Centauri's Thoughts

Its been brought to my attention that even unix users can launch attachments from e-mail if they are using a graphical environment (which, I suspect, is most, these days). This is because if something is on the desktop in KDE or Gnome, clicking it can invoke a program called a “launcher”.

Of course, all the standard rules SHOULD apply: you dont execute programs when you dont know what they are. Even if you receive something from a friend, what if they were somehow infected, and it was sent from their system, without their knowledge? you shouldnt run programs you get without expecting to receive THAT program, end of story.

Its also been brought up that while you cannot easily obtain root on a unix system, enough damage can be caused by the primary user of a system, that this doesnt matter too much. The average unix user has the ability to e-mail and do other functions, and this is not something you want a rogue program doing from your name.

reference

You know its really an abuse of all of our time and effort when we have to develop a system like CAPTCHA.

The term CAPTCHA (for Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) was coined in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas Hopper and John Langford of Carnegie Mellon University. At the time, they developed the first CAPTCHA to be used by Yahoo. reference

Spammers have no ethics, morals or respect of other peoples time. They are lazy and greedy, and want the world to provide them a free ride.

We have to spend a lot of time making sure our own software cant be abused by them. e-mail, blogs, forums, comments. anywhere that data can be entered is potentially at risk.

I know I shut down my OWN forums and blogs a few times because of spam.

I have CAPTCHAs now, but this war is far from over.

Since the system rebuild, I had a chance to start some things over, and one of those was getting java and eclipse (using apache tomcat) working on my machine.

This is only the beginning, of course, I have a long ways to go. Luckily, I can learn a lot only by studying code and practicing (as I did to learn C).

Its frustrating to wake up one day, find your PC locked up, only to discover that something is seriously wrong and it wont boot up.

After searching for a way to recover the system (in vain), I took the hit and re-installed linux and re-compiled my apps. One and a half days later I am back with almost ALL the functionality I had before.

This is actually faster than I remember considering the number of apps that were NOT in the install distro.

*sigh*

I love it! As much as I've wanted to open people eyes to the possibilities of unix, some people would just not listen and Lo and Behold, Windows Vista, The best thing that ever happened to Linux.

The whole DRM and remotely disabling your computer is now a reality, and warnings were first written a while back.

I see that THIS has been updated to include Vista and IE8, in addition to the lengthy history.

But its not just me talking about How Windows Vista is turning people to Linux. There are many others.

One of the things I gave up 5 years ago to use unix on the desktop was games. I didnt really play very many, and I had at that time, maybe 20 total, and considered this a small price to pay to gain all the other advantages.

After some chats with people more savvy than I about the advances in the linux community recently, I bought, installed and began to use a graphics card. The one I got for my motherboard, and is a good balance of price/performance is the GeForce 8600 GT.

After installing the card, there is a procedure for turning off the old drivers, and getting a minimal driver running then install the Nvidia proper driver. After that, its gaming time!

I can again play Quake 3, and now a new one Enemy Territory: Quake Wars.

I knew it would happen someday.

After many years of running FreeBSD, and not having quite all the Desktop functionality I needed, I began the task by looking at top 10 distros in linux.
FreeBSD is wonderful for seeing code, and running servers (apache, PHP, a MUD or MOO, you name it) uptimes of a year is not uncommon.

The desktop KDE works fine, as do many apps, including the vast ports collection. The bigger problems for me were the little day to day annoyances, like flash not working correctly, affecting more and more site visits. Perhaps some of these issues would be solved with more training on my part.

That being said, I picked OpenSuSE 10.3 and started on another machine in the house set for someone else. On this machine I took a good week, to test various abilities that I absolutely required before I switched my main machine over (I have been running FreeBSD since 2004).

Its been a few weeks since I converted my machine, and things are going quite well. Some people are now loading and running OpenSuSE 11.0, but given the KDE problems they are having, I think I'll wait for 11.1

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - The $100 laptop computers that Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers want to get into the hands of the world's children would be durable, flexible and self-reliant.


The machines' AC adapter would double as a carrying strap, and a hand crank would power them when there's no electricity. They'd be foldable into more positions than traditional notebook PCs, and carried like slim lunchboxes.


For outdoor reading, their display would be able to shift from full color to glare-resistant black and white.

Read the whole article here

I knew some time back that Mac OS-X was the same operating system as mine (Free-BSD) and because of that, I knew that the Mac GUI could be put on almost any hardware, since it is now removed from the OS a bit.


I also know that they had made some changes and tweaked the version Mac was using over the standard FreeBSD tree, but the changes wouldnt be too drastic.


Looks like they are going to be on very similar hardware now that they will be using Intel chips.


A full article from John Dvorak here

Today I am delving into Yet Another Language, ruby version 1.8


Its not like I dont have all kinds available to me already, and some I have known for many years:


BASIC - since 1978
C - 1989

perl - 1992
html - 1994

php - 2003
python - 2003


But, I have been fighting against OOP since the days of my old Borland compiler because it made little sense to me, and I could see no advantage to it over procedural C. Actually, what I objected to was C++, not Objects in particular, and no good examples and documentation at the time (being self-taught in most things).


I have had to work on Visual basic 6 at work for some projects, and that experience has at least shown me properties and methods of existing routines in VB, I still had not written any classes on my own, nor did I need to.


While digging and wandering today, I happened upon some writings about ruby, and about how object oriented it is. The example code I saw showed just the kind of things I was used to seeing in VB, especially the methods for strings myvar.downcase and myvar.capitalize and myvar.reverse


"AHA!" I thought, now HERE is something I can use, its direct, to the point, and like perl, the syntax does not require pre-declaring of variables (one of the main reasons I use perl to throw code together quickly). So now, I have a simple way to learn the basics of Object programming. Once I understand it (by playing with it, as I have done in all other languages) - I can apply its use into all the languages I use (if a situation calls for it).


One possible application for this kind of technique is in my robotics programming, just as when I learned event-driven programming, and found many uses for it.


We never stop learning


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