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.
