BLOGical Thoughts

I did some software installs on a friend’s computers on Sunday. I installed DeVeDe and gdvdslides on two computers and Windows XP Service Pack 3 on a third. The Linux installs went fine, as usual, but Service Pack 3 seriously broke the XP box. I finally had to get into Safe Mode and restore it back to the restore point that was taken just prior to installing the service pack. Just another example of how well Microsoft writes software, I guess.

While testing the gdvdslides install, I found a couple of bugs, so I will be looking at those this week.

I spent a lot of time on Saturday rewriting my bookmarks page. That page allows me access to links of interest to me while I am not at home. The problem with it was with maintenance. It was laid out well, but to add or remove items from the page was really hard. This is because the page was laid out as a two column table with sections. If you adjusted the size of one section, you had to do something with the adjacent section to make up for the adjustment. It was just too much trouble to add and remove links.

I redid the page into unordered lists with a twist. The twist is that the lists can be collapsed into their headings. So what you see is about 20 lines instead of several hundred. There are four topic headings: News, Entertainment, Technology and Miscellaneous. You can expand subheadings by clicking on them. It works well and doesn’t take up the real estate of the original design, but you really have to know what you are looking for to find something. Check it out at http://blogicalthoughts.com/bookmarks.html

Silly sign of the day:

Free/Open Source Software

• TestDrive Automatically Downloads And Runs The Latest Ubuntu Development Snapshot In A Virtual Machine
• Linux Advocacy: The Right Way
• 8 of the Best Free Linux Geometry Software
• Canonical plucks Matt Asay from Alfresco - is it ‘go time’ for Ubuntu?
• A fresher Linux desktop
• 13 Ways To Customize Ubuntu Netbook Remix For Better Usability
• Record your Desktop with Linux Tools
• Open Symbian: New World Order or Big Yawn?

“It’s Mine, and You Have to Pay (and Pay and Pay) For It”

• Appeals Court Says Internet Content Should Be Held To Standards Of Strictest Jurisdiction
• Do Patents Slow Down Innovation?
• Because When MetroPCS Says ‘No Contract,’ It Actually Means ‘Well, Of Course There’s A Contract’
• No, Copyright Has Never Been About Protecting Labor
• Comcast CEO Argues Rules Will Protect Customers In Merger, While Comcast Lawyers Argue Rules Are Unconstitutional
• Patent Office to Review VoIP Patent
• Authors Guild: ‘To RIAA or Not to RIAA’
• The Pirate Bay To Be Censored in Italy, Again
• Patent nonsense

Local and Other News

• UK Whistleblowers Highlight The Dangers Of Widespread Police Surveillance/Database
• Barnes & Noble rolls out second Nook update
• Microsoft to patch 17-year-old computer bug
• PayPal halts ‘personal payments’ to, from India
• FBI calls for two year retention for ISP data
• Gov tempts young London onto ID database with booze, ‘games’
• Top 50 Funny Computer Quotes

My recently returned Cooler ebook reader seems to behave itself. It boots faster, turns pages faster and remembers where you were after you turn it back on. It also keeps better track of battery life. All in all, I’m fairly satisfied with it, but I still can’t recommend it to others. There are definitely better ebook readers on the market.

I bought a silicone sleeve for the reader from Wirester.com for $14. Since the sleeve is pink, I had some thoughts about whether I should get it. I figured that since silicone is semi-transparent, the blue of the reader would modify the pink of the sleeve and I would end up with something I could live with. Turns out I was right.

I have a fairly free weekend. The only thing I have on tap is (I think) a software install. And that would only be DeVeDe and gdvdslides. I will have to verify that job, though.

Silly sign of the day:

Free/Open Source Software

• Linux Newbie : Why grep almost never yields something productive
• The Small Picture: More OpenOffice.org Extensions
• Health Check: FreeBSD - “The unknown giant”
• Ubuntu advances: Why Ubuntu server installations will surge in 2010
• Ubuntu Global Jam: Will Partners Pitch In?
• What is Markdown and why use it?
• Fresh Version of Linux Mint Offers Tweaks and Updates
• Speed your internet up with NameBench

“It’s Mine, and You Have to Pay (and Pay and Pay) For It”

• Wal-Mart, Target Put Squeeze on Redbox
• Book Publishing Industry Just Now Realizing That Change Is Turbulent?
• The Case(s) of the Broadway Dance Steps
• This Has To Be A Joke: Music Duo Claims It Won’t Sell CDs Again Until ‘Piracy’ Is Stopped
• South Butt Responds To North Face As Only It Could
• Law firm demands retailer destroy all copies of Olivia Munn comic, retailer refuses
• Behold ‘The Amazon Effect’: Now Murdoch’s Gunning for the $10 E-Book
• Archers Daniel Midland abuses copyright law to censor criticism
• UGA employee accused of extortion

Local and Other News

• Corporation Says It Will Run for Congress
• US bill seeks cybersecurity scholarships
• Google turns to NSA for help in cyberattack defences
• Oracle: destroyer of virtual worlds
• Microsoft has another IE flaw
• Scientists discover dinosaur’s true colors
• Microsoft to patch 26 holes in Windows, Office
• Washington Post’s graphs of federal budget deficit
• Microsoft’s Police State Vision? Exec Calls for Internet “Driver’s Licenses”
• Lawrence Lessig calls for a Constitutional amendment on campaign financing
• On the claimed “war exception” to the Constitution
• Report: Shelby Blocks All Obama Nominations In The Senate Over AL Earmarks

I have tested the RPM files I created from the gdvdslides’ DEB files using alien. They half work - that is, the program and its help files are installed, but the dependencies are not installed and there is no menu entry for the program. I guess I will have to take a closer look at the alien command line switches. If that doesn’t help I will have to actually create the packages using a distribution that is based on Red Hat packages. This is too bad, I thought I had my problem solved.

We have about 6 weeks left in winter, and we still haven’t had any significant snowfall. It is currently 34°F. If this continues, we are going to have a really dry summer. I have never had trouble with my well, but it depends on subsurface water and I may have a problem this year if things don’t get white and deep soon.

Silly sign of the day:

Free/Open Source Software

• Google’s Android code deleted from Linux kernel
• Symbian OS now fully open source
• The Top 7 Best Linux Distributions for You
• Two Nifty Features in digiKam 1.1.0
• Two thousand open source applications for the public sector
• Fedora vs. Ubuntu: Is Either Better?
• The KDE 4.3 System Settings - Part 1 - Introduction + Look & Feel
• FreeBSD 8.0 installation walk-through
• Hands-on: new single-window mode makes GIMP less gimpy

“It’s Mine, and You Have to Pay (and Pay and Pay) For It”

• Pete Bouchard and the Battle Against Bogus Takedowns
• Awkward Stock Photo Blog Hit With DMCA Claim
• Elisabeth Murdoch: ‘Borderline Piracy May Be Our Best Outlet’
• Boston Scientific to Pay J&J $1.73B to Settle Stent Patent Disputes
• License to control?
• Did The Recording Industry Really Miss The Opportunity To ‘Monetize’ Online Music?
• Aussie ISP beats Hollywood on ‘copyright’ rap
• Behold ‘The Amazon Effect’: Now Murdoch’s Gunning for the $10 E-Book

Local and Other News

• Confusion bars children’s author from curriculum
• Researchers penetrate last bastion of Windows security
• Blinded by the light
• Microsoft probing new hole in IE security
• Hackers Steal Millions in Carbon Credits
• Gmail to drop IE6 support this year
• File-sharing scam targets Twitter
• The end of SQL and relational databases? (part 1 of 3)

With a little help from the Internet, I have found the ‘alien’ command line tool, which allows me to convert Debian packages to RPM packages. I have done that for the latest version of gdvdslides. After I test the packages, I will post them on the Rimrock Software web site.

I need to sit down and document the processes I am using to produce the gdvdslides distribution. Some of them must be run in the correct order, and I need to document that order. I probably could turn that into a web article on how to deploy your program.

The video that came down in my podcast downloads was not worth the bandwidth. Too bad those people run the best Harry Potter podcast, or I would unsubcribe from it.

Silly sign of the day:

Free/Open Source Software

• Build A Linux Distro Online
• OpenShot – An Easy-to-use Video Editor For the Average Linux User
• Free PR2 Robots Offered to Open Source Robotics Researchers
• How to Install and Use Mac Fonts on Ubuntu
• Ubuntuzilla Repository Makes Firefox 3.6 Installation in Ubuntu Even Simpler
• Netbook Distro Leeenux Linux 2.0 with lots of Applications
• How to Remove Windows Viruses with Linux
• F-Spot: An Able-Bodied All-in-One Image Machine

“It’s Mine, and You Have to Pay (and Pay and Pay) For It”

• Non-Practicing Patent Holders Winning Bigger And Bigger Awards — And Why They Like East Texas
• UCLA professors banned from posting videos online
• Report: Three-Strikes On ACTA Agenda
• The Google Books Settlement Culture Clash, and What About Fair Use?
• USTR suggests fears over ACTA are based on ‘misconceptions’
• Typepad Threatens Takedown of Herald Justice League Unlimited Exposé
• AIG plans to pay $100 million in another round of bonuses

Local and Other News

• Microsoft security dev tools go ‘Agile’
• Australian censorship law collapses under public disapprobation
• How Fedora protects your data with full disk encryption
• Anti-RIAA Site Folds
• Microsoft looking into Windows 7 battery life failures
• Denmark dumps Microsoft
• File-sharing scam targets Twitter
• Nehalem Mac Pros take 20% performance hit when playing audio

Every morning, I use a podcast program to download podcasts so I can listen to them at work. The sum total of what I download rarely exceeds 200MB. I was quite surprised this morning when a video from the Pottercast crowd showed up in the downloads. It is 549MB (that doesn’t count the other four podcasts being downloaded) and it is still downloading. It may well make me late for work. I think I’m going to send off a nastygram to those folks. I really didn’t expect a video to show up in audio downloads.

I have actually advertised the newest version of gdvdslides on the Lazarus and Freshmeat web sites. We shall see if the download statistics pick up a bit from that.

Silly sign of the day:

Free/Open Source Software

• 5 Linux Speed Tips
• Advice on building a Linux box
• Puppy Linux: Your new best friend
• Enlightenment E17 - Another windows manager for Linux
• Linux is not hard, it’s ignored
• What bothers me about the Ubuntu-Yahoo deal
• Stali
• Blogilo: KDE’s blogging client

“It’s Mine, and You Have to Pay (and Pay and Pay) For It”

• Obama’s Director Of Citizen Participation Patents Displaying News With Financial Info
• Vision Media Requests Injunction Against Blogging That “Cast[s it] in a Negative Light”
• News.com Prevents Falsely Accused Grandmother Of Getting Kicked Off The Internet By The MPAA
• David Fincher on copyright clearances
• Anti-Piracy Scheme “A Scam & Legal Blackmail” Say UK Lords
• Will your big-screen Super Bowl party violate copyright law?
• Patent infringement lawsuits raking in the big bucks
• Census of Files Available via BitTorrent

Local and Other News

• Windows 7 RC Users, You’re About to Become Lost
• Researchers Uncover Security Vulnerabilities in Femtocell Technology
• Botnet sends fake SSL pings to CIA, PayPal, others
• Teenager invents low-frequency radio for underground communications
• Retailers fooled by fake and borrowed IDs
• ID minister promises virtual immortality for all Britons
• ‘No scan, no flight’ at Heathrow and Manchester
• South Australian Government gags internet debate

As you may recall, I am having problems with a new video card in my 64-bit workstation. I was going to boot up the Ubuntu 9.10 Live CD to see if that would solve the problem. Instead, I used the Ubuntu 9.04 Live CD and my problem disappeared. Apparently, If you install Ubuntu with the ATI driver (to support my original on-board video card), then change to an nVidia card, the driver is not smart enough to recognize the video card has changed.

So I spent part of the weekend re-installing Ubuntu 9.04 64-bit on my workstation. That was the easy part - the tedious part was re-installing all the programs I had installed to support the work I do on the machine. Although there are several more programs to re-install the last one I did over the weekend was the Lazarus and Free Pascal development system. That one was not so straightforward, as you have to install from a couple of dozen DEB packages obtained from the Lazarus web site. And you have to install them in the proper order. When I finished that, though, I had a working 64-bit development system.

I have also finished and released the latest version of gdvdslides, my video slideshow program for Linux. The latest version fixes some problems I found in the program, including slow menus and buttons and a tendency to lock up the buttons and menus (drag and drop was the culprit there). You can pick up the latest version at http://www.rimrocksoftware.com/.

Silly sign of the day:

Free/Open Source Software

• How to Install any Linux on a USB
• 7 of the Best Free Linux Calculators
• Computing, Even in Linux, is All About Failure
• When is it worth saying it’s Linux?
• Another Small Victory for Ubuntu Server Edition
• Stupidware
• The choices inside Ubuntu
• The real value of FOSS to business – A personal example
• VLC Media Player To Get Extensions Starting With Version 1.1
• Video editing in Linux: a look at PiTiVi and Kdenlive

“It’s Mine, and You Have to Pay (and Pay and Pay) For It”

• EU’s Gallo Report: Rubbish Recycled
• Labels: Lower Music Prices And Increase Your Profits, Study Says
• With Kindle, the Best Sellers Don’t Need to Sell
• ACTA One Step Closer To Being Done; Concerns About Transparency Ignored
• Copyright, companies, individuals and news: the rules of the road
• Dutch Judges Plagiarize, Potentially Infringe, Blog Post In Decision About Copyright
• Carlos the Jackal, imprisoned for life, looks in lawsuit to protect his image
• Who Dat Holds The Trademark To Who Dat? NFL Threatens While WhoDat Inc. Asks Why?
• BitTorrent census: about 99% of files copyright infringing
• Amazon Surrenders In Weekend E-Book Battle

Local and Other News

• Results of Study on Cellphone Use Surprise Researchers
• CIA, PayPal under bizarre SSL assault
• Many voice encryption systems easily crackable
• Google phases out support for IE6
• Canadian Broadcasting Corporation signs up with weird American copyright bounty-hunters
• Attacks against SSL
• Victims lost $9.3 billion to 419 scammers in 2009
• Accused grandmother-pirate sees Web service suspended

I uninstalled mencoder, devede and mandvd from my workstation last night, then reinstalled them from the respositories. After installation, I gave DeVeDe a try and verified that it works again.

I then created an ISO file from the 15-part Superman serial from 1948. It was about 3 1/2 hours in length, but it fit on a single DVD because it was recorded in a lower screen size than regular DVDs. It generated a 2.3GB file, which I burned onto a DVD. Now I just have to find 3 1/2 hours to actually look at the serial.

At least five months after I sent it in for ‘repair’, I finally got back my Cooler Reader ebook reader last night. The story of this is too long to relate here. Needless to say, I will not purchase anything else from these jerks. Not even a cover for the reader.

Silly sign of the day:

Free/Open Source Software

• Apple’s iPad vs Notion Ink’s Adam tablet with Ubuntu: battle of two worlds
• What’s the Future of Linux and Solaris at Oracle?
• Try Gstyle Project, A New Gnome Theme Manager
• Dear Netflix
• Could open source abandon the Google train?
• Ubuntu: More bugs than ever?
• Make Pretty GUI Apps Fast with Python-Qt
• Opengear Scores $1 Million Deal
• I’m in a good open-source software place
• How to Clone Drives and Partitions with Clonezilla

“It’s Mine, and You Have to Pay (and Pay and Pay) For It”

• Geist: Three strikes and you’re out system draws cries of foul from governments
• Ubisoft’s new DRM solution: you have be online to play
• As EMI Cites Harvey Danger Lipdub As Inducing Infringement, Harvey Danger Singer Says Lipdub Makes Him Incredibly Happy
• What’s A Bigger Entitlement Mentality? Demanding Old Business Models Must Remain… Or Liking Free Stuff?
• Strikes’ Policies For Infringers Debated
• RIAA rejects reduced fine for ‘piracy’
• Institute sued for Olympic name
• Could P2P blocking be legalized by new net neutrality rules?

Local and Other News

• Bank Sues Identity Fraud Victim After $800,000 Removed From Its Account
• Microsoft issues patches for stability
• Law firm threatens 150 innocent people with court action
• For the Love of Culture
• Security researchers blast credit card verification system
• 10 things Netbooks still do better than an iPad
• Does Freedom Of The Press In The UK Include Just Making Things Up?
• Experts fret over iPad security risks

I downloaded a 15-part Superman serial from archive.org and last night I attempted to create a DVD from the video clips. I was unsuccessful. I had trouble with both DeVeDe and ManDVD. I am going to un-install and reinstall both of those and see if that helps. They both worked in the past, so the only thing I can think of is something got upgraded that broke them.

I figured out how to add multiple icons to buttons in Lazarus. There is a button property called NumGlyphs that is supposed to tell the button how many glyphs are in the image. For instance, if there are two glyphs in a 20×20 image, the image would be 40×20, with the images side-by-side. In that case, NumGlyphs would be set to 2 and the button is supposed to display half of the image when it is enabled and the other half when it is disabled.

There is only one problem with this: the button image display is broken. When NumGlyphs is set to 2, the two images are merged into one and displayed. This is unacceptable for gdvdslides, so I will have to leave out the fancy images. I will also have to write up the problem for the Lazarus people to fix.

Silly sign of the day:

Free/Open Source Software

• Goodbye KDE, Hello XFCE
• Ubuntu: Enterprise Management Getting Easier?
• Linux Motherboard Follies
• How To Set Up A Terminal Server In Linux Using Ubuntu 9.10 And FreeNX
• Netbook OS
• And the best Linux desktop distro of all is…
• RevLin OS: Would You Use It?
• What Does It Take to Be a Linux Guru?
• Anything the iPad can do, Linux can do better.

“It’s Mine, and You Have to Pay (and Pay and Pay) For It”

• Microsoft Sues Prominent BitTorrent Tracker For $43m
• Wait, Who Wants A Proprietary, Locked Down Device That Limits What You Can Do?
• Universal, Pay Those EFFing Lawyers
• Jammie Thomas Rejects Offer From RIAA To Settle For $25k Plus Request For Judge To Vacate Last Week’s Decision
• Tintin Fans Attacked By Tintin Lawyer
• Dueling Billboards Debate Wife’s Hotness
• Environmental group sues Honda for “Save The Earth” trademark infringement
• Ofcom to charge terminated downloaders to appeal
• Piracy letter campaign ‘nets innocents’
• Dish Network wins $51M judgment against alleged satellite-TV pirate

Local and Other News

• Ellison to recruit thousands for Sun integration army
• IE Windows vuln coughs up local files
• What Would Life Be Like Without Windows?
• Home Office spawns new unit to expand internet surveillance
• Steve Jobs uncloaks the ‘iPad’
• Nebraska Man Admits DDoS Attack on Church of Scientology
• iPad DRM endangers our rights
• 7 Essential Features Left Off of the iPad

I have never had a problem with Linux when replacing a video card in a working system. That is, until last night. I was having trouble with one particular program on my 64-bit workstation that I attributed to the built-in ATI video and its (open source) driver. So I ordered an nVidia card, which came last night. I installed it and started to boot up the machine, but it croaked during the boot process, talking about an ACPI problem. I then booted up a 32-bit Live CD of Ubuntu 9.04 and that worked fine. I suspect some kind of compatibility problem between the nVidia card and the 64-bit Ubuntu 9.04 install. I will be trying 64-bit Ubuntu 9.10 from the live CD tonight to see if the problem goes away. If it does, I may be forced to move to that version, which I still have major qualms about.

I wanted to change the look of icons in gdvdslides when they are disabled, so I tried a trick that works in Delphi. I created an icon that was twice as wide as normal. The left hand side is the icon and the right hand side is the icon when disabled. The only problem with this is Lazarus doesn’t quite work the same way as Delphi in this regard. I ended up with both sides showing at the same time. I will investigate this further, but I don’t think there is anything I can do about the problem. I may just have to live with what Lazarus does to the icons when buttons are disabled.

Silly sign of the day:

Free/Open Source Software

• Personal Finances on Linux with KMyMoney
• Free training webinars feature Linux luminaries
• Disk-O-Tech: Linux Disk Management
• The Free Software Way, by Richard Fontana, Esq.
• Ubuntu’s default search engine to change in deal with Yahoo
• KDE 4.4 Kreeps Kloser to Komplete
• Linux performance: is Linux becoming just too slow and bloated?
• 10 old-school Linux tools I refuse to let go of
• Screenlets: Eye Candy for Linux Users

“It’s Mine, and You Have to Pay (and Pay and Pay) For It”

• IFPI Loses “Deep-Linking” Case Against Baidu
• Bev Stayart Sues Yahoo Again For Violating Her Privacy Rights
• Oh dear: Google flagged over logo dispute
• Brian Eno Explains How The Recording Industry Is Like Whale Blubber
• EU to assess piracy detection software
• Vancouver Olympics ‘Brand Protection Guidelines’ Almost Entirely Arbitrary
• Howard Berman Concerned About Internet-Repressive Regimes, Except If They Help His Friends In Hollywood
• Piracy letter campaign ‘nets innocents’
• Copyright, companies, individuals and news: the rules of the road

Local and Other News

• Google Toolbar caught tracking users when ‘disabled’
• Defects in e-passports allow real-time tracking
• Cool DIY Streamliner Motorcycle Gets 214 MPG
• One day after latest fix, Microsoft investigates new IE flaw
• Rogers Canada forces Android update that takes away root access

Back when I was fixing a friend’s dead computer, I never really explained about my choices of operating system installation. Here are my thought processes about that.

The computer was at least 6 years old. It was running Windows 2000 when it died. I had to replace the motherboard and power supply to get it running again. When I did that, I looked for drivers for the new motherboard that supported Windows 2000, and found none. I then made the decision to install Ubuntu 9.04 and put Windows 2000 in a virtual machine, so the environment would look as close as possible to the original.

Why could I do this? It is because the fundamental philosophies of Microsoft Windows and Linux are totally different regarding hardware. Windows provides a basic operating system which provides hooks for hardware drivers. The manufacturers are expected to provide the drivers to support their hardware. So different manufacturers may provide hardware with identical chip sets in them, but they all provide their own individual drivers.

Linux has adopted a different philosophy. Linux supports chip sets natively - it isn’t necessary for the manufacturer to provide any support. So if you install a new piece of hardware and Linux can recognize the chip set, you automatically have support for the device. Of course, if the new device has any special features thrown in by the manufacturer, Linux may not support them. That’s the only time you need a driver from the manufacturer. nVidia video cards are an example of this.

The virtualbox program provides a set of drivers to emulate hardware for Windows so that operating system can be run. So the virtualbox VM provides drivers that manufacturers no longer provide for older versions of Windows. We end up at almost the same point we were at when the computer died, except it is now much faster and much more capable.

Silly sign of the day:

Free/Open Source Software

• KDE vs. GNOME: Configuration and Admin Tools
• Buying a Linux Laptop …
• Linux on the move: the future of portable distros
• 5 Firefox Add-ons For Better KDE Integration
• Open source has survived the recession
• Top 5 Most Wanted Ubuntu Weblogs for 2009
• Record-setting Linux
• Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 Alpha 2: First impressions on ‘difficult’ hardware
• Report: Linux Gains Ground, Windows Stumbles
• 9 Tips For Working with MySQL Databases

“It’s Mine, and You Have to Pay (and Pay and Pay) For It”

• New Music Format File Can Be Updated Remotely
• The Public Domain Manifesto
• New Attempt To Get Around Section 230 In Apparent Effort To Bury Small Site With Legal Expenses
• Gorillaz manager criticises Pharrell Williams file-sharing views
• The Future Of Music Business Models (And Those Who Are Already There)
• Motorola seeks ban on US BlackBerries
• RIAA in pickle over Jammie Thomas ruling
• Librarians for Fair Access resists exclusive content contracts
• Public Domain Manifesto

Local and Other News

• Apple earnings jump 50 percent
• Legalize Competing Currencies
• China Accuses U.S. of Cyberwarfare
• The Forfeiture Racket
• DHS ‘brainiacs’ to commercialise airport liquids-OK scanner
• Life after Windows: What happens to tech if Microsoft dies
• Report: Attackers sent Google workers IMs from ‘friends’
• US gov’t data-laundering: using corporate databases to get around privacy law
• SoCal school district bans the dictionary