Archive for the ‘Computers’ Category

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KDE4 Revisited

Thursday, October 30th, 2008

Back in February, I took a look at the new KDE4 and what I had found was less than desired. Always willing to re-address an issue, I installed the newer 4.1 version of the beta and dug around a bit.

I found much of what I had complained about has been cleaned up. Configuration is much easier now and previously missing configuration controls have been put back in place. The KDE team has restored my faith in the new version with this alone. I was dreading a Gnome clone.

They also canned the Duplo Lego look, for something not quite as chunky, but still too large. Thankfully, with the re-established controls in place, you can fix it quickly.

The Plasma widgets never really impressed me and they still don’t, though they are getting better. Dolphin is an interesting file manager, but konqueror still holds my heart there. Both are included, of course, so choice rules supreme. (Not that I do much with a graphical file manager, as the command line is where I typically roam.)

Kickoff finally has the ability to revert to the standard KDE3 style menu. Thank you!

Integration with Compiz-Fussion was seamless and I didn’t run into any troubles – rather amazing considering the complexity of it.

However, the one thing KDE4 still lacks is application stability. I couldn’t go for longer than ten minutes at a time without an application crash. Scrolling menus often didn’t refresh correctly. Shortcut settings would change in the interface, but not work. KMail couldn’t empty the Trash folder on my IMAP accounts without dying. The desktop itself never died, but I couldn’t get much work done.

In short, KDE4 is not ready for real work, but it’s getting better – much better. Once the environment is out of beta, I’m pretty confident at this point that it will suit me just fine and satisfy my needs for a completely configurable desktop environment.

Again, I’m thankful. I didn’t really want to move to Gnome.

Addendum: It appears that the newly released Kubuntu 8.10 has abandoned KDE3 and gone exclusively with KDE4.  I can’t imagine why they would do this, considering the issues I’ve seen with lack of stability.  Time to dig up a test machine and try a fresh install, I think.

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Spirit of Service

Tuesday, June 24th, 2008

I don’t think there’s anything more frustrating that dealing with the typical technical support call. In this case, my DSL modem bit the dust. It’s was an ActionTec GT701-WG, which I was not completely thrilled with for starters, but it did the job well enough – until yesterday.

Out of nowhere, the Web interface died. Normally people aren’t on the Web interface to their DSL modem everyday, but I have a script running which queries the status page once every ten minutes. If the PPP or DSL connection is lost for three minutes after first discovery, the script triggers an X10 power switch to reset the modem (complete with a 20 second pause between power down and power up.) A script like this wouldn’t normally be required at all, except that I had two incidences where I lost DSL connectivity while I was at work and needed to obtain files from my home machine and for some reason or another either DSL itself or PPP wouldn’t re-connect. The script had helped me out, according the logs, once since I enabled it.

Back to the current issue: Along with the Web interface giving up its mortal coil, the PPP connection finally dropped as well. DSL was still trained, but that was it. I had a modem which wouldn’t respond to me and no line to the outside world.

The system had worked flawlessly, as I said, for about two years, with the script in place for the last eight months, so nothing had changed on my end for quite some time. I tried connecting several times manually, and managed to get in on the Web interface for about two or three minutes a couple of times each, before its little brain went south again and then wouldn’t even respond to ICMP pings. From that data gleaned, I verified settings and what connection status there was with my ISP, just to be thorough. I tried the hard-reset process – which didn’t work. Finally, the beast simply wouldn’t come back to life at all.

All signs pointed to a dead modem.

Come this morning I gave Qwest a call. It didn’t take long to reach a “technical” support person, I have to give them that, but the rest was an exercise in stupidity. I explained the complete situation, from loss of the Web interface to the lack of reset capability and asked what it would cost to replace the modem. He didn’t answer the question, instead wishing to go through a series of trouble shooting steps. I won’t bore you here with the full conversation. Suffice it to say that after an hour and a half of walking through the various steps on two different computers over this “technical” support person’s script, he came to the thoughtful deduction that the modem wasn’t working correctly and needed to be replaced.

No way! I would have never guessed. How nice it is to have “technical” help like this.

Since it wasn’t under warranty anymore (nothing ever is when it dies) I have to pay for a new modem. They wanted $50 for a refurbished replacement. Thanks, but no thanks. I’ll get a brand new modem, thank you, even if it costs more. My biggest problem now is finding a decent modem on a timely basis. Everyone in Salt Lake seems to sell nothing but ActionTec – which I’m not very trustful of. Cisco 678′s are getting harder to find as well.

In any case, I wasted an hour and twenty minutes of my life, appeasing a script reader. Had this “technical” support person just listened to what I had to say at the very beginning, and answered my original question, I’d have that time for my purpose instead of their scripted nonsense.  I suppose I should have been more forceful in my demands, but I would have hoped that I didn’t need to be.

I do know now why Qwest’s motto is “Spirit of Service” – you certainly get nothing very tangible.

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Stupid Windows Tricks

Monday, June 2nd, 2008

Take a few minutes and watch this video of a demonstration of Windows 7 multi-touch technology. At first glance you may be thinking, that’s some spiffy new technology. I’m going to run down a whole list of reasons why this is going to flop.

Screen dirt

I can’t speak for everyone on this concern, but it is a big one for me. I can’t stand a dirty monitor. If there are fingerprints, smudges or smears which get in the way of my work, it simply pisses me off. At the resolution I run displays, even a tiny drop of pop spit up by carbonation of a nearby drink is noticeable. Now you want me to smear my fingers all over the screen on purpose? No thanks.

Tired arms

With your monitor in the traditional position of straight ahead of you and up at eye level, arm fatigue is going to set in very, very quickly. Don’t believe me? Try it now. Pretend you’re working with this interface on your monitor for a few minutes and see if your arms don’t start to tire. This means you either have to suffer through the arm fatigue and take more breaks from your work, or move the monitor into a non-tradition position of flat on the desk in front of you. Now try working in collaboration with someone else on a problem with the screen flat down on the desk.

Fat fingers produce little detail

Pointing with a mouse or trackball is as precise as the cursor. Pointing with our fingers works to a certain extent, but how often do we pick up a pen or other smaller diameter object to point with, even for a large screen presentation? Trying to run CAD or photo manipulation software with your fingers is going to simply suck. How about just spreadsheet work? Do you want to be pushing around on a spreadsheet, trying to narrow it down to the correct cell?

Blocked vision

Speaking of tired arms and fingers, what about the fact that your hand is in the way? Does anyone want to be editing a photo or laying out a spreadsheet with your hands blocking the view of your work? Try to imagine touching up a photo, where you’re trying to clone another portion or work at blending a scratch or other damage, where your hand is blocking your view.

Screen longevity

Touch interfaces take their toll on screens. I have a HP PocketPC, which after three years is already scratched and slightly worn in spots (such as the close button, which is always in the same place) in spite of my rather careful attitude toward keeping the screen intact. How many users are going to want to buy a new monitor every two to three years, because you’ve scratched up the one you’ve been using with your fingernails, or the touch membrane is wearing out and becoming less responsive? How many women with long nails are going to want to cut them short because their monitor at work uses capacitive connectivity rather than pressure?

Touch screens have their place, and they’ve been around a long, long time now (1971) – but never caught on for mainstream applications. Why? Because it is a senseless waste of effort for most tasks. Leave it to Microsoft to try to redo an otherwise limited vertical market of Point of Sale systems, pocket devices and industrial interfaces to a general PC interface. They just couldn’t take the clue that the reason this hasn’t taken off in the mainstream over the last 37 years is that there simply isn’t a need for it.

A whole lot of “gee-wiz” and not a damned bit of common sense in this one.

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Debian Idiocy

Tuesday, May 20th, 2008

So that I’m not accused of being unfairly biased against Microsoft (I am biased against Microsoft, but I don’t believe I’m being unfair about it. :twisted: ) I have to comment on the latest fiasco from the Debian Linux team.

This one hit me head on and caused me a few hours of unwanted work, as well as a general feeling of unease, as the two workstations and three servers I own personally are using Ubuntu’s OpenSSL and OpenSSH packages (Ubuntu is a derivative of Debian.)

The problem is a simple one.  The package maintainer of OpenSSL of the Debian project decided that because Valgrind and IBM’s Rational Purify were having issues with error messages when linked against OpenSSL, that he’d ‘fix’ OpenSSL and OpenSSH (and everything else using libssl) by removing the code needed to generate truly random numbers for key generation.  This limited keys to being seeded by a short INT: 1 to 32,768.  Well, you don’t have to be a security expert to know that if you are limited to 32,768 “random” numbers, it won’t take long to brute force attack such keys.

Hence, the problem.  All versions of OpenSSL and OpenSSH used by Debian since Sept. 17th, 2006 up to the recent Debian updates, use this retarded random number scheme and generated easily broken security keys, for otherwise secure standards.

What this meant for me was a general feeling of insecurity and now a distrust of the Debian distribution, not to mention a few of hours of my life I would have rather spent doing anything but replacing keys.  This isn’t just an innocent mistake, this is moronic maneuver beyond belief.  Gergely Risko, sums it up nicely.

The whole mess was caused by one person, Kurt Roeckx.  He took a shortcut rather than a valid fix for a simple problem. To make it worse, he somewhat tried to cover up his mistake by releasing the real fix (putting the code back in) in the “unstable” release code, and not saying a word about it for a full week.

I’d almost be willing to forgive him for the initial mistake, if it weren’t for the fact that even a non-expert in security code (aka, me) could tell at a glance that this was a very bad thing to do.  That he tried to silently re-introduce the code back in without letting people know of the dangers, is even less forgivable.

If the Debian team has any integrity, they’ll move Kurt over to something that he can better handle, something which is not essential to security.  No sense in throwing out the maintainer with the bath water, as it were.

In the meantime, I don’t think I’m going to have a lot of trust in ‘fakechroot’ doing the right thing, either.  (Kurt maintains that package as well.)

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Loose Your Data, the Microsoft Way

Thursday, May 1st, 2008

May 1, 2008 (Computerworld) Microsoft Corp. confirmed on Wednesday that it delayed the rollout of Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) because changes to the operating system can corrupt data in the company’s retail point-of-sale and store management software.

I hate to laugh, but I have to.  If it was some bizarre interaction with a third party software package, I might be able to forgive it as an oversight.  But to create two different service packs, for two different OS’s that both corrupt data in one of Microsoft’s own, rather expensive, software packages?  How pathetic can you get?

Certainly it is within the best interest of every systems administrator out there, to test all service packs and updates with the software they run, to ensure that their mission critical applications don’t explode on them.  It falls on their shoulders, ultimately.  However, you would hope that Microsoft, as large as they are, would test their own software against their own OS roll outs.

I know that Microsoft is the 800 pound gorilla in the software cage, which makes them a natural target, but with their recent mistakes in judgment and poor software offerings (Vista simply sucks, the Windows Genuine Advantage is anything but and has screwed up several times now telling valid customers that they’re software thieves, Windows Home Server still corrupts any data you save directly to it across the network, and the last two service packs weren’t released to paying Microsoft Developer Network customers, etc.) I have to wonder if they’re not starting to collapse under their own weight.

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Illegal Hyperlinks

Sunday, March 23rd, 2008

This article is scary in so many ways, that it gives one pause to even browse the Web anymore.

The gist of it all, is that the FBI put up some faked URL’s on a message board which they thought was being used for trading child pornography and then recorded the Internet Protocol (IP) number of any system which connected to their fake site. They made no distinction of how a person got the link, however. This means that someone could email the links in question to a person they want to damage, using misleading names on the links and cause a completely innocent person to find the FBI’s honeypot!

The FBI then took the IP information and traced it down to the supposed owner and used this to obtain a warrant for each location for dawn raids.

Let’s be blunt about this: when the FBI made no distinction on how someone got to the site, they engaged in utterly shoddy police work.

One of the most disturbing lines in the article is as follows:

Vosburgh faced four charges: clicking on an illegal hyperlink; knowingly destroying a hard drive and a thumb drive by physically damaging them when the FBI agents were outside his home; obstructing an FBI investigation by destroying the devices; and possessing a hard drive with two grainy thumbnail images of naked female minors (the youths weren’t having sex, but their genitalia were visible).

The obstruction and possession charges seem legitimate, but I have to ask, what the hell is an illegal hyperlink? What is the definition being used for this? If the hyperlink is illegal, can’t the FBI be charged for creating an illegal hyperlink?

Between this kind of questionable police tactics and the ongoing construction and use of data fusion centers, we’ve entered a whole new age of Orwellian existence. I would recommend to everyone to start encrypting everything, whether it is sensitive material or not. Make them waste time on trying to decrypt chocolate chip cookie recipes and text files that only have quotes of the Framers in them. Make them expend effort for nothing, so much effort that they become mired down under the weight of it all.

Following are links to various encryption tools.

http://www.gnupg.org/
http://www.truecrypt.org/
http://www.arg0.net/encfs
http://www.freeotfe.org/

And a page covering many drive encryption systems.

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