Digital: A Love Story
Posted: March 18th, 2010Digital: A Love Story: “A free game (Win, Mac, Linux) based on BBSs and conspiracies.”
(Via NonsenseBB.)
Tool of The Month: jhead
Posted: August 22nd, 2008jhead – Exif Jpeg header manipulation tool
Things jhead can extract from an Exif jpeg file
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Things jhead can modify in an exif jpeg file
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I wish I had bothered to search for this tool when I bought my Samsung D900 which fails to write the correct timestamp on the damn photos… oh well, better late then never.
Via Mac OS X Hints (or more precisely, google and the keywords on a comment on that post):
Simply use jhead -dsft *.jpg on the files to set
the EXIF date to the file creation-date
Mac Only
Posted: February 22nd, 2008After 10 years I no longer consider myself a linux user and all it took was a few months of using OSX.
Mac is so much better it makes no sense to compare it with anything else out there at the moment. It’s in a league by itself.
Note: My home server still runs linux. Linux is without competition in the home server market in my opinion.
Leopard Review and Great Tip
Posted: October 31st, 2007The Ars Technica review of Mac OSX 10.5 Leopard is probably not the best out there but I still like it (despite the annoying, unnecessary and presumptuous history lessons) – feel free to leave a link to your favorite review in the comments and I’ll link to it in this post.
Despite that it does contain a very good tip:
If you want the alternate look when the Dock is on the bottom too, type the following commands at a Terminal prompt:
% defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES% killall Dock
The alternate dock look is awesome! Absolutely love it.
And yeah last thing you need is to read another “me-too-upgraded-post” but just in case you need to know: everything went ok. letterbox is currently not working but it will be fixed soon according to the author. Apart from that everything seems ok. There are some compatibility lists out there that _might_ be outdated.
One Retarded Thing In Mac OSX – No Easy Shortcuts
Posted: October 30th, 2007There is no easy way to create application shortcuts (a shortcut to an application that may or may not have arguments). It’s extremely easy to do in Windows and Ubuntu (<your-favorite-nix/linux-distro>) but not in OSX.
I’m sure that as usual, some idiot apple zealot (sorry for the pleonasm) is going to try (yeah try, comments moderated but they still try) to post a comment saying how that’s a good (great) thing, Steve Jobs is a genius and I’m dumb for not knowing that it’s such a good thing or even knowing what a shortcut is (like when I posted about the iPhone lacking a SDK and guess what? It will get one – in your face zealot 
).
Browser Windows Inside The Application
Posted: October 15th, 2007Let’s skip the part about the why – that’s for another post, maybe. I want to create an application that has browser windows inside it. I’m hardly the only person to want to do this but there seem to be surprisingly few ways to do this if you consider cross-platform support a must.
Java can’t do it. In fact after searching I was only able to find 2 options:
Option a) wxMozilla – I already knew this one but considering the last version of it (0.5.4) came out in 2005 and there are at least few posts/emails around the web seem to indicate some problems – though I haven’t investigated this thoroughly.
The big plus of wxmozilla is that I believe this is what was used to develop gush and what I want to do (want != will) is very similar to gush in terms of GUI.
Option b) GtkEmbedMoz/Gecko# – this is the solution that I’m leaning towards.
Does anyone out there know any other options? Preferably something usable with either Java or Python (I really don’t feel like coding in C++) and Linux/Mac/Win support would be nice though only Linux/Mac support is strictly required.
UPDATE: having looked at things in more detail I don’t think GtkEmbedMoz/Gecko# is a good solution for me based on the OSX support and the fact that I’d rather use python for this. That leaves me with wxMozilla as the only option for now (and I’m not sure that it will work).
UPDATE2: while what is (was?) the main page for wxMozilla doesn’t show it, there is an April 2006 version of wxMozilla on the sourceforge page.
Converting Between Audio File Formats
Posted: August 28th, 2007In a previous post I explained a way to convert a cue/FLAC to mp3. Recently I had to convert a cue/APE to mp3. While searching for ways to do it I came across this post in the aidanhm’s stuff blog. While it has very few posts (the last one in mid February) it does have a few posts that explain how to convert between different file formats (APE, FLAC, WAV,…) and how to deal with cuesheets in Ubuntu.
Since it’s explained there, there’s no point in me repeating it here.
While I haven’t done any of this in Mac OS X, I did download xACT
xACT stands for X Audio Compression Toolkit. It is a GUI based front end (written in AppleScript Studio) for the unix applications Shorten (3.5.1), shntool (2.0.3), monkey’s audio compressor (3.99),flac (1.1.3) and cdda2wav 2.01a32(with paranoia support).
I also looked at this page which explains how to use xACT to convert .flac files to mp3.
UPDATE: Filipe IMed me about a better option for Mac OS X, Max.
Hasta-la-Vista
Posted: March 21st, 2007After like 6 weeks I removed Vista from my laptop last week. The main culprit was application compatibility (or lack of thereof) – either not installing, not running, not running well i.e. crashing OR requiring “tricks” (read annoyances) to run (run as admin and stuff) and other random, lesser annoyances.
Off course the fact that I also have Ubuntu on my laptop means that on an average day I won’t use Windows anyway – be it XP or Vista. Nevertheless I miss the integrated search. Beagle sucks. I’ll give tracker a try and post some comments about it – if I remember… I probably wont.
Off course performance (or the lack of it) had something to do with it but it was a significant factor (just another “little thing”).
Generally speaking there’s something about Vista that seems to cause more attrition – you are forced to become aware of it for some reason(s) I can’t seem to figure out what exactly. No it’s not UAC, I turned that off – it got really old, really fast (“sigh. continue”) and I suspect turning off UAC will be the norm among Vista “power users”/experts/wtv. I should probably mention that I’m used to Ubuntu’s password prompts whenever I need to do admin stuff and those are NOWHERE near as bad as UAC – in fact I don’t even consider those prompts all that annoying (except when they take a while and I forget in which monitor they are opening in). That’s because you get the UAC prompts (yes, plural) not at the start of the application/installation but only when the applications actually tries to do the admin stuff. So much for unattended installations. I found it very annoying. And why not go all the way instead of that half-ass “continue” button, why not just ask for the password? (wouldn’t surprise me if they were just afraid of trojans imitating it)
Ok that UAC rant was a bit off-topic… I was talking about attrition, I didn’t explain very well what I meant by it. I’m sure GUI experts have some term for it but I don’t know it. The GUI just seems to run contrary to some common GUI design principles at times – mainly those of directness (try changing the wallpaper or the theme), efficiency/predictability/consistency (the new control panel where everything is at least a thousand clicks away in 100 different types of menus/tabs/wtv and you have to guess where and when you do you’re rewarded with something that looks a lot like the old XP applet where it used to be 2 or 3 clicks away from the starting line), comprehensibility, simplicity and clarity. Though it’s hard to pinpoint where exactly where (except in the control panel case), but it just annoys me (though I think it’s mainly windows explorer and the taskbar/system tray). I used Vista for 6 weeks, and I’ve every version of Windows since 95 excluding ME (yeah I dodged that one, the only (large) version of Windows that became a flop so far), and I couldn’t get used to it. Plus the more Gnome evolves the harder it is for me to go back to any Windows, I just miss Gnome and it’s attractiveness. Something else that is to blame for my lack of patience with Vista is that every time I boot into Windows it feels like a chore. It’s something I don’t want to do, it’s something I’m being forced to do.
Funny thing. There was a time when linux newcomers complained about installing apps in linux and said that I should be more like in Windows. Now it’s the other way around. People try Ubuntu and ask why isn’t app installation in Windows that easy and convenient. I doubt that’s something Microsoft will ever manage to do.
Thank god for Linux and GNOME (and Mark Shuttleworth for Ubuntu).
Now compare my Vista experience with that of OSX: today, for the first time, I used OSX for more than 5 minutes unattended simply because I left my notebook at home and Filipe was in a meeting (thanks btw) . A full half hour! And I got used to it. I was quite impressed with how fast I got used to it – and I how much I actually liked it (loved the growl notifications that kept popping up) – though I obviously didn’t use it long enough for major annoyances to appear (like some linux/windows app that has no equivalent in OSX or having to use interface-crippled software like VLC). Sucks that I have to admit it (but no way I’m going to stop making no-one-uses-it jokes). I feel dirty somehow, like I’ve joined the unwashed mass of Mac-Zealots *eeew* I already felt slightly ashamed of belonging to the same species as them… But I’ll go even further: if I knew what I know now (namely that linux’s power management would keep sucking) I would’ve bought a macbook (one of the 13″ models probably) one year ago when I bought my Vaio. There I’ve said it. Now I’ve got to go take a bath.
But before I do one more word of praise for Linux and another stab at Windows: my Windows XP installation currently occupies around 40GB. My Ubuntu installation (including 3 different desktop environments – GNOME, KDE and Xfce not counting fluxbox which is too small to matter anyway) occupies around 4GB – 10x less.
In Summary:
Why don’t I use Vista? I have something better, it’s called Ubuntu.
Do I recommend OSX? No, I haven’t used it enough to recommend it or recommend against it. One huge disadvantage is that it’s tied to Apple hardware. (Zealots: please don’t bother telling me how that’s actually a hidden advantage, it’s not)
Making Windows look good – Linux themes in Windows
Posted: March 13th, 2007I learned about Linux themes in Windows via the Tux Vermelho blog (in Portuguese) which in turn learned about it from the Tech by Colin blog (in English). I’ll mirror the instructions here just in case:
1 – Download the Belchfire to patch to make Windows accept new themes (hurray for MS crippleware) from here.
2 – Download a Visual Style (Colin recomends these):
* Clearlooks
* Human
* Plastik
I went with clearlooks (same one I usually use in Linux).
3 – Icons. Get the Tango Patcher. Previews here.
I went with Tangerine (though I usually use the OSX icons in Linux – they are just sooo purrty).
4 – Tango for Firefox and Tango/Tangerine for uTorrent. You may be able to find (some of) these themes for other applications too.
And that’s all folks.
Windows Vista – First Impressions
Posted: January 18th, 2007From one and a half days of Vista use:
The Good:
- UAC actually looks pretty good, unfortunately I suspect many users will disable it;
- More security stuff (such as ASLR) – only time will tell how effective they will be, but it’s no doubt an improvement;
- It feels a lot more responsive;
- The WinKey+Tab is badass (though not as good as OSX’s expose);
- Search for everything (documents, programs, configuration options, …);
- It’s pretty (I really like the new progress bar in explorer).
The Bad:
- Configuring Windows with the new control panel is much harder – options are spread around like crazy;
- Networking for laptops is as bad as in XP (i.e. nowhere near as good as in Ubuntu);
- They couldn’t even ensure out-of-the-box compatibility for Visual Studio 2005 – they’ll address it in VS2k5 SP1.
Some links I cant be bothered to make a specific post for:
Online Security Sessions from TechEd IT Forum Available
Windows Vista Security Guide
Gunnar Peterson’s OS Security Features Chart
SNR=0
Posted: September 26th, 2006GLP 2006:
- Portugal Telecom screwed us and instead of the 1Gbps that we had last year with 100Mbps reserved for the WCG, we got 200 Mbps with the same 100Mbps reserved for the WCG. So 100Mps / 100 people… that sucked. And no point in mentioning the IP incident – that would’ve been the death of it.
- FREE!!! POPCORN!!! courtesy of Sapo – that kinda makes up for the lack of bandwidth right?
- 4 (I think) XBox 360 for everyone to play.
- The VIP feeling of the stadium’s VIP room – much better than the basement.
So was it better than last year? Well… the lack of bandwidth is a big issue but overall I’d say yes.
FEUP:
Moving on, the start of this semester at FEUP has been a bit of a mess thanks to the the Bologna process. Gotta love chaos.
This semester I’m taking the following courses (some loosely translated):
- Microprocessors and Personal Computers (mostly IA-32 assembly – using MASM)
- Statistics
- Databases (PL/SQL?!? plus MySQL)
- Logic Programming (in prolog. I predict this one is gonna give me a lot of work)
- Operating Systems (yay plus we start with the unix api 
)
Microsoft’s Zune:
It can be accuratelly described with 3 letters: DOA
Nintendo’s Wii:
I’ve been wanting to blog about this one for a while now. The wii has gotten a lot of attention around the blogosphere and in gaming sites/forums. One might mistake this hype for something more substantial and it’s not uncommon to see predictions of the Wii’s “inevitable” success. This is not unlike the attention that Mac OSX gets from the blogosphere and, in fact, from the traditional media itself. A Martian reading the blogosphere would be induced to think that the Mac actually has a significant share of the PC market. But like most of us know, the reality is quite different. The core of the problem is the simple statistical problem of a non-random sample of the population – the population of people who feel the need to be fanboys (this is of course a biased oversimplification). The point is, while the Wii may sell much better than the Gamecube (if simply due to the fact the gamecube was the late arrival in the current/past generation console war), it is unlikely to rival the Xbox 360 or the PS3.
Considering the supposed hardware specs, calling the Wii a next generation console (PS3) is a bit (Xbox360) of a stretch. I’m sure that the fact that I own a PS1 and a PS2 makes me biased but if sony did such a good job with the first 2 generations of the product, why should I (or anyone else for that matter) assume that it won’t do the same again this time? And for the record, I think the Xbox 360 is going to be as big as the PS3.
No Net @ My Room – Crappy Wireing:
Bye Bye tvtel? Hello claranet?
Filesystems:
ZFS will takeover the world. The new fat – a new filesystem we can all (linux, bsds, OSX, Windows via 3rd party software, not like MS would ever do what’s right for their customers) agree to support (and hopefully use by default) – a man can dream. I’m getting tired of having to use fat on my portable HD. FAT’s limitations are well… too limiting in these days – keeping files below 4GB means I have to tar them into multiple archives or split them. But there’s simply no other filesystem that is supported across the different systems. While I wait for ZFS to conquer all, I’ll have to come up with a temporary solution – maybe HFS with a fat partition with HFS software for Windows.
Next on Rei – Through The Wire:
New Toys Part II & III. This past few weeks have been kinda hard and I’ve been very busy and I still have 2 tons of things to do. Hopefully I’ll get the logserver up by the end of the day and still take a look at Statistics or maybe Databases. And god I hate classes at 8am.
Why Switch To Ubuntu
Posted: August 28th, 2006Why Linux over XP? How Ubuntu Users Respond – and many of the reasons are valid for OSes other than Windows XP (coff*OSX*coff).
The US-CERT Bulletin Debacle
Posted: January 12th, 2006It has been all over the news for the past couple of weeks or so. The US-CERT released its Cyber Security Bulletin 2005 Summary and while I’m not one to doubt human incompetence the fact that this report was put together by someone who supposedly understands the concept of “operating system” makes me think it might’ve been more than just incompetence. At issue is the fact that the bulletin for some reason decided to divide the vulnerabilities by what operating systems they affected, to quote the report: “Software vulnerabilities are categorized in the appropriate section reflecting the operating system on which the vulnerability was reported“. So far so good. Unfortunatelly whoever put it together, apparently, doesn’t understand what an “operating system” is. So according to that Cyber Security Bulletin only two operating systems exist: Windows and Unix/Linux. And so under that classification, the US-CERT bulletin states:
“There were 5198 reported vulnerabilities: 812 Windows operating system vulnerabilities; 2328 Unix/Linux operating vulnerabilities; and 2058 Multiple operating system vulnerabilities”
We all know how competent and umm… competent the press is. There is no point in blaming this on the “Microsoft Press Machine” though I’m sure they were happy to give a hand to the more useless members of the press, the fact is they didn’t have to. Out of the majority of the reporters out there, the few that actually understand anything about what they are reporting on are usually incapable of doing anything more than just copying a press release into a text processing program and changing the words a bit as well as occasionally asking for quotes from “experts” – people usually attached to a big company that has something to lose by telling the whole truth. And I’m not even going to mention their need for sensationalist headlines… oh wait I just did. All this said, it was obvious to everyone with half a brain that the words in the US-CERT bulletin were going to be interpreted/transcribed by the press as “Windows is more secure than Unix/Linux” or even more appallingly as “Windows 3X safer than Linux“.
I don’t know what makes me more sad: the fact that the tech press still doesn’t know that security of an operating system cannot be effectively measured by number of vulnerabilities alone, the fact that they don’t know that “Unix/Linux” actually consists of a large number of different operating systems OR that the US-CERT doesn’t know it – or at least decided to pretend it didn’t know, in which case the question becomes “Is it worse to be incompetent or corrupt?”
And now, for the facts. First of, like I said before, “Unix/Linux” isn’t an operating system but rather a large number of very different operating systems like for example IBM’s AIX, Apple’s Mac OS X, RedHat Linux and NetBSD. As if this mistake wasn’t big enough, somehow, the US-CERT decided that a vulnerability in firefox was a “Unix/Linux”-specific problem even though the majority of firefox users are probably runing it in Windows. You can argue that most open-source OSes include firefox as the default browser and this a firefox vulnerability is more or less analog to a IE vulnerability in Windows (even though IE’s integration into Windows is much greater than FF’s in any Linux distro) but the bulletin in question makes no distinction between software integrated into the OS and third party software.
When the vulnerabilities are properly broken down by OS, the picture we get is quite different:
All of Microsoft’s discovered security exploits for Windows only amount to a pretty reasonable 44. Microsoft products in total (including MS Office, Internet Explorer, ASP.NET and the like) comes to 122.
(…)
Individual Unix distributions faired very well: Apple Mac OS X clocked in at 21 vulnerabilities, tied with IBM’s AIX. HP-UX had only 15 vulnerabilities. SCO had only nine.
For the top Linux distributions, things look peachy. Red Hat had seven vulnerabilities; Suse 12; Debian 10; and Gentoo a mere five.
Non-Linux open souce distribution FreeBSD clocked in with 13, while ultra-secure NetBSD maintained its reputation with two vulnerabilities reported.
And like NewsForge pointed out, US-CERT’s own Technical Cyber Security Alerts shows a different picture:
* 22 Technical Cyber Security Alerts were issued in 2005
* 11 of those alerts were for Windows platforms
* 3 were for Oracle products
* 2 were for Cisco products
* 1 was for Mac OS X
* None were for Linux
And more:
US-CERT’s list of current vulnerabilities contains a total of 11 vulnerabilities, six of which mention Windows by name, and none of which mentions Linux.
And like RedHat said comparing Linux with Windows: “fewer vulnerabilities were critical and patches were brought out more quickly.“.
And to make matters worse, all this talk about windows being more secure than the so called “Unix/Linux” operating system, the whole WMF drama is unfolding: first an Exploit Released for Unpatched Windows Flaw, then a New IM Worm Exploiting WMF Vulnerability, followed by Microsoft to Patch WMF Exploit Early and what is a drama without a hero? More dramatic. In typical MS fashion, the final exclamation point: Two New WMF Bugs Found. For 7 days a fairly serious vulnerability remained unpatched by Microsoft… what more can I say?
As a result the computer security community will be drinking its milk from a carton with the word “MISSING” in the back, right above a picture of US-CERTs credibility. Will it ever be found?
.XXX
Posted: June 9th, 2005Joi Ito has Some notes on the .XXX Top Level Domain. My opinion was pretty much expressed by joat in this post: It’s not going to work. And not just because of the silly price tag but mainly because it would be trivial to censor all .xxx websites. This has little to do with parental control software – children can’t pay for porn. This has to do with people watching porn at work/university/school/public libraries/whatever. In summary, porn sites currently have nothing to gain by moving to .xxx and a lot to lose.
The Skype Protocol
Posted: May 9th, 2005I’ve recently began trying out Skype after hearing so much about it all over the net and from relax. I found this interesting paper from Columbia University entitled “An Analysis of the Skype Peer-to- Peer Internet Telephony Protocol“.