computers

Firefox 3.5 on Ubuntu

Jason Thibeault,

FYI, in case you weren’t aware, Firefox 3.5 is available on Ubuntu in the repositories as firefox-3.5, so grab it in Synaptic (or Alt-F2, then type “sudo apt-get install firefox-3.5” without quotes). It installs concurrently to your 3.0 installation, and automatically makes a copy of your existing profile, so you won’t lose anything.

Must remember to also update my work computers… sigh. At least I have a method of creating MSIs out of the Firefox installs relatively easily. I hope the IETab extension isn’t broken though, that could put a kink in my upgrade path.

Oh, and it’s out for Windows too, though to get it you’ll have to go to their site, click on the Download link, click Save, then go doubleclick on it, and next your way through the wizard. I’m also unsure if it installs concurrently, and in fact suspect it probably doesn’t. Who says Windows is easier, again?

Firefox 3.5 on Ubuntu
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Oh COME ON, Elections Canada!

Jason Thibeault, , , , , 1 Comment

POST #300! Didn’t even notice until after I posted it! This is like a geek version of a car odometer rollover.

After the results of their latest election post-mortem, in an effort to ramp up the amount of participation in our electoral process, Elections Canada wants to set up voting over the internet. Boy howdy will that ever increase participation. Probably get well over 100% turnout, in fact!
Continue reading “Oh COME ON, Elections Canada!” →

Oh COME ON, Elections Canada!

Lose the CD library, fellow troubleshooters!

Jason Thibeault, ,

One thing I have always hated about being an IT guy is being expected to have CDs on hand for a million pieces of software (Microsoft, especially!), to be ready for any occasion when called on to do some bit of troubleshooting. Partly because CDs are bulky and there’s too damn many of them to have to lug around “just in case”, but mostly because CDs are way too fragile a media to have to rely upon when you’re expected to keep 150+ computers operational. As always, I have a fix for this.

Continue reading “Lose the CD library, fellow troubleshooters!” →

Lose the CD library, fellow troubleshooters!

you hit the emu. you killed the emu. –more– Welcome to level 2

Jason Thibeault, , 8 Comments

On the first networked, Unix-based computers, your gaming options were severely limited. You could play the Colossal Cave Adventure, a text adventure game (one of those text-based ones with a parser that accepts commands like “go north”, or “throw stone at ogre” or “examine your navel”); simplistic AI-based games like a chess game where you’d have to play a physical board, enter your move in chess notation, and the AI would give you its move in chess notation in return; quiz games of all stripes; or maybe even a Star Trek based game (which I remember playing on my Tandy 1000 EX, my first computer, and is admittedly pretty fun as a strategy game). In 1980, though, the first graphically represented, heavily D&D-influenced RPG came into the picture and completely blew the rest of the RPGs at the time, out of the water.

Of course, by graphically represented, I mean it used ASCII characters used to display text on the console to represent the player, the dungeon, items and monsters. Turn by turn, you’d move an @ symbol one space at a time — and for every space you move, the monsters on each floor of the randomly generated dungeon if they are awake and roaming, or know where you are, would either wander aimlessly or come after you with relentless tenacity respectively, hoping to put an end to your spelunking career. Meanwhile, you ran around grabbing everything that wasn’t nailed down, like gold for points so you could get on the high score list, or weapons, scrolls and potions to make killing these ne’er-do-wells easier (thus facilitating your staying alive to get more gold).

Continue reading “you hit the emu. you killed the emu. –more– Welcome to level 2” →

you hit the emu. you killed the emu. –more– Welcome to level 2

Computers, DVRs to be outlawed in Canada

Jason Thibeault, , 1 Comment

The copyright row is heating up, after the Conference Board of Canada nearly wholly plagiarized the recommendations of the International Intellectual Property Association (IIPA) with regard to what Canada should do about infringement of copyrighted materials. Ignoring every recommendation of the report commissioned for this study, written by Law Professor Jeremy DeBeer, the IIPA — err, sorry, the CBC — instead recommended several restrictive actions. Please note that in this quote, “closely approximate[d]” means “copy and pasted verbatim”.

It also acknowledged “that some of the cited paragraphs closely approximate the wording of a source document.”

The report’s recommendations closely mirrored those advocated by the property alliance.

Both suggested:

* Protecting measures aimed at preventing unauthorized copying.
* Outlawing devices that enable such copying.
* Providing strong civil and criminal penalties for violations.
* Carefully defining exceptions to the rules.

Think for just a moment how much technology would be outlawed if everything capable of making a digital copy of an already digital format (CDs are not analog, remember). Beyond that, there’s always the analog “hole” — if you can play it, you can then record it being played via voice recording devices. Just because the digital format is locked, doesn’t mean the contents are at all protectable — if you can decode it to listen to it, you can also record it afterward.

Here’s an itemized list of every exception necessary to these rules:

  1. fair use.

That’s the exception used right now by every single “pirate”, bought and paid for by the levy applied to every single blank media bought in Canada (regardless of the legal arguments made on Wikipedia, that levy either insulates against copyright violation charges or it’s unconstitutional — you pick). By fair use, as long as you’re not making money off someone else’s work without the person getting a cut, you are within your rights to do so — whether via iPod, computer, DVR, satellite radio recording devices, blank CDs, DVDs, VHS tapes, cassette tapes, reel-to-reel or a vinyl record generator. The reality of copyright today is that the vast majority of people trade music and movies around to one another, buy what they like, and don’t buy everything they’ve sampled. GOOD movies make more money today than they ever had, with the industries making record-breaking profits annually, and likewise with GOOD music. If you have the right to inspect the entire product before making the decision to purchase it, then you have the ability to filter out the crap and only purchase those movies and music that are worth your money. No longer can the industries shovel onto consumers horrible tripe and still expect to make a profit.

Make no mistake, those are the stakes — it’s not about the industries being cheesed off that all sorts of people are hearing or watching stuff without paying, because that’s always happened from day one; it’s all about protecting the industries’ rights to rip you off by selling you crap that you wouldn’t pay for otherwise.

Computers, DVRs to be outlawed in Canada

Awesome SSH tricks

Jason Thibeault, , , , ,

Greg Laden’s having problems with his ScienceBlogs site‘s commenting (those problems being that Movable Type sucks), so he’s started posting stuff on his old WordPress site. Stuff like this great Linux Journal video, showing you how to spawn a GUI-based program on a remote server over SSH.

I pointed out on that post’s comments, if you’re going to tunnel into the box, you’re better off to SSH in, then spawn VNC Viewer and redirect its output to your local machine. However, after I did so, I realized I’d made a tiny mistake about this — my reasoning behind this was that VNC’s compression is vastly superior to the compression afforded by using -C on the SSH command line. If you do spawn a full VNC session, you’re actually running the video through two layers of compression — one, from VNC Viewer to the VNC Server, and one from the local computer’s X server to the remote’s, to pick up the VNC Viewer output. This is more a logic flaw on my part than an actual issue, and in this way you can get a full VNC connection encrypted over SSH, so the technique is not without its merits.

This site also shows you how to forward a port over SSH. It’s tailored for RPM-based distributions, and slightly incorrect about the SSH command line to use, but still. Even tells you how to do it using PuTTY on Windows!

Here’s the magic:

sudo ssh -N -T -L 5901:192.168.1.100:6000 [email protected] &

If you try without the username@ip at the end, as shown on the site I just linked, SSH will just spit up a syntax text and quit.

You’ll need to be root or sudo this, as it’ll first ask for local privileges, and you’ll need an SSH-enabled account on the remote box. This command will connect your local port 6000 to the remote computer’s 5901 (VNC display 1), over SSH, and keeps the command running as a daemon in the background (the &). You can then use VNC Viewer from your local computer, to your own computer’s port 6000, and you’ll see the remote screen, tunneled through SSH and thus encrypted.

If you connect a bunch of these ports at startup, you can create a “bouncebox” of sorts if you want a single point-of-access for multiple servers. Try this with port 80 on each remote server and a different local port for each connection, and you can create a whole web of bounces on your internal network so you just need one NATted computer to give to your client / open to the net, and a whole slew of open ports on it will grant access to myriad things. This way you can also run iptables on that bouncebox and meter out who gets access to what from one centralized location.

Something like this was used at one of my previous jobs to grant access to servers in a super-secure data centre. I wasn’t one of the privileged few allowed access to this — I was but a mere LAN monkey at the time. I’ve since upgraded my skillset significantly after having moved on from the company, spurred on by a need to prove I’m as capable and clever as any one of their Linux guys. I’m getting there. And, it’s all self-taught, every shred of that computer knowledge that I use daily to bring home the bacon. Was going to be an English teacher, you see, until I realized computers are easier to deal with than people.

Awesome SSH tricks

Today’s lesson: men and women ARE different

Jason Thibeault, , , , 3 Comments

Since we’re talking a bit about gender norms and sexist behaviour lately, here’s a fascinating study Jodi pointed out to me yesterday regarding what people perceive as sexist.

Jodi has reservations with some of the questions asked, feeling as though if there’s not a preexisting stereotype regarding the behaviour in the question, it’s not really sexism, or it might not be perceived as sexism. The example she gave me was that if someone were to see me typing madly away at my keyboard and say “wow, he’s good with computers, too bad he probably sucks at fishing,” while it does follow logically that heavy computer users might not get as much outdoor activity as others, the fact that there’s no preexisting stereotype suggesting that computer users are bad at fishing means that the statement is not a prejudice so much as a logical deduction. If someone were to see me and say “my, what a good looking man, too bad he must be bad at fishing”, if there was a pre-existing prejudice against hot men regarding fishing ability (like the example used of intelligence), then that would be a sexist comment.

One of the more surprising results to me is the fact that more women than men find misandry to be sexist. I suppose it’s not surprising that they’d be more attuned to sexism since the women’s liberation movement is probably still fresh in most women’s minds, but it’s quite surprising that men ignore sexism against them as often as they ignore sexism against women.

Wait, is it sexist to say that men are predisposed to turning a blind eye toward sexism as a whole? Studying this stuff always feels like you’re walking into a trap.

Today’s lesson: men and women ARE different

She might have been your evil overlord

Jason Thibeault, , 1 Comment

I can’t bring myself to go to bed right now, am not feeling all that hot in various respects, so I’m hanging out on the computer until the Sinutab kicks in so at least I can breathe. Go read The Plan at Almost Diamonds, a thoroughly enjoyable short story about a woman and her “long game”. Also, say Happy Stephanie Zvan day to the owner and proprietor.

I just have to say, this story reminds me a lot of my original plans to become an English teacher, and how those got scuttled when I figured out I was pretty good at computers and could build a life out of my abilities. It also dovetails with my growing fascination with science and space, and how people keep telling me that I missed my calling. The best laid plans, and all that. (Do you see what I did there?)

I sense a sick day coming tomorrow. At least the stuff on my agenda could theoretically be done from home.

She might have been your evil overlord

Trippy but catchy

Jason Thibeault

Link sent me by Pickles:

This song was built almost entirely out of sounds recorded from the Disney version of Alice In Wonderland. Here’s some more info and a downloadable mp3.

This video does nothing to refute my hypothesis that the visuals in the original were designed to make the heads of people on acid trips explode. My problem with this particular hypothesis is that I’m not likely to test it any time soon.

It also occurs to me that I don’t have an appropriate category for this. I should make a Virals / Memes category soon. Putting in Computers until I do.

Trippy but catchy