On Tuesday night I became an Ubuntu member. w00t! My application for membership was processed by the new Regional Membership Board for Europe, Middle East and Africa. I will not go into the actual process itself, only to say I was a somewhat nervous about it. Luckily though, my application was approved. Thank you to everyone for their encouragement and to those who supported my application :)
I have been using Twitter on and off for several months. Some of the time the service works, the remainder of the time I am reliably informed that "Something is technically wrong." Currently, Twitter is the only web based application I use on a regular basis which breaks just as regularly as I use it.
If Twitter provided an important service, email for example, I would have stopped using it in favour of something more reliable; however, arguably, Twitter does not provide an important service, so I have persevered with its less than reliable service, though I have to admit, my patience is wearing thin.
For me, Twitter has stopped being a fun distraction and has become something which I like to do, but more often than not, I end up feeling frustrated when I do. Problem is, I have become comfortable with keeping a virtual diary of day-to-day, hour-to-hour, minute-to-minute distractions. I also enjoy the sporadic conversations which occur between mutual followers.
Do not misunderstand me, I think the basis of the Twitter service, "What are you doing?", is valid and simple enough to remain being a great idea; however, for fear of stating the obvious, I do not think the Twitter service is currently scaling well enough to cope with the digital populace. And more worryingly [at least for the Twitter developers], I am not sure it ever will, not in its current guise and regardless of the underlying technologies.
Also, there is something which has been bugging me about Twitter, the fact that it is hosting my data. The data in question, may on the surface seem unimportant, and for the large part it is; however, on occasion I have found myself wanting needing to refer to my backlog of tweets, only to find the Twitter service lacking, again.
As an example, only the other day, Becky and I wanted to watch an episode of a certain serial drama and neither of us could remember the last episode we had watched. Ah ha! I thought, I will search my Twitter history, I am sure to have tweeted about it. The following conversation went something like:
me: Ah b∗ll∗cks!
Becky: What's wrong?
me: Something technical!
If I was hosting the tweets myself, I feel certain the above short conversation would never have taken place. I would have been able to search my data, find the information I needed and carry on with my otherwise happy existence.
I am feeling all Twittered out, not with the concept, but with the service. I am going to rectify this by developing my own mini Twitteresque application. The application will provide similar functionality to Twitter, but obviously it will be served from my own hosting account. The application will store my tweets within its own database as well as pushing them to Twitter. Ideally, once the application is running, nobody, apart from myself, should notice any difference as it will appear as though I am Twittering as normal.
Twitter got me hooked on keeping a diary of meaningless events, but then left me wanting. So, thank you Twitter, I now have a new project to keep me amused for a while.
End rant. Start project.
In my last post I had a mini rant regarding the BBC's use of RealPlayer and how I believe Real's media formats are not particularly well supported under Linux. In the comments which followed, James pointed out the fact that RealPlayer is supported under Linux; you just have download the executable binary file and install it yourself. In my reply to James, I stated:
While it may not be difficult for power users to install Real Player, I think regular users would maybe struggle. Personally, I cannot remember the last time I had to download and install an executable binary; which either says a lot about the current state of Linux and how far it has come, or how poorly supported Real Player is.
Anyhow, I do not like moaning about stuff without doing anything constructive to rectify things; so, I decided to write this little howto install RealPlayer guide for Ubuntu Linux. If this is something you are interested in doing then follow the instructions on my wiki.
Update: I have moved the instructional part of this post to my wiki, see:
http://crunchbang.org/wiki/realplayer-on-ubuntu/
In case anyone does not know, the BBC News 24 channel has a technology programme named Click. The Click website describes the show as, "The BBC's flagship technology programme"; so expect a fairly mainstream show featuring technology news and gadget reviews. Anyhow, Andrew kindly reminded me that this week Click contains a special on free [as in beer] software. Ubuntu Hardy Heron and OpenOffice.org are clearly spotted in the programme, which has to be a good thing :) If you missed the show, you can watch it online with the BBC's iPlayer.
Also, while I am on the subject of the BBC, is it not about time the BBC made their online services more Linux friendly? As a fully paid up license holder I am somewhat frustrated with the BBC's continued support of Windows Media Player and Real Player media formats, neither of which are particularly well supported on Linux. In fact, these days I rarely use the BBC website as it frustrates me so :(
I have created a new page on my website. For lack of a better name, I have called the page "Interesting Stuff Elsewhere". The page features a list of links to "stuff" which I have deemed interesting enough to share via my Google Reader account.
The "stuff" is a hodgepodge collection of articles, blog posts, podcasts and videos; having said that, the "stuff" could be anything and the only real way to find out what the "stuff" is, is to click on the links. One thing is for sure, all the links lead to dead good "stuff" :)
I am not overly superstitious, I have been known to walk under ladders, but yesterday had to be the 13th. It may not have been a Friday, but it was definitely the 13th. I know this because everything I touched exploded in my face, a slight exaggeration maybe, but seriously, if it could have gone wrong, it did go wrong. Even simple operations like creating tarballs was too much for me. My only consoling thought during my many mishaps was the fact that I was not suffering alone.
Some people blamed their boobs on magic, disturbances in the force and warps [glitches, surely?] in the Matrix:
Due to an almost magical series of administrative, record-keeping, and usability errors, the domain registration for A List Apart momentarily lapsed this morning.
It was like a disturbance in the Force, or a warp in the Matrix.
Others held their hands up, admitted to a serious problem and got on with the job of correcting it. Some people started throwing muck, while others helped out in a more constructive manner.
Of course, all of this nonsense pales into insignificance when you think about what is happening in meatspace. Still, yesterday was the 13th, I am glad today is the 14th.
This is one of those security notices which on first glance appears to be serious enough to take a second glance. I have therefore republished the entire notice:
===========================================================
Ubuntu Security Notice USN-612-1 May 13, 2008
openssl vulnerability
CVE-2008-0166
===========================================================
A weakness has been discovered in the random number generator used
by OpenSSL on Debian and Ubuntu systems. As a result of this
weakness, certain encryption keys are much more common than they
should be, such that an attacker could guess the key through a
brute-force attack given minimal knowledge of the system. This
particularly affects the use of encryption keys in OpenSSH, OpenVPN
and SSL certificates.
This vulnerability only affects operating systems which (like
Ubuntu) are based on Debian. However, other systems can be
indirectly affected if weak keys are imported into them.
We consider this an extremely serious vulnerability, and urge all
users to act immediately to secure their systems. (CVE-2008-0166)
This advisory also applies to the corresponding versions of
Kubuntu, Edubuntu, and Xubuntu.
== Who is affected ==
Systems which are running any of the following releases:
* Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty)
* Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy)
* Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy)
* Ubuntu "Intrepid Ibex" (development): libssl <= 0.9.8g-8
* Debian 4.0 (etch) (see corresponding Debian security advisory)
and have openssh-server installed or have been used to create an
OpenSSH key or X.509 (SSL) certificate.
All OpenSSH and X.509 keys generated on such systems must be
considered untrustworthy, regardless of the system on which they
are used, even after the update has been applied.
This includes the automatically generated host keys used by OpenSSH,
which are the basis for its server spoofing and man-in-the-middle
protection.
The problem can be corrected by upgrading your system to the
following package versions:
Ubuntu 7.04:
libssl0.9.8 0.9.8c-4ubuntu0.3
Ubuntu 7.10:
libssl0.9.8 0.9.8e-5ubuntu3.2
Ubuntu 8.04 LTS:
libssl0.9.8 0.9.8g-4ubuntu3.1
Seriously, it is time to update your SSH keys.
Yesterday I published Darkness Returns, a GTK+ and Openbox theme. Today, in an effort to move more CrunchBang Linux material onto my site and wiki, I am publishing Brightness, another GTK+ and Openbox theme. I no longer use this theme myself, but I know some users have stated they prefer the theme which was used in CrunchBang Linux 7.10.2 [I guess you cannot please all of the people all of the time.] Personally, I prefer the increased contrast between application and data provided by Darkness Returns, but there you go.
As with Darkness Returns, Brightness uses the Clearlooks GTK+ engine. I have made the theme available on my wiki. I have used the theme under Openbox with no known issues. I have not tested the theme under GNOME.
Regarding the origin of the theme, if I remember correctly, I used the Gilouche theme as basis to work from. Even though I prefer to use a darker theme, I still really like the openSUSE artwork, it is professional and consistently good.
It occurred to me this morning that I have been using the same GTK+ theme for a couple months. I consider this fact to be a result; I have comfortably settled into using a theme and I had not fully realised it, that has to be a good sign! While I enjoy playing around with the look 'n' feel of my desktop, I cannot help but think it is a waste of time and I should be doing something more constructive; therefore, this morning's realisation comes as something of a relief.
The theme I have settled into using is called Darkness Returns. I named it so because CrunchBang Linux was originally distributed with a dark theme, then it changed to a light theme, before moving back to a dark theme for the last release; hence, Darkness Returns — pure genius :)
Darkness Returns is based on the Clearlooks GTK+ engine. It is not actually as dark as some dark themes, instead it is more of a halfway house between the lightness and the darkness; maybe I should have named it "Sitting On The Fence"? Anyhow, a couple of people have asked me for the theme and so I have made it available on my wiki. More screenshots of the theme can also be seen on my wiki: CrunchBang Linux 8.04.01 Screenshots. Feel free to use and abuse :)
"A consonant please Carol, and another, and another, and another, and another." — actually, this post is not about Carol Vorderman or Countdown, it is about some interesting[?] script output I came across when attempting to write a new spam filter. I will explain…
Just lately my website has been receiving some rather odd junk comments. The comments make no sense and they have quite obviously been sent by some automated junk flinging robot. The reason the comments make no sense is because they seem to be constructed from random characters. Apart from making no sense, these comments were also becoming a nuisance as they were easily slipping past my existing keyword filters.
So, the other night I decided to sit down and write a new filter to try and catch these random character junk comments. I started by analysing some previously submitted comments to try and find any common patterns. One such pattern I found was multiple strings containing 5 or more consecutive consonants. Thinking this to be unusual, I ran some tests against a flat file containing 21110 common English words. I thought the results were interesting. Here is what I found:
I should state that the above results are in no way definitive. I know this because I also ran the same test against another file containing 311141 words found in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. Still, by using the results of the initial test I was able to construct a list of safe words to use with my new spam filter.
Finally, yes, I did consider not writing this post; however, I am sure my publishing of these results will not change anything. Besides, Arthur, my 80 year old neighbour, is the biggest Countdown fan on the planet, he is also quite Internet savvy and definitely thinks Carol Vorderman is hot — he may find these results quite useful in increasing his daily Countdown score!
Last Saturday I received a telephone call from the Ubuntu UK podcast team. We had a chat, it was fun. Parts of our conversation can be heard in their latest podcast, S01E05 - Everybody Come Aboard. I have just listened to the podcast myself and apart from the feature with me, it's another great show :)
I would like to say thank you to the guys for allowing me on the podcast. I can now place a tick next to the item, "Appear on a podcast" on my list of things to do before I die :) Oh, and thanks also for using a picture of Daisy, an unexpected, but pleasant bonus — Daisy will no doubt grin from ear to ear when I show it to her :)
URL: http://podcast.ubuntu-uk.org/2008/05/07/s01e05-everybody-come-aboard/
I came across another regular expression test tool today. This one is an Ajax enabled regex tool which lets you evaluate regex expressions in several languages, including PHP PCRE and PHP POSIX, with instant results. You can choose which functions to use, such as match, match all, replace, split etc. I much prefer it to the similar regex tool I mentioned a couple of months ago. Everything considered, it's a very handy resource for when you are struggling with those pesky expressions.
URL: http://regex.larsolavtorvik.com/
Blog: Lars Olav Torvik - Programming and computer stuff.
Some interesting thoughts about Launchpad by Martin F. Krafft. Martin is basically saying that Canonical got it wrong with Launchpad, not because of its closed source nature, but because they missed an opportunity to create a decentralised system:
What we need is something as slick as Launchpad, and thousands of instances thereof, which all peer with each other, automatically. The information would automatically be mirrored wherever it’s referenced, so the entire cloud would be highly-available and failure-proof.
I agree that this would be great, in theory, and I look forward to testing the system soon, not :) Seriously though, being a member of the Launchpad Beta Testers team and having used many of Launchpad's features, I am not sure that Martin's proposal is even remotely possible — is it possible to maintain a complex project such as Ubuntu without a centralised project management system?
Other than Ubuntu, Puppy Linux is probably the only Linux distribution I follow. I have been a Puppy fanboy [yeah, I do not mind admitting it!] for a long time, so I was thrilled to read about the latest release, version 4.00. From the release notes:
Finally it has happened! The last 'official' release of Puppy was version 3.01, released October 15, 2007. Version 4.00 is happening 6 months later, which is an incredibly long time considering the previous frenetic schedule of releases. Anyway, here it is: the live-CD file is 'puppy-4.00-k2.6.21.7-seamonkey.iso' and is just 87.1MB. Download from http://puppylinux.com/download/.
Also from the release notes, and something that I am particularly pleased with:
GTK1 and Tcl/Tk abandoned. The decision was made to go for a totally GTK2-based system. This meant that there could be a consistent user-interface throughout and further reduced the size.
I am downloading the live-CD as I type. I will give the system a run tomorrow night, and if I get time, I will post with my initial thoughts/feedback.
Some people, I will not name names, complain about non GNOME related posts appearing on Planet GNOME. For the record, I am not one of those people. I enjoy reading random posts written by the GNOME hackers. As an example, read this one, an interesting and witty post containing such gems as…
Dispose of the males. They don't have ovaries. Local laws may make it awkward for you to release animals from laboratory environments, so dump them into a bottle of ethanol. They'll probably die happy, to the extent that fruitflies can really be happy.
and…
Slowly move the tweezers apart. If you are lucky, the abdomen will split and you'll start pulling out internal organs. If you're unlucky, the head will come off.
Eew! :D
Over the last couple of nights I have completely rewritten my personal wiki. The wiki previously used the PHP WikkaWiki wiki engine, it now uses a bunch of custom PHP scripts. The scripts are similar to those used by my blog software, Whird. I decided to perform the rewrite for numerous reasons, some of which I have listed below:
I was unhappy with how WikkaWiki was formatting the underlying HTML, specifically the way in which it would never use the paragraph tag, opting instead to insert break tags. While this probably sounds like a minor issue, it was really beginning to bug me.
I started this site [crunchbang.org] with the intention of coding all of the software/scripts myself. Therefore, and somewhat obviously, my use of WikkaWiki was always going to provide reason for my conscience to niggle me.
As mentioned before, WikkaWiki is very hackable; however, it was never going to be as hackable as something I had produced myself.
I wanted both my blog and my wiki to use the Markdown markup language. While this was not a problem for my blog [it has always used Markdown] I could not find any suitable plugins/hacks for enabling Markdown within WikkaWiki.
The rewrite is pretty much complete and is now live. I have tried to make sure any URLs used by WikkaWiki are either reused or redirected. Please feel free to drop me a comment if you notice anything funky occurring.
I have been working on a small redesign of my website, again. Visually speaking, not much has changed; I have dropped the off-white background colour in favour of pure white, updated my Ubuntu advertisement, and changed the font used in my logo.
Regarding the new logo font, it is BastardusSans, one of Manfred Klein's many freely downloadable fonts. I really like Manfred Klein's fonts, not only because they are high quality and freely available, but because they are so diverse. Manfred Klein's portfolio features hundreds of decorative, historical, picture and text based fonts. If you are looking for a unique font for a new a project, do yourself a favour and go check out Manfred Klein's portfolio at TypOasis.
Back to the website redesign; as well as the visual changes mentioned above, I have also made changes to how the XHTML is formatted — just recently I seem to have been spending a lot of time browsing the web using Links; it was during one of these sessions when I noticed just how poorly my site was rendering in a text-based environment. I have now fixed this and my site should not only look better, but make more sense too :)
Other design alterations include:
An updated print specific CSS file. Pages from my site should now print nicely [when printed from a modern browser.]
A complete redesign of my personal wiki, the wiki design now matches that of my blog. I am still loving my Wikka Wakka Wiki installation, its hackability, speed and ease of use continue to impress. I did have a problem with spam comments last month, but it was easily fixed.
A change to the font-family referenced in my site's CSS. Previously I had been specifying a range of sans-serif fonts, including but not limited to Arial and Verdana. I have changed this and the font used now is simply sans-serif. I am not sure how this change affects other systems, but IMHO, it makes for more readable copy on my Ubuntu Linux based systems.
As mentioned at the top of this post, I have updated the one and only advert on my site. I have had one advertisement on my site since it started, it is a non-commercial advertisement for Ubuntu Linux. I have toyed with the idea of displaying Google Adsense, but I just cannot bring myself to do it, so instead I have updated my Ubuntu advert :) The image has been shamelessly ripped from the new Hardy Heron CD cover art. I have no idea who the three models are, or who photographed them, but I really like the image — there is something strangely appealing about this type of top-down photography. I am not sure of the legalities of ripping the image, but I am sure modifying it to be used as a webby advert will do no harm. See below for some resized versions:
Ubuntu Circle of Friends - 300 x 396 pixels
Ubuntu Circle of Friends - 200 x 246 pixels
Ubuntu Circle of Friends - 100 x 123 pixels
That pretty much covers my recent redesign efforts [although I have been tinkering for days and I am sure to have missed some minor details.] Finally, I have got some plans to include some new features on my site, namely a new bookmarking system and links to interesting posts and articles from my shared Google Reader feed. I will post more details about this as and when I get around to scripting the features in.