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No, really.

Wed, 21 December 2011 23:39:52

Okay, no really, this time I'm going to start blogging again. Really. I swear. One week, next Wednesday, I will have another post. Seriously.

I'm Back Baby

Wed, 21 September 2011 12:37:51

After countless months of not blogging, the longing need has finally caught up to me. I finally fixed the login bug that has been plaguing this site for months and I will begin posting again. My goal is once per week. High fives all around!

Mobile E-commerce Security

Wed, 27 October 2010 00:25:35

Mobile E-commerce presents somewhere around 0 new threats for e-commerce dealers. People assume that because a device is transmitting over the air that it some how becomes inheritance insecure and this is simply not the case. In order to make an insecure purchase on a legitimate E-commerce site, mobile or otherwise, it really takes the combined stupidity of the consumer, the seller, and the payment middleman (Credit Card company, Paypal, etc). I would even go as far as to say that Mobile E-commerce is (or will be) more secure than traditional ecommerce. I know what you're saying, you're saying "Abe, this is quite the ludicrous allegation you've just made, it can't possibly be true!" Oh, but it is. As I'm sure you know, any e-commerce site whose even mildly reputable conducts all purchasing over HTTPS using SSL encrypted sockets both ways. SSL is incredibly secure using several keys in different fashions to make sure the site is coming from where it says and that no one except you and the site knows what you're discussing. Lets say, for example, that for whatever reason the e-commerce site said "No one wants to steal from out customers, so lets not use HTTPS." Well then you're open to attack, right? Wrong. Payments all go through a middle-man and %99.999 of the time this middle-man is a huge company who isn't as dumb as the e-commerce site you're dealing with. This company will require HTTPS requests. This, obviously, applies to every sale on this e-commerce site, mobile or not. If you're on a mobile device, you get the added benefit of having all your data encrypted when it's transmitted over the air, so people can't even read the encrypted version of your data, because it is encrypted; nowadays, most mobile encryption algorithms (i.e. GSM) have been cracked by one of several attacks. These breaches will destroy mobile security, however, we can rebuild it: stronger, better, faster. Once the new encrypting standard for mobile devices is put into place, mobile devices will not only have HTTPS/SSL to keep them safe, but they'll have whatever new encryption comes out. The only reason it might be easier to steal personal information from a mobile device vs. a desktop is that a mobile device would be easier to pick up and run away with.

Co-op till you drop

Wed, 28 July 2010 18:02:24

The video game industry is changing and has been for the past five years or so. What happened five years ago, you ask? The Wii came out. And no this is not one of those "TEH W11 FTW" articles that seemed to be so popular in the traditional press about four years ago. This is one of those "TEH W11 started a snowball effect which is influencing the entire business." What am I talking about? Is it the epic motion controls of the Wii? No, it is not. The Wii brought several news things to the table. One of which was the epic motion controls. Although I think the most influential thing it brought was over-shadowed by the controls. This thing, was multiplayer. With the Wii, for the first time, four friends could sit around a TV, laugh, yell, and generally express emotion in a way no other console had allowed them. This had nothing to do with the hardware or the controls. It has to do with the general attitude that the Wii conveyed. An attitude of fun. When people think of the Wii they do not think of hardcore tank-n-spank sessions or of leveling up. They do not think of the games themselves, but instead they think of the people who they will be playing the games with. And this is a true revolution. Once the impact of these emotion-drawing, friendship-creating games was shown. It began to get adopted by the other major consoles. This is evident, for example, in the Xbox 360. In may of 2008, about 18 months after the release of the Wii, we start seeing these "co-op only" games start to show up. Army of Two, although generally panned by critics for it's repetitiveness and lack of originality, is still a classic to me because of the great times I had playing it with friends. This game forces players to work together and help each other out in ways few games had before. About six months after Army of Two, we see the first "Co-op only" game to achieve critical success. Left 4 dead was an original concept mixed with simple and repetitive gameplay, with no character development or story to be found. But it had one thing going for it, can you guess? Yep, co-op. This game, which was really pretty bad when you look at it, is amazingly fun, with very high replay value, but that has nothing to do with the game, it is only entertaining if you play with friends. After the success of Left 4 Dead, and it's sequel. We start seeing more of these great coop only games show up. Resident Evil 5, Borderlands, Splosion Man, and Lara Croft: Guardian of Light. All of these games received a large amount of praise and success because they properly play on peoples teamwork and emotions (Except Lara Croft, that games not out yet, but I'm expecting greatness). These games are cheaper to make, have higher replay value, and create a more enjoyable experience for most gamers, as long as they have someone to play with. In conclusion, I feel that this coop trend is a great thing. These games are fun, not because of great graphics, controls, or even gameplay. They are great because they make people work together and bond in ways other games never have.

Putting Things into Perspective

Sun, 25 July 2010 02:29:56

When I embed a video into my blog, it is played in your browser, which is running a Flash plugin, whose markup was transfered via HTTP, whose streaming over TCP, which is running over ethernet, which is being bounced through switches, which are told what to do by routers, which are connected to the internet, which is being routed through several continents (and probably under the ocean), to reach a computer, which is running the web server, which is running atop the operating system, whose state is held in ram, and whos files are on the harddrive, which is attached via a sata cable to the motherboard, which was developed in India, produced in china, shipped to the US, which was then resold to the server farm in finland, which was kept in storage, until they put it inside a computer case, and connected it to a wall socket, which draws energy from the grid, which is powered by a dam, which was paid for by a government grant. What am I trying to say? You better enjoy this video, because it cost literally trillions of dollars to get to you.

Define: Art

Mon, 28 June 2010 23:23:00

How do you define Art, that is the question. According to some douche-bag critic (Whose name I shall not mention) "Art" is Photography, Cinematography, Writing, Drawing, and everything except anything to do with computers. I think he is wrong, so why don't we ask someone who actually knows what she is talking about? To whom am I referring? I am, of course, referring to the loving mistress that is Google, Inc. "The products of human creativity" Interesting. If I look around, all I see is human creativity and ingenuity. My house was designed using creativity, this cheap yo-yo was ripped off of a better yo-yo using cost saving creativity, this computer was built using loads of mathematical creativity. That horrible kidnapping I just heard about on television, used creativity to plan and execute. Hitler needed creativity to plan out what he hopped to be the eventual hegemony of the world by the Nazi Party. What am I trying to say? Is Google wrong? I say, no. If it involves creativity, it is art, which means nearly everything everyone has ever done, falls under that ruling. That is all.

Ubuntu Tip: Configuring Compaq TC1000 Touchscreen

Sun, 27 June 2010 20:33:59

I recently picked up a Compaq TC1000 convertible slate from SWAP (Well actually, we got four, but that's another story). Here is a proper xorg.conf for Ubuntu 10.04 for this tablet.

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier "pen"
        Driver "fpit"
        Option "AlwaysCore" "on"
        Option "Device" "/dev/ttyS0"
        Option "BaudRate" "19200"
        Option "MaximumXPosition" "8600" # "6250"
        Option "MaximumYPosition" "6485" # "4950"
        Option "MinimumXPosition" "154"
        Option "MinimumYPosition" "110"
        Option "InvertY"
        Option "TrackRandR"
        Option "SendCoreEvents"
        Option "ReportingMode" "Scaled"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
	Identifier	"Default Screen"
	DefaultDepth	24
	Option	"AddARGBGLXVisuals"	"True"
EndSection

Section "Module"
	Load	"glx"
EndSection

Section "Device"
	Identifier	"Default Device"
#	Driver	"nvidia"
	Driver  "nv"
	Option	"NoLogo"	"True"
	Option  "ConnectedMonitor"	"DFP"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier     "Generic Keyboard"
    Driver         "kbd"
    Option         "CoreKeyboard"
    Option         "XkbRules" "xorg"
    Option         "XkbModel" "pc105"
    Option         "XkbLayout" "gb"
    Option         "XkbOptions" "lv3:ralt_switch"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier     "Configured Mouse"
    Driver         "mouse"
    Option         "CorePointer"
    Option         "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
    Option         "Protocol" "ImPS/2"
    Option         "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
    Option         "Emulate3Buttons" "true"
EndSection

Section "ServerLayout"
    Identifier     "Default Layout"
    Screen         "Default Screen"
    InputDevice    "Generic Keyboard"
    InputDevice    "Configured Mouse"
    InputDevice    "pen"
EndSection

Section "Extensions"
    Option         "Composite" "Enable"
EndSection

All credit for this conf goes to charon79m over at UbuntuForums.org You'll also need the fpit drivers installed for the pen.

sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-input-fpit

The last part, which was not mentioned in charon79m's post, but was dreadfully important to me was the removal of setserial. If you tried to follow the FujitsuStylus page in the community documentation, with no success, you will, in fact, have to rollback any changes you made to setserial configuration files, or simply remove the setserial package.

sudo apt-get remove setserial

Once I removed setserial, everything fell into place and now all the hardware, including the digitizer (pen), work flawlessly!

Fixing Mercurial Push Error over SSH

Tue, 22 June 2010 16:54:42

This is an issue which arose when attempting to push an update to my mercurial server. For whatever reason, pushing through SSH did not work.

 
abe@zoey-desktop:~/abess$ hg push ssh://abeisgreat@192.168.1.254/srv/code/private/abess/
remote: abort: There is no Mercurial repository here (.hg not found)!
abort: no suitable response from remote hg!

The fix for this is simple. All you need to do is Add a second slash after the hostname of the machine. Like this.

 
abe@zoey-desktop:~/abess$ hg push ssh://abeisgreat@192.168.1.254//srv/code/private/abess/
pushing to ssh://abeisgreat@192.168.1.254//srv/code/private/abess/
searching for changes
1 changesets found
remote: adding changesets
remote: adding manifests
remote: adding file changes
remote: added 1 changesets with 6 changes to 6 files

As you can see, changing

 
ssh://abeisgreat@192.168.1.254/srv/code/private/abess/

 
ssh://abeisgreat@192.168.1.254//srv/code/private/abess/

Fixes all our issues! I would guess that

 
ssh://abeisgreat@192.168.1.254/../../srv/code/private/abess/

would also work. But solution one is easier.

Google says "Where we're going, we don't need codes!"

Fri, 11 June 2010 03:36:21

Alright fine, nobody at Google actually said that, however that does seem to be what they're doing. In regards specifically to their image searches. If you really think about it, it would be nearly impossible to write a chunk of code to sort out the 'filth' of an image search, and for that matter, it would be nearly impossible to write code to properly 'tag' images. I mean for the vast majority of things, it would be nearly impossible to write an algorithm to find or categorize them, except in the most general of sense. Then how does Google do it? They don't you do! Most of Google's best services rely on popularity to work properly. If no one used Google's search, then Google's search would work badly, and therefore no one would use it. The fact Google managed to overcome that initial hump is quite impressive. Once they did, however, they were given the ability to make many services which others could not, due simply to the other companies' smaller user base. This is most prominent in the Google Image Search, which I would guess is their third most used service, right behind the Google Web Search, and Google Adsense. As I mentioned earlier, images are horrifically hard to sort programatically. Because Google has this user base they managed to make a fairly functional image search. The way Google's Image Search works is simple, if somebody searchs for 'Red Car', then the code returns a bunch of red stuff, which is one of the few things we can do fairly easily and programmatically. Once the code returns a bunch of red stuff, the user is forced to look through red houses, red barns, red computers, red keyboard and mice, red stuffed animals, and everything else red. I don't know about you, but if I searched for 'Red Car' and got a bunch of red plush animals, I would be fairly annoyed. The search is not functioning properly, because only one person is using it. But if I, as that one user, go ahead and hunt through a few pages of red stuff, to find the one 'Red Car', and lets say I click on that image. Now Google knows, you search for 'Red Car', then you presumably found what you're looking for, because you clicked on the thumbnail, now next time someone searches for 'Red Car', that picture you clicked will be higher on the list. If we get 1 billion people, searching constantly, we grow quite a large database of information. That is the fundamental concept behind Google's searches. There is still times, however, where there is no overwhelming color, or no indication of the contents of an image based on the page it came from, so what did Google do to overcome this? They made a game. And no, I'm not kidding. One of Google's lesser known, but still important projects is the 'Image Labeler' Quite possibly the most boring game ever conceived. All you do is sit with a randomly matched partner and attempt to guess the same tags for a random image. Then you score points based on the complexity of the tag. The key to Google's success is not the fact that they have brilliant programmers (which they do), but the fact they come up with ideas like these so that they don't need to write code, because regardless of how well code is written the human brain will always be able to do things code can't. Google is able to offer quality services because they grasp that computers are not all powerful, And that's why Google says "Where we're going, we don't need codes!" (Remember, no one at Google actually ever said that, but I feel like somebody should)

Why I'll Never Buy an iPhone

Tue, 08 June 2010 18:55:08

I'll never buy an iPhone, because I can't write applications for it. "Why?", you say, "There are thousands of user created applications, what do you mean you can't write applications for it?" Let me clarify, I didn't say no one could write applications, I said I couldn't. "But why?", I hear you asking again. The answer is simple, because it's a huge investment. Chances are, you've heard that becoming an iPhone/iPod Touch developer is about $100 a year. Not too bad, right? Wrong. That is only to become a developer. If you read a bit more, you will find out that in order to use the iPhone devkit, which you just paid $100 for, you need an iMac. And seeing as you can't install OSX on anything except Apple hardware, that means you now have to spend $600 on a low-powered and over-priced Mac Mini. Truth be told, $700 is not too bad, I would probably pay that. Now we have our Mac and our iPhone devkit. What's next? Learn Objective-C. That doesn't sound too bad either, I mean I've been around the block, worked in C, Python, Perl, and AS2. O-C can't be too much different, right? Again, wrong. Let us take a quick peak at O-C.

@interface classname : superclassname {
    // instance variables
}
+classMethod1;
+(return_type)classMethod2;
+(return_type)classMethod3:(param1_type)param1_varName;
 
-(return_type)instanceMethod1:(param1_type)param1_varName :(param2_type)param2_varName;
-(return_type)instanceMethod2WithParameter:(param1_type)param1_varName andOtherParameter:(param2_type)param2_varName;
@end

I can read most programming languages, but I can not read that. It would probably take me 100 hours or so to get used to the O-C syntax. If I had taken those 100 hours and instead worked at, for example, Mcdonalds for $10 an hour, I would be $1000 richer, that's another $1000 I've lost. Thus far, I am out $1700. Let us say, I have now developed my first iPhone application. It's been polished to perfection and all that is left is for it to go through Apple's Quality Assurance (or whatever they call it). Seeing as there are no written rules about what can and cannot be written for iPhones, that means that a core concept of my application could be in violation and Apple could just say "No", then I would have spent $1700 and countless hours working on this application to only have it turned down. And that, my friends, is why I will never buy an iPhone.

Using python-indicate in 10.04

Mon, 03 May 2010 16:46:33

The indicator applet is awesome and it's fairly easy to configure to work with alot of applications. But what if we want to make our own applications which integrate with this new menu? Well if you're a python scripter like me, you're in luck. Lucid is packaged with a new python module called python-indicate. The best part about this new module is that there seems to be absolutely no documentation as to how it works, cool huh? I'm sure within a week or so the internet will be swarming with documentation, but as of this posting, it seems lacking. This whole thing started when I installed a me-menu applet (is applet the right word?) called gm-notify. Gm-notify is a simple program to check your gmail without the need for a desktop client. I checked out the source of this application and it is written in python and luckily, kind of commented. I was able to deduce a lot of the basic syntax for python-indicate from looking at this applet's source. And here is what I came up with. In order to make an applet to work with the indicator applet, we need to create three files. Lets say our application is called "hello_world", we need to create these files: /usr/share/indicators/messages/applications/hello_world /usr/share/applications/abe.desktop And our python script file, which can be wherever. In "/usr/share/indicators/messages/applications/hello_world" all we need is the location of the .desktop file for the application, which happens to be the second file. For our hello world, these would be the contents.

 
/usr/share/applications/hello_world.desktop

We also need to make the file which we just told it about. You will need to create /usr/share/applications/hello_world.desktop and put these contents inside it.

 
[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Test
Comment=My Test App!
Icon=applications-email-panel
Type=Application
Exec=LOCATION_OF_PYTHON_SCRIPT
StartupNotify=False
Terminal=false
NotShowIn=GNOME;

Make sure to change "LOCATION_OF_PYTHON_SCRIPT" to the path to your python file. I symbolic linked my to /usr/bin/hello_world.py so I only needed to say hello_world.py, but if you don't want to do that you will need to type out the whole path. At this point, you should log out and log back in to refresh the indicator applet and let it identify the new items. When you log back in, you should see a "Test" entry under the indicator applet, if you do not, double check permissions and file locations. Last thing we need to do is create our python file. This was fairly easy to create based on the gm-notify script, I wont go through and explain this all, it's fairly simple, and commented quite a bit, you should be able to work your way through it and get yourself started.

 
#!/usr/bin/env python
import indicate 
#python-indicate, the reason for this example
from twisted.internet import gtk2reactor
gtk2reactor.install()
from twisted.internet import reactor
#I don't really get this reactor stuff, I think
# it's just used as a keep-alive type thing
# but it might be doing more.

def serverClick(*args):
  #Function to be called when the main item in the indicator applet is clicked
  print args

def labelClick(*args):
  #Function to be called when an indicator in the indicator applet is clicked
  print args

#This is the addIndicator function, indicators are the sub items in 
#  the indicator applet. 
def addIndicator(indicate_str):
	#Creates a fresh indicator object
        new_indicator = indicate.Indicator()
	#Adds a name attribute
        new_indicator.set_property("name", indicate_str)
	#Adds a count attribute, shows (#) next to indicator
        new_indicator.set_property("count", "0")
	#Creates the label for the indicator
        new_indicator.label = indicate_str
	#Connects a click on the indicator to labelClick
        new_indicator.connect("user-display", labelClick)
	#Adds it to the dictionary of indicators
        indicators[indicate_str] = new_indicator
	#Displays the indicator
        indicators[indicate_str].show()

#Creates a new server object to show up in the indicator applet
server = indicate.indicate_server_ref_default()
#We need to set a type, I don't know what types exist, but as
# long as you have one it seems to work.
server.set_type("message.mail")
#This is .desktop in the applications folder
server.set_desktop_file("/usr/share/applications/hello_World.desktop")
#Connects the click on the main 'server' button to serverClick
server.connect("server-display", serverClick)
#Makes the indicators dict
indicators = {}

#runs the addIndicator Function, adds 'Hello World!' indicator
addIndicator('Hello World!')

#I have no idea what this does, like I said, i think it just keeps
# the program alive
reactor.run()

You should now be able to click on the "Test" icon in the indicator applet and it will show up a "Hello World (0)" indicator beneath it. Sorry if this is too brief for your taste. I would just like to get it our there to help people who just need a starting point, hopefully I'll make a more in depth post later.

Hak5's USB Rubber Ducky Unboxing (With Pictures!)

Tue, 27 April 2010 15:40:17

If you have been following the Hak5 podcast, you know that Darren Kitchen, the host, has been working on a super secret Rubber Ducky project for some time. Well about two weeks ago he announced that some developers would get development units, he described it as the ultimate crowd-sourcing. I got mine today in the mail, it included the Tweensy PCB, a rubber Duck, and a piece of paper with pinouts and some website URLs, here are some pictures I took of what I got. I was quite honored to receive this ducky and I will make sure to do my best to benefit the community as best I can. After I got over the awesomeness of this device, I started looking into development. I got some simple keyboard macros working. It opens up a terminal when I plug it into my desktop. Pointless but kind of cool. I tried to use the CTRL-ALT-DEL demo on a Win7 machine and it first had to install the driver, then it didn't work. Not sure why, I imagine it has to do with the way it identifies itself as a keyboard. Anyway, check out these pictures! I have already started compiling some simple keyboard macros and will be posting some programs and code in the near future.

Ubuntu Tip: Sharing Wifi over Ethernet

Mon, 26 April 2010 19:38:22

I don't know about you, but I like wireless Internet. Wifi works great for most occasions, but sometimes you just need a wire. I came into a scenario like this yesterday when I needed to access the FTP on my friend's Xbox. His house is completely wireless, no ethernet line anywhere. His classic Xbox, obviously, doesn't have Wifi. What do we do? My solution was to use his netbook as a bridge. Using the built in Wifi to connect to the network then use the ethernet port to connect to his Xbox. At first I thought this seemed difficult, I would need a DHCP server and a billion other packages to transform his netbook into a miniature router, right? False. I remembered reading a blog post somewhere (I would give him credit, if I remembered where I read it) about how to easily share your internet connection with Ubuntu. All you needed was a machine with a Wifi card, an ethernet port, and then you need a normal ethernet cable (not a crossover or anything) to connect to the other device. Luckily we found a short yellow cable at his house. Truth be told, finding the cable was the hardest part. I didn't really remember what to do, so I just opened the Network Connections dialog and started looking around. I knew it involved changing just one setting or two, but like I said, I wasn't really sure which settings. Once I was in the connections window, I decided to look in the properties for eth0, it may be eth1 or something else on your machine. For example on my desktop, the device was eth4, as I've had many different NICs over the years. To be clear, you are editing the settings for the device which will be attached to the other device, not the one which you are getting Internet through. On this machine, wlan0 is the wireless card and is connected to his wifi this entire time. We don't need to mess with that one at all. Once we are in the properties window for your ethernet device, we need to go over to the IPV4 settings tab. We need to change the 'Method' drop down to be 'Shared to other Computers', there are some other interesting options in there too, which I didn't care to explore. Once you have selected the bottom item in the drop down you can go ahead and click 'Apply...'. You will see the indicator applet in the notification area begin to twirl again If you don't see this you may need to either reconnect the ethernet cable at both ends or click on the applet and click 'Auto eth0', sometimes it didn't autoconnect properly. That's it! Your other machine should now have a valid IP which you can use for whatever, it will also be able to access the internet and do the fun things that go along with that. This tactic should work with every modern Ubuntu release and the client device can be anything with an ethernet port, including an Xbox, Wii, 360, or another computer.

UbuntuOne is Evolving

Fri, 23 April 2010 00:35:59

I've been using UbuntuOne for awhile now, I had it back during the initial private beta. To be honest, at first I wasn't totally sold. The client was glitchy, the servers were slow, and I seemed to get more *.u1conflict files than actual files. After about six months of little improvement, I was worried that U1 was going to fall by the wayside and become nothing more than a cheap gimmick that didn't work well and nobody used. I really stopped using U1 for several months while it was still fairly unstable. I only recently started using it again when an update came out that allow synchronizing folders outside of the '~/Ubuntu One' folder. This was of interest to me because I had recently been having an issue with some scripts which I often used which I wanted to have on all my machines. I also wanted to be able to add and edit scripts as I felt like it, for this, U1 seemed perfect. I borrowed something I saw in Crunchbang Linux (they were not the first one to do it, by a long shot) which was a ~/bin folder. Similar to /usr/bin, except it is user specific. All that is needed to create one of these in Ubuntu is to create the folder, then edit the '~/.bashrc' file to include '~/bin' in the PATH variable. Which is really just one line. If you're following along at home you can run this command to add the necessary lines to your .bashrc.

echo "export PATH=\${PATH}:/home/$USER/bin" >> ~/.bashrc

Once I had this set up I right clicked on ~/bin and selected "Synchronize with Ubuntu One". And guess what? It did. The folder was created on all my other machines and the files were synced up, I think it even preserved permissions, but don't quote me on that. After I setup this shared '~/bin' folder, I started using U1 more. I also set it up to synchronize my ~/Documents and ~/Pictures. I didn't bother doing ~/Music because it seems like it's going to sync music automatically with the U1 Music Store. I also didn't bother with Videos because of the folder's size and because of how little I used it. This was a great convenience, but I didn't think much of it. Another element I had attempted to use before in my first run with U1 was the contact syncing. I read in the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter that syncing with phones was aloud again, and I was a little surprised because I never knew it was aloud in the first place. But regardless I decided to set it up and see if it worked, it did. All the contacts on my HTC Touch synced and merged correctly with the U1 contacts. It was at this point when I started to see U1 doing things other synchronization services didn't. A couple of days after that I saw a video on the U1 blog showing off the new 'Public URL' feature available in Lucid. This is quite possibly the most useful thing in U1 for me. It seems like every day I need to show someone something or send someone something and it's too big for email or they don't have anything installed for me to send it to them. I'm really hoping they allow this for all forms of files, not just images, because it would be so convenient to have all my files on a server and when I need to give one away, just make a URL for it. I've seen other file syncing servers do things like this, but never quite as smooth as it looked in the video. The final element that made me admit U1 was great was the launch of the new Web UI today (or yesterday). I imagine they released it on the 22nd to line up with the 10.04RC release. The new Web UI, aside from looking damn sexy, also adds the Public URL feature. Just select a file, click More, click Publish File, and boom, you get a public URL. I tested it with some images and some python files and it worked flawlessly. The release of Lucid is definitely going to make U1better than ever. It almost seems that Karmic was simply a large scale beta (Mind you the U1 website still says beta, but then again, how many years was Gmail in beta?) and had they waited and released U1 in it's current state with Lucid and not packaged it with Karmic, it may have made a bigger splash in the community. U1 is definately getting to be more useful then I expected. If you haven't used U1 in awhile it's a good time to take another look at it, as it has really evolved and is a whole new suite of syncronization tools.

Apple Fanboys' Improper Accreditation Habit

Mon, 12 April 2010 13:52:06

To paraphrase some podcast which a colleague of mine was listening to today, "You see all these big companies changing to HTML5 for a device that will be a small percent of the market." This is a good example of an Apple Fanboy accrediting something to Apple, something which Apple had little or no impact on. HTML5 has been showing up well before the iPad was announced. Before the iPad, Youtube had already created an HTML5 beta. Before the iPad, DailyMotion has already adopted the HTML5 video tag. Before the iPad, Wikipedia had already switched to HTML5's video tag. These were all things that happened before the iPad. I keep hearing people comment that websites are switching to HTML5's video tag because of the iPad and that is simply a fallacy. I think it's worth noting that I am not using Fanboy in a derogatory sense. Apple Fanboy, Microsoft Humper, Linux Nut, they're all ways of saying someone is set in their ways. I think Apple Fanboys get the worst rap and it is at least partially deserved. You don't hear Microsoft Humpers screaming "Revolution!" at every SP release, do you? Linux Nuts are slightly worse when it comes to praising their OS than Microsoft Humpers, but I think it's clear Apple Fanboys are the worst when it comes to worshiping your company like it were a god. Let's get some examples, shall we? Apple is praised for their App Store. But the idea of a centralized repository of software has existed in the Linux world for years. Even earlier versions of Ubuntu had the "Add/Remove Software" (or was it Add/Remove Programs? I can never remember which is which) Add/Remove Software was a simple browser to download and install applications. It was preceded by Apt and various other package managers used in Linux and it was later replaced by the Software Center, but still the idea existed for awhile before Apple used it in the ipod. What about Time Machine, that revolutionary backup system by Apple? There is absolutely nothing special about Time Machine, the rBackup suite for Linux can do the same thing. rBackup and rRestore are utilities to automatically backup your files to a remote system and then it allows you to browse through previous backups and restore a single file or multiple files at once. There are also other more important examples, like the Mouse, which Apple is generally credited for making (by people who don't know better), when in fact it was developed by Xerox, then seen by Steve Jobs and recreated by Apple. Now to give Apple the benefit of the doubt. They did actually revolutionize the... uhm... Well I guess they made iTunes Store, that was pretty cool. To return to the original topic, HTML5 and the video tag specifically are going to be adopted and give flash a run for it's money, not because of the 0.001% of users running iPads, but because it's a superior technology. However I have the feeling, that this will be one more "Revolution" that will be retold as "One of Apple's Great Ideas."

Graphically Editing the Fstab

Fri, 26 March 2010 20:36:08

If you are new to Linux you may not know what your fstab is. The fstab is a configuration file found at /etc/fstab, which contains information about drives and partitions on your machine. More specifically it contains information on which drives to mount, when, and how. This is achieved by specifying parameters for the drives. I've always tried to avoid my fstab. The few times I have edited it, it hasn't ended well. Generally ending with my machine not booting. Today, when I picked up my new 1.5TB hdd I decided to try to conquer the fstab once more. I had a memory of seeing a GTK based application for editing the fstab. I couldn't remember the name, but I thought it might have been one of the new utilities that popped up when going from Jaunty to Karmic. To my relief I found that Karmic Koala was packaged with a utility, called pysdm, to add entries to the fstab. After checking it out, I found out, it works pretty darn smooth.

I was hoping to set my new drive (/dev/sdb1/) to automatically mount and I would also like it to be mountable or unmountable by any user. I know these things were all doable via fstab. I don't have a clue how I would add these into the fstab, and thanks to pysdm, I don't need to learn. Pysdm can be launched via the terminal by typing 'pysdm' or it can be launched via the System > Administration > Storage Device Manager.

Once Pysdm has launched it has a list of drives and partitions. If you click down the list, you will find most partitions have configuration information on them. I did have a partition without configuration data on sda, sda3 did not have configuration information because I was forced to comment out that partition's line in fstab a few months back, because for whatever reason it was keeping my machine from booting. Under the sdb tree, I had my sdb1 partition, which I created earlier using gparted. This drive had no configuration information, I was asked if I wanted to create an entry for this partition. I accepted and pysdm went ahead and created an entry in the fstab for this drive. Once the entry was created I clicked the "Assistant" button (which I feel to be a misleading name). This will pop up a "Select Options" dialog with loads of options for your drive. I made sure the second and third boxes were checked on the first tab, then I left the other tab's configuration alone. I then clicked "Ok" and then clicked "Apply" on the main window.

After this, I restarted, and almost magically, my drive mounted. I also tested unmounting the drive, which also worked perfectly. All in all I was pleased with this utility. It seemed quick and stable and fairly easy to use. Most importantly, it protected me from myself and did it's job perfectly. It's worth noting that a search for pysdm on google will find mostly outdated pages, which originally discouraged me from using it, but it 's still actively developed, just all the screenshots seem to be out of date.

Youtube without Youtube.com

Thu, 18 March 2010 01:28:29

Anyone who has had a discussion about Youtube.com with me knows that I am not a huge fan of Youtube.com. I enjoy some of the user generated content, but I dislike the amount of pirated content currently on Youtube.com and I dislike their lack of willingness to do anything about it. Technically, Youtube.com seems to be a fine site, as long as you have an interest in uploading videos. Their interface was designed to make it easy for users to upload content. For someone like me, the interface is cluttered with tools which I don't use and more importantly, don't care about. All I would like to do is subscribe to people, get alerted when they upload new videos, and have a simple interface for managing my subscriptions. Then the question becomes, how do you to get to Youtube's content without using Youtube.com?

My first idea was quite basic, use RSS feeds provided by Youtube.com to, essentially, turn each user into a podcast, which I could watch however I choose. A quick glance around Youtube.com will not yield much in the way of RSS feeds. This is for good reason. If a user is able to both "Subscribe" and "Subscribe via RSS", chances are it would cause a good bit of confusion for users. Also if users were given the ability to subscribe via RSS, Youtube.com would lose all revenue from the videos because their ads would not be viewed. Just because something is not shown, however, does not mean it is not there. A google search dug up this page. About half way down this page there is a "Users" section, which explains that every user has an RSS podcasting feed. Great news, no?

Once this was figured out, I went about finding a podcast reader to take care of downloading new videos. Several linux podcast clients exist, but one in specific stood out, Gpodder. Gpodder allows you to not only track podcasts using a simple and effective interface, but it lets you actually search for Youtube.com users and subscribe to their feeds through their lovely and simplistic GTK interface. After you have subscribed, gPodder will download all the new videos from that user! I only watch 5-10 youtubers, therefore it only took me 30 seconds or so to subscribe to everyone using gPodder. The other nice thing about gPodder over the Youtube.com interface is that you can mix in your other podcasts which aren't from Youtube. For example, I have four Youtube feeds and one from Revision3.com set up. Another feature of gPodder is the ability to sync your feeds between computers. It will even make sure you don't download the same video in two locations if you do not choose to. GPodder also offers basic podcast client features like syncing to portable devices. If you're wondering, you can still view all the information about the Youtube video including rating, number of views, description, and yes, even a thumbnail.

GPodder makes watching Youtube drastically less painful. The only disadvantage is that you must download all videos before watching them. Which for browsing Youtube would be very annoying, but I find for watching subscriptions it works fine. Most of my videos get automatically downloaded before I get a chance to watch them which means I don't have to worry about downloading when I want to watch them. It also means that I don't have to worry about slow Internet speeds or for that matter, having an Internet connection period, because they are already saved. GPodder also has the ability to automatically delete videos after a number of days, so if you are concerned about disk space, that is probably something you'd want to enable.

Gpodder is availible for Windows, Mac, Linux, and FreeBSD. It is also in the Ubuntu repos or you can download it here.

Hello World!

Mon, 15 March 2010 00:45:37

I bet you're wondering what HighQualityInternetCorn.com (or HQIC, for short) is. It is a blog. Which is not about corn in the slightest. This is a blog about Comic Books, Linux, and Video Games. HQIC is not a news site, although I will often be discussing current issues. It is in fact an opinionated blog. Which means, I will be discussing items of interest and letting you know how I feel about them. Now, I know what you,re thinking "Why do I care how you feel about something?" And to that I respond, you probably don,t. I think Blogs are useful because they allow a large number of people to express their viewpoints in great detail. From this large selection of opinions the reader can then form an opinion of their own based on what he or she has read. For example, I may post an entry discussing linux podcast clients, comparing them, and eventually revealing which is my favorite. (It,s gPodder, by the way). This information is not useful to you unless one day you are asked to answer a series of random questions about me, but I kind of doubt that that will ever happen. However I feel the information I would be providing in the "Compare and Contrast" may potentially be of use. Another thing I will be writing about will be fixes for obscure Linux problems. Things like changing the language on GDM, or something. These wont be as opinionated, they will simply be small walkthroughs on how to accomplish a simple task. I will post about whatever I choose, it may or may not be interesting to you. Which is why we have RSS, you can pick and choose. (Speaking of which, the rss feed will be here via FeedBurner) Anyway, I will post a more formal "Hello" in a week or so when the engine is done. I am typing this into a SQL prompt at the moment. So disregard spelling errors and such.