Vault

An article in Nature discusses whither or not the Voynich Manuscript is a well designed fraud using a known form of encryption. For those of you who are not familiar with the Voynich Manuscript, its Elizabetian era “book” that is in a never before seen “language”. Most fraudulent manuscripts from that era have been demonstrated so by linguists and cryptographers. So far the Voynich Manuscript has stumped experts (mostly because it contains so many similarities to actual language structure. You can find out more about the Voynich Manuscript at Philip Neal’s Voynich Manuscript page.

Commercial Interests and the Future of Linux is a very interesting article from one of IBM Linux team developers on why Linux is so popular with big blue, HP, and SGI. Well worth a read.

Sorry for the slot news last week. My family and I spent the Christmas break on a cruise and it cost like 40 cents a minute to access the internet. It’s all good though, I probably needed to unplug for a while.

Just a quick note.  Went and saw the Lord the the Rings “Return of the King” yesterday.  It is without a doubt the single greatest movie ever created.  The trilogy itself will almost assuredly go down in history as the greatest movie epic ever made.  The battle sequences we amazing.; the story execution was enthralling;  and the climaxes were overwhelming.  “Return of the King” is as close to a perfect movie as I have ever seen.

Undoubtedly the most powerful Office suite for Linux is OpenOffice.org/StarOffice (aka: OO.org.)  It has most of the features of Microsoft Office and many many features that are not available in MS Office.  The biggest problem with OO.org is its overall lack of UI integration with any Linux desktop.  Sure it looks and acts fine but it does not fit with the rest of the desktop when using something like KDE or Gnome. 

Ximian has worked to fix this by “Gnomizing” OO.org through their OpenOffice.org Bonobo Integration project (which has evidently died since being bought by Novell.)  But that still left the best Linux desktop environment out in the cold.  Well that has changed.  The OpenOffice.org KDE Integration Project has been made an “incubator” project by OO.org (meaning that if it continues well it will be come an officially “accepted” OO.org project.)

This is good news for the KDE desktop community.  The interesting part is that lots of KDE/OO.org integration has already taken place.  KOffice already had plans to switch its file type to OO.org’s document type; and there is already an KPart for OO.org files in Konqueror (the founder of that project is also the founder of the OO.org KDE Integration Project.)  The X11 calls have already been replaced and work will hopefully start on a KDE NWS.

Several articles
I have posted have covered the utility and functionality of the KDE Run
Command. I have begun using one more… this one is based (slightly
modified by myself) on information presented in a KDE tutorial by Antonio Larrosa Jiménez. Check this out.

Go
into your KDE Control Center and browse to the “Web Shortcuts” section
in “Web Browsing.” There will be a list of web shortcuts that can be
used from within Konqueror and the KDE Run Command. Click the “add”
button and put the following information in the text boxes:

Search Provider Name: Qt Documentation
Search URI: /usr/share/doc/qt-devel-3.1.1/html/\{@}.html (works for Redhat 9; qt-devel-x.x.x will need to be modified for your specific Qt distribution)
URI Shortcut: qt,QT,Qt

When you click the ok and then apply you will be able to access the qt documentation via run command simply by typing qt:qstring (qstring being name of object function or tool instant entire c its like developer heaven>

Another great example of the functionality and flexibility of KDE and QT.

We are beginning the process of converting some of our workstations of to Linux.  Our current infrastructure seems to be ok, but we were having a little bit of trouble authenticating to Novell’s eDirectory.   For anyone who is having this same problem here is a straight forward tutorial Mike found on getting it working, written by Novell itself. 

I have been looking at HTPC stuff as of late because Mike’s very sweat TiVO unit.  Well unknown to some is the fact that TiVO is Linux powered and any Linux enthusiast can make their own (and include whatever options they want.)  Things like xmame for video game playing, DVD ripping/burning, TV-to-DVD burning, web access controls, etc.. are just a Linux box away.

Found a couple good resources for this.  HTPC How-to is a great resource; as is mythTV (check out the screen-shots.. if you don’t know what Linux is capable of it will blow your mind.)

Just thought I would pass another KDE link along.  this link talks about kconf_update.  Its a KDE script designed to auto-magically update KDE configurations for all users on a given machine the next time that user logs in (the first time after kconf_update has been installed.)  Need to do a system wide change to all your KDE users personal settings 6 months after an install?  Here ya go.

Mike passed my along this link on Software Reality concerning the instance of role fragmentation in the IT work-place.  Its basically a 15 minute rant, but damn if its not funny (funny in a “oh crap, this is my life!” way.)  If you are a programmer you will appreciate this.  If you are a programmer that is managed by a network administrator you will really appreciate this.

Have run into a couple problems the last few days.  My home Linux box got hacked via weak user password (my wife now has some “minimums” for her password=) ) and backdoored.  You can check out here to see a pretty good list of *nix backdoors and rootkits.  You will forgive me if I don’t go into too much detail yet…

The link on Jason’s blog pointed in the direction to find this link. Rhymezone is search engine for public domain information.  Jason used it to search the entire collection of Shakespeare, but it can be used to do things like search the Bible, the U.S Constitution, famous quotations, Mother Goose nursery rhymes, etc..

There are many of use currently using Redhat 9 that are in the market for a new Desktop OS.  The two that I am strongly considering at this venture are Mandrake and SUSE.  They both have a few things going for them:  no broken’ass KDE version installed;  mp3 support out-o-da-box; and they have not abadoned the desktop community!

 Here is a review (read the comments too, they have some nice mandrake tips) of Mandrake’s newest desktop OS.

In addition here is a quick review of  SUSE’s latest Linux offering.  The reviewer also makes a point I have been making for a long while.  The question is not IF Linux is ready for the desktop… the question is WHICH desktops are ready for Linux?

My co-worker just got back from Houston, TX (the dirtiest city in the US!) At the same time Daniel sent me this list; it seem appropriate. You know you’re livin’ in Texas if…

1. You measure distance in minutes.
2. You’ve ever had to switch from “heat” to “A/C” in the same day.
3. Stores don’t have shopping carts; they have buggies.
4. Stores don’t have bags; they have sacks.
5. You see a car running in the parking lot at the store with no one in it no matter what time of the year.
6. You use “fix” as a verb. Example: I am fixing to go to the store.
7. All the festivals across the state are named after a fruit, vegetable, grain, or animal.
8. You install security lights on your house and garage and leave both unlocked.
9. You carry jumper cables in your car… for your own car.
10. You know what “cow tipping” and “snipe-hunting” are.
11. You only own four spices: salt, pepper, ketchup, and Tabasco.
12. You think everyone from a bigger city has an accent.
13. You think sexy lingerie is a tee shirt and boxer shorts.
14. The local papers covers national and international news on one page but requires 6 pages for sports.
15. You think that the first day of deer season is a national holiday.
16. You know which leaves make good toilet paper.
17. You find 90 degrees F “a little warm.”
18. You know all four seasons: Almost Summer, Summer, Still Summer, and Christmas.
19. You know whether another Texan is from southern, middle, or northern Texas as soon as they open their mouth.
20. There is a Dairy Queen in every town with a population of 1000 or more.
21. Going to Wal-Mart is a favorite past time known as “goin’ wal-martin” or off to “Wally World.”
22. You describe the first cool snap (below 70 degrees) as good chili weather.
23. A carbonated soft drink isn’t a soda, cola or pop… it’s a Coke, regardless of brand or flavor.
24. (…and in honor of Mike) You believe that the fastest way to get through traffic is to stop in the middle of the intersection during the red light.

Inductive user interfaces (aka: IUI’s) or more commonly called “task-based” interfaces are a user interface (aka: UI) advancement that promotes “usage” or “tasks” over individual applications.

The article above talks about how Microsoft has promoted and been the most noticeable innovator of IUI’s. The reason I point the article out is because of an apparent “slight” to the Mac OSX community regarding the amount of innovation going into their OS. The author basically states that Mac OSX has done little or nothing (I would strongly support the use of the word nothing!) for UI advancement. This really bothers Mac users because they historically see themselves as the origin of all things innovative. And they were… once.

It’s a popular trend in the “literary computer expert world” to slight Microsoft for now comming out with a UI to the level of OSX. Some authors go so far as to say the Mac OSX is the “ultimage Unix desktop.” While many people believe the OSX is the most beautiful personal computer UI in existance… the reality of the matter is that it is less functional than OS9, less user-friendly than XP, less flexable than KDE,and less innovative than any of the above mentioned.

IUI’s is a wonderful advancement for the majority of end users (as long as power users do not loose their flexability), and one that should be promoted in all desktop UI’s. Denouncing it and rejecting it does nothing to help improve user interfaces. And makes those who ignore it look as ignorant as those who thought the internet was simply a fad.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. I have been blessed with the most wonderful family (and its getting larger all the time…) and the greatest friends one could ever possibly have. Thanks to all of you!

I have finished a couple new rpms that are now available in the apt repository.  In what is surely the most “fun” group of packages I have made; I now have a complete a group of Seti@Home rpms for KDE!

• setiathome-3.08 -Is the setiathome executable.
• ksetiwatch-2.6.1 -Is a taskbar applet/application that allows you monitor your seti client from inside KDE
• ksetisaver-0.3.2 -Is a KDE screensaver with star charts and and LCARS look & feel.

The setiathome client is a command-line application, but here are some pics of ksetiwatch and ksetisaver.  Thanks to Charles R. Anderson for his work on the original ksetisaver RPM.  Because setiathome is kinda funny (it puts its configuration files in the same directory as where the binary is called from), here is my recommendation for installing them:

Install the setiathome rpm.  Then as your main user do:

mkdir ~/.setiathome
echo ‘#!/bin/sh’ > ~/.setiathome/setiathome
echo ‘/usr/bin/setiathome’ >> ~/.setiathome/setiathome
chmod 755 ~/.setiathome/setiathome

After that just make sure you point ksetisaver and ksetiwatch to user “~/.setiathome/setiathome” instead of the executable directly. You can also use kcron  to set up a cron job (crontab -e does the same thing) every four hours or so.  If setiathome is running the cron job will have no effect but if its not running it will restart it.

What a great way to start the holiday weekend.

My wife things I am a computer geek.  So I like to spend some free time programming, playing video games, watching Lord of the Rings and Babylon 5 (which SHE like to watch also BTW…) and generally know entirely too much about computers.  She married me, didn’t she?

Well evidently catching a geek guy is not all bad.  Check out this HowTo Girl’s Guide to Geek Guys.  To be absolutely honest its pretty much spot on.

I hate spam!  Luckily if you are a Linux/KDE user your options for solving the spam dilemma are better than most. SpamAssassin is a heuristic email filter for tagging unsolicited commercial email.  It does text and header analysis, checks blacklists, and will even use Vipul’s Razor.

This innovative Open Source product can be put together with a properly configured email client to filter out unsolicited spam.  This is the tutorial I used to configure SpamAssassin with Kmail.  Some additional spam filter/Kmail information (including more information for using SpamAssassin with Kmail) can be found  here.

I have had several positive comments about last weeks Run Command article. The REALLY interesting stuff comes when you combine the Run Command with some of Google’s less known capabilities mentioned in this article.

For example I do a lot of conversions. I am constantly having to chance inches to meters.  Miles to kilometers etc..  Well using Google Calculator and the Run Command I can simply put into the Run Command this:

and I have an instant answer from Google! Need a pizza?  Hit Alt->F2 and type this:

(replace 73111 with your zip code) and you have the phone number of a local pizza place.  Make sure to read the Google article… you can do reverse phone number lookups, find a taxi, get a map, and much more… all using the KDE Run Command.

The Alt->F2 shortcut in KDE is one of the least used (by new users) and most useful functions in the KDE environment.  It is the KDE Run Command and not only can you use it to start applications but it can be used to automate searches, get help, and much much more.  I am dedicating this post to some of the lesser known functions.  Try typing some of these commands:

• <command>  Start an application without leaving the keyboard.
• kdesu <command>  Run a command as root without leaving keyboard.
• </path/to/directory>  Opens a konqueror window in the specified directory.
• gg: <search>   Does a google search and displays the results.
• dict: <word>   Look up an English word in the dictionary.
• wp: <topic>  Lookup topic material in an online encyclopedia.
• help: <appname>  Get application specific help.
• man|info: <sys tool>  Tool help (in a nice KDE GUI) throught the unix man or info pages.

The enhanced browsing functions are wonderful.  Some of the others I use are rf: (rpm find), bug: (find a specific bug report for KDE), ggi: (google image search), ggg: (google groups search), fm: (freshmeat search), cpan: (CPAN perl search) and many many more.  You can find the full list of browsing enhancements in the KDE control center “Enhanced  Browsing” Section.