My main phone has been a HTC Wizard, sold by O2 as the XDA Mini. I bought it because it has a nice screen, a built-in keyboard, and will run PuTTY, which is handy when I’m pretending to be a sysadmin. It’s useful, in that it’s a pretty good Internet Device – though one of the new Nokia tablets would be better – but it fails massivly on several important criteria. Like:

• It’s too big. It’s not a device you can slip into your pocket and forget about, and it has an exposed screen so you have to remember not to put it where your keys or anything sharp is.
• The touch-screen is too stupid, and occasional resets the time while in your pocket.
• The battery life is annoying.
• You can’t lock the display when the media-player is on.
• The headphone jack is 2.5mm. Why? What is stopping them from using a standard jack?
• Windows.
• Mobile.
• Sucks
• Donkey
• Balls.
• Yes, that did need to be five or six points.

So, my new solution is for the XDA to live in my bag and be Wifi and GPRS if I can be bothered to swap the sim around, and I have got hold of a Sony Eriksson z310g. One of the few Eriksson’s with the clamshell form factor I prefer, an Eriksson interface (which I prefer to most of the rest) MP3 ringtone support and, and this was no small part of my decision to buy it, support for trutap. If I’m going to work for a mobile application company, it would seem useful if the software works on my phone. (FTR, it installed quickly and easily, its failure to connect to start with was because the phone installed the new Internet settings for WAP but not Java connections, and the MSN IM networking stuff seems to work. I’m pleasantly surprised :-).

Now the complicated bit. Getting my contacts off my XDA onto the 310 from a clean Windows install (without the supplied XDA drivers). Note: I do not have Office installed.

• Install Microsoft Active Sync
• Discover latest Active Sync will not sync to Windows’ built in address book like all previous versions would.
• Discover that there is no way around this, searching on the internet for a while.
• Decide to fuck this and try it in Linux. (Ubuntu, Feisty Fawn install)
• Find a tutorial for this follow it religiously.
• Everything installs fine, detects fine, all messages fine.
• Click “Sync”
• Nothing happens.
• Tail all relevant logs, track USB connections, unplug USB, reboot, plug in, tracking all logs, viewing all messages, turning up debug.
• Nothing happens.
• Search internet for solutions to nothing happening.
• Nothing continues to happen.
• Decide to fuck this and go back to Windows
• Find age-old version of Outlook 2002 that came with an older computer.
• Install it.
• Discover that latest version of Active Sync doesn’t support that either.
• Wonder how Microsoft Internet Explorer is not allowed to be backwardly compatible with itself when ActiveSync is.
• Wonder how the fuck we expect Microsoft to comply with other people’s data interoperability ideals when their own software is incompatible with itself.
• Locate shady copy of Outlook 2007.
• Install shady copy of Outlook 2007. Am surprised when I don’t have to reboot.
• ActiveSync doesn’t find any copy of Outlook on this computer.
• Reboot.
• ActiveSync finds Outlook 2007.
• The more things change.
• Sync contacts to Outlook.
• Install “Sony Ericsson PC Suite”
• Allow PC Suite to sync with Outlook and Phone.
• Get contacts on new phone.
• Jump for joy.
• Attempt to PURGE all traces of Outlook from my computer
• Fail.
• Book complete windows Reinstall for when I get back home from Christmas With Folks.
• Sigh.
• Go find Christmas Cake.
• Yay Christmas Cake

Linux distros – such as Debian and Ubuntu – routinely maintain their own forks of open source applications with security updates backported from newer versions of software, without the associated functionality updates that the full new version has. This is why we call the current release “stable”, functionality doesn’t change.

Firefox the application is open source, Firefox the brand is decidedly not. Firefox the brand is the protected property of the Mozilla Corperation and they really don’t want people messing with it.

People produce systems on top of Firefox, hundreds upon hundreds of extensions. These rely on the version of the browser being reported being accurate. If the browser says it is version X.01, but it is really X.01 with the security patches from X++, then even if it reports itself as X.02, it doesn’t know if functionality it is relying upon is working. Or if it will segfault if it tries. It doesn’t even know to check, because as far as the extension is concerned, it’s running on a minor patch level advance on its target version.

Enter the iceweasel concept.

Iceweasel is a way around this problem. It is not Firefox, but it is mostly compatible. It is, in fact, Firefox with a different name and logo, and with the patches that the package maintainer applies. It isn’t called Firefox, so gets around the branding limitations. It is compatible with most firefox extensions, as it happens.

Then the GNU foundation go ahead with an actual product called Iceweasel which is not just Firefox with the serial numbers filed off, but a seperate maintained branch with new functionality. This (the name, at least) is a really silly idea, as it confuses the concept of “iceweasel” as suggested in the Debian-devel discussions last time this came up as an unbranded Firefox with an actual product.

So Firefox – the brand – isn’t quite free enough for Debian, and Iceweasel isn’t actually 100% compatible with Firefox.

So stop fucking telling me it’s just an argument about the graphics.

Last weekend I went to LUGRadio Live 2006. I had a blast from the moment I got to the initial Friday lunch meet to the moment I left, annoyed I couldn’t stay for the after show party (Damn hotel bills).

Good Things

Talks

I didn’t go to very many talks, mostly because I was too busy shooting the breeze with people and playing computer games. In fact the only two actual talks I went to were Sara Ewen’s talk on PlayStation 2 Linux (Though I missed the bit on PS3 Linux) and Simon’s talk on Django (Which has lead to the rebuilding of the “Storyville” and “PFD4-2” projects in it. Watch this space). I also went to Bruno Bord’s talk on how much they swear in LR, and bits of the Women in Open Source talk (I caught the last twenty minutes) (Actually, I’d quite like to know what Jen, Kat & Phated – who hosted the talk – think about the recently announced Fedora Women project and others of its ilk. They may have discussed that, I wasn’t there.

Oh, and Dotwaffle’s talk on the Linux Demo scene (including a demonstration of a 64k demo called Origami, which I highly recommend you watch. It’s beautiful.

I went to more talks than I realised.

People

I met and remet some wonderful people. I made them wince at bad jokes and I took the piss out of their beards. Some of the people had corsets, some had full tuxedos, most had jeans and T-Shirts. They were all wonderful.

LAN Gaming

We played Enemy Territory. I shot Aquarius. He shot me. Repeat. This would have been better had we not been on the same team.

The Party.

About more later.

The Low Tech Wiki

They set up a Low Tech Wiki – AKA, A black board – upon which notes were made about stuff that was changing.

But it got spammed, and used for random crap, and because we had no revision history we couldn’t revert the changes.

Simon Willison and I started a discussion page on the back of the board on the Saturday night and by the end of Sunday that was still going strong.

What went not so right

Don’t get me wrong, the entire event was a blast, but in order to help them do even better next time:

The Hotel

I stayed at a hotel universally referred to as the Quality Chin. As hotels go it was reasonably priced (Heh. Our prices were something like 33% of their normal rates. At full price I’d have been… disappointed). The breakfast was fine but nothing stellar.

The hotel’s heating broke down. Or, rather, broke up. It apparently – on one of the hottest days of the year – decided to put everything up to full whack until they ripped the fuses out. The hotel was hot.

My room’s bathroom had black bits.

The bedroom was definitely a single. The bathroom could have held the encampment for napoleon’s entire army. I found this odd.

None of this is the LUGRadio team’s fault or responsibility, obviously.

Too Many Things

As Aq mentioned I’m not entirely sure how you can resolve this. There were effectively seven things happening at any one time. One main stage, two smaller stages, three community group gathering events and just shooting the breeze. I suppose the only way around it is to see which talks people want to go, see if you can group them so that those things don’t clash, and hope it all works. So if you found that the people interested in Linux on PS2 tended to also want to go to see Matthew Garrett’s talk about “Linux and Laptops” but not the more ethereal talks such as “The Zen Of Free”, arrange that Zen clashes with PS2, for example. It’s the kind of system that requires a lot more organisation and a certain amount of living with the consequences, but since it’s not me who will have to do the organising, I can suggest things as I please.

The Party DJ

Of which more later.

The weather

Winter. LRL2007 needs to be in winter or at least autumn. If nothing else, flights are cheaper.

Beards

This year by the end of LR, there were significantly fewer beards, and this is a Good Thing.

The Party

So, upon the Saturday evening it was decided that there should be a Party. So there was a Party. Some people dressed up properly for it (well, two people did). Some dressed up a bit (wave) most didn’t bother. There were cakes, and the cakes were very fine indeed. There was Guinness, and that was very fine also (I haven’t drunk Guinness since I was at university, and since we were back in a student bar I decided to revert to form and sit in the dark with a pint of the black watching the social butterflies dance in the bright lights.

Watching the dancing was interesting. (No, of course I didn’t dance. If you say you saw me, you are wrong. I have a twin brother. His dancing is worse than mine). Mostly because the DJ was more of a club-style than disco-style, as he claimed. The result of this was he was playing lots of loud thumpy tracks at deafening volume and complaining that nobody was kickin’ it on the dance floor. Then he started playing cheesy stuff (The Time Warp – albeit a disco remix; Madness – which got Jono on the dance floor; and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. This brought a core of hard-core dancers onto the floor, where they danced as if nobody was watching. Natalie was intent on getting people to dance, but had to leave early, so it is for her benefit I mention the first person to start dancing was at 23:10.

Anyway, after a few cheesy tracks people could dance to, the DJ went back to the heavy thumpy stuff that drove them away. After that it turned into a tide effect: The DJ would play a few cheesy tracks to lure people into his domain, and then as he thought he had them in the groove would switch to something loud and thumpy, clearing the floor in seconds.

There was a MAME cabinet (Which played 4 player Gauntlet, which is something everyone should so at least twice), at one stage I counted 8 people around it with nobody on the dance floor at all.

Somewhere in this country there is a facility designed to get around the laws stopping them from cloning people. This facility is running a scientific study into how many times you can create an absolutely generic DJ, identical to all the others. Every so often one fails and is forced to become a fairground announcer (“If you’d like to ride, if you’d like to ride… scream if you want to faster…”) but the rest go out into the world of professional party DJing, and nobody can tell the difference…

...also, I notice that if you want to find out how many long haired people are in your audience, simply start playing “The Ace Of Spades” and they’ll all be in one place. Moshing like their hair was on fire.

The Macs

I can’t let this one go. At Linux User Group Radio Live 2006: the plasma announce boards, the recording software and – for a while – the Enemy Territory server were all PPC Macs running OS X, because they Just Worked when they needed to.

Nothing much I can add to that.

The final bit

It was great. Same time next month?

And if you can tell me the name of the track that accompanies most of this, I’ll be your friend forever.

• Mail going to things at aquarionics go to Sneaky
• Mail going to things at gkhs go to Jar
• Other mail goes to POP accounts
• All mail is pulled from POP/Sneaky/Jar to Atoll, my home server
• I read mail over IMAP with Mail.app, Thunderbird, or Roundcube, depending on where I am.

So, on Friday, DNS on Sneaky goes away, meaning mail can’t get to it for a while. Mail begins to build up.

Saturday, Jar’s mail goes bye-bye for a little while too, but just my ability to collect it.

Sunday, Atoll runs out of disk space on /

By Sunday afternoon, all this is fixed. I’ve deleted excess stuff on Atoll, pol’s got DNS back for Sneaky, ccooke has put Jar’s door open again.

I’m still not getting mail.

Seems odd, Retchmail is still supposed to run on the half hour… Spamassassin isn’t admitting to junking it all… Nothing in syslog…

...nothing at all in syslog…

Todays lesson in Linux Admin. If you run out of space on /var, Syslog and Cron will shut down, as will anything that can’t live without syslog.

So I restarted syslog, cron, and everything else that had died without my permission.

Emails. Fassands of them.

sigh

1. Every x (default: 1000) requests, PHP will delete all outdated sessions.

This is how Debian Sarge does it:

1. Every half hour (at 9 and 39 past) run a script
2. This script runs a second shell script that parses the PHP config file with a regex to get the value for how long sessions should last (Which is odd, because a PHP script will get this automatically)
3. The first script will then find all session files older than that value
4. Delete them.

WHY? WHY WHY WHY?

This is the kind of braindead overcomplication stuff I’d expect from Gentoo, but the whole point of Debian is that it’s /sane/.

1. Put PCI Card into machine
2. Put network card into machine
3. Download and burn IPCop ISO
4. Install it.
5. Put the ADSL Settings in the ADSL Settings Page.
6. Do something more interesting with the time you saved not [m]ucking around.

sudo apt-get install ruby
./configure

sudo apt-get install bdb
apt-cache search bdb
sudo apt-get install libdbm-ruby1.8
./configure

cd ..
wget ftp://moulon.inra.fr/pub/ruby/bdb.tar.gz
tar zxvf bdb.tar.gz
cd bdb-0.5.5/
less README.en
ruby extconf.rb
sudo apt-get install ruby-dev
sudo apt-get install ruby1.8-dev
make
ruby extconf.rb
make
sudo apt-get install libdb2-dev
make
ruby extconf.rb
make
sudo apt-get install libdb4.3-dev
ruby extconf.rb
make
sudo make install

cd ../gonzui-1.1
./configure

sudo cp /usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8/i386-linux/bdb.so /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/
./configure

apt-cache search libruby
sudo mv /usr/local/lib/site_ruby /usr/lib/
./configure

cd ../
rm -rf gonzui-1.1* bdb*
logout

Transgaming is an oddity in the F/OSS world. It started off as “WineX”, a fork of Wine (Wine is “not” an emulator) with DirectX support, then they became a commercial thing. Because WineX (Now known as Cedega) contains GPL code (A fork from just before the original Wine went LGPL known as “Rewind”) they have to release the source, which they do, but only as a CVS tree. The way they do this is by Added Value, and this is what the Added Value is:

It just works.

That isn’t ‘only just’, that is, it just does it. They have this thing called Point2Play, which is basically a separate emulated instance for every game you install. You set it up, run Setup.exe from the CD or whatever, and the game is installed in its own little world. Another click to run it.

That, in fact, is better than the equivalent install under Windows, which for some games will spread shit all over your system, this way it’s in its own little fenced off area of the world, and won’t affect anything else with mismatched libraries or anything. Like the Apple package system, really.

It’s not perfect. Actually, although the program is better than when I last used it (As WineX, a year or more ago), the supporting structure appears to have actually lost functionality, as the Game Support Database has gone from a place where you can find all the tricks people used to get a game working, how well it works, how many people want it fixed etc, to just a “Popularity” and “Playability” ranking which, being a 1-5 rating, isn’t helpful for things like “The sound doesn’t work, but the video’s fine”. This facility seems to have moved to a bog standard PHPBB bug-ridden pile of insecure shit (Not a fault of their install, merely one of PHPBB in general, of which I am Not A Fan).

The only problem I had getting it working was the unholy alliance of sellotape and glue that holds the ATI drivers into xorg, which was fixed by a reboot (Annoyingly). For a while, once I had FireFox, Thunderbird, XChat, Gaim and City of Heroes all working under Linux, I had no more need of Windows. Hurrah!

Then a further reboot sent my maximum resolution for X down to 640×480 from 1600×1200 due to a “Horizontal Sync Beyond Range” problem, so I’m back in Windows. Less Hurrah.

This was apparently caused by my monitor not being plugged in properly (so it wasn’t detected properly, so it failed). Hurrah again

Nevertheless, I bought one. Because it was cheap.

(It does, I should warn potential followers in my footsteps, come with a half-filled colour cartridge and no black. Factor in another 15 (The same cost as the printer, fact fans) for a full black cartridge. Cheap printers are a false economy. Lesson ends)

Much of the work of getting this all working under Debian has already been done, and much of this article cribs liberally from the Gentoo Wiki article for the same thing.

These instructions are for Debian Sarge (That’s ‘Testing’) and so should also work with Ubuntu.

This is what you do:

Preparation:

(I love Debian)

Grab the Real Linux Drivers from Lexmark:

http://downloads.lexmark.com/cgi-perl/downloads.cgi?ccs=229:1:0:389:0:0&emeaframe=&fileID=1151

Installation:

Create a new directory, and put the file you downloaded above inside it. Lexmark’s drivers all extract to the current directory.

Be inside that directory

Bypass their horrible “auto install” script by running:

and then extract install.tar.gz (which also goes to the current directory)

You should now have a whole host of useless files and a couple of RPMs (Because we all know that everyone uses deadrat, don’t we? sigh) so we turn them into Debian packages using Alien:

And then “dpkg -i” on both of them to install. Make sure the printer is plugged in and turned on, and then run:

followed by:

Which should say something like:

direct z600:/dev/usb/lp0 "Lexmark Lexmark 510 Series" "Lexmark Printer"

Cups

Setting up cups is somewhat beyond the scope of this article, but what the hell.

Default install of cups doesn’t let anyone outside the local machine access the interface. If this is cool, great, otherwise edit the /etc/cupsd.conf file to let in anyone in 192.168.* or whatever your network’s on.

Cups interface is on http://localhost:631 (It’d be useful if the package mentioned that while it was installing, or something) the admin password is your root password (the username is ‘root’) so don’t, whatever you do, ever access CUPS admin over an Internet connection until you change that behaviour. It’s a stupid bloody default anyway.

So. Click “Administration”, “Add Printer”, Fill in stuff, “Lexmark” (Use the top one, rather than “USB #1 Lexmark” or whatever), Make is – duh – Lexmark, Model is the only one it gives you, Print a test page to make sure it’s working, if it isn’t, then “tail -f /var/log/cups/*log” to see why.

Have A Lot Of Fun.

My main problem with Zope is the documentation which is either a) for a version in advance of the one I’m using; b) has a prerequisite level I can only aspire to; or c) Doesn’t answer the question I have (like ‘What parameters do I feed it?’) whilst being the comprehensive, only documentation on the subject.

I’ve switched to KDE at work, because whilst I don’t like the interface, bloatedness or flakyness of it (esspecially JuK and Artsd, which I have to manually kill several times a day), the KIO system rocks (Basically, it allows me to open webdav documents with the filename ‘webdav:user@server/path/to/doc’, other documents over an ssh connection (fish:user@server/path/to/doc) or anything. There is absolutly no fucking way this should be part of the desktop environment, it should be split off from KDE so that everything, everybody, from curses to gnome to enlightenment should be able to (and should) use it.

Most of all, because the only text editor I can use with it is Kate, the KDE Advanced Text Editor, and I keep getting syntax errors because ”:wn” isn’t valid python. No, kvim doesn’t work. The Ubuntu (actually Debian in this case) package for AMD64 doesn’t actually include the kvim binary and I can’t get the thing to compile manually.

And now I have 10 minutes to get up and dressed before I have to go try to catch the bus. TTFN

Tuesday I got home from work at about 20:00 as usual. I discovered that atoll, my main server and home to my life, documents, music and email was thrashing at a 50.00 load average and the terminal was spewing out line upon line of “DriveSeek Failed” errors. This was not an unknown error, Atoll’s previous hard drive (Identical make and model) died in a similer way about a year and a half ago. The drive can read fine, but as soon as you try to write to it it thrashes the computer completely. I ended up buying the replacement drive (the one that has just died) and eventually (about two months ago) sent the old one off to be repaired. So I sat and swore at the drive for a while, redirected my email, powered off the computer, and wished I had more time to deal with this.

At this point, there was a doorbell. Nobody apart from the Jehovahs Witnesses and the Pizza People use our doorbell, so at 9pm this was unexpected.

It was, in fact, our neighbour. He was delivering a package that UPS had failed to.

It was the replacement hard drive.

The timing of this was so incredibly fortuitous that my immediate reaction was to install the drive and start copying the data. This was hastily kyboshed. The last thing I want to do is replace the dead drive with the same model that has died so faithfully twice before.

Wednesday I got atoll to stay together long enough to be able to edit /etc/fstab so that the broken partition (it was only one partition this time) was mounted read only, which means the server is back together until next month, when I can buy a new hard drive. Eventually, I decide to put the replacement 120 gig drive into my desktop, where it doesn’t matter so much if it dies. I resolve to do this at the weekend.

Thursday

Can you guess what happens Thursday?

1. Everything works perfectly.
2. The main server dies
3. The main server explodes
4. The hard drive in my desktop dies.

Anyone who went for the forth option can have a cookie.

This has been a bad hardware week.

You will require:

• sox (via your package manager)
• lame (Or some other encoder, see below)
• The 3GPP reference converter files

The first is easy, sensible people should be able to apt-get install sox or whatever. The second may require some compiling and following instructions, the third is more complicated. The 3GPP FTP site appears to move around a bit, so links go outdated. I got it from here, but you might have more luck just searching google for "26104-520.zip".

You need to get that file, unzip it, unzip the zip inside it (It all unzips into the current directory, so you'd best put it somewhere on it's own first) and you'll get a series of c & header files. If you're using Linux (and the rest of this assumes you are) cp makefile.gcc Makefile and make it. xa.bi's site (Where I found the decoder existed) says you should do some playing with the files, but I've no idea what difference it makes. His site, btw, contains a much more advanced AMR converter than this, but I didn't need that kind of complexity. Put the resulting executables (encode and decode) somewhere useful, and remember where it is.

This is the shell script I used to make it go, you could edit it, or write your own.

#!/bin/bash

# By Aquarion - Aquarion@Aquarionics.com
# Do what you want with it, it's not rocket science.

##Change these:
#Wherever you put encode and decode when you compiled them:
CODEC=/home/aquarion/opt/mms

#Temporary directory. Chances are you've already got this set
#TEMP=/tmp/

#Where do the final MP3s go?
FINAL=mp3/

for file in *.amr; do 
	FILE=`echo $file | sed -e "s/.amr//"`; 
	echo -n "$FILE [AMR] -> [$TEMP]"
	$CODEC/decoder $file $TEMP/$FILE.$TEMP > log.std 2> log.err; 
	echo -n " -> [WAV] "
	sox -r 8000 -w -c 1 -s $TEMP/$FILE.$TEMP -r 16000 \
		-w -c 1 $TEMP/$FILE.wav > log.std 2> log.err; 
	echo -n " -> [MP3] "
	lame $TEMP/$FILE.wav $FINAL/$FILE.mp3 --silent \
		--tt $FILE --ta $USER --tl Aquarionics --ty `date +%y`
	echo  " :-) "
	rm $TEMP/$FILE.wav;
	rm $TEMP/$FILE.$TEMP;
done

That script as written takes all .amr files in the current directory, turns them into .mp3 files and puts them in a subdirectory called "mp3" (which needs to exist before you run the script.)

And there you have it. If you want to convert them to oggs, you'll need to muck around with the "lame" line of the script a bit. Oh, and you'll probably want to change the album away from "Aquarionics" too.

With one monitor plugged into the monitor port and the LCD display, you too can have a dual-head setup. It's great. You do it like this:

In XF86Config:

Section "Device"
	Identifier	"radeon_one"
	Driver		"radeon"
	BusID	"PCI:1:0:0"
	Screen		1
EndSection

Section "Device"
	Identifier	"radeon_zero"
	Driver		"radeon"
	Screen		0
	BusID	"PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
	Identifier	"LCD"
	HorizSync	30-57
	VertRefresh	43-72
	Option		"DPMS"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
	Identifier	"CRT"
	HorizSync	30-57
	VertRefresh	43-72
	Option		"DPMS"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
	Identifier	"LCD Screen"
	Device		"radeon_zero"
	Monitor		"LCD"
	DefaultDepth	24
	SubSection "Display"
		Depth		24
		Modes		"1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
	EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "Screen"
	Identifier	"Monitor Screen"
	Device		"radeon_one"
	Monitor		"CRT"
	DefaultDepth	24
	SubSection "Display"
		Depth		24
		Modes		"1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
	EndSubSection
EndSection


Section "ServerLayout"
	Identifier	"Default Layout"
	Screen		"LCD Screen" rightOf "Monitor Screen"
	Screen		"Monitor Screen"
	InputDevice	"Generic Keyboard"
	InputDevice	"Configured Mouse"
	Option		"Xinerama"
EndSection

• I’ve learnt that the secret to chocolate sauce is to shake the bottle with the lid closed.
• Brown shows up on white curtains, seven feet from the table where there was ice cream and a limited amount of chocolate sauce.
  • And the carpet.
  • Also the television, speakers, post and furniture.
• Do not follow Aquarius blindly when he says “Kernel-image-2.6.4-k7” as your laptop is not a K7 and this won’t work.
  • 686 works better
  • XF86 doesn’t like your laptop much.
  • Project Utopia is Neat.
  • Debian Rocks.
• It’s a good idea to pay your rent
• You should remember that you’re getting paid by cheque, and these take four working days to clear.
• My bank has just decided that cheques now take six working days to clear. The age of communication is upon us, and Halifax is going backwards. May it fuck off and die, and take my overdraft with it.
• Buying a Young Persons Railcard is cheaper than the discount it gives you for a ticket to Durham.
  • ...yet despite already having a Railway Photo Card (for my Letchworth/London railcard) I need another photo card for the YP Railcard.
  • I still don’t deal with photo booths well.
  • Using the advice a model gave me on how to not look like a serial killer in passport photos makes me look like a male model.
    • Who is also a serial killer.
    • Train compains remain morons.
  • RedDragDiva’s Mushroom Thing is really nice.
  • It’s vitally important to take your keys when leaving the office
    • Especially when the following day you can’t get out of the house because your girlfriend deadlocked the door (your keys for which are in London) and the back garden backs onto three other back gardens.
    • The spare keys are in LC’s room, on the dresser.
    • You moron.

I’m off to Durham for the weekend. TTFN

Where it fails:
When there is more than one address on the To: line.

Why I don't care:
I don't often send mail to more than one person.

“Martin Underwood” wrote:

“Johnny” wrote:

“Conor” wrote:

It means your PC won’t become a trojan infested pile of stinking crap

That sounds like Windows to me, ever increasing in size too.

I’ve always wondered: do Linux and MacOS have any security loopholes? Is part of the problem simply that most virus writers direct their attentions to Windows because it is the most popular OS? I believe that XP is inherently more secure than Win 95/98, but is more prone to viruses because virus writers are concentrating on XP rather than Win9x. The same may be true of Linux and MacOS compared with XP.

For MacOS this is partially true, being less of a mainstream OS it doesn’t get so many viruses. Linux is slightly more preemptive and reactive, the theory is that since so much of it has source code open to public viewing, somebody somewhere will see any potential security vulnerability. In fact, Linux/Unix based systems do suffer from such exploits for similar reasons as Windows – and about as frequently – but the community as a whole tends to react far quicker and with much more honesty about the problem. (For example, see this, an archive of this year’s security announcements for Debian GNU/Linux).

On top of this, Linux has a couple of other advantages. Firstly, that usually the only “given” on any Linux system is the kernel itself, other functionality is supplied by a myriad of other packages. The mail server could be Exim, Sendmail, QMail or any one of a hundred others, for example, but for a Windows system you’re pretty much guaranteed to be running Exchange. Windows’ ‘cohesiveness’ – the property that makes it a much easier to use desktop system than any current *nix based one – is the very property that makes it an easier target, since you can pretty much predict what’s running on any given Windows box and target that.

Finally there are the Users. Most of the Linux user base are still relatively geeky people who are aware of the importance of keeping up to date with the security holes, whereas a frightening number of Windows users have the same sort of problem as Oscar above, that they don’t understand what they actually need to do or – in a more office based scenario – why they should care.

Of course, the fact that Windows users outnumber Linux users 100 to 1 (at least) doesn’t help either, plus a number of crackers will deliberately aim at the “Evil Empire” on purely ‘moralistic’ grounds.

Fear the fuckwits who think themselves on the side of “Good”.

Faithfully Yours,

From his Windows PC, though his Linux news server :-)

Various people are doing the “One True Packaging” thing for distribution, not least Installshield – whose eponymous system is pretty much the standard for Windows applications, but all these have dependency problems, in that they all include every possible dependency in the package itself, meaning you’d end up downloading and installing a new JavaVM for every Java application you use.

Ideally – as Stephen pointed out when I mentioned this on IRC - this would be LSB based, so that it could see “Well, I don’t have that library, so I will ask apt for $(standardised name of application)”, and if it worked that way it’d be great, but the current system whereby everything is packaged separately for every distribution means that developing a major Linux application requires either understanding every variant on each package management system or a willingness to get the community to do all the work for you, and do it exactly how you want it to be done. And if a job’s worth doing…

All of which could be avoided with a little co-operation, which is something OSS people are meant to be good at.