The toman diaries

Firefox 1.0 for SuSE

fredag, november 12, 2004

Firefox 1.0 is out, thought I should mention although it is generally way to slow for my 300Mhz machine.... And people say there's not much difference between major browsers when it comes to speed! BS! Both in loading pages and showing me the interface Opera is king. I need to use firefox on occation though, to doublecheck my websites. Opera is better in all these repects of course ;-)

And since it has such a decent rendering engine, I thought I'd link to the SuSE Firefox 1.0 rpm's. Just for the hell of it. Installing now, lets see if its any better than the previous monsters. (OK, so its GTK2 but who cares right?).

Filesearch ala Google

lørdag, oktober 16, 2004

Google has relesed a beta of their take on filesearching, called Google Desktop Search.

It works by indexing all files on your computer, that is, it scans all files and put them in an index, a database. This lets you find the files a lot faster than you otherwise would. It scans continously, so keeps the database up-to-date enough so that you can find what you browsed in Opera or IE just a minute ago.

This [indexing] isn't new of course, MS Windows 2k and XP already has it built in and its called the Indexing Service. You turn it on and off in the disk' properties and search the database from an awkward interface somewhere completely else. Unix also has a similar utility called locate which searches a database normally created every 24 hours. Other similar programs exist for windows as well, but their names slip me right now.

Google Desktop

Whats really different about Google's approach is its inclusion of your local database in normal websearch. It appears just like google news does, above your normal search results. Exactly how it does this I dont know yet, but it works equally well in IE as in Opera, so I'm guessing it is hijacking some networking component in windows itself. A little spooky if you ask me. This is also probably the reason why its incompatible with so many programs, including the Microsoft Firewall Client on the ISA Server, some anti-virus (nod32, Panda), and, notably, the webhancer dll, which also hijacks windows networking. (Some of these incompatabilities can be fixed though, but thats not the point...)

Another nice(?) thing about Google Desktop Search is that it finds Outlook (and Express) Mail, in addition to having categories for spreadsheets and word documents etc. All windows-centric in other words..

Now let me see if I get enough time on a windows computer to really like this app.

The Wall

søndag, juli 11, 2004

Israel says it doesn't respect the International Court of Justice. Israel says in it's statements that the court consists mainly of Europeans, and that these arn't actually known for being "pro-Israel". (eg, dont like occupation, but thats another matter is it?)

Sure enough, 5 of 15 judges are from european countries. (Two from the middle East, two from Africa, two from South America, one from Russia and two from the far East. One is from the USA) Obviosly, the vote on the legitimacy of the Israeli wall came out 14 to 1 in favour of it being ilegal. Guess who voted against it; who couldn't separate politics and humanitarian issues? Thats right, the USA judge Thomas Buergenthal. Interestingly, he was in a German concentration camp during world war 2 and came to the US from Slovakia.

The Iraqi flag

søndag, juli 04, 2004

I remember reading about the CPA making a new flag for iraq that would indicate "new times". But noone has yet started using the proposal, and it is disputed wether there actually was a competition about the design at all, although both the competition and the new flag was announced by reuters. I guess reuters got it from "official channels" in the CPA.

According to The Independent, the flag was designed by a London resident Iraqi named Rifat Chadirji. He is the brother of a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, and says he never heard about any flag design competition: "My brother just called me and asked me to design a flag on behalf of the IGC. Nobody told me about a competition".

The flag symbolizes "a new iraq", eufrat and tigris, and the kurdish population of iraq. IT has colors that are not in the arab tradition, rather it has Israeli colors which is not very welcome... The kurdish part is certainly interesting, and says something about who designed it, and possibly the reason for designing it. The kurds have been suppressed by Saddam Hussain, but they are not by any means a majority in Iraq. (Although they are the biggest minority.) - If you were to design a new Norwegian flag, would you include a reference only to the minority sami population? Thought not.

Getting desperate

søndag, juli 04, 2004

The George W. Bush /Dick Cheney election campaign-aratus is getting desperate. They are sending leaflets that contain a list of 22 Coalition Coordinator duties (does the term Coalition Provisional Authority mean anything to you?) church leaders should perform on their behalf:

• Send them a list of all members of their church.
• Tell them about at least one more church they can instruct.
• Recruit 5 more people that can help in the memeber registration effort.
• Talk to the pastor about holding a church meeting regarding the election.

Soon Bush will ask the same from democrats, I'm sure. (Maybe they are already? What do I know about American elections)

Microsoft France thinks source code is a password

fredag, juli 02, 2004

Paris City hall is buying new computer systems, concidering various software vendors, among them Microsoft and various Open Source alternatives. The Open Source software is so cheap to install and run that Microsoft has let its resellers in France cut prices by as much as 60% to get a deal.

Paris says price, ease of modification (because of open source-code) and more importantly, security is the main reason to go the open source way.

Security is something MS has never been very good at. Or at least, they haven't taken it very seriously until late, when they have started saying they care more, even though security holes still pop up like mushrooms in the autumn. (I had to download something like a whole CD-ROM worth of upgrades for a three month old basic Windows XP home system a year ago)

So what is MS saying about Open source and security? From the referenced article:
"'If I have a safe in my room and I give the code to everybody, will it be safer? I don't think so".
How is it that they can compare source code to passwords and security codes?
The valid comparison would be
"'If I have a safe in my room that is built in a known way making it hardened by contantly letting people try to break it, will it be safer? I think it would".
I get pissed when the press leaves such false statements uncommented.

The Fox, an intelligent yuropian-hunter

torsdag, juli 01, 2004

Just a little quote from FOX news, which claims to be "Fair and balanced"

Bill O'Reilly "interviews" Charles Kupchan, professor International Relations at Georgetown University about why France doesn't want to send NATO troops to Afghanistan but EU troops instead:

FOXNews.com - The O'Reilly Factor - Interview - France Is At It Again: Hurting America's War on Terror:

"O'REILLY: Isn't the reason he [Chirac] doesn't do that in Afghanistan and Iraq and gives us a problem whenever we try to provide security for new governments because he doesn't like Bush? It's simple as that. It's personal. He doesn't like the Bush administration; he wants to embarrass America?

Professor, I've got 10 separate incidents in the last year-and-a-half right here, 10, where the French have either lied to the United States or embarrassed us unnecessarily because they disagree with our policy. Isn't that the truth?"

I know FOX news is bad stuff, but has he been smoking George Bush' after-a-public-speech-socks or what?

Krekar again..

onsdag, juni 16, 2004

Mullah Krekar's case in Norway was tossed out of court because of lacking evidence yesterday. The same day, the US said they were still convinced that Krekar was a terrorist threat. Interestingly, the judge said "it didn't make the case much easier" that one of the key witnesses which had 'evidence' against Krekar, had been tortured by PUK (one of the Northern Iraqi groups) while he was being questioned there by the US. Afterwards, he was taken to Abu Ghraib where he made his testimony to Norwegian police. Initially, he was very critical of Ansar Al Islam (Krekars group), but toned this dows as time went by. Norwegian police stopped this investigation once they learned about the torture, they didn't want to put their witnesses' safety on the line.

Suddenly out of the blue today,Krekar was sentenced to 15 years in prison in Jordan, this time for plotting terrorist acts and for having connections to Al-Quaeda. Notably, 7 others were sentenced in the same court at the same time, to the exact same punishment. The only person present got his sentence halved immediately to 7,5 years. Another 6 people were also on trial, but they have all died "in unknown locations under unknown conditions". This time it wasn't Krekar who was the leader of the group... Jordan has earlier failed in getting him extradited from Norway for drug smuggeling.

Norwegian police and the Justice department says they haven't heard a word from Jordan about the case until it came through in the press. (And nothing from them afterwards either).

American pressure or new evidence? - Neither Krekar or his lawyer has so much as heard about the case, nor has he been presented with his charge. Krekars lawyer says he isn't even hinting that the US is behind this, he says he is saying it is. No lawyer appointed, no time to present his version of the case, no nothing. Just: "You are sentenced".

So why 15 years? You see, Norway has this law that says it cant extradite someone to a country if there are even remote chances they will be sentenced to death. They need assurances of the opposite. That was presumably one of the reasons why he wasn't last time. (Along with missing evidence of course). Someone has probably been thinking a bit more this time around and thought that if they got him judged for anything less than death, he would be extradited. Many right-wing politicians in Norway still think he should be extradited, including a key figure Erna Solberg from Høyre (Right party) which is currently in position.

I wonder if Bush can use this in his champaign: "Ya seer, thees teerrrorist was seenteenced in Joordan for haaviing cloosee tiies to Osama, aaand he haaad cloosee tiieess with Saaadam as weell. Seee huw riight we weeree?"

Oops, where did lady Justice go?

Bergen Commune goes Linux

onsdag, juni 16, 2004

digi.no reports that Bergen Commune, housing the second largest city in Norway with the same name, is switching all its networks from Windows and UNIX to Novell Suse Linux citing millions of NOK in savings, better security, more options and higher stability.

The commune has two networks, the educational network with 36.000 users (32.000 students and 4000 teachers) and the administrative network with 15.000 users.

The administrative network switches from old HP servers running UNIX to new HP Integrity Itanium servers running Linux clusters with Oracle databases. The educational network will run Linux on IBM eServer BladeCenter servers.

They chose SuSE ahead of ie. RedHat because of Suse's leading technology such as support for 64bit architechture, their focus on KDE (they think KDE is "a generation ahead" of Gnome), and their European base which means they have better support for 'obscure' languages.

They underline that they are not "tossing out windows"; They will still use MS Office on most clients, and they are keeping some windows servers for backwards compatability.

Firefox

fredag, juni 11, 2004

I just installed Mozilla Firefox on my SuSE machine. It is the slowest program I have ever used. Period. It took between 5 and 10 seconds to open a new tab, sometimes it took just as long before a tooltip appeared.

I dont know why this is... Is it because it uses GTK instead of Qt like Opera does? I doubt it, other programs use gtk too, like the GIMP and gtk-gnutella. The gimp is relatively fast, but gtk-gnutella is also very slow, unlike qtella which uses Qt. Maybe there is something to it, but I also think the firefox developers need to clean their act before I can use it.

I think I'll stick with Opera.

Back to SuSE, 9.1 this time

mandag, juni 07, 2004

As you've read, I've gone back to Linux again, after doing some on and off with Windows XP. I found that going to Windows was faster (that time), but the Windows management has me frustrated. Its almost impossible to manage seriously without having some kind of schooling.

Linux on the other hand, has millions of user groups that, through figuring out things by themselves, has really learned how the system actually works. - Of course Linux is also completely open, so it is possible to figure things out. And it was made for managing etc, etc... I'm as comfortable on the command-line as I am in the UI.

Now. Speed. Linux kernel 2.6 still isn't as fast as Windows XP if you do very few things. But one place it really outshines Windows is in its memory management: It doesn't page to swap things that you are likely to use again anytime soon. Windows just put whatever it feels like in the swap when it needs to, resulting in an awfully slow return to the desktop for instance. Another thing is the 2.6 kernel improved resource prioritizing. I can do a lot of things at the same time wihtout even noticing it becoming slower. I can run KDE 3.2.1, listen to streaming mp3, run Opera with 30 heavy pages open, edit a big html file with colorcoding and instant scrolling. Even run a high-end screensaver on top of that without as much as a hickup. On a pentium 2 300Mhz with 256MB memory. So overall, Linux really IS faster.

Why Suse over fedora then? I loved my first suse installation, which was 9.0. When I recently installed Fedora, I found it to be lacking a lot of polish: Icons were missing, I couldn't specify port ranges in the redhat firewall config tool, it didn't recognize my digital camera as being 'a valid block device', it didn't automount my USB drive, it couldn't play video without installing extra packages, I had to manually configure the sound-card. - Granted, all these things are things that can be figured out, but I'm a Linux newbie.

Suse 9.1 does all these things. A welcome change from 9.0 is that it even configures my ESS es1869 sound-card properly.

There are some SUSE 9.1 reviews at desktoplinux if you want to read more about it: SuSE 9.1 review roundup

Update 11 june: OSNews is running an article on the slowness of linux, and people seem to have opinions on it there too.

Finally

mandag, juni 07, 2004

I dont know if its me or if it is the actual lack of skilled journalism out in the world, but I think I have found something quite unique: an article about the web as we know it, and why we must use standards to keep it.

It explains why you must use standard data in your website, or be forced to do the longhorn dance. It is us or it, we the people or microsoft. Open vs closed, freedom vs central command. It's your choice and you control it.

I hope more people will read this piece.

via exclipy.com

Sound, this time in Fedora Core 2

torsdag, juni 03, 2004

I have an old Compaq system, a presario 5030. This isn't very nice to Most linux distros when it comes to (at least) sound.

Making sound work was moderately easy in Suse 9.0, all I did was tweak some settings, GUI style in Suse's excellent YaST config tool. Turning off PNP detection worked there. With Fedora Core 2, things didn't go as smooth intitially. I did run Core 1 once, and using sndconfig to adjust some settings worked nicely. Sndconfig doesn't come with Core 2 though, it uses ALSA which sndconfig apparantly doesn't work with.

What I had to do was laid out to me by a Fedora user by the name of Linus Walleij. He had installed it on a Compaq Deskpro EN, which has the same soundcard, in an apparantly equal configuration as that of the Presario 5030.

Simple steps:

Log in as root, then edit /etc/modprobe.conf. My modprobe.conf looked like this before this edit:

alias eth0 8139too
alias usb-controller uhci-hcd

There is my network card, and the usb controller.

I inserted these lines from the page linked above:

# ALSA portion
alias char-major-116 snd
alias snd-card-0 snd-es18xx
options snd-es18xx enable=1 isapnp=0 port=0x220 mpu_port=0x388 fm_port=0x330 irq=5 dma1=1 dma2=0

# OSS/Free portion
alias char-major-14 soundcore
alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0

# card #1
alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss
alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss
alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss

Now restart, and the sound works brilliantly. Just remember to run up the volume of PCM in the volume control.

Good ol' days

lørdag, mai 01, 2004

First you occopy a country, then you piss on its prisoners. Thats liberation for you.

More gmail

tirsdag, april 27, 2004

I read that gmail is facing trademark battles, many are calling themselves or their products gmail already.

In Norway, a company selling sunglasses are calling them (or him)selves google.no. I just found that a company calling themselves Gallager & Robertson is selling its e-mail product gmail under the domain www.gmail.no

I wonder if google will loose their legal battle against them too... They lost in trial trying to get the google.no domain from SMSfun

Yay, I've got G-mail

tirsdag, april 27, 2004

As a blogspot user, I was invited to try out gmail: yay! And it works pretty fine. But only in IE and k-meleon. Argh. Not Opera 7.5 beta1. It loads in Opera, but after getting all the HTML, it is just white. - No matter what settings I use :( It appears that google uses some activex, which Opera doesn't support) Sigh. I'll have to use my 'Open link in k-meleon' menu item then...

Its funny though, in my first mail (the one from gmail), one of the ads was for, tada, Opera's search function! OK, so the first mail was laden with info about gmail's search functions and in general about all the ways that make exectly Opera such an incredibly good browser. But its too bad that gmail doesn't support Opera anyway. It officially supports almost every other browser, meaning IE5+ and the Gecko family (which includes k-meleon)

I'm not going to rant about gmail's privacy issues (yet), I haven't even read the privacy statement properly yet. Maybe later. Now I'll send myself some mail I need to store in public but don't have room for elsewhere...

Scary commentary

søndag, april 25, 2004

Commentarys tend to be the most insightful and entertaining articles in most magazines and newspapers. They give the writer more room to elaborate and think things through than does the first serve, most money - breaking news..

Today however, I read a zdnet commentary by Grover Norquist, talking about the EU case against microsoft. He argues that the case disturbes the american economy by taking away the very foundings of competition.

I thought it was the other way around, that monopolys held up by anticompetitive actions such as withholding vital information for a competitior to actually compete, was the real threat to the economy. Oh no - he says Microsoft has gotten where it is right now squarely because of their hard work, innovative products and good marketing.

No arguing about the latter, but I think Grover Norquist needs a reality-check.

And more:

"Americans must be concerned about these latest developments because they spell trouble for our own economy. To the extent that our companies are forced to compete in foreign markets with one arm--or more--tied behind their backs, their overall competitiveness will suffer. The time spent waging legal battles, customizing products for punitive rules and regulations overseas, and monitoring an ever-changing sea of obstacles erected by foreign governments takes away from the ability of American companies to innovate."

I dont get this. Earlier in the article he says "To be truly successful, businesses must be willing to work internationally." - Is he arguing that because an international company is based in the US, it shouldn't have to worry about the rest of the world's laws and moral?

Paper DVD

lørdag, april 17, 2004

Sony and TOPPAN has developed a 25 GB blu-ray DVD disc consisting of 51% paper (moulded with some plastic I suppose).

Benefits? Cheaper production, more rigid (believe it or not), and finally it allows for higher quality label printing. As a bonus you can probably use your paper schredder to destroy your sensitive data...

I'm looking forward to better-looking, more natural-feeling DVD's

Its already possible!

lørdag, april 10, 2004

I read at bbc that..

"By the year 2010, file-sharers could be swapping news rather than music, eliminating censorship of any kind."

Why, its already possible, very very possible! By using a)A descriptive file-name, and/or b)metadata for the article you're publishing into the Gnutella and Gnutella2 networks, you can publish anything you want, anything. - And anyone can find what info they want, without cencorship. Today.

Of course, the Gnutella network doesn't provide you with the propagation things like RSS give you, gnutella is still limited by your own so-called 'horizon'. The gnutella horizon is your virtual near vacinity, your neighbours, of other users of gnutellla software.

The following table from leuf.com shows your horizon for any given TTL, a querys Time To Live (x), and the number of computers you are directly connected to (y), which is what determines your horizon size.

	TTL=2	TTL=3	TTL=4	TTL=5	TTL=6	TTL=7
n=2	4	6	8	10	12	14
n=3	9	21	45	93	189	381
n=4	16	52	160	484	1456	4372
n=5	25	105	425	1705	6825	27305
n=6	36	186	936	4686	23436	117186
n=7	49	301	1813	10885	65317	391909
n=8	64	456	3200	22408	156864	1098056

Note that this table doesn't take into concideration a relatively new addition to the gnutella protocol called ultra-peers, which have between 70 and several hundreds of connections called leafs. Ultra-peers themselves normally connect to 5-10 or more ultra-peers, while leafs connect to 2-4 ultra-peers making the horizon multitudes larger given the same TTL.

But this is your horizon; Those at your horizon also has such an horizon and those connected to them also has one, so one can actually say that all computers in the gnutella network are connected. Because everyone shares files on gnutella, we can actually say that all articles on the gnutella network are potentially on all computers in the network. If I want a book from computer number 20000, one of the users in my 10000 number horizon would have to fetch that file first, for me to at all know about it, and so on. If an article or a subject is interesting enough (wants to be shared), it will spread pretty rapidly throughout the network in enough copies that anyone can get it.

The only problem seems to be one of trust, of quality, like in any other editor-less world where everthing can be anything and everyone is likely to be a terrorist or even socialist with communist tendencies. But who is to say the current media talks more truth? --Making a decentralized news-source without cencorship is incompatible with editing. The most popular stories are probably also the most interesting and therefore often most truthful stories. I know I delete the bad stuff myself...

Learning how to compute

lørdag, april 10, 2004

I just read an article on newsforge where a sysadmin is telling the story of his three year old grand-daughter learning linux.

It was a fun read, not only because I like to hear success-stories about Linux, but also becuse it reminded me of my first steps on my brothers first computer, a commodore 128 (I never got one myself). While I don't remember how I started things, how I saved things, or how I did almost anything, I remember how I was so facinated that I could do something, I could make something (draw houses, boats and cars at that time).

This is what the story above is about, a three-year old learning how to draw images and play games. On Suse Linux 9.0.

So who is growing up, Linux or the kid?

Check - 1,2,3 froogle

onsdag, april 07, 2004

Want a quick way to check the current prices for some product? Use the new Froogle wap service in your Opera hotlist. I've previously mentioned how you can customize Opera's wap display to make it perfect for the hotlist.

Isn't Bill an MS fashist after all?

tirsdag, april 06, 2004

Corbis, the professional photo site, was founded in 1989 by Bill Gates. Ironically, you can now win an Apple G5 a day by logging in to that site.

Oh the irony...
Thanks to achhoo for mentioning gettyimage for me, this made me think of corbis, and well...

gmail = 1 gigabytes of mail

fredag, april 02, 2004

OK, is it an aprils fools joke? Seems not, cause google announced march 31(the most popular story on cnet right now btw) that they would set up a free webmail which offers users a whopping 1 GB of storage. Then they issued a pressrelease the 1.april, and its still there the second (today).

So we checked it out, we in #opera at irc.opera.com, and found that they indeed had mail-servers in place; I tried sending a mail to a nonexistent@gmail.com, and got a "Delivery failure" message, with a message ID of [dont@remember].gmail.com.

But sadly, only a selected number of people, 1000 of them, would be joining betatesting. I guess that means people they imagine are very popular with mail, (so they can really test it) and I'm not :-(

Back to the Windows

onsdag, mars 17, 2004

I admit it. I gave up. I resorted back to Windows after trying a myriad of Linux versions. Why?

Every Linux was way to slow on my pii300 machine. Lastly I ran Debian woody with nothing installed except Xfree86 and WindowMaker besides the 'base system'. - And Opera, just to try if it would help things out. But no, Opera was as slow on Debian as on Suse as on Fedora. Windows XP pro is a dream come through. Really.

The only thing that was faster on linux was running multiple applications at once. No matter how many apps I had running, 20'ish on each virtual desktop, nothing seemed to slow down, except it was really slow to begin with.

So what is the minimum requirements for any given kernel? Do I have to compile it myself to make things better? I guess that would help. But for any given default kernel on any given distribution it seems like you need at least 700 electrical horsepowers.

Now I can print to our network printer as well; Canon i550 officially has no support in cups. Shame on Canon.

Funky radio

lørdag, mars 13, 2004

Wefunk is one of the best radios on the net.. It does old-school Rap, good rap and good funk and absolutely no talking. Check out their archives!

Besides their HTML and CSS is also pretty tidy.

WML, the real RSS?

lørdag, mars 13, 2004

RSS is, like many point out, and I agree, brilliant for retreiving content quickly. (It was built for content, no surprise there).

But as RSS catches on, organizations will probably start putting images, html formatting, ads and whatnot in it too. Which means we're back to where html is now: at XHTML. So whats the point then? Why not simply use XHTML if you want to convey images and push ads? Why destroy the brilliance of RSS with you eager to make money of it; the point of RSS for any operation, it should seem, is to lure people to your site with as little bandwith and management costs as possible.

Enter WML, the original mobile markup language. I've long used WAP on my aging Siemens c/m35 mobile, and WML is OK for its purpose. Its all about content, and you can't throw much unrelated content in it before it starts lagging seriously with the normal mobile modem connections and frustrated users start looking elsewhere.

Like RSS, it's an XML dialect, but it has more options to it even though its not modular like RSS(?). It lets the user navigate in it through cards, which can be hidden elements until they're requested. Much like using DOM I suppose, except somewhat limited. It is an application, when thinking about it I get a microsoft feeling where I'm somehow tied into the webpage without control over what I see or not. But decks are very suited on WAP, because of mobile display's limited resolution. Of course it also makes it somehow interactive, which is nice sometimes...

So why isn't WAP used more 'on the web', in common programs, for quick and easy reading? Google has a decent(?) search-engine for the 'mobile web', so finding stuff shoulnd't be too hard. The only place I know you can actually use it is in Opera, which added a WAP reader in version 4.0. The image on the right shows an Opera panel (aka hotlist tab) with Ananova in it (using my customized stylesheet for Opera). Nice isn't it? Remember the decks? Perfect for a panel. You can easily browse a wap page, and it takes almost no bandwith, and no extra work on the provider side to get you the info you need.

With WML 2.0, it essentially became XHTML .. Take whats out there, you may not need RSS at all. (duck).

Crashing Gimp

torsdag, mars 11, 2004

I hate creating gif's for transparancy, because of the stupid unisys patent. Besides, png always look better, and is almost always smaller too. And it's a bloody free standard, and I love those.
- I use the Gimp for image-creation, and it started crashing when both saving and opening png's a few weeks back.

I have no idea why, but after deleting zlib.dll in the PATH of my system (this was windows\system32 here), it worked fine. It was what they call 'ancient', dated 1998, so I copied over the zlib.dll from the gtk folder. I hope no other programs start crashing now.

Torrents in Opera, with Suse

fredag, mars 05, 2004

I don't know about you, but I love bittorrent. It's just so efficient and so plain simple to use.

I've lately been struggling uphill to understand Linux, and I think I'm getting to grips with it, albeit slowly. Coming from the windows world, I'm in effect handicapped by all the glamour and flashing lights (although they often fusk).

I wanted bittorrent to work in my Suse 9.0 installation, and so I set out to find a client that could do the downloading for me. I went straight for the source, the bittorrent official client is by far the simplest around. I found an rpm for suse 9.0, called bittorrent-3.3-2.noarch.rpm.

What intimidated me at first with this client was that it required command-line arguments for operation. Not that I don't like that, but under windows, I just couldn't get it to work. Guess what, I made it work under Linux. Linux IS easy like they tell you! Its just windows that has terrible command-line tools and syntax, which varies from windows version to windows version. Not so with Linux or Unix, and there's a LOT of documentation out there too. And there's the man pages as well, which give you the jump into understanding what the creators of a program were thinking, and how to operate it..

Installing it

Anywho.... This post was supposed to be about how I got bittorrent working in Opera, and that rather elegant too if I may say so;

Download that rpm I mentioned, and just install it with yast (that is, open it in Konqueror and press the "install with yast" button; you can also use yast package-name.rpm, or the original rpm -i package-name.rpm from the command-line. I used the Konqueror Yast option, it installed some additional packages I needed as well; python, for instance. Not sure if rpm does that...)

Now that it's installed, its time to set up Opera. Since I didn't install the GUI version, I needed to latch out the konsole to work it so I could see it (it is possible to run it directly, but then you'll never see whats happening). You need to set up a file-type entry in Opera, with the mime-type application/x-bittorrent, and file-type torrent. The elegant part is the command-line you put in "Open with other application".

konsole --nomenubar --noscrollbar --notoolbar --noclose --workdir /home/toman/btdls --vt_sz 70x9 -T Bittorrent -e btdownloadheadless.py --max_uploads 9 --max_upload_rate 29 --minport 6900

Now, this might look intimidating, but what it says is this:

Open konsole, with no menubar, no scrollbar, no toolbar, dont close when the program is finished, set the working directory to /home/[user]/btdls (eg save the torrent here), with a size of 70 columns x 9 lines, Call the window Bittorrent; In that konsole, Execute the command-line bittorrent client with max uploads of 9, max upload rate of 29kbps, listening at port 6900 and above.
09 march: I've updated this and set the working directory for the konsole instead of telling the bittorrent client where to save it with --saveas. It didn't work if the torrent was set to be saved in no folder of its own

It looks like this:

I love it when I can control how apps work. :-)

Opera's search function

Opera is just lovely when it comes to modification. One of it's lovelies is that you can add and/or edit the search engines it already comes with. So why not make one for torrents? You can actually use google for that, and its very simple. You probably know google can search for exclusive types of documents, but those that are listed at the advanced search page are not interesting here. You can add file type:torrent to the query, and it will find torrents only!

Now.. You can add a search engine to Opera with the nice Search.ini editor for windows. But on Linux, the manual way is by adding the below to ~/.opera/search.ini, minding the number, it needs to be 'next in line':

[Search Engine 40]
Name=Google Bittorrent
URL=http://www.google.com/search?q=%s+filetype:torrent&sourceid=opera&num=%i&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
Query=
Key=bt
Is post=0
Has endseparator=0
Encoding=utf-8
Search Type=0
Verbtext=17063
Position=-1
Nameid=0

Compiling fun

tirsdag, mars 02, 2004

Yay, I've compiled my first programs!

It started with PSI, which went smooth as butter. But when I wanted to check out Qtella, I got into trouble.

It complained I didn't have the kde-include files, or rather, that I may have installed KDE in an odd place asking me to provide the --with-kde-includes= option to ./configure. Little did I know that I had to install kdelibs-devel. So if you have a relatively default suse 9.0 installation, install that.. Its compiling as I write.

Bin laden caught?

lørdag, februar 28, 2004

The iranian state radio is reporting that Osama was caught long ago, in Pakistani areas. But both American and Pakistani officials deny this. I'm not going into a discussion about the fact, cause those are impossible to get when there is war.

What is interesting though, is why he hasn't been cought when all countries around afghanistan are in with the US war against Bin Laden's associates.

Saddam Hussain was 'officially caught' when there had been period of falling support for G.W.Bush over the war in Iraq. So it's tempting to imagine that US and pakistan high officers are holding Bin Laden in the same secret place Saddam is now, just to reveal him as being caught just before the US presidential election. With so much dirt comping from that administration, it wouldn't surprise me a bit. They keep on saying he will be cought, and I have to wonder how they can be so sure, and why the whole administration is smiling so darn wide much the time.

MS offices, uh ...

fredag, februar 27, 2004

The part of the distribution contracts that said vendors had to give up their rights to their patents when facing microsoft has been removed! "For customer satisfaction reasons". Yuck.
And further:

"Microsoft believes that the patent-related provision is lawful under Japanese, US and EU law,"

Funny how they think it's OK to circumvent patents themselves, while they "believe in Intellectual Property".

MS offices raided in Tokyo

torsdag, februar 26, 2004

Quote from the BBC:

"The Fair Trade Commission alleges that Microsoft insists that if the companies - such as NEC, Hitachi and Sony - want to pre-install its Windows software on their computers, they must sign away their right to sue the US giant, even if they find it has used their patent technology."
...
"Unless Japanese companies agree to the clause, they cannot pre-install Windows in their computers."

Interesting indeed. How the hell is this even possible for companies to sign on such a thing? I'm sure the commision wouldn't raid if they didn't have evidence. The allegation is pretty straight forward, they've probably seen the contracts.

I just hope the judicial system in Japan isn't bribable or lets itself be fooled by MS' statements that "its the customers who will suffer" like they do in Europe right now. You're damn right it will be the customers. Your customers. - There are other products but yours, and if you didn't hide your interfaces to your technology while bundling your products, it would be a fair game.

(Not that the two are directly related though...)

HipHop is everything is ...........

tirsdag, februar 24, 2004

I just watched the movie Scratch. It's a really funky film about HipHop culture, breaking it into it's various parts, looking back in history, looking at present state commercialism and the future hiphop version of that.

The movie itself feels like made by a DJ, every Point is scratched upon, everything is one long set of intertwined scenes and it really, really flows. I got kinda tired at about 1hr10min, but the last 12 minutes were summarizing so it didn't really matter.

It has a really good theme of collaboration and using hiphop as a way of avoiding conflict. DJ Shadow points out that [inaudible] were the first to take the secrecy out of dj'ing by revealing what records they were using. 'They' said like hey; This is what we use, take it and make something better so that 'we' can improve on it.

"Take this and improve on it so that we can learn". Taste that and compare to software.

Qbert is another DJ whose history is told. He is really mental about hiphop. Not mental in the stupid phrase describing a psyciatric patient, but he really feels hiphop is about more than just being cool and playing the right stuff. Not that any of the other charachter in the movie are all about being cool, but Qbert talks about it alot, having alien figures in his apartment. At the end of the movie, this mentality is expressed as "We are all us. If you hurt anyone, you hurt a part of yourself."

And the end musical theme? Edvard Grieg's Dovregubbens hall.

Mullah Krekars attorney speaks

fredag, februar 20, 2004

You all know about the north Iraqi group Ansar al Islam, and its former leader mullah Krekar. Krekar is in Norway and is being prosecuted by what seems like the entire norwegian legal apparatus. The allegations have been varying, the first terrorist-allegation was dropped a few months ago, but there are now 'new' evidence around.

The claims are that Krekar has been directly involved in many attacks in Iraq, even though he resigned as leader a long time ago to move to norway and live with his refuge family. Ansar al Islam is the prime link between Saddam Hussain and Al-Quaida, and as long as the US doesn't find the WMD they claimed were in Iraq, the group seems like the only justification left talking about. But noone has evidence of such a link.

So what do you do?
Without evidence, you need to make evidence appear legal or otherwise, and this it seems, is what the US, Iran (yes, iran), Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and Økokrim (Norwegian Police' Economic Crime Unit, by the way the one that lost when accusing DVD-Jon...) in norway have done. Krekar was recently released (again) from custody because the court found that the 'new' evidence, namely information aquired from a few ex-ansar al islam members wasn't any good.

Why? These members were tortured into saying the right things. Krekars attorney says they have firm and detailed evidence of this. They've been kicked, beaten, put naked in the freezer, gotten arms broken.
First they're interrogated by american military, then left for the group opposing ansar al islam, PUK, to torture, then interrogated again by the americans, then PUK, and then finally, the norwegians come in. They 'were present' at the interrogations, and so they say noone was tortured into saying anything.

Imagine youself being tortured every time you do something you're not supposed to do. Again and again. Wouldn't you try to say what you're supposed to say? What the interrogators want to hear? Thought so.

The justification factor

Certainly, Ansar al Islam is violent. The US is violent. Saddam was violent. Other groups in Iraq are violent. Israel is violent. Groups in Iran are violent.
I just heard an interview with a (female) socialist expert who lived in Iraq for quite some time. She compared Iraqi affairs, where a lot of groups in northern Iraq have control over limited areas and constantly fighting, she compared it to Norway around year 1000, when there were lots of 'småkonger', little kings, ruling here and there.

Who are we to take one of those groups and compare them with our civilized (dangerous word nowadays) lives in the west? Who are we to superimpose our way of living on their affairs? What if Ayatollah Ali Khamenei of Iran started accusing John Kerry of adultery? Claiming thats bad in Iran so he must be put in jail in Iran? With a "fair trial"?

Oh the dangers of trying to prove something you want to be true. I'm currently reading Jan Guillou - Coq Rouge

Windows NT4/2000 Source code leaked

lørdag, februar 14, 2004

Yep. Someone has brought the source-code of w2k and nt4 into the public.

This will be really interesting to see play out. Microsoft has already posted a note on their press page saying it's not a result of their shared source sheme nor is it leaking in-house. So who did? The obvious answer is an ex-employee. It appears it comes from someone at mainsoft.com; a crash-log generated by Linux(!) when the editor Vi crashed, reveal details of the state of the system at that time, ca 2000... (Mainsoft does UNIX<->Windows porting etc. of software, MS is one of their customers)

But the official answer will probably be something like an ex-employee currently working on an open source project while stealing code from windows and forgetting for a moment that windows wasn't open source.

I've always wondered, how much open source is in Microsoft products? We know much BSD stuff is in (they can say that), but why reinvent the weel when nobody can catch you copying it anyway?

In the days of SCO suits and microsoft loosing the offence, I can't help wonder if this is a simple (but risky) ploy by MS themself, with the intention of scaring customers away from open source. Yes. If I was deciding purchase of some systems, I'd stay away from software where unauthorized MS code may turn up, cause MS has a legal system of their own and I don't have enough money to fight that.
But it might backfire on MS too. What if lots of open source code is found there? Code that isn't BSD or public domain, only with the copyright comments snipped? Or did they make availiable only original code? (Unsurprisingly, Microsoft is playing down the security aspect while telling reporters that the main issue here is Intellectual Property.)

How much will this add to the confusion of source code (Will your neighbours put up a taller fence if you tell them you write open source code)?

Who's first in suing who?

RSS validity

lørdag, februar 07, 2004

In an effort to improve a stylesheet for RSS, I went googling for +http OR +www OR +the filetype:rss OR filetype:rdf OR filetype:atom. The search returned 241.000 results. Seing how XML is used in many none-rss applications like web-pages, I excluded that type.

Anyway, if you are interested: The stylesheet worked perfectly on 87.875% of the first 800 feeds, leaving 12,125% barely readable. The percentage was the same in the first 400, indicating no difference in implementation between high and low rank/status pages. The feeds that don't work are mainly specific namespaces like foaf, but a few also have invalid RSS markup (but only 3 feeds were invalid XML). About 0.8% are styled with CSS themselves, while approx 3% are served as text/plain (which I didn't count).

Why 400 at the time? Because I got tired in my left little-finger from holding down ctrl+shift while opening the pages in the background in Opera. - Thats right, I ran RSS feeds in 400 pages simultanously. Yes, RSS is light, but 400 is quite a lot anyway. It's so many I didn't see a page button at all with 1280 solution.

Was the MyDoom creator an American?

torsdag, februar 05, 2004

The Norwegian e-mail provider runbox has been touched by the FBI in relation to the MyDoom worm(s).

When the Bugbear virus broke, one of their customers was in the spotlight, and the individual has been paid close attention to for the past year.although the name he is using on runbox has now changed slightly. A person with a name suspiciously alike that is using a runbox account now.

Yeah, yeah, we all hear MyDoom is russian, and how easy isn't that to believe in these times? Unsecured Russian bio-weapons, Afghan terrorists (Afghanistan borders with russian republics) and links between Saddam and freedom-fighters in Chechnya (Hard to figure the english spelling of that country).
It's just to easy to believe. Although the two are otherwise unrelated, it's tempting to remind you that Al-Jazeera was hacked into a patriot website by an american. The general picture of Russians (or eastern europeans in general) seems to be that they're a bunch of (ex-)communist thugs. It's too easy to label something on the internet as russian just because the lead stops there.

It kinda reminds me of "gang-crime" in Oslo nowadays. The media is all over a recent killing, citing immigrant crime, and begun discussing this 'immigrant crime', even though the police time and time again tell them some of the worst crime is performed by native Norwegians, most notably by bikers of Hells Angels and the like. But if it isn't Hells Angels, it has to be immigrants right? No Norwegians who arn't Linux users would ever do something like that, would they?

English and Norwegain

tirsdag, februar 03, 2004

After having spent much time online where the the langauge I read is predominantly English, I like to tell myself that I know english quite well. Natively norwegian and having been tought english since 4th grade should also help that though.

It is however, much easier to express oneself in ones own language, even if I write mostly in english as evident in this blog and most of my other online activities.
Therefore I've created another blog in Norwegian where you'll be able to find more of the real me and what I care about. The host of the other service, weblogg.no also lets me upload images, which makes it easier to maintain without me having to upload them elsewhere. It also has RSS summaries, and it's all free in contrast to blogspot.

I think I'll keep this blog mostly as my technical half, although I'll try to write here what I think is interesting for international readers. So drop by :-)

Suse and ALSA

lørdag, januar 10, 2004

And here you go: Kevin W asked me kindly to go on with the description on how I got sound working in Suse on a Compaq Presario 5030, because his ESS es1371 card wasn't working in his Mandrake box. I believe Mandrake uses the same sound-setup as RedHat and Fedora, namely sndconfig, so this will probably not apply. Also the es1371 card isn't the same as es1869. Anyway, this is the story:

Run yast sound as root in a konsole. You can also use the more graphical Yast2 from the KDE control center, the steps are the same.
Answer the questions as they come, and let Yast (or alsa, is it?) probe for old cards. You'll then be taken to a screen without any cards listed. Choose Add card and scroll to ESS in the left pane before you choose es18xx from the right. Click next, then choose 'Advanced, with possibility to change settings'. You should see a list of settings there. Click the 'PNP-detection for es18xx ...' entry. Type 0 in the field at the bottom and click Set. If you now click Next, your card should be all set!
(Note that I'm still very new to linux, so if this doesn't work for you, look elsewhere :-)

Word security 'feature' ?

fredag, januar 09, 2004

It's weird. Just when you start believing Microsoft will do security out of the box, I'm utterly dissapointed again. - Not that I ever really believed MS actually would put security ahead of marketing, but there you go.

MS Word has a feature letting you password protect documents you create in the proggy. I never used it, and I didn't even find it when looking. Maybe I just have the wrong version of windows (the one without MS Office).
This password thing has been compromized such that anyone can make modifications to the file without a password.

Anyway, my point is: When is security a 'feature'? If it says password protect, it damn well means password protect, not 'let the user opening this document believe it is password-protected by displaying a prompt when she tries to save it'. It's almost like putting a Do not wreck sign in front of your newly sown lawn which is next to a kindergarden where kids play with dogs. -- Granted, the bypassing of passwords require some techie skills and a hex-editor, but thats not the point. A password is something you use to protect your documents, not something you use to hinder non-techies from modifying them.

What I do when creating something secret is use Cryptext, but that will not let me 'share' the document in whole or in parts like Word does with its feature. - Which is probably pretty useful in a working enviroment, but it again proves MS lack of security-minded employees.