Why Dont You Blog?

Cuil, Cuil ffs? Repress a shudder at the name. It’s a (relatively) new search engine. It’s good, although it’s had a bit of a critical drubbing. It’s much prettier than google. Its results make a lot of sense. It’s not stuffed with sponsored links or spam links or dominated by top-ten-authority corporate results. So I think I like it, although I’ve only used it on test basis.

I also really like Ubuntu. Of course, any Linux version is admirable. and Ubuntu is more admirable than most.

I am just going to have a pointless rant about the branding – calling things ethnic-sounding names to make perfectly good and worthy things sound just that bit more credible.

The wikipedia entry doesn’t do much to disspell any impulse to sneer at the Cuil name:

The Irish ancestry of Anna Patterson’s husband Tom Costello sparked the name Cuil, which the company states is taken from a series of Celtic folklore stories involving a character called Finn McCuill. The company says that Cuil is Irish for knowledge and hazel.

That’s “Irish ancestry” in the sense of “American Irish”, then? (One Irish great-great grandparent and an Irish surname qualify any American as Irish. Although I remain to be convinced that Costello really counts, here….)

Wikipedia does some serious undercutting of the legitimacy of the Irish ethnic explanation for the brandname, from a standpoint of linguistics. Which feeds my instinctive prejudice against the word, the spelling and its supposed “cool” pronunciation.

I used to get riled every time I saw claims that Ubuntu was the “African word for” something, as if Africa didn’t have more languages than any other continent in the world.

Ubuntu is an African word meaning ‘Humanity to others’, or ‘I am what I am because of who we all are’. The Ubuntu distribution brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the software world. (from Ubuntu.com)

I have to turn my pedantry against myself. That said “An African word for” not “The African word for”. Maybe I have been misjudged Unbuntu. I do a cuil search for “ubuntu is african for.” The first page is whole string of official ubuntu links, none of which say it is the African word for anything. In fact, many of the definitions that turn up are reasonably precise, a Zulu word and a South African philosophy.

My bad. I must have imagined the “African word for” phrase, misremembering the blurb from the old distro I have somewhere.

But google and cuil do both unveil an apparent subgenre of geek humour based on the misremembered “Ubuntu is African for”

Ubuntu is African for ‘Can’t configure Debian’. (typical link: Ubuntu forum post)

Indeed. ubuntu is african for ” I CANT CONFIGURE SLACKWARE”
(typical link: Another forum)

ubuntu is African for “time sucker”, right? (link: I-phone blog forum)

Ubuntu is African for “struggles to install mouses”. (from information rain)

Most off-the-wall is
Ubuntu is African for sharks with freaking laser beams on its head. (from animetro)

Am I beginning to see a pattern, here? I’ll have to try it.

Cuil is Irish for “excuse to use a disgustingly lame pun in a blog title”

(Sorry.)

This blog feels slightly shortchanged in the weird searches department. For example, if you look at HjHop’s site, he gets searches that are bizarre enough for him to make a funny feature of them.

Search engine choices that bring unsuspecting people here are generally just odd. Not entertaining, just odd. Normally, there are between 5 and 15 for Schwarzenegger (?) and similar numbers for pictures of guns. (??????) Sometimes, castles come top, usually Bodium castle – but there were only 7 searches for this today. Today’s search referrals also included Rorschach (‎7) art and fine art, (‎6) and (‎5). 5 Fruit and veg is normally a front runner but came nowhere today. I defy anyone to make a readable post out of that lot.

I suspect noone has ever been directed by a search engine to what we fondly believe is the normal content of our posts.

But this blog could acquit itself well, if it ever gets in a competitive event relating to volumes of blogspam. According to Wordpress stats for this blog, there have been 2,624 approved comments but

Akismet has protected your site from 13,409 spam comments already

Akismet doesn’t even cover the whole life span of the blog and it’s probably been reinstalled a couple of times – hence, reset to 0 – but even on these figures, that’s a good few times as many spam comments as there were legit ones.

There are clearly spam fashions. I quite admire the craftsmanship involved in the ones that have generic phrases designed to flatter you into allowing the comment through the filter:

Love your blog. I’ll bookmark it and return later.

or the old favourite from last year, with words to the effect that:

I didn’t quite understand what you said on [insert name of blog] but I’m interested to know more.

However, it’s as if the heart has gone out of the spammers. This week’s “new black” for spam seems to involve sending some random syllables, occasionally with a load of links:

qkncihdf tjnprcd mitqlanp oznqx eaqrpzu imfwatulo sjmxrqgh

for example. Or, what about this, where even the links don’t make an effort to disguise their innate spammishness, let alone entice the unwary with promises of free meds or unfeasible bodily expansion?

biprong unbrimming martinetism bosn amative biota spongida expectingly
ziafm wnwwqwuy
http://jdskmnffl.com
ktuhbdk info
http://jlvxkeva.com
uosgu wcmqjs
http://sgqwajre.com
kxrrd qzfkagqn

What’s going on? There are eleven of these in the Akismet spam queue today. Not one has an English word in it.

The Register had a long security post about blogspam, on Friday. The article was about a malware scam that claims to take the user to various legit sounding places.

Over the next several weeks I noticed a lot more of these, not only pointing to Google but also to Yahoo and MSN. The servers they pointed to all had the same basic structure, such as google-homepage.google-us.info, msn-us.info, yahoo-us.info, etc. Every one resolves to the same IP address: 124.217.253.8. That IP address is registered to Piradius.net in Singapore. The server appears to be hosted out of Kuala Lumpur. The domains, however, are registered in Ukraine:

(They’ve all moved since the article was written, of course.)

The rest of the article is fascinating. Click on one of these imaginary images and they run an executable. The article shows a series of legit looking screendumps, with the alerts very well designed. They put the fear of malware into you and offer you apparently Microsoft-approved solutions. There’s even a blag Microsoft Security Centre. The only intrinsic design flaw was that it said XP Security Centre, which was immediately suspicious to someone running Vista.

I’m as much of a mug as anyone. I just hope I haven’t fallen for any of these…….

One thing I’m pretty sure this blog been subject to (thanks to Firestats’ fund of fascinating information on referrers) is a hack of restricted Wordpress content using the Google cache. It just involves asking for things from the cache by modifying the url request string. (I’ve done that by accident I suspect)

That password-protected site of yours – it ain’t
It’s one of the simplest hacks we’ve seen in a long time, and the more elite computer users have known about it for a while, but it’s still kinda cool and just a little bit unnerving: A hacker has revealed a way to use Google and other search engines to gain unauthorized access to password-protected content on a dizzying number of websites.

We don’t have any restricted or pay-per-view content,so no loss as far as this blog is concerned. But, it’s sort of blog-validating to be in there in a “dizzying number.”

Oh dear. I am really not having a good day today.

This site, and a few others I admin, is hosted on a Linux server and today I was SSH’d in doing some admin tasks. One of the advantages of it being on Linux is the crontab. Over the years, the crontab for this account has grown into a convoluted, long, interesting, useful but undocumented crontab. For non-*nix people, the crontab is a way of scheduling things and is great for setting up automated processes like backups, sitemap submissions and the like.

Today, I needed to copy a line out of the crontab and use it elsewhere. I logged on and tried to list the crontab. In my haste I typed:

crontab -;

(missing the “l” key by a few mm). Argh. This has had the unfortunate effect of killing the entire crontab. I could cry. I should kill myself as punishment for the sheer stupidity. Now when I send crontab -l, I get the dreaded “no crontab for [account name]” message as a response.

What a nightmare. I am stupid enough to have no backup of the data in the crontab, nor was it documented well enough to recreate it properly. I should be shot.

At the bare minimum, I hope this will act as a lesson, for myself if no one else, in the importance of documentation and backups.

[tags]idiot, linux, rant, site-admin, why-dont-you, whydontyou[/tags]

I will keep this short and sweet for now. I am considering buying a satnav GPS device and, from initial research I think I would like a PDA version, rather than the more “normal” car mounted satnav system.

Obviously, as a poor blogger (feel free to donate ) I am aiming for the cheapest one possible, but I still want to avoid a total lemon. Does anyone have any suggestions / comments on the topic? Ideally, I want one which is relatively easy to add new maps to (North America would be useful but not straight away).

Would a SatNav be better (more cost effective) than a PDA? While I feel I would like a PDA, I will admit I am not sure the extra functions will get used. The main reason for the purchase is to be able to navigate to remote places, I am not sure that being able to write a spreadsheet when I am there will be that valuable. Also, if I go for a PDA, would getting one with WiFi be worth it? It strikes me that a PDA without WiFi would be pretty pointless, the trivial task of bluetoothing data from my phone to PC is annoying, so I can only assume it would be worse with a PDA.

In a perfect world, I would be able to get the system for under £150, but I suspect that is massively over-optimistic, especially if I want a WiFi PDA. I have seen the MIO P550 PDA, which seems to have everything I want, for around £220 — does anyone know if it is worthwhile? Is there a Linux GPS PDA with WiFI? That would probably tick every one of the boxes as far as my buying wishes went

Previously, I have complained how Linux (and the Linux Gods) truly hated me and went out of its way to make my life miserable. Even repeated sacrifices of Windows and Apples didn’t help until, like a Miracle sent from Tux, I came across PCLinuxOS. This has been wonderful. It works with all my hardware and is really easy to use.

There is one small problem. Since I mentioned Toutatis in the last post, the Linux God Tux seems to have passed the message on to the Rails God to make my life hell once more.

PCLinuxOS is still brilliant. It works really well. It came with Ruby installed (version 1.8.5) and installing ruby gems (0.9.2) was a walk in the park. The problems started when I got all clever and issued:

gem install rails –include-dependencies

The first time, I got an error message saying it could not find rails in any repository, second time it seemed to run ok. Sadly, despite getting messages telling me rails-1.2.3 is properly installed, I can’t get it to run. I get various error messages, depending on what obscure task I am trying to do (eg. “rails demo” produces errors about not having the 1.2.3 version, and needing to edit environment.rb to reflect the actual version…).

This creates a bit of a quandry. I can download (in fact I already downloaded it) the Rails CD version of PCLinuxOS, but I like this installation. It is set up to my preferences. I have spent time tweaking it and installing firefox extensions (for example). The thought of re-installing just to get rails running is nauseating. However, one of the reasons I wanted Linux was to do Ruby / Rails development in a way which matched the deployment server.

Choices, choices… I think it is time for some more sacrifices… Maybe some coffee beans will do the trick for Ruby, no idea for Rails…

Well it seems I have had at least a partial success with the installation of Linux onto this machine. Numerous attempts with openSUSE, Ubuntu and Solaris all failed dismally.

openSUSE 10.2 in both 32 and 64bit versions refused point blank to find the USB device (previously they found it) and certainly wouldn’t give me the facility to configure it. This is doubly strange as I have openSUSE 10.2 running on an older machine in the spare room which uses an identical USB WiFI dongle, and it worked straight out of the box. This really is a shame as over the years, I have come to like SUSE and thought it’s progress was excellent.

Ubuntu 6.10 (32/64bit) and Ubuntu 6.06 (32 bit) also completely failed to work. While it was similar to openSUSE, Ubuntu is a lot more frustrating with it’s problems. The way Ubuntu obsesses about hiding the inner workings and hand-holding pretty much drive me insane. As I see it, the main reason some one will go to Linux is because they want the power and capabilities offered by a great OS. Making all of this hidden and “unintuitive” strikes me as abject lunacy.

Solaris 10.2 (32 bit) bombed. I wasn’t really expecting much from this, my experiences with Solaris on desktops in the past has never been “fun.” This time was no different. It got as far as trying to set up the graphical interface and crashed. A reboot and it was the same all over again.

While the Solaris farce was no surprise, I was a bit disappointed by the first two. This time last year I was happily running multiple linux machines (SUSE and Ubuntu) and would regularly tell people about the benefits of using them (see blog archives for examples). I honestly thought that the way both were heading, there was actually a chance you could get Linux out to the broader audience (ask heather – I kept harassing her to try it, saying how easy it is now, etc.). Give my recent experiences, I think both have taken a step backwards.

No one expects a “niche” OS like Linux to have out of the box support for every hardware device on Earth, but I would expect them to make it easier for people to find the problems. Having lots of on-line resources is useless when your problem is the network connection! I wonder what the goals of the various distros are – in the case of Ubuntu, I can only assume world domination. If the distro makers want to really move away from the small home market share (in the main, people who work in technical jobs), they need to re-think their approach.

This brings me to my last attempt. PCLinuxOS. Worked straight out of the box. I even did it twice to check. Both time this ran perfectly. Given the frustrations, and the cabinet full of install DVD/CD-Roms I have, this was amazing. I am even writing this on Firefox, under PCLinuxOS.

While I am impressed with it’s ability to find and connect to the network first time (with lots more configuration options than either SUSE or Ubuntu), I am not fully convinced I “like” PCLinuxOS yet. Give me some time to play with it, and see what installing new software is like – the main reason I want Linux is to set up an Apache server with PHP5, Perl, Python and Ruby/Rails to assist with web development. If this is not up to the task….

Anyway, let me close with a big well done to PCLinuxOS. It has succeeded where the bigger names failed (Even Mepis dropped the ball).

Well, it is the weekend. Previously, I said I was going to get some Cat5 (or Cat6) cable and hard wire myself into the router to see if I could get 64 bit openSUSE or Ubuntu working. I have discovered that 5m of Cat5 costs £24.99 from PCWorld and that is a lot more than I intend to pay on the off chance it allows me to get Linux up and running, on the grounds the Belkin works fine in Windows.

However, there is some remaining perseverance.  Tonight I have started the incantations, I have sacrificed a square pane of glass to the LinuxGod (a window… get it? Oh I give up) and unwrapped two penguin (bars) to inspect their entrails. Hopefully this will enable me to get a working Linux system over the course of the weekend.

I suspect, if I am honest and borderline serious, I am going to resort to installing 32bit openSUSE or Ubuntu, as they have worked with this device in the past. If this still fails, I will travel to Antarctica and kill every single black and white, flightless bird I come across. In a bizarre fit of over confidence, I also have a 40gb partition put aside for Solaris. I may be online again before 2008…

(An aside on the posts about TW’s Linux problems and the really helpful comments people have posted.)

When they are working, new forms of Linux are great for the user and they make you feel all warm and fuzzy about the possibility of voluntary co-operation.

I love Linux when I can get on a machine that someone else has set up.

A few years ago, setting up Linux was a fantastic challenge. (It took two days to configure it to even see a screen display on a bog-standard monitor.)

Modern versions set themselves up on a stand-alone machine perfectly, while you are having a cup of coffee. But modern hardware and our expectations of having things like networked wireless broadband access can make the set up process just as intransigent. It’s great to use a pre-configured and working Linux system. It’s harrowing to set one up when something goes wrong.

Not least because you need net access to even start to find a solution. Hmm. How exactly do you manage this if you haven’t got another working machine with an Internet connection? Pretty unsurmountable problem there.

Surmount it and you find an infinite number of forums that offer access to other people’s expertise. Assume you are lucky enough to find one where you aren’t laughed out of the place for saying “what’s the root directory?” You find that the people who know what they are doing and are really trying to be helpful expect you to be able to adapt their instructions to edit the source code and recompile binaries for your PearlDropsElectric 4-USB-hub adapter on the basis of a slightly similar driver for the Dolcis 2-USBII adapter. (Yes, I made them up)

At this point, you already know you will reduce a potentially working PC to a new form of electronic landfill if you even open the file in a code editor.

At the same time, a fair number of Linux distros still seem to call for you to use a floppy disk, when it’s unlikely your case even has one, let alone that you have spare disks that haven’t degraded into the dust from which they sprang.

You slink off back to Windows, shamefaced, until you have taken a post-graduate course in computer science. In Swedish.

If only someone would bring out a version of Linux for morons… This blog has always whined about technology books that claim to be for “newbs” or “dummies” or “idiots” and turn out to mean “slightly below par rocket scientists who do brainsurgery in their spare time”.

It has to be for real Linux morons.

People who can’t even untar distros (or understand what that means.)

(The FireStats for this blog – which makes its fair share of LInux posts – show that about twice as many visitors use a Mac than use Linux. A Mac, ffs. )

Seriously. I now believe linux is a collective conciousness which has taken steps to punish me on a constant basis. You can take your weak monotheistic religions which offer some abstract punishment in an afterlife and shove them, the LinuxGod is punishing me on a daily basis. For hours at a time.

Today, on prompting by Michal, I downloaded SimplyMepis 6.5rc3 (64bit version), burned it to CD and tried to install it – hoping that its claimed hardware detection abilities would solve the problem with the USB WiFi dongle. Did it work? Not a chance. Mepis was good enough to not even be able to get a graphical interface working (I use a WinFast PX7600 GS which most other distros get working instantly). For some crazy reason, Mepis demands you log in as username:root password:root on first install (as if that provides any security..) but when I tried this from a console login, all I kept getting was “login incorrect.” After doing this for about 15 mins, I finally gave up. Yes, I am a glutton for the LinuxGod’s punishments.

As I was in a *Nix frame of mind now, I gave openSUSE (still installed) another shot. I wish I hadn’t.

Once more, I went through the farce of trying to configure the Belkin USB dongle. I manually entered the WEP key numerous times. I deleted the Network card setting and re-entered it numerous times. The end result? Well, the little red “x” says it all…

When I try to view the connection information window, despite it thinking it is working (and it claims the Router wants me to enter the WEP Key…), I get this:

Not exactly confidence inspiring, is it? For completeness I gave recompiling the driver another shot. Following the steps as given on the Wiki, with the RT73 source files and on numerous other sites, I still only get as a far as:

make

which results in this page of nonsense:

As you can see, the LinuxGod truly, truly hates me. I might have to get a copy of OSX and install that instead… Either that or just allow the impending nervous breakdown take its toll… (Will try Solaris 10 next week, just for kicks)

[tags]Linux, SUSE, openSUSE, Mepis, SimplyMepis, Operating System, Technology, Wifi, Networking, Belkin, Open Source, Computers, OS X, Mac, Router, Solaris, Unix[/tags]

Well, it seems I have been thouroughly defeated by both Ubuntu and openSUSE (64bit versions). I pretty much spent all day Friday trying to get an openSUSE install connected via a Belkin WiFi USB dongle – which, incidentally worked instantly with the 10.1 32 bit. This failed to the extent the XServer died and I had to do a complete re-install. It appears openSUSE is not as tolerant for “hot swapping” USB devices as you would hope

On Saturday I cracked and tried an Ubuntu 6.10 install. I dislike Ubuntu because I feel the hand holding is over the top and personally find it next to impossible to get anything done on it. In the past, however, Unbuntu has been better than SuSE at finding devices and getting them working.

Not this time.

Ubuntu, in the case, was even worse than SuSE because of how difficult it is to get administrative commands working. After four hours, although I hadn’t destroyed the install, I gave up and reinstalled openSUSE.

Today, I have spent another five hours trying to get the WiFi dongle working – all to no avail. SUSE claims it is trying to connect to the router, but there is no activity shown on the dongle (it has an LED which blinks when it is working), so I suspect SUSE is lying. I spent two hours trying various methods of building the drivers – namely:

./Configure

make all

as suggested at LinuxQuestions.org. I tried the versions that come with the RT73 file. I tried the method shown by GIDForums and even followed the steps at http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/RT73_Wireless. All were good and seemed to make sense…. but none worked. At all. Each time I ran “make” it failed with millions and millions of errors.

In the past, when I have tried to configure WiFi cards in SUSE I have been presented with a screen like this one (on the left – hopefully), but for some reason this is all changed in the 10.2 (at least the 64 bit version). This change is not helping matters. The old layout, while it could be confusing, at least allowed you edit the bits which needed editing. The new version is some what different.

Now, the screens I get look like this:

Now they appear “better” but they are pretty much useless when it comes to trying to “problem solve” the WiFi issues.

So far, nothing I have tried in three days has worked. When I look at the modules loaded, I have rt2500usb and rt73usb running in openSUSE. I tried to kill either of them with

modprobe -r name

But this did nothing either – openSUSE claimed modprobe didn’t exist (although it would show me the man page for it).

Eventually (i.e. now), I have given up for a while. Most of the solutions I can find require me to be connected to the internet to enable a fix – seems to defeat the purpose but…. Next weekend I plan to go to PCWorld and buy a Cat5 cable long enough to reach from the router to the linux box, hopefully this will allow an internet connection and enable the fixes. Until then, I am staying Windozed. Sadly.

Now, I love linux. I really do. However, until it is possible for people to use it out of the box with common store bought components it really is going to remain a niche product. This is a shame because for basically free you can get a fully functioned PC which runs a powerfull, easy to use and capable office package, web servers, graphics manipulators and much more. To run a similar system using the MS products everyone is so used to would cost thousands. With the advent of crap vista, and the change to “look and feel” you would think this is an excellent time for people to migrate to Linux. Sadly, at least in the case of SuSE and Ubuntu, Linux is not ready for this task. Can you imagine going to a shop and buying a television which required three days of recompiling before it would show a picture?

[tags]Linux, SUSE, Ubuntu, Wifi, Wireless, LAN, Networking, Technology, Computers, Society, Rants, YAST, openSUSE, Belkin[/tags]

Not much online time today, sorry. I am fighting a (losing) battle with my technology.

I have spent most of today trying to set up my main PC as a dual boot Linux/windows box using openSUSE 10.2 (64 bit) and Windows XPSP2.

Sadly, I have been far from successful.

The problems began with Partition Magic. The PC I have came with WinXP installed on its 180gb HDD. As I had around 100gb free space, I thought putting 20 gig aside for Linux would be next to no problems. I ran diskeeper and checkdisk to make sure everything was fine (it was) then I rank Partition Magic to resize the disk – I planned to make a 1gig swap file and about 14 gig for the linux install.

Sadly, each and every time Partition Magic rebooted (claiming it was going to resize the partitions) it came up with “Error 1513 Bad Attribute Position in File Record” and suggested I looked at the help files. I honestly spent over an hour doing this (reboot, choose partition sizes, restart, get error message, check help files, find nothing, reboot, choose partition sizes…. etc). Nothing I could find in the help files was any use.

Eventually I cracked and went to a web search engine (why didn’t I do this the first time!) and found out my Partition Magic 8 needed an upgrade to 8.01 and then a patch applied. Isn’t software great?

This done, everything went fine. The install interface for openSUSE is easy to use and easy to understand. I did spend about an hour choosing which packages I wanted but that was just because I’d become a kid in a sweet shop at that point. In the end I settled for Gnome and about 4gb of software. Linux is fantastic.

The install went smoothly…right up to the point at which it needed to connect to the Internet. It found my Belkin USB WLAN adaptor and identified it perfectly. It even found the SSID of the network. When trying to connect it (as it should) asked for the WEP key, so I entered it. After what felt like a week, it came up asking for the key again, so I entered it again. This happened five times before the computer gave up and I had to restart the network connection.

After two hours of trying different things (converting the key from HEX to ASCII etc), I had pretty much exhausted everything I could think off. I have been back to windows to check the settings (they are fine) and I have tried the USB device on other linux machines (although it was an Ubuntu machine) and it works fine. Nothing I seem to be able to do will make my openSUSE installation connect to the wireless router. I have hit a complete brick wall now and I am fed up of entering 26 hex characters every ten minutes so I have given up and come back to windows (yes, sad, I know).

I will try a brief google search to see if I can find the answer, but to be honest I dont know if I can be bothered any more. There is more to life than spending almost an entire working day trying to make software do what I want it to do. The idea is that computers (etc) make our lives easier and less stressfull. If people are writing such bad code that I have to give up all my spare time to get their software to work, I am not really interested. The same applies to Symantec and their fundamentally broken Partition Magic.

I love linux. I have two linux machines running fine here (one openSUSE 10.1 [32bit] and one Ubuntu). I used to love openSUSE and hate Ubuntu. Times may be changing.

If any one has had similar problems, or knows and answer, please let me know!

[tags]Technology, Linux, Windows, Software, Operating System, Wireless, Networking, Rants, openSUSE, Ubuntu, Belkin, Netgear, Partition Magic, Error Messages, Symantec[/tags]

Nice analogy on a Guardian Technology page in an article by Andrew Brown last Thursday. The topic was anti-virus firms holding the public to ransom with Mafia style tactics.

The warnings that bubble up almost daily from your system tray could all be reduced to one marketing message: “Nice computer you’ve got here. It would be a shame if anything were to happen to it”

However, I don’t completely agree. It’s not as if the big three firms to which he refers are threatening to spread malware if you don’t instal them. Anti-virus firms may rely for sales on the fact that the Internet is seething with malware. It’s certainly true that it’s in their interest to talk up threats and keep everyone in a state of fear. All the same, they don’t distribute malware and I don’t believe they can get much advantage from nagging us into constantly updating.

Andrew Brown is basically saying that av software isn’t necessary because you can keep out intruders with a firewall. I’m not convinced that just having a firewall is always the answer.

He’s saying “Don’t use Internet Explorer” or “Outlook Express,” only use free or legit software, don’t go to shady sites. It’s all good advice but it’s not infallible.

Above all, he’s an industry professional, obviously well-regarded enough to be a Guardian columnist. He knows what he’s doing. I don’t suppose any kids or less-expert friends and relatives ever use his computer. Most (non-Albanian) people have less idea of what’s going on in their PCs than they have of Albanian grammar. Andrew Brown might be able to tell whether an obscure system process needs to connect to location xx.xx.xx.xx but the rest of us don’t. And we certainly couldn’t tell if a worm had spoofed a legitimate process. (I suspect he might have trouble doing that.) We don’t know if registry entries are genuine, given the zillions of redundant just-in-case entries that come with Windows. Most of us don’t even know how to open the Windows registry and would finish off our PCs permenently if we tried to edit it.

Even with Linux, in its new user friendly versions, even an expert user has to take most of its actions on trust. And Firefox is no longer hole-free is it? (In fact, unlike IE, Firefox will handily store your passwords in a human readable format.) Are malware distributors never going to abuse people’s trust by adding code to open-source freeware? Almost any piece of software has weaknesses and the world seems full of evil geniuses who can find them a lot faster than they can be detected.

I prefer to have a stab at eliminating malware myself and at detecting it by looking at the packets my PC sends, just as a half-interesting challenge and because I hate to feel powerless in relation to using my PC. I’m not much better at it than the average toddler is at ballet dancing. When malware defeats me, I’m more than glad there are products that can do better than I can at stopping it.

Good article, very nice metaphor. Can’t agree 100% though.

Tags: technology, malware, firewall, antivirus.

As lots of people will be aware, Linux is a fully functional, open source, operating system which runs on a massive variety of hardware platforms (from embedded devices to high end servers), comes with all the source code, comes with a massive variety of application packages (massive is an understatement) and generally costs nothing.

One of the other “wonders” of Linux, is the different variations you can have (often called Distro’s or Distributions). Vendors such as Novell (SuSE), Mandrake, RedHat (etc) all make versions. The sheer scale of the different distros is hard to appreciate but take a look at the DistroWatch website to see what is out there, or for a smaller sample, Wikipedia has a shorter list.

Despite this great variety, there is a common theme in that all the distros are – broadly speaking – the same. You execute commands in the same manner, you have a root account in the same manner etc. Add to this the similarity to Unix and you can see why linux is great and this spread of distros is not something to be scared of.

Now, not all that long ago a new distro appeared which while being good was hardly “better” than the others. In fact, this new distro changed some of the fundamental ways Linux used to do things (no root account for example) and created a “learning curve” for people moving from one distro to another. One thing this distro did do which was good, was to ship hundreds of installation disks for free. This distro was Ubuntu.

Since Ubuntu managed to flood the market, it has grown in popularity at an astonishing rate. This is not exactly something I was initially over the moon about (for examples, look at these search results) but it is good to see Linux get more mass market publicity.

However, as time progresses I now think it may not be such a good thing. Months ago, I gave up on PCW because it was becoming morbidly repetetive and the Unix column mentioned nothing but Ubuntu. If this was kept to generic “Unix ways of doingt things” it might not be a bad thing, but it isn’t. It is almost invariably Ubuntu specific things.

Recently I had the chance to read through back issues and the current issue of PCW – including the Unix column – and this trend has remained. The current one should be ashamed to call itself a “Unix” article. The whole section is now Ubuntu articles. Each month the author waxes lyrical about how great the latest distro is and how to work round the weird way Ubuntu does things.

As far as I can see it, this trend carries over to pretty much all the general PC publications, and worryingly is present (in smaller doses) on the more specialist magazines. As more and more people get locked into the Ubuntu way of doing things, Linux as it used to be will cease to exist and the day where Linux is a single OS in the manner of Windows will be upon us.

This is not a good thing.

You can tell the Christmas period is nearly over, the new crop of PC related magazines are all proclaiming (through front page blurbs) about how great Windows Vista is.

Now, before I rant, I have never used Vista and I am sure it is a great operating system.

For those of you who live under a rock, Vista is the latest version of Windows (ie it could also be called Windows XP2 or Windows 2007 depending on how you want to spin a name) and is supposedly an overhaul of the windows code from the ground up.

I have seen previews and read reviews on Vista and it looks like it will be a positive step for Windows, but XP is good. Why spend in the region of GBP160 to upgrade when in effect, you can already do everything it offers?

Now, if we use the cover of PCW as an example, it claims:

IT’S FASTER, MORE RELIABLE AND MORE SECURE
WHY YOU SHOULD UPGRADE AND WHICH VERSION TO CHOOSE

Now, call me old fashioned but I suspect a less than objective review is going to take place here. Sadly, this is nearly always the case when Microsoft churn out something significant and new. The MS PR machine seems to ensure that the PC press will generate page after page of rave reviews. Now I accept this does not happen all the time, but when was the last time you read a bad pre-launch review of either Windows or Microsoft Office?

Sadly, I can remember the run up to Windows ME being released and this was trumpeted (albeit not like Win 95 or Vista have been) about what a great upgrade it would be for the home user, how stable it would be and how secure it would be.

Then a few months later, reality hit and everyone realised what a dog WinME was….. 98 was “great” but only really took off after the service packs and so on. It is unlikely that Vista will be a really dencent operating system until after SP1 has been applied. None of the others have been.

Taking the three PCW points though, still leaves a big so what?

Vista is “faster” if you have a good processor, 1gb of RAM and a decent graphics card. Well, really. Who would have thought it. In the Winter 2006/2007 issue of PCW less than 50% of the PC systems (inc laptops) advertised would be able to run Vista properly. Shocking.

Vista is more reliable? Really? How do they know this? Have millions of users put it through it’s paces yet? Has it been running servers and workstations for months on end?

More secure? Possibly true as general windows security is abysmal. However it is like saying putting a rope in a door way is more secure than leaving it open. I’d rather have a door myself.

Now, is there any point to this rant? Well sort of. You see there is already an operating system which does ALL the things Vista claims and has been on the user market for long enough that it’s reliability and security are proven.

Linux.

Now, I hate Ubuntu but you can get it for free, it will do everything PCW claims are selling points for Vista and will run fast and secure on things other than the top of the range PCs. If you get Vista / Office 2007 you will need to learn new user interfaces and ways of doing things, so why not save yourself a few hundred pounds and get Linux?

Well, as it has been inordinately sunny here over the last few weeks, getting time to type up blog entries has been thin on the ground.

That notwithstanding it is shocking how fast the time is passing – it only seems like yesterday I was complaining about how pants Personal Computer World magazine was, and planning to cancel the subscription, when the latest copy arrived in the post today. I had intended to cancel, honest.

This month (again) I wish I had. To stop the rants taking over I am planning to address each issue I have with the magazine in separate stages.

Despite my annoyance, there are some postive points. The cover disk (”more than 8GB of great software” and “9 full products worth £176″) is reasonable. Unusually for something which heavily relies on its “value” as a Unique Selling Point, this disk is crammed full of open source software – which could reasonably be downloaded by anyone with a faster than dial up connection. The brunt of the disk space is taken up with Star Office 7 (brilliant), SuSE 10.1 Live DVD (good – but you will have to burn this to a disk before you use it, and then download a better version to install it), Knoppix 5.01 (not bad – live CDs of this distro turn up everywhere though) and the ever present Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake (This gets everywhere, I suspect there are more copies of this floating around on disk than there are people in the world). It is good to see PCW head down the open source route some more.

This leads me nicely on to a hatstand comment in the Letter pages (p 25 for the pedantic). Tom Callway from the Open Source Consortium quite rightly chastises PCW for their comments about OS software in the July issue. The reply is bordering on the nonsensical. It somewhat resembles a Microsoft or Adobe press release…

Alan Stevens replies that while the software may be free, it might not be a good choice for small businesses to use it on the desktop. He explains that the lack of familiarity is the key problem thinking that “most people know how windows and windows applications work.” He states that this may affect productivity and make it harder to recruit / retain staff.

Some good old FUD there…. (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt for the newbies).

He finishes off with how it can be difficult and expensive when things go wrong because specialist help is needed.

This was obviously written by someone who has not stepped outside a Windows (and old Mac) dominated corporate environment for quite some time. Of the people I know who interact with Windows based software on a daily basis I would say less than 2% are actually aware of any of its underlying properties. Less know how the OS itself does things.

IT support for Windows based PCs is big business and can cost phenomenal amounts of money. There is a reason for this…. It is not because every user is a Windows expert…..

To further highlight the idiocy of the comment, Linux applications are nearly all identical in “look and feel” to their windows based versions – it takes a fraction of a second to learn where the file menu is etc. Most Open Source office packages are close enough to (for example) Windows that the transition is totally painless. Less hassle than (for example) switching from Word Perfect to Word. I am sure any one uses Lotus Notes at work, but not at home will be aware how easy it is to learn new ways of doing things. The implict statement in PCW’s reply is that business have to use Windows because that is what the staff have on their home PCs.

Pure madness.

How hard is it to use Firefox? (Open source is not just linux!!!!)

What learning curve is there for someone moving to (eg) SugarCRM from MSCRM? If you know how to use the MS package, you can use the OS equivalents with just as much ease. For hardened experts it may be different – but the reply is talking about general-skilled staff.

Things will get funnier when (if) Vista, Office 2007 et al., are launched. What argument can there be then for staying with closed source software? When most home users use Works, why do companies use Word? They are similar, but so is star office (even more similar IMHO).

Shame on you PCW. Very poor reply.