ellipsys

Google Chrome for Linux - Finally!

nospam@example.com (Marcus Friedman) — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 20:00:00 -0800

Yes, I know it’s a Beta release, but…

We all know that “Beta” has a special meaning for Google, and besides…
Google’s Beta products and services are usually quite better than others that claim to be stable or mature.

On January of this year, I shared with you some facts that show that it takes Google no less than a year since it releases a new product for Windows to having a version of the same product running on Linux (see “Google, are we second-class citizens?“). The 1.0 release was launched on December 11th 2008. 362 days later, Linux and OS X users finally have a native beta for their respective platforms.

I’ve tried it on Debian Lenny, and I have to say that I’m really pleased and that it runs wonderfully. So, for those of you that are done with Firefox’s bloat and subpar performance, now you have the choice to run a modern, lightweight, reliable and extremely fast open source web browser.

The only bad news is that we’re still second-class citizens to Google, and that doesn’t seem likely to change in the near future. Now that we have Chrome… where’s the Google Talk client for Linux? 4 years and counting…

How (not) to answer technical questions (or "the cow riddle")

nospam@example.com (Marcus Friedman) — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 20:00:00 -0700

Sometimes, asking a question can be a big challenge. Because even if your question is very clear and precise, there’s always someone that will get it wrong. Perhaps that would be something to expect in fields like fine arts or philosophy, where so many things are open to interpretations and debate. But when it comes to highly technical matters, it’s amusing to see all the ways that things can go wrong after a question has been asked.

How many time have you asked a technical question on a forum or newsgroup, and have only received lots of useless, clueless, wrong or even arrogant answers?

Obviously, human beings can’t always provide a right answer to a given question, and that’s something we have to live with. But nonetheless I wonder: what’s the point in giving an answer when...

you’re not answering the question that was asked
your answer is clearly not helpful (and you would have noticed that if you had thought for a minute before answering)
you really don’t know what the answer is (and maybe you even know that you don’t know)
you don’t have real world experience on the subject (and no, having a friend who knows, or having read a paper on the subject is not equal to having real experience)
you’re not qualified for answering (for example, because a question is about medieval history, and you happen to be a car mechanic who hasn’t even studied history as a hobby)

So let’s see how a clear, simple, precise question can be answered in every possible wrong way.

Fair warning

This article contains some slang and expressions that might make some people feel uncomfortable. You’ll also find a good deal of sarcasm. So if that’s not ok with you, please don’t read it (or at least don’t complain about it after having been warned)

© 2008-09 by Marcus Friedman - All rights reserved [ 33fb10b7 - ba27c3ed ]
Continue reading "How (not) to answer technical questions (or "the cow riddle")"

A good resource for system administrators and IT professionals

nospam@example.com (Marcus Friedman) — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 20:00:00 -0700

In case you’ve missed it (even when the chances of that happening are low), there’s a new website for system administrators and IT professionals that you’ll probably find useful. Server Fault was launched on April 2009 as a private beta, and went into an open beta on May 2009.

Basically, Server Fault is a place where system administrators can ask questions and get answers from peers willing to share their expertise. It uses OpenID, so if you already have for example a Google, Yahoo or Technorati account, you can use those credentials for authentication.

The website implements an interesting feature called reputation, which is a scoring system similar to those used in some bulletin boards.

There are literally thousands of questions that have already been asked (and answered), which indicates that the site’s popularity is quite good. If you take a look around, you’ll find very different kind of questions: from the most basic you can think of, to the extremely specific or complex ones.

From time to time you’ll also come across some question that is totally irrelevant to systems administration, but that’s something that cannot be avoided (anyway, the voting mechanisms offered by the website help a lot to separate the wheat from the chaff).

Asking a question is a different story. Sometimes you can be lucky and get pretty good and clever answers. And some times the only thing you’ll get will be useless ones. Or even none at all.

I’ve been testing Server Fault by submitting some tough technical questions, and while sometimes I got really good answers or hints on how to solve specific issues, I also got quite a lot of irrelevant replies. But even in those cases, I’ve found the overall experience quite amusing.

As with any other online resource, this one certainly can’t replace the professional advice you could get from an expert on a given field. But I think it’s a good place for sharing knowledge amongst peers.

How to protect your PDF files with open source tools

nospam@example.com (Marcus Friedman) — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 20:00:00 -0700

When you need to distribute documents in PDF format, you’ll probably want to protect them. If you are working on Mac OS X (or Windows) and you have Adobe Acrobat, that can be done quite easily.

But if you’re running Linux on your desktop —or even if you’re using Windows or a Mac and don’t want to use proprietary programs—, there are free tools that will let you protect your files by adding encryption, passwords and restrictions.

One of those tools is pdftk (the pdf toolkit). On Debian and Ubuntu, pdftk is already present in the official repositories, so all you have to do to install it is:

apt-get install pdftk

In the product’s website you’ll also find binary packages for FreeBSD, Mac OS X and Windows.

Here are some examples that show you how to use the program:

Encrypt a PDF using 128-Bit Strength (the default) and withhold all permissions:
pdftk mydoc.pdf output mydoc.128.pdf owner_pw foopass
Same as above, except that a password is required to open the PDF:
pdftk mydoc.pdf output mydoc.128.pdf owner_pw foo user_pw baz
Same as above, except that printing is allowed (after the PDF has been opened):
pdftk mydoc.pdf output mydoc.128.pdf owner_pw foo user_pw baz allow printing

Besides the security functions, pdftk has many more features that you might find useful too, including the ability to merge, split and rotate PDF documents, or applying watermarks.

Retrogaming: emulating a ZX Spectrum with open source tools

nospam@example.com (Marcus Friedman) — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 20:00:00 -0700

The Sinclair ZX Spectrum was one of the most popular home computers during the 80s (along with the Atari 800XL, the Amstrad CPC series and of course the Commodore 64, the best-selling single personal computer model of all time). For those who have ever owned a Speccy, this machine needs no further introduction.

Almost 25 years have passed since the golden era of home computers, and it seems like an eternity in these days of multi-core, multi-gigahertz CPUs, when even a cheap mobile phone is way more powerful than any of those machines from the eighties.

For those of you who would like to revive those old times, today we’ll take a look at the best open source ZX Spectrum emulator (which you’ll be able to run on Linux, BSDs, Mac OS X, Windows and many other platforms, including modern game consoles like the PSP and the Nintendo Wii).

© 2008-09 by Marcus Friedman - All rights reserved [ 33fb10b7 - 22fd4412 ]
Continue reading "Retrogaming: emulating a ZX Spectrum with open source tools"

How to manage your video collection with open source tools

nospam@example.com (Marcus Friedman) — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 20:00:00 -0700

When you have a large movie collection, keeping track of it can become troublesome. Many times you’ll want to watch a movie again, but searching through a huge set of DVDs in order to find it can take a lot of time. Maybe you lent that movie to a friend, then forgot about it, and now you wonder why is it that you can’t find it. Sometimes you won’t even remember the title of the film you’re looking for, but you can remember who was its director, or the name of the leading actor. But then again, conducting a manual search by directors’ names can be quite difficult.

Fortunately, there are many open source programs that can help you to catalog your movies and manage your collection with ease. Building your catalog takes time, specially if you have a large collection, but in the long run it’s time well spent. And after you’re done, you’ll be able to search your catalog in almost any way you can think of (by title, by genre, by cast or crew, by year, etc.) and find a movie instantly.

Most of the video collection managers are desktop-based applications. However, we’ll focus on a web-based product, which can be a bit more difficult to set up than a desktop program, but it has some important advantages, like being a platform independent solution and allowing you to browse and manage your collection anywhere.

Broadcatching with open source tools

nospam@example.com (Marcus Friedman) — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 20:00:00 -0700

Broadcatching can be defined as the downloading of digital content that has been made available over the Internet through RSS feeds. Instead of having to spend time visiting multiple websites to find the contents that you want to download, you just need to find a relevant RSS feed and add it to your broadcatching client. The program will monitor the feed, and when it finds new contents it will let you know, allowing you to start new downloads with a single click. You can even tell the broadcatching client to download new contents for you as they become available, so the whole process becomes fully automated.

If you want to know how to take advantage of broadcatching by using open source programs (on Linux, Mac OS X or Windows), please read on.

Please note that downloading copyrighted television broadcasts is not considered legal in some countries or states. The purpose of this article is to give you an overview of some open source tools available for broadcatching. It is up to the readers to decide if or how they should use such tools.

How to download anything you need using open source tools

nospam@example.com (Marcus Friedman) — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 18:00:00 -0700

Are you tired of searching endlessly for the files you want to download? Are you sick of waiting at the direct download sites for the files to start downloading? Have you ever spent hours downloading a video, only to find that its quality was rather poor, or that it was a fake? Have you ever wanted to be able to download videos from sites like YouTube, Megavideo or similar ones, instead of having to watch them with their embedded Flash players? If you answered “yes” to any of those questions, then read on.

Today we’ll talk about some pretty cool programs designed for making the find-and-download process as quick and painless as possible. Most of the programs we’ll mention are multiplatform, meaning that you’ll be able to use them not only on Linux but also on Mac OS X, Windows and may be other platforms too.

This article is organized in four sections:

Direct downloads from one-click hosting servers
Peer-to-peer file sharing using BitTorrent
Downloading streaming contents
Broadcatching (a brief introduction, with a full article on the subject coming soon)

File sharing with open source tools - An introduction

nospam@example.com (Marcus Friedman) — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 16:00:00 -0700

This article provides a general introduction on popular file sharing methods, comparing them and weighing their pros and cons.

Those who are already familiar with this subject can skip this article and go to the next one, where we’ll look into specific open source programs that can be used for downloading large files (see How to download anything you need using open source tools).

Although there are lots of ways for downloading large files efficiently, let’s focus on two of the most usual approaches:

Direct downloads
Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks

Now let’s see how they work, and what are strengths and weaknesses.