dawgiestyle

01/31/05: Is Open Source Ready for Prime Time?

Oh great, another article about Linux on the business desktop, right? Nope.

That was me as I saw the headline on eweek and clicked on it. I do always click on the is linux ready? links, hating that the subject is beaten to death, but still curious as to what the opinion is this time. Anyway, this isn't one of those articles, so lets move on.

This one is actually more about open source software on the enterprise back-end, and how it enables small companies to utilize enterprise class solutions.

Companies such as SourceLabs Inc. and SpikeSource Inc., have entered the market with just this model in mind, offering an open-source software stack and providing services around it. The stack typically includes Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Perl/Python components, otherwise known as LAMP.

A good read.

01/30/05: LookAhead Firefox Extension

I found out about this extension at thinkblog.org, and it is pretty sweet. Kind of a variation on the built in Google search bar.

I don't have anything to add to what Michael says about it in his post. I'm just spreading the word :)

Thanks for the tip Michael!

01/29/05: Google vs. Yahoo!

Geekblog is getting added to my favorite blogs. Anand, I'm not trying to trackback every post, honest!

Actually, I found this post extremely educational. Most people now take for granted that Google is the best search engine to use, but according to this article, Yahoo! May! Now! Be! On! Equal! Footing! (Sorry to anybody sensitive about mocking yahoo's use of the exclamation point.)

I don't think I will ever completely abandon Google, but there are many occasions where I just don't find what I am looking for on Google. Anand's tests seem to suggest that Yahoo's results can be more wide-ranging, which in many cases means a better chance of finding answers that aren't necessarily the most popular.

01/28/05: Firefox FUD is Born

I knew it would happen. Apparently, Microsoft zealots do exist, and they are here to tell you that you should consider yourself lucky to have arbitrary code from the internet executed automatically on your pc. Groklaw has the story:

Unbelievably enough, a Jupiter analyst, Michael Gertenberg, has written an opinion piece which ComputerWorld, unbelievably enough, has printed, cautioning businesses that they might want to think twice about switching from IE to Firefox because "Firefox lacks the ability to run Microsoft ActiveX code."

Go read the article. It includes an email from a Groklaw reader responding to Mr. Gertenberg in an attempt to set the lost one straight.

I am certainly open to criticism regarding the software I use, the scripts I write, or pretty much anything else, but within reason. Tell me that any other browser is better than Firefox and I will respect your opinion, but telling me that Internet Explorer is better than Firefox because it executes code automatically, well, that'll just get you laughed at.

01/27/05: MySQL 'Bot' Attacks Windows Systems

Malicious hackers have launched a zero-day bot attack against default Windows installations of the MySQL database engine, infecting vulnerable systems at the rate of 100 per minute, security experts warned on Thursday.

One-hundred systems per minute. The good news is if you use strong root passwords, you should be safe.

The SANS ISC recommends that MySQL users select a strong password for the "root" account on Windows installations. Administrators should also set up restricted access to root accounts and apply firewall rules to make sure MySQL servers are not exposed to attackers.

This is really a no-brainer, but it seems that some still think these rules don't apply to them. The responsible users, on the other hand, have long since realized that if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem - perfectly illustrated with this incident.

I often wonder why some people continue to run windows. This is actually not a direct crack at MS, so bear with me. I have encountered individuals who run MySQL, cygwin for bash scripts, PHP, and Apache all on their windows box. What? I know, its crazy. Interestingly, these are often the same people who continue to ignore security concerns, and who will eventually ruin the internet for the rest of us.

01/27/05: Referrer Spam Losers

Referrer spam - a truely retarded concept. Ok, I realize that the purpose of spam is to annoy us to no end, but to waste resources (even if they are stolen) on spoofing referrer urls is clearly one of the dumber spam schemes. I don't really need to rant about spam in general. We all feel the same way. Its just that this type doesn't seem to even provide a false pretense the way the "mass email marketing" does. The links showing up in my referrer list aren't selling me anything, and in most cases lead to non-existent websites. On the other hand, I doubt anybody is pathetic enough to get a kick out of messing up our referrer lists, but then, stranger things have happened.

01/24/05: Which desktop to use?

Here's a cute comparison of a few desktops from Geekblog. The author explains Gnome, KDE, OS X, and Windows as if they were your girlfriends.

KDE is the sensible girlfriend. When she gets dressed up, she looks great, but she generally prefers a simple, unassuming look.

I wonder what he would say about my favorite, XFce.

01/23/05: Gmail Anyone?

I have been sitting on 5 Gmail invites for a couple months now in case any friends/aquaintances needed one. Well, nobody needs one, so I'm going to stop being greedy and offer them up to the first 5 people to comment to this post. Remember to include a valid email address where I can send the invite. An ISP email would be the safest bet since I hear hotmail automatically sends them to the junk folder. I don't know if that is just a rumor or not, but just to be safe, use an address that you know will work.

People aren't quite as ravenous over gmail invites anymore since they are so common, but I'm sure there are 5 more people out there wishing they had one. Well now's your chance :)

01/23/05: Fetchmail For Easier Desktop Administration

My latest project at work involves the use of MS Exchange with the pop3 connector to retrieve mail from external mailboxes. This made me want to try out Fetchmail, which does exactly that. Of course, my home mail server of choice is Qmail, not Exchange.

I'm sure there are many people like myself who have 5 or 6 seperate email accounts set up in their preferred mail client. While this is no big deal, it can be quite a hassle to remember/re-enter all the account information after a fresh desktop install. Wouldn't it be much easier to set up one account that includes mail from all others? A simple use of message filters can then seperate the mail as it arrives.

So I went once again to the trusty FreeBSD ports collection on my fileserver and installed the Fetchmail port. A quick scan through the man page was all I needed to find the syntax for my ~/.fetchmailrc file. I opted to set up a cron job to poll the pop3 servers every 5 minutes rather than use daemon mode. My reason for this being that there may potentially be other people in the household using my fetchmail system who have no *nix experience. My understanding of the man page is that each user needs to have their own Fetchmail daemon process running, and I'm not quite sure how to achieve that (I am open to suggestions). Anyway, I thought it would be easy enough to add a cron job for anybody using the system, and it seems to be working ok so far.

Now, the next time I set up my mail client, I only have to set up my local server pop3 account and it will get all my other mail to me. Setting up a few message filters can be much easier than remembering passwords I rarely use.

Another advantage of this setup is if my internet access goes down sometime in the middle of the night for any length of time, I know that I have recieved all email up to about 5 minutes before it went down.

I really should start looking at disk redundancy for that server.

01/20/05: Music Studio On A CD

One of today's emails from the Edmonton Linux Users Group was about a Linux live CD focussed on music recording. Called Studio To Go! by Fervent Software, it is based on the 2.6.9 kernel (not sure which distro though) and costs 50 pounds.

I don't think I would pay this without first seeing it in action. Live CDs are always a little slow when using more than one application at a time. Having done pc recordings before, I know that you want all the ram you can get, and even more if recording more than a few tracks. The idea of this product is very cool, but I would definitely want to see it demonstrated on an average home computer before opening my wallet for it.

If anybody has used it, or anything like it, please let me know how it works.

01/19/05: Microsoft's AntiSpyware Tool Removes Internet Explorer

Many Microsoft Windows users who downloaded the recently released AntiSpyware program from Microsoft, or had it installed through an automatic Windows update, woke up to a surprise. Unintentionally, the heuristics of the software detected Internet Explorer as spyware, and removed the program from their systems.

Articles like this always rekindle my enjoyment of The Onion. Enjoy

01/16/05: More Differences Between Linux and FreeBSD

More FreeBSD for Linux Users by Dru Lavigne -- BSD and Linux are both Unix workalikes. How different can they be? In certain cases, very! Though the systems share a family tree, their differences sometimes stand out. Dru Lavigne explains FreeBSD's directory layout, devices, kernel modules, and terminology to Linux users.

I love these articles, mainly because I use both operating systems and FreeBSD is my newest addition. I've heard many *BSD users trash Linux for various reasons and I just don't really understand why. Sure it has advantages over Linux, but that works both ways. I just think this all or nothing attitude is counter-productive. Take some time to decide what the best tool for the job is, and keep an open mind to alternatives. The results can be surprising.

01/12/05: Buffer Overflow in Exim Mail Server

The Exim mail server software is among the latest security concerns. This is listed as a Debian issue since Exim is the default mailer for the Linux distribution.

This being a blog, I don't mind tossing in a little editorial. Exim has achieved the position of least favorite mta on my list. The thing is, I have absolutely no concrete evidence against the software, just a feeling I have about it. Anytime I have experienced emails mysteriously disappearing and other weird problems, Exim has been the software in use at the time. Personally, having never really tried Postfix aside from allowing it to remain on my Suse 9.2 system, I prefer Qmail. Ease of installation and administration plays no small part in this.

Other security concerns included the glibc package for Debian; pdftohtml, hylafax, o3read and poppassd_pam for Gentoo; and nfs-utils for Mandrake.

01/10/05: Microsoft: Windows 2003 Outperforms Red Hat

This is too good:

According to a "massive" study conducted by the impartial Microsoft Marketing Department, Windows 2003 servers outperform Red Hat Linux in every possible configuration.

"This was a real eye-opener," explained Microsoft spokesperson Harold Fudd. "There was simply no competition between the two. We can only conclude that people still clinging to the legacy, mediocre Linux platform have absolutely no clue."

Check out the rest of the fake article at humorix.org

01/10/05: Serial ATA (SATA) on Linux

Jeff over at nethub.org has found a good article about Linux's support of various SATA chipsets. SATA RAID is near the top of my list of things to try, and for anyone else considering it, this is a must read. Jeff writes:

...not all Serial ATA controllers are created equal. Most Serial ATA controllers claim to have RAID capabilities built in, but keep in mind that true hardware RAID capabilities are only available from a very few cards. I've seen many headaches related to the "fake" or "software-based" RAID that many of these cards cause.

After the many good things I have heard about Linux software RAID capabilities, I may just go that route rather than buying a much more expensive hardware RAID solution. Afterall, I'm cheap and stubborn. Still, how disappointing it would be to buy incompatible hardware, especially with a 25% restocking charge. Keep that in mind before you run out and buy a bunch of SATA drives.

01/09/05: Subversion: First Impression

I spent some time this weekend installing Subversion on my relatively fresh FreeBSD fileserver. Having never extensively used CVS, I didn't really have anything to compare the experience to, but for what it's worth, here's how it went.

I starting with a vague idea of what I wanted. Basically, that boiled down to web browser access, just like the CVS repositories for the many open source projects that use them. Aside from that, I really didn't know the first thing about Subversion, or revision-control systems in general. The Subversion book was just what the doctor ordered. Chapters 2 and 3 were great for background information and basic use, while chapter 6 handled server configuration. For my purposes though, I concentrated on the apache section.

Using an existing webserver for this task could prove quite inconvenient since Subversion requires Apache 2.0, while version 1.x is easily still the most prevalent. This means you would either have to upgrade apache, or optionally, install apache2 alongside 1.x, and just listen on a different port. Luckily, my FreeBSD installation is still only a few weeks old, and I had not yet required apache for anything, so I went ahead and installed version 2, and then Subversion, using the ports collection (how spoiled the ports collection has me already).

With a little more reading on creating a repository, making the necessary changes to httpd.conf, and adding authentication and authorization, it was up and running with my PHP scripts imported.

Now, after playing with it for a few hours, I am very happy with Subversion itself, and its combination with apache2. I am almost eager to start more PHP projects just so I can fully utilize its features. Then again, this Dawg Tag rewrite is taking long enough. At least now I can keep it organized even as I work on it.

I definitely recommend checking it out, even if you don't program. Hell, I'm no programmer, though I do try to be :)

01/07/05: Revision-Control Outside of Collaborative Work

Keeping Your Life in Subversion by Joey Hess:

Revision control is great for collaborative projects and distributed projects. How well does it work for individuals? According to Joey Hess, fantastically. He's kept his home directory under revision control for years--here's how he does it with Subversion.

There is just something very cool about seeing your home directory as it was 2 years ago. I will be looking into this first for my Dawg Tag PHP script. Even though I am the only person working on it, Subversion can help me to keep my files organized. As it stands now, I have 2 seperate versions running all the time (with older versions archived). One exists for me to work on, and the other is where I roll the successful changes, always keeping it one step behind in case I really mess something up. From what I understand, revision-control can clean this up considerably. Once I become comfortable with it, I am sure I will start experimenting with it as Joey Hess has. A very cool prospect and a fine article.

01/05/05: Local Linux User Groups A Great Way To Contract Work

Yesterday, the company I work for asked me if I knew a PHP Programmer as a project came up where one would be required. I admitted that I did not but would see what I could come up with. Now, I am a fairly new member of the Edmonton Linux Users Group mailing list, having joined only a few days ago, but the idea struck me to post our requirements to the list. To my surprise, within 30 minutes members started emailing resumes and phone numbers to me.

These people were no hobbyists, but real professionals well skilled in programming with various languages. I was amazed at the amount of talent at my fingertips.

It occurred to me that all of these people strongly believe in open source software, and that the ease of the process was due (aside from the need for income) to the sense of community that is typical open source advocates.

I know now that if I ever find myself needing an expert, my first course of action will be emailing my local LUG, wherever I may be.

01/04/05: The Trustworthiness of Blogs

I often visit thinkblog.org for Michael's thought-inspiring articles. His article Do Bloggers Really Have an Impact? considers the bloggers' truth in relation to, for example, network news' truth. From Michael's article:

We're getting more first-hand reports, for instance, of whatever we wish; but with no standards, no real bias either way. This can be a very good thing, but it can also be quite confusing: you read something on one blog and it's spoken like the gospel truth, and then another contradicts it, or someone puts another spin on things.

But what of the blogs of the people with an agenda? How do you know the news you're getting is trustworthy, informed, &c.? (Of course, how do we really know from the huge networks?)

I think blogs are as trustworthy as the reader is skeptical. If you read something that really grabs your interest, they you really should check some alternate sources. Cross reference as much as possible if you are looking for truth. However, many people, including myself at times, just want to read something entertaining. I don't necessarily care if its true or not as long as it makes me laugh. Kinda like that guy you know that constantly tells fake stories, but you don't care because he is funny as hell. In most cases though, I think it is possible to identify the bits of truth in a blog article and strip away the bias, depending on how well written. Then if you are really interested, you can at least do a search on these truth nuggets to verify their validity. All in all, blogs are a great source of information that wouldn't normally come up in your day to day browsing.

01/02/05: Recommended Firefox Extension: Stumble Upon

From sensiblyeclectic.com:

Stumble Upon lets you 'stumble upon' cool websites that have been highly recommended (rated Great!) by friends and community members with interests similar to your own.

StumbleUpon lets you review any page on the web. Rating a page I-like-it automatically shares it with friends. Rating pages also improves your stumbles - as you review your favorite sites (such as bookmarks and daily visits) StumbleUpon learns what you like and starts to show you more interesting pages.

StumbleUpon ratings also connect people with common interests. Clicking Page Review lets you add a short review to a site and see what other people thought of it. These opinions help you discover people on StumbleUpon with similar interests.

This strikes me as a good way for new sites, such as my own, to gain visitors. There are many, many interesting sites out there to be found, and if they are truely worthy, then theoretically to number of Great! ratings should rise exponentially, providing this extension becomes fairly widely used. It also seems to provide an alternate way to search for sites of interest without having to search for particular things. Now to give myself a perfect rating.

01/02/05: PHP Photo Album Software

I just read an intriguing review on davidfuchs.ca on a piece of software called Gallery. The software, written in PHP, seems ideal for anybody wanting to share their photos over the internet, but does require a PHP capable webhosting package (yes, that was shameless self-promotion, sue me). Apparently, photos can be organized into categories for easy cataloging. From the article:

I like how I can upload all my images via FTP, and then point the Gallery software to that directory for import. It automatically resizes my images to create the thumbnails, an intermediate image at 640x480 (for regular viewing), and it also leaves the original image untouched (though this is configurable - you can have it reduce the size/quality of the full-size image if they're very large). Other features include slideshow views, the ability to display JPEG ExIF header data, and a permissions system so I can keep photos of friends/family available to them only.

I have been putting off posting my own pics for over a year. I guess this is as good a time as any to get it done and try a new piece of software. Wish me luck!

01/02/05: Yes. Avant Browser is IE Too

One of the most common arguments I hear against switching from IE to firefox is "I use Avant, not IE," or "I don't use IE. I use [insert IE upgrade here]." I just want to make people aware that not everything is as it seems, so you should read carefully. Buyer beware and all that. In fact, here are the first few lines from Avant Browser's website:

Have you ever tried surfing with a tabbed web browser?

Try Avant Browser, an upgrade to Internet Explorer. Avant Browser is a fast, stable, user-friendly, versatile multi-window browser. Now, Avant Browser is available in 34 languages.

Do you see what I see? An upgrade it Internet Explorer you say? What does that mean? Well, it means that you still have a very good reason to switch to Firefox. The security holes you may have been trying to escape have followed you and, aside from a decent popup blocker, you are still very vulnerable.

Everybody, except Microsoft, is telling you to stop using IE, so what's the problem? You don't have to use Firefox. There are many other alternatives. Try Apple's Safari or Opera. As long as you stop using IE, I don't care what you use. If I'm this easy to get along with, can't you be? :)