CrunchBang - Code, Design & GNU/Linux

Interesting Stuff Elsewhere

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" :)

See: http://crunchbang.org/elsewhere/

I am not superstitious, but…

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.

Ubuntu Security Notice: openssl

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.

Brightness GTK+ Theme

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.

Darkness Returns GTK+ Theme

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 can not 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 :)

5 Or More Consecutive Consonants

"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:

• 85 unique strings containing 5 or more consecutive consonants.
• 113 words containing 5 or more consecutive consonants.
• 9 words containing 5 or more consecutive consonants and no vowels: crypt, lymph, lynch, myrrh, nymph, pygmy, rhythm, sylph, tryst
• 10 words containing 6 or more consecutive consonants: latchstring, metempsychosis, polysyllabic, polysyllable, porphyry, rhythm, skyscraper, strychnine, synchronize, synchronous
• 1 word containing 6 consecutive consonants and no vowels: rhythm
• 1 word containing 7 consecutive consonants: strychnine

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!

A Chat With The Ubuntu UK Podcasters

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/

A(nother) Regular Expression Test Tool

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.

Launchpad Got It Wrong?!

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?

Puppy Linux 4.00 Released

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.

Planet GNOME Goodness

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

Wiki Rewrite

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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. As mentioned before, WikkaWiki is very hackable; however, it was never going to be as hackable as something I had produced myself.

4. 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.

Site Redesign & Fonts by Manfred Klein

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.