of software licenses shouting about how piracy is destroying the recording industry. Marie was talking about an article that explores issues like the GPL in a measured way that doesn’t require the reader to be steeped in free software issues or have a particular opinion on them. It’s a nice introduction to the topic and I’m glad she linked it because stuff like this coming from a relatively neutral position isn’t as common as it should be. I tend to get fired up and unreasonable about the subject for a number of reasons. The main thorn in my side is the total lack of understanding that either side of the debate usually has about what the GPL (and often the LGPL) actually does. I know that asking people to read and understand anything before they loudly state an opinion about it is asking too much but damn…

Anyway, the point to this story if there indeed is one: twenty minutes later I visit Marie’s site again to copy the URL and notice that there are already three comments attached to it. Huh. Yep, you guessed it. Three consecutive posts damning file trading piracy and linking the RIAA. I’m beginning to think that there is just a bot used in conjunction with Google that seeks out links to articles the RIAA finds “objectionable.” There is no other way to account for the speed and predictability of response to posts on the subject. I know you’re shaking your head right now and wondering what other completely paranoid conspiracy theories I’ve got up my sleeve but it happens a lot. I delete the stuff without replying to it since in every instance there are multiple posts from the same range of IPs based on a single link in a post. I might be wrong about the ‘bot part though since most of the comments posted are too angry to be the work of a rational, coolheaded script.

I’m going to let this one go in hopes that I’m actually dragged screaming to a mental institution for paranoid hallucinations. I’d feel better if it just happened on my site.

As a tech support person I obsessively tell people to back their shit up and I do very little of it myself (other than scripts to CDr). To be fair, I can deal with losing stuff because the truly important things are tarballed and spread out all over the place. After this last kneejerk reinstall (the c library breakage that rendered both Mozilla-based browsers and the package management system inoperable making me think the entire system was hosed) I’m actually running a CDr backup of my home directory right now. I tried a couple of different tools and for some unholy reason there was odd synchronicity in the geek press because a couple of stories were posted today about one of them.

I’ve been fooling around with Mondo Rescue for a couple of days now trying to get it to work. It spits out errors about my grub configuration being in the wrong place (which it isn’t) and dies before actually doing anything. I thought I was going crazy at first but then I noticed the note about Debian being the most problematic distribution. There’s a fluffy overview at Newsforge that really tells you nothing that you can’t find on the website if you’re inclined to worship at the temple really lame news sites. After deleting my old lilo configuration files (remember to purge kids) I got it up and running. Unfortunately I don’t really have 172 hours (if the early estimate was correct) to spend changing CDs. This becomes especially important when there is an animal loose in the house who savagely attacks the CD writer drawer when it ejects. I guess I could just back up a couple of directories and try to restore them on another box. Looks like it could work.

Why is this surprising to anyone who’s used a laptop atop a lap for more than ten minutes. I put at least a sweater between me and the little furnace when I’m couching it.

I am incessant in my quest for new ways to procrastinate. Despite the fact that I have three papers (and some other incidentals) due in like two weeks I am undaunted and followed a link in from PC Linux Online to check out a new toy to pound on and break. This time around it’s the CoffeeCup HTML Editor. They’re advertising it as “free but not open source” so of course I’m curious what it is they need to hide behind binaries.

This isn’t the first time that I’ve played with CoffeeCup software. Back in the dark days of Macintosh usage (which is coincidentally back in the dark days of design work and printing presses) I accidentally downloaded their HTML editor for that platform. In every case (giving testament to how bad my memory is at times or at least how many times I need to make the same mistake at 28.8 until I learn better) I cleansed my application from my hard drive in a matter of minutes because it was crippled in some way. This violates a very important principal of mine: I will never pay for “shareware” that I can’t really try out. Face it, my only reasoning for blowing money on commercial software is if it can do something that no free piece of software can do. If I can’t even try out the more advanced features what evidence do I have to base my decision on and why should I bother if I can’t even fix problems myself? Yes, zealotry, I can deal with that.

I’m not incredibly impressed with the interface which seems to come from the MS school of adding button based toolbars everywhere by default. Of course you can always banish them from the views menu but, still, what a mess. I didn’t bother with any of the wizards — partially because they’re always a little on the stupid side and also because if you can’t produce an intelligible page of HTML at this point you’re hurting. Open tag, close tag. It’s not rough stuff but this editor is modeled after Front Page and assumes that you don’t know what the hell you’re doing. The other thing that draws immediate comparison to Front Page is the amount of “built by” stuffed in the HTML it generates. That and it’s butt ugly even for a commercial Linux application.

I think most of the problems with this editor are explained by the copyright date which lists the latest year as 1999. It’s old software that no one wanted to buy released as free in hopes to generate some kind of curiosity. In my case it worked despite the bad associations I have stowed away in the darker recesses of my memory. There are a million better editors for HTML than this some intended for that use and some just easily adapted. Unless you’re really in need of an editor that produces WebTV tags (another sign of its age) or a conversation piece for the next LUG meeting. At least there is some degree of consistency in applications this company produces — install, groan, and delete.

I stumbled upon this long and heated thread about Debian losing users to Gentoo while following up on the ten gazillion bug reports I have out there. Yes I do actually follow up/harass/annoy after filing bug reports. This has always struck me as being a pretty weird issue because, in my mind, they’re two very different beasts. Gentoo is a neat new toy (and I mean toy in the occupying and absorbing sense not the crappy and breakable sense) and Debian is sort of an elder statesman. Usage depends a lot on what you’re looking for.

Debian is (too) often criticized for shying too far away from the bleeding edge (which I’ll disagree with after the recent serious breakages in unstable — having the package management system disintegrate is more bleeding edge than I ever want to deal with) which I think has more to do with misunderstanding the structure of the distribution than actual fact. If you scroll down to the bottom of the page I’ve got a banner that plays off of this misconception. Pick your poison – there are people like me who pretty much stick with what is stock apt-get-able and there just as many folks packaging and using the new stuff as it comes out. There have been unofficial KDE 3 packages for nearly as long as they’ve been available in every other distribution. Making jokes about stale packages in stable if you don’t understand policy is a little Dan Quayle at this point. Given the insane amount of documentation and community support that Debian has you’d think these misconceptions would be a little less widespread these days… I really think this post sums it up rather well.

A good portion of the thread I mentioned above actually concerns popular misconceptions about Gentoo and the advantages of compiling everything. The general consensus is that it’s sort of a whiz bang, not-use-my-machine-for-3-days and yields very little performance gain in the end. This is all great and technical and makes the kids feel like they’re doing something really l33t. It’s also harmless because I really doubt that people are really pursuing a 3% performance gain especially on desktop machines.I do ridiculous things on my machine and it’s all binary for i386. Right now with applications open on seven desktops I’m: load average: 0.06, 0.03, 0.01. That includes having MS Word open in wine and burning a CD from an ISO. Granted, I’m not a gamer so I’m not trying to push my hardware all the time but still with 97% of my resources free and an untouched swap partition I’m not sure that optimization of any kind as fun as it might be to tinker with would really benefit me in any way discernible outside of a benchmarking application.

Gentoo is something fun and new that doesn’t hold itself to rigid debugging and seamless integration. Gentoo is perfect for people who wipe out an install every four or five months because they want to try something new. Debian tends to be a one install distribution if you’re happy with it. Unstable can be a little rough at times but generally works just as well as commercial distributions with more new toys to beat on and break every day. I have nothing against this and I don’t think that many of the developers posting on that endless thread do either. I’m all for case mods, overclocking, and any of the other endless diversions that keep people glued to their machines.

To be fair, you can’t blame the distribution for its users. Gentoo has come very far, very fast (which also works to their advantage since they’re not dealing with three or four different versions of every piece of software) and are also committed to being a non-commercial distribution. It’s very good stuff philosophically and technically but, like most new and exciting things, the fans tend to be a little annoying. It’s difficult to take a kid talking about his third Linux install ever (in the same month even) and how much faster it runs than anything else. The truth can be embarrassing and cause fits of -09 optimization in hopes of defeating the barons of fluff. But like I said, you can’t blame the distribution for its users.

Somewhat Related
Some Debian servers were destroyed in a fire. If you’re trying to update non-us or security and getting errors this is why. I’ve had a couple people email me to ask me what’s up. The non-us machines are back up (at least as far as apt is concerned) and I’m not sure about the security machines. It’s been a couple of days so I’m guessing those will be back in operation sooner than later.