November 25, 2009
Moved to the Latest Kubuntu
I installed Kubuntu 9.10 on my computer. And I have to say, I'm finally back to being satisfied with Linux.
- I had problems with the video drivers, which were making using my computer irritating.
- And the flash video works painlessly on all sites I've been to, whereas it was a bit broken before
- Adding MP3 support and the like happens smoothly at the beginning, a real joy!
Posted by ma at 5:24 PM | TrackBack
English Shellcode
This is crazy! Have a look at the paper:
http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~sam/ccs243-mason.pdf
English Shellcode, by Joshua Mason, Sam Small Fabian Monrose and Greg MacManus shows how you can encode a malicious payload into spam-looking, but valid, English prose.
Whitelisting just got more difficult...
Posted by ma at 5:21 PM | TrackBack
November 9, 2009
Upgraded to Kubuntu 9.10
Yes, I have made the upgrade! I'm glad I did. All these annoying video card glitches are gone, and my flash player works for Colbert Nation! It was fairly simple to set up the flash and MP3 support too! Its a nice step forward!
Posted by ma at 7:25 PM | TrackBack
Alphanumeric Shellcode
I'm surprised that this didn't make the news... some guys came up with alphanumeric shellcode on ARM processors. That means that some filters can be bypassed. So some buffer overflows that were thought as safe are not exploitable.
If you're really interested in the technical details, its there.
Posted by ma at 7:22 PM | TrackBack
August 26, 2009
Troubleshooting Flowchart
Simple generic-purpose flowchart on how to get something to work on any computer program, courtesy of XKCD.
Posted by ma at 10:45 AM | TrackBack
July 21, 2009
Interesting Security Solution
So obvious, yet I didn't think about it first!
Posted by ma at 4:49 PM | TrackBack
July 15, 2009
Flow-based packet switching
Very interesting article. The concept is simple, it saves enormous power and would allow data centers to actually shrink in size!
Posted by ma at 11:53 AM | TrackBack
May 24, 2009
Ubuntu for Windows Power Users
A nice article for new converts to Linux on Tom's Hardware
Posted by ma at 7:18 PM | TrackBack
May 23, 2009
Kubuntu 9.04
I finally go around to install the latest Kubuntu on my new laptop. Finally, my 64-bit hardware is going to be used to its full potential!!!
But what a pain it has been. The audio didn't work 100% out of the box, meaning that it would work in Amarok, but not with flash and VLC. I finally got it to work, but then the microphone didn't work... turns out that I needed to jack up the alsa mixer settings.
Here are the links to the solutions, just in case it helps you :)
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1073884
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1130384
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1055591
Posted by ma at 10:04 PM | TrackBack
February 12, 2009
Facebook Privacy Settings
10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know
Nothing to add. Read, do. :)
Posted by ma at 7:17 PM | TrackBack
December 31, 2008
Creating a Fake CA Certificate
I have to say, beautiful work...
MD5 considered harmful today
The authors describe how they were able to create a CA certificate that would be trusted by a browser. it involves smartly crafted MD5 collision attacks. Some of the work is novel, as in how they came up with the collision. Other part is out of 'sheer luck' in a sense. All it took was a CA that was dumb enough to use MD5 AND sequential serial numbers, both of which should be easily removed from tomorrow onwards. Still, nice and solid work.
Its been some time that I've enjoyed reading a scientific article...
Edited to add:
The problem is 'fixed', at least for Verisign.
Posted by ma at 3:33 PM | TrackBack
June 26, 2008
The OpenMoko Cellphone is Out
This is pretty neat... the world's first open source cellphone is finally released to the public.
The site is suffering from the slashdotting right now, but when that is done, please go to OpenMoko.
Its a 400$ cellphone that has open hardware specifications, an open source software stack, and pretty neat features... Think about it... even wi-fi!
We'll have to wait and see what's the cost going to be like in India. If my offer letter is good, I might, might might have enough money for one. Am I being vain and materialistic?
Maybe... but my main desire is to support that initiative. The Open Source concept is rocking the world for the better but it isn't sheltered from economic realities...
I want to see this thing sold out, and teach a lesson to the industry: give us the phones we users want, not those that the suits at Rogers, Bell, AT&T, etc. want.
Posted by ma at 2:05 PM | TrackBack
April 12, 2008
Fighting Global Warming, One Computer at a Time
I found this little application and you must use it!
Its called LocalCooling and it enables a somewhat decent power saving scheme. You can do the same with the Configuration Panel or Dell Quickset, etc.
But where it does differently is that it tells you how much electricity you are sucking up by using your computer and keeps statistics on how much power you're saving using it. It is an eye opener, and it has a feel-good side to it.
Oh, and it doesn't annoy me like QuickSet does...
So, please install this on your machine and save saving electricty, money, and emissions!
Posted by ma at 10:51 AM | TrackBack
October 1, 2007
Getting More Out of Your Laptop's Battery
This is a useful read. It shows how you can use Intel's built-in power management in Windows XP to have more out of your battery!
Posted by ma at 11:10 AM | TrackBack
June 21, 2007
Now a Patent Examiner (of sorts)
I've just registered for the Peer to Patent initiative, allowing the public to examine patent claims. You know how much I don't like software patents, so it will be my pleasure to help investigating these claims while I still have access to the wealth of scientific databases that Concordia lets me reach.
Posted by ma at 3:41 PM | TrackBack
May 24, 2007
ps to emf howto
So, I'm working on my thesis presentation powerpoint. Putting a screenshot of my graphs (generated by udg) is not a great option when you resize.
The conversion from ps look ugly in powerpoint too, so that's not a winner.
BUT, there is something to be done.
Here' how I'm doing it:
1- Use ps2pdf to convert the file to pdf format
2- Use PDFFly to convert to SVG
3- Use a text editor to remove the text and line at the bottom (easily distinguised by the fact that they are text boxes of one character, preceded by a bunch of polyline)
4- Double-check in IE that it looks good (Firefox's rendering is flawed on that one. Oh, and you need Adobe's SVG Plugin)
5- Open in Vision, and save as emf
6- Put the emf file in powerpoint. That's it!
Posted by ma at 11:16 PM | TrackBack
February 27, 2007
Christian-Themed Linux
Hello,
I find this quite cute... and I might even use the next version. On the other hand, I feel they're pushing it a bit far... a Christian theme for Mozilla???
Anyway, have a look at them:
Ichthux, based on Kubuntu
Ubuntu Christian Edition, based on Ubuntu.
They have similar, although a bit different packages. As far as I read, Ichtux has a bit more pre-installed stuff, but I guess I'd have to try out.
Posted by ma at 6:37 PM | TrackBack
December 29, 2006
Why I'm Staying Clear From Vista
The new Windows operating systems has "bad" written all over it.
You know my position against DRM, and it looks like Windows Vista is designed for it!
Read that great article by Gutmann
Oh, and it looks like it might break your applications too...
Well, backward compatibility is always a problem, but still... there's that point that make it too much.
I love the comments on blogs that say stuff like "I've been doing this for years with KDE". My ubuntu system uses Gnome, so I'm not too familiar with KDE, but I'm taking it as fact when its repeated so much all over the place.
Posted by ma at 6:20 PM | TrackBack
December 19, 2006
PHP Security Problems
Hmm... not giving me a happy feeling. So PHP won't be on top of my list when its time to learn a webapp-related language.
And Starfire isn't out yet... :(
Posted by ma at 4:08 PM | TrackBack
December 5, 2006
Ubuntu Powa!
oooooooooooooh yeah baby!
Ubuntu Linux 6.10 is on my laptop as I type this and I looooooooooove it.
It installed smoothly and it has not caused me any pain after the install for configuration.
Directly after install, I used the install CD to add a very important package: Network Manager.
Once this was installed, it automatically detected my wlans and configured my wireless networking in a snap... I just had to type in my password.
Now, I also used automatix in order to install the DVD libraries and all those very useful software packages too. Its a step along the way of having dev-buntu ;)
It took me only a few hours to have everything I wanted (and more), compared to the half a day or full day of before. Oh, and it was mostly automatized, so I didn't have to actually DO anything, really. Yay!
Posted by ma at 8:04 AM | TrackBack
November 7, 2006
PST 2006
From October 30th to November 1st, I attended a conference: Privacy, Security, Trust, in Markham. The proceedings are not online just yet, but they eventually will. Both CCECE and PST aren't online yet... that's annoying!
I presented a paper there, which went well. Security Hardening of Open-Source Software. We described an onthology based on security engineering, defined 'security hardening' and showed examples in C. There were no hard questions or anything like that.
There were a few interesting things that I saw:
Sushil Jajodia presented the fruits of his team's research in a tool named CAULDRON, which maps your network's vulnerabilities, draws attack graphs to your crown jewels, and correlates Snort information with this attack graph. Very useful for any sysadmin. I don't know if it is publicly available though.
Brian O'Higgins presented the software sold by Third Brigade. Deep packet inspection in a driver, that works with a few rules that just WORK. Looks sweet too!
The paper of Horkoff et all, "Analyzing Trust in Technology Strategies" is one of the few "Trust" papers that won't put me to sleep by the end of the first page.
Folkerts and Bischof, in "A Comparison of Reputation-based Trust Systems" come up with metrics and a framework to evaluate reputation systems. I didn't read the paper through, but it looks like a turning point in the field.
Alam et al. propose a new form of access control, Constraint-based RBAC (CRBAC), targeted to service-oriented architectures. They developed a language to specify access constraints (as far as I understand) on top of classical RBAC. It allows for partial inheritance of rights too.
Kong et al. propose protected data paths by allowing the kernel to keep a cache on the behalf of the application, so that the application is not able to access the data itself.
One of the neat things I discovered is the Quero toolbar. I installed it on IE7. Its a convenient search toolbar, and it has an integrated ad blocker. I can get the same in Firefox, but its good to know I can have it in IE too. It allows to replace the standard address bar of IE7 so that there is no visual duplication between IE7 functionality and the toolbar. I like it!
I still need to sift through many papers... will keep on updating this page as I go along
P.S. some presenters very very boring... its almost shameful.
Posted by ma at 6:31 PM | TrackBack
October 12, 2006
The 10 Commandments of C Programmer
If you know how to code, read it, and practice it!
THE TEN COMMANDMENTS FOR C PROGRAMMERS (ANNOTATED EDITION), BY HENRY SPENCER
Posted by ma at 7:20 PM | TrackBack
October 8, 2006
Geek Time! Family Time!
So, its the Canadian thanksgiving weekend!
I had my parents in town... but you'd think God would let that in the way of a few adventures? Think again!
The summary:
- some progress in my research, yet my prof goes unrealistic again
- campus devotional goes great!
- help a guy move in a... convicting... way
- got a hold of a sister in Lausanne on Skype. Its been a while I was trying to encourage her.
- music, music, music!
- movies: Syriana, Return of the Street Fighter, Animatrix
- first lab monitoring time goes as a breeze
- API madness
Before I get started with the rest of the week, let me say I had a good time for the Thanksgiving holiday.
My folks and I had a good meal on Saturday. My mom went to church with me and we had a great buffet at Casa Corfu afterwards. Monday was a day off, and I helped a sister who's trying to get wireless internet in her business, and was well thanked for my efforts by a nice meal!
On Tuesday, I went with my mom to the Botanical Gardens' China Garden. They have, every year, 'La Magie des Lanternes', chinese lanterns all over the place, built around a given theme. This year was celebration. I'll put the pics online soon enough.
some progress in my research, yet my prof goes unrealistic again
So, I managed to work a bit with my colleague and we hammered down the biggest parts of that paper ok at this point. Obviously, we could cut 4 pages of extra English if we really got down to it, but that's not the focus now. At our weekly meeting with our supervisor, we had once more the whole argument on how we'd specify what we had to specify, although I thought we agreed on that months ago. No big change in the end, so things are still OK.The thing is... he wants more examples done by next week. Nevermind the fact that I need to actually research that stuff, implement it, test it, refactor it, document it, convert it, build a performance benchmark around it, etc.
The other thing he requested will be relatively easy to do, although its just gonna be time consuming.
campus devotional goes great!
So, one brother shared one of his quiet times, and we did a game to discover each other. We had to write down a secret about ourselves on a piece of paper, fold it, and put it in a basket. Then, we all picked a name, and we had to guess who the person behind the secret was. Lots of laughter, and nice discoveries. Also, we had a birthday cake ready for one sister's birthday.help a guy move in a... convicting... way
Someone I met a long time ago. He calls me and asks for some last-minute help packing. It should be quick, he says, because its just a room... just need to pack his books.I swore when I entered the room. A tiny space, covered with books, newspapers, and whatever else.
And there were a lot of books. Mostly Bibles. In all translations, in multiple copies. And it was fullllllllllllllllllllll of it!
Suffice to say that I left feeling my hands so dirty that I didn't want to open my apartment door with them and that I really really want to have a clean room and household now. As much as it is sad to say, I just don't want to be like THAT nor anywhere close to it. I know it sounds like judgment, but it really is discernment.
got a hold of a sister in Lausanne on Skype. Its been a while I was trying to encourage her
Won't say too much of it. I just find it neat that God has got me there first, so that I can be of some use to her (I hope). Maybe He wants to take our friendship for great purposes? After all, the world is a small place, and God doesn't see our role to play in it as a small one.music, music, music!
Listened to a mix and match of the Fulda Symphony Orchestra. There are some legal CDs on the web. I'll keep you posted with that I liked.movies: Syriana, Return of the Street Fighter, Animatrix After the devo, we watched a part of Animatrix. I like that DVD so much! You can learn the history behind the Matrix. I watched another tidbit of Return of the Street Fighter, which is in the public domain now. Sometimes, I just need some gore.
For my brain, with my parents, I watched Syriana, from George Clooney. Very good movie about how the US' thirst for oil is messing up the world, with political plots left and right. A lot of mixed storylines make it very interesting.
first lab monitoring time goes as a breeze
So, this week, I had my first lab monitoring time. I actually stuck in 2 sessions, because I never really stepped in the labs before and I needed to figure out how things would work out.So I discussed a few things with a colleague, and looked upon my dear friend, sourceforge for a solution. What did I find?
Super SSH!!! Ohhhhhh yeaaaaaaaah, that's the stuff!
Now, let me give you a hint of the problem: we have about 20 computers in that room, and they all need to be configured for our students. Do I look like a guy who'd like to log into each of them to type the same boring commands?
No! My lab monitoring time is all about being paid extra to do my work... oh, and helping the students. That too
;) (kidding). But, in my non-student-helping-time, I want to learn about tools and technologies that make my resumé more attractive, read my Bible, catch up on the 10'000 things I got to do in my life. Typing the same commands 20 times over isn't on that list, you'll notice.
What's when sssh comes in handy. In no time, I was able to configure all the computers into a farm, create a SSH identity key for automatic authentication, and use sssh to configure all the computers to accept my connections WITHOUT asking for a password. OOOOOOOOOH yeah!
Thats in my toolbox. Can you tell my geek side is happy?
API madness I had some compiling issues with AFC and thus decided to transition to uthash after looking at some APIs. I transitioned one module fine, but the second was just causing me too many problems, so I rolled back to AFC and started working a bit on the code to fix it to my liking. That's neat about Open Source software. Maybe I'll end up contributing a lot of things to that project, who knows?
Posted by ma at 8:39 PM | TrackBack
October 3, 2006
Bluetooth Works!
I purchased a Motorolla H 700 on Ebay... it was a good deal overall.
I was struggling to use it on my PC however. When I connected, it was doing some annoying noise and the voice was not carrying through. I read Skype forum posts, googled... nothing!
Today, I tried another Google search, found back an old article I read already, then bothered looking at the user comments. I saw this thing about pressing the button after connecting by the PC. It wasn't for my model, but I tried it anyway... and it worked!
I'm now able to use my headset on Skype without using Vitaero, and record voice. The latter is actually the reason why I got the device in the first place, as I want to record sermons and put them on the web.
Two words for the non-techies: Happy Geek.
Posted by ma at 6:02 PM | TrackBack
June 13, 2006
Using Remote Desktop with SSH Port Forwarding
I helped a buddy yesterday to connect to his machine at home while the Concordia network didn't allow the remote connection. Here's the short howto he wrote for me to publish.
Please note that the solution assumes that Cygwin is installed with the X server.
I was trying to connect to my computer at home from office. The strange thing
about our office is that we have a secure lab, therefore not so many things are
possible here. However, this gets us to do intresting things which are far
better than those that are done outside the lab.
do we know about Remote Desktop Connection?? Of course we do. the crappiest
desktop connection there is. Since it is crappy, we were not able to connect
from our secure lab to the desktop. Why?? Because when we bound the ports of
the the machine at home to the ports of the machine in the lab by(3389 and 80
are the posrts that Remote Desktop connection listens to):
ssh -L 3389:localhost:3389 -L 80:localhost:80 (doctored to remove the remote IP of the remote host)
We ran into a problem. The remote desktop Connection does not allow you to
connect to yourself. BUMMER!!!!!!!!!!!!
What did we do??
We came up with the solution on the website www.rdesktop.org. Basically, the
same as Remote desktop connection but better. The difference in that you can
connect to yourself. The graphic is bad. Since you are on X-server. But what
the heck!!
And...We are using SSH.. which is secure. Not your everyday remote Desktop
connection which is "who knows what"!!!
Sia
Long live the opensource.
Posted by ma at 1:33 PM | TrackBack
June 11, 2006
Gah!
I'm feeling overwhelmed.
The conference on the Da Vinci Code that I'm presenting is next Friday. I had quite a bit of stress related to getting the room, mostly because of a slow communication link (email) with my sponsor for the room. Now, it is booked, but there is an issue outstanding.
Other than that...
I'll put work aside... its been special this week.
On Monday, besides work, I go spend time with the elderly in that retirement hospital (best translation I could guess). We had fun. We were in the outside garden this time around. The guy playing the piano had his hat land on the roof that covers the meeting place of the garden... and I'm the one who had to go get it. Oh, and I also tripped over the power cord of his keyboard. DOH! Anyway, the evening went smoothly.
Once that was done, I helped my brand new sister (she was baptized the sunday just before! Yay!!!!!!!!!!!!) with her French and her knowledge of Canadian history. After that, I had to update my finances tracking so that we could settle the accounts between roomates. My bed welcomed me.
Tuesday was the same as usual. I helped my roomate with his computer problems. That was a shock surgery. We took his case from his old computer and that's pretty much it! We replaced the motherboard and the power supply. The difficult thing was to get the two CD and DVD players connected because of their master/slave configuration (fun cable twisting). I had to spend quite a bit of time debugging the hardware, but it is (mostly) done. Windows is not booting (not a surprise... you move from a Pentium 4 board to an AMD Athlon XP board... there's probably just the bytecode that is compatible with what was before). I had the chance to test quickly the Helix Forensic CD and I enjoyed it. Its fast and it has just the right tools to do imaging and detection.
In parallel of all that, I finished reading Will the Real Heretics Please Stand Up, 3rd edition, which I loved tremendously! Granted, the author has a view of the early chuch father that is a bit high. Still, its been doing good to my soul. The interesting thing is that it comes from an evangelical author. He gave the the taste to read the texts of the early christians myself.
On Thursday, I helped a sister move to her new apartment.
Friday, we had a time watching movies with the campus group at church. We had the pleasure of watching Mr. Deeds, followed by Motorcycle Diaries. The first one whas a typical funny adam sandler movie, full of fully expectable plot twists and american ending. The second one was a jewel. We see the young Che Guevara who decides to put aside his last semester in med school to travel from Argentina to Venezuela with a biochemist friend. Their motorcycle ends up breaking down and they finish the trip by foot. In their journey, they meet a lot of misery, especially form the natives of South America who were expelled from their land. The contrast between the two characters (at least at first) is impressive: the young che is an example of faithfulness to his beloved and of honesty, and Alberto Granado is the example of lying and lusting. They spend time in a Leprosy camp too. A truly inspiring journey.
On Saturday, I finished fixing my bike. I had to change the tires, take care of some rust, get myself a new lock for it, etc. Now it is fully done and ready to be used. Now that it stopped raining, I should be able to go to school on Monday using it.
In the evening, I had a date with my brand-new sister and a dating couple of the church. They treated us with wonderful fish and potatoes, followed by some games that made us laugh a bit. Then, we watched Batman Begins. I liked the character development, which is much more developped that in many American movies I see. I relate to the young Bruce Wayne, who can't feel his shame because of his anger... I know that I have still much work to do to understand my emotions after years of repressive habits BUT! I promise that I won't be inhaling an opiate with some ninjas to help me deal with that! :)
This Sunday, I delivered a message on the communion at church. I was talking that the communion/eucharist/Lord's supper brings us closer to God by the dual combination of the product and the process. I'll try posting my message notes on TheoThoughts. I had a study with a guy who decided to be baptized next Sunday. I'm excited. This is a prayer answered! I also worked (and will be working) on my Da Vinci Code document today.
Here's a quote from one of our brothers, Ignatius, considered to be a disciple of John:
"My lust hath been crucified, and there is no fire of material longing in me, but only water living +and speaking+ in me, saying within me, Come to the Father.
I have no delight in the food of corruption or in the delights of this life. I desire the bread of God, which is the flesh of Christ who was of the seed of David; and for a draught I desire His blood, which is love incorruptible."
(Ignatius to the Romans 7:2-3. I got it from www.earlychristianwritings.com)
Posted by ma at 7:39 PM | TrackBack
Ubuntu 6.06 is out!
Oooooooooooooooh yeah!
The best and brightest of Linux distributions got better.
Ubuntu is a Debian-based Linux distribution that is aimed at the average joe. From my experience, I would guess that it can be used without a shell for the average desktop. Laptop is another story, especially because that WPA is not well supported just yet.
I upgraded my laptop and I have to work out a few issues regarding the wireless connection. I tested the Live CD on my roomate's computer and it was doing an OK job (except for the sound that was not detected. Is it a missing driver in the LiveCD?). I have yet to test the installation procedure.
One thing I can comment, besides the improved software, is that the whole thing looks sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek. A lot of the typical open-source uglyness is gone.
They still have the policy of frozen software versions, which is annoying to me (but I'm not a typical user... I could be fit for the debian testing or unstable, really). This means that they freeze a functional version of the software in their repository and will release update only on major issues (typically security fixes). There is a lot of wisdom in it ("if it ain't broke, don't fix it"), but that's not my 'cutting edge' style.
Anyway. Get yourself the Desktop livecd by Bittorrent and try it!
Posted by ma at 7:30 PM | TrackBack
March 26, 2006
Gotta See Primer on Web Application Security
Microsoft has increased (a little bit) in my esteem after dedicating one of their shows on web application security
The Code Room: Breaking into Vegas
Posted by ma at 5:39 PM | TrackBack
February 20, 2006
Trying to Keep the Blog Looking Good
For some weird reason, MovableType reverts to the old file system path. I changed that for security reasons, and some of my template is missing, making the page look bad. I tried using a symlink to work around the problem and it looks OK for this new template... lets hope it keeps on working ;)
Posted by ma at 6:16 PM | TrackBack
February 13, 2006
Website is Back
Finally!
The admin of the server hosting had a few problems with bad users not keeping their installs secure and everything, and disabled all web space of users with blogs. He reccomended some preventive measures, which I mostly put in place (work in progress, ~90% done). You will not see much of a difference as a user.
Anyway, its good to have the world connected to me once more :)
Posted by ma at 2:41 PM | TrackBack
January 28, 2006
OpenBSD Pains
So, I downloaded and installed OpenBSD, the most security-conscious operating system out there (as far as I know).
The installation proceeded smoothly, even though I had to go for a ftp install for some weird reasons. I am running it on a Pentium 100 MHz, which does not make things that great.
Nevertheless, the installer is on a floppy and works very well. It is not user-friendly, but the walkthrough on the website compensates for that. Because of my old platform, I could not install a GUI, so it was very "old school" computer system, with the text-only environment and the need to know all the commands by heart. Yay for my geek side... boooh for my time.
The real problem that I have: very few precompiled packages and patches :'(
That means I gotta download the source of everything and its dependencies and compile it. I gave half a day to DansGuardian to compile and it wasn't done yet...
So I decided to move to another OS (maybe a Linux that _works_) that has a lot of precompiled packages ... this thing is just too slow to compile anything worth mentioning on its own.
Oh well, I won't be able to say I'm running the safest OS on the planet just yet...
Posted by ma at 2:53 PM | TrackBack
Anonym.OS
So, after reading a hyping-good review on Wired News, I decided to download and try out Anonym.OS.
In short, this is a live CD preconfigured for the privacy zealot/freak. It is really interesting, because it really has all the good things there by default, including Tor and Wi-Fi support. The underlying OpenBSD operating system is meant for security, so we are talking about a strong solution.
However, it is slow. How slow? Very very very very slooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow. I tested it at work, on a fairly solid machine, and I was waiting and waiting and waiting.
Thus, its useful, but only so much. Maybe it will have a proper maturity in a few versions...
Posted by ma at 2:47 PM | TrackBack
January 11, 2006
Review: SimpleD Budget
I had the chance to work out a bit with SimpleD Budget , an open source budgeting tool for Windows.
It has a few bugs, is unmaintained, but is overall cool.
BUT, won't let you do any real planning beyond the current month, which is a fatal flaw in my opinion.
So, if you want to be a little bit bohemian, but not too much, then you can use this. At the beggining of your month, you set your expense objectives, you keep track of the spending, and at the end of the month your balance is carried forward to the new one and you repeat.
Nice, but not powerful enough for me. I have two options left: my custom Excel/OpenOffice file, or I can try the steeper learning curve of a more serious accounting program in Linux. I saw a few and I found them rebarbative...
Posted by ma at 7:49 AM | TrackBack
December 28, 2005
Typing this under Linux, with wireless
So, it looks like I did not have to scratch my head to have the latest and brightest version of wpa supplicant installed in order to have my wireless working.
I did download it, managed to compile it...
But then the new kernel version was out. I tried it with the old wpa supplicant, and it was working.
Do you want to do it too?
Very easy
sudo apt-get install wpasupplicant
sudo gedit /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf and put in your settings (some reading required to figure out what to put there)
For me, since my laptop has has ipw2200 card:
sudo wpa_supplicant -ieth0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -Dipw
Afterwards, I unplugged my ethernet card, then ran
sudo network-admin and set eth0 as my default gateway.
Finally, since I could only ping up to my router,
sudo dhclient
And everything was working fine afterwards.
I now just need to put that in the computer initilization scripts so that it happens automatically at each bootup :D
The good news is that I'll be doing most of my work from Linux now (assuming all works right), ,instead of Windows. My geek side is happy triumphant now!
Posted by ma at 9:06 AM | TrackBack
December 3, 2005
Mozilla Firefox 1.5 is out!
It is out, baby...
It is hot and rocking, an order of magnitude better than its predecessor... oh yeah!
Too bad that the Bible toolbar doesn't work anymore on 1.5
For those less geeky, Firefox is a web browser that is simply better and safer than Internet Explorer. Its open source too, so its a good ethical choice. I suggest you try it. The tab browsing will, alone, restore your sanity.
Posted by ma at 10:12 AM | TrackBack
November 26, 2005
VLC 0.8.4 is out!
Oooooooooh yeah baby!
The most polyvalent media player out there just got better! It reads DVD, pretty much all video formats, and pretty much all music formats. I think only RealMedia is out of its reach (yet). It acts as a streaming server, etc.
You know you want it.
Posted by ma at 5:44 PM | TrackBack
October 26, 2005
OpenOffice 2.0 is out!
My favorite office suite is better than ever, and finally an official release.
Its been some time I was using the betas and release candidates, with the not-so-occasional crashes and all.
But this is not fully installed, with the dictionaries I need.
I deeply encourage you to use it, especially if you don't have Microsoft Office on your machine. If you already have it, give it a try anyway. They support the OpenDocument format, which is one of the real few standards for file formats, and it has real future.
Posted by ma at 9:37 PM | TrackBack
October 13, 2005
Ubuntu is Out
Ubuntu Linux is the hottest Linux distribution these days, and the newest version is now out.
I'm downloading it using BitTorrent, because I'm a good Internet citizen :)
So, this week's "me time" will be centered around installing this on my laptop and listening to some good music.
The sad news is that there is still no built-in WPA support for my wireless, which means I'll have to beat my laptop into submission to get it working. *sighs* Linux is still an imperfect world.
I'm not gonna complain too much, cuz I'm not investing _any_ time to get those features working... and, besides, computer issues should not rob God's-given gift of joy in my life (and I'm good at letting those pointless things effectively robbing it).
I'll tell you about my experience when I'm done with it :)
Posted by ma at 8:23 AM | TrackBack
October 10, 2005
Firefox sweetness
I stumbled on the Firemonger Project, which created a "distribution" of Firefox and Thunderbird (+ plugins and utilities). They have a fairly good mix. You should give a shot to quite a few of those extensions and tools.
I just tried FireTune and I love it already! The load time is really lowered, and the option to replace the connection failure alert box with a page is really sweet. Anyway :D