Microsoft just killed the Mac vs PC adverts. You'll never be able to look at those Mac adverts in the same way again. However I still can't work out if the earlier jerry seinfeld & bill gates adverts were super clever or simply advertising suicide? Either Microsoft are playing a amazing poker game or playing crazy?
Category: technology-and-computing
A couple of interesting features found recently
This little feature, submits the current song to last.fm and uses its unique database to recommend which tunes to play next. Its simple, effective and I've not seen anything like it anywhere else till itunes 8 introduced the genius feature.
This took me by surprise, I was sending a email and mentioning a attachment from a previous email but Evolution decided to ask me the above question. I got to say it was well received although it was wrong.
No choice but learn Python…
I was reading about the guy who started the Specto project and started reading through his blog. I came across this blog post mentioning how it all started out of frustrating because there was a lack of interest for person tracking system like Specto turned out to be.
I do want to spend sometime learning Python for this exact reason, theres a small tiny apps which I want to write to speed up/improve a task or too on my machine. But I'm not sure where to start and I'm starting to think I should just use Flex/Air as i can do that much quicker.Yes its bad news but what other alternatives are there for a non-progrmmer like myself? I had hoped Konfabulator might have offered a simlar thing but the linux alernatives are all writtern in Python anyway (screenlets, gdesklets, etc). Then my favorate application which i have yet to play with deeply Conduit is also written in Python and its add on are also in Python. And last of all the xbox media centre uses python for its scripting. So it time to get serious, and to be fair I did say I was going to start learning python in my new year resoultions.
So first point of call, what editor? I only got attached to XMLspy ages ago for writing large dense XSL and XSDs. So I can change easy enough. I thought I'd ask Mr Python, Simon Wilison but looking at his blog he was undecided in 2003 and who knows what he's using now (i did twitter too).
Jedit was in the comments and was one of the first I looked at. It runs on everything Java does, is GPL and support Python along with XSLT too. What also tops it off for me is Robin McKinnon uses it (i actually remember him showing me this). So I'm giving it a try and pull up some Python hello world type stuff to play with. I left the O'reilly Python book at home but when I get back I'll have a look through that. If you know anywhere else I should be looking, shout. I've not forgotten Uche's 4Suite.
Only Ubuntu left standing
Headline news, Mac users not as secure as they first imagined
A laptop running a fully patched version of Microsoft's Vista operating system was the second and final machine to fall in a hacking contest that pitted the security of Windows, OS X and Ubuntu Linux. With both a Windows and Mac machine felled, only the Linux box remained standing following the three-day competition.
Send to Flickr
Bahi sent around the call for testers a while ago and I thought actually Kflickr's and fspot's been ok but both very bloated for a simple uploader to flickr. So I thought I'd give send to flickr a try.
It does work as shown above but I've already got a few bits of feedback already.
- The icon on the gnome desktop does not scale to a size bigger that 32×32 it seems. It needs a scalable icon.
- There's no ability to rename the file names or set collections.
- I assume proxy support is done via gnome?
- It would be nice to have some little notification when its finished uploading or be able to have the uploading progress bar as a notification
- The whole application seems to disappear once the upload is finished. Need some confirmation of upload.
- Good call on the right click option.
BBC’s Ashley Highfield joins the Gnu/linux geeks
Nope its not April 1st. Yesterday George Wright and Jono Bacon setup and installed Ubuntu 7.10 on Ashley Highfield's laptop. I was there with my camera to capture everything as it unfolded. Don't worry, people this isn't the end of the coverage. Expect blog even more blog posts, audio from the install fest and if Ashleys up for it, video in the near future. So thats 601 users now Ashley? No but seriously, good step, lets hope Ashley enjoys using Ubuntu and learns more about this mystery operating system which makes you really think differently…
Technorati Tags: ashleyhighfield, bbc, backstage, jonobacon, georgewright, ubuntu, gnu linux
Software I’m using on ubuntu
Since switching to Linux, I've been feeling my way through a bunch of different free and open software. Some of the software I've picked up from when I was using Windows, others have been replacements and even in some cases I've picked completely different software for things I've never imagined.
- QTM blog editor
- Hamachi VPN
- Liferea RSS reader
- Amarok music player/manager
- Skype
- Gossip and Gajim instant messengers
- Gnome Do launcher
- Blueman Bluetooth manager
- Blue Proximity scanner
- Conduit
- KeepassX password manager
- Screenlets widget framework
- Specto notification application
- Tomboy Notes personal wiki
- Inkscape
- Gimp
- Thunderbird and Evolution email clients
- Firefox browser
- Jungledisk
- Tellico collection manager
- Timevault backup manager
- OpenOffice
- Eclipse IDE
- Jungledisk
- Virtualbox
- Azureus
- icecast
I am missing a decent RSS reader like Particls but generally everything is covered.
Technorati Tags: software, computer, ubuntu, opensource, linux, gnu linux
The Trojan malware arms race
So after the London Geekdinner with Doctor Richard Clayton from Cambridge University, (you can watch the videos here 1, 2, 3, q&a or listen to the audio in total here.) I had a little wonder around the net to see what I've been missing out on since I moved to GNU/Linux.
And as expected the battle over adware, spyware and trojans has grown into something extremely serious. A friend at work keeps talking about the problems she has with her windows machine. The things she describes sounds like trojan activity but I can never be sure, so I'm not quite at the point of saying to her reinstall Windows fresh again. (We actually rebuilt her machine over the Christmas period already, because things were so bad she couldn't login). However after hearing about this banking trojan on Security Now recently. I'm reconsidering my advice.
Not only does it Trojan.Silentbanker steal your passwords, but it can perform a man in the middle attack on SSL connections, rendering the secure nature of SSL totally useless. It can also modify HTTP and HTML, meaning when you log into your bank and try and pay your bills it will replace your bill details with ones of the trojans chooses. Yes click that button to transfer funds looks legitmate but it will go to a off shorebank you've never heard of. It can steal cookies, certificates, cache passwords and change your DNS settings on the fly. So type in your banks url and the browser gets sent to a site which looks like the banks site but actually its not. To finish off it automaticlly updates its self and for some reason can install it a midi driver which screws around with your sound. Maybe to play the sound “kuchhing” when you finish that hijacked transation?
Technorati Tags: trojan, windows, geekdinner, londongeekdinner, Trojan.Silentbanker, securitynow, security, privicy
eMail problems Fixed
If you have emailed me in the last 2 days, I may not have got it because I'm experiencing email issues at the moment. It should get fixed soon, but right now its best to ping me on one of my gmail addresses. End of public broadcast.
This has been fixed, and it wasn't my host's fault. Actually it was me forgetting to set remove the proxy settings. I wish Thunderbird and Firefox would support global/operating system wide proxy settings as its painful to change it multiple times when connecting to the BBC network.
Gnome Launchy
So I've wanted something like quicksilver for a while and I found launchy when I was on Windows but I couldn't find anything for gnu/linux. Till today when I found a few. Gnome-Do, Gnome launch box and Katapult.
I stuck with Gnome-Do because its smooth, the plugin support is pretty good and I love the blog of the developer (see quote later). I do kind of wish for the smaller box style of Launchy instead of the boxes of quicksilver but you can't have it all. Oh it would also be great if the background dimmed a little. You know add a little compiz-fusion power to the whole thing.
On a personal note, I have used Mac OS X, FreeBSD, and Linux exclusively for the last seven years. I don’t use Windows because it lowers my quality of life. I haven’t tried Vista. I recently made the switch from OS X to Ubuntu after realizing that all Steve Jobs wants is for you to shut up and buy a new iPod; don’t you dare criticize his taste or the way he treats third-party developers like dirt. Also, I’m fairly confident that propriety software has no future. Yes, I am aware that proprietary software has a multi-trillion dollar past and present, but this implies nothing about the future.
Nice!
Technorati Tags: gnomedo, gnome, kde, plugins, quicksilver, launchy