Galootix

Piratebay down?

2007-12-05T02:13:00.000-08:00

At this point it's nothing more than a rumour, but word on the streets is that The Piratebay has been raided by police again. I can ping their IP and their tracker seems to be working fine, but such rumours are inevitable whenever the site goes down. Who knows?

I'm passing it on anyway because I'm irresponsible that way.

1st update: Given that my blog views have more than doubled since I posted the above (not a difficult feat, mind you), and everyone visiting is searching on some variation of the words piratebay down, I'd say the problem is a widespread one.

Dammit! Just let me finish this Battlestar Galactica torrent!

Seriously, though, I'm still pinging through successfully.

--- thepiratebay.org ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 4000ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 176.535/202.730/270.733/34.598 ms

--- tpb.tracker.thepiratebay.org ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 21131ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 160.589/221.843/339.991/75.557 ms

If the servers had been seized or shut down, they wouldn't ping back. I'm sure the site'll be back up soon. Don't panic.

2nd update: I popped into the IRC channel.


[04:08:21] * Topic for #thepiratebay.org is: thepiratebay.org is down atm. http://bayimg.com back online 
[04:08:21] * Topic for #thepiratebay.org set by [NoFate]!Nofate@bnc.gamehotel.dk at Wed Dec  5 03:19:27 2007

A horking pile of bugs

2007-11-03T21:05:00.000-07:00

Jaq asked me why I was laughing, so I showed her this, from Ubuntu's Hardy Heron roadmap:

She just smiled and nodded.

Deluge BitTorrent Client

2007-09-15T00:58:00.000-07:00

I loved BitComet as a bittorrent client, but that was on Windows. When I switched to Linux I missed it something fierce. Kirby suggested running μTorrent under Wine, and that did well enough as far as transferring files went, but the interface wasn't emulated properly so it was ugly to look at. Yeah, I figured that was important enough to keep looking. I'm shallow.

Everyone likes Azureus, but at the time I only had a low-end computer, which would choke on it. I eventually settled on KTorrent, using it for the past year or so. But it always stuck in my craw that I was forced to use a KDE app in Gnome just to get the features I wanted.

When I accidentally blew away my Ubuntu install last week, it was as good a time as any to search out new options. That's when I wandered back to the Ubuntu forums after a long absence and spotted a 3rd party forum for Deluge, a GTK based bittorrent client written by a couple of Ubuntu geeks. It's got all the features I like in KTorrent, and none of the features I don't (an aqua-wannabe interface, mostly, but I already said I was shallow). It runs on Linux, of course, and it's been ported to OS X. Someone's working on a Windows port, too, which is good because the only way to affordably run software in Windows is to steal it, so they need bittorrent clients.

If you're running Edgy or better, it's in the repos. A more recent .deb is available at deluge-torrent.org. It works, I'm happy, and that's all that matters.

Scraping

2007-06-05T14:49:00.000-07:00

I lifted this code from Google Hacks about six months ago. It hasn't failed yet. Until today. As was pounded into my head over and over, scraping web pages is unreliable.

$ cat /home/galoot/bin/calc 
#!/usr/bin/php5
preg_match_all('{<b>.+= (.+?)</b>}', 
  file_get_contents('http://www.google.com/search?q=' . 
     urlencode(join(' ', array_splice($argv, 1)))), $matches);
print str_replace('<font size=-2> </font>', ',',
  "\n{$matches[1][0]}\n\n");
;
?>

Okay.

$ calc 2000/364

5.49450549

So far so good.

$ calc 2000/366

5.46448087

That's right.

$ calc 2000/365

{Carlo <b>...

Heh. That's from the 8th hit for those search terms.

Back to the drawing board.

Running IE under Ubuntu

2007-04-11T03:05:00.000-07:00

I've been wanting to install Ubuntu on the laptop ever since I got it. The Edgy live disc detected all the hardware flawlessly (for Googlers, it's an Acer Travelmate 5610), with the only "tweak" being trying to remember the wireless network's password. (edit: Almost all the hardware. The TI 5-in-1 card reader remains invisible.) I was getting real close to dual-booting into XP (I need Internet Explorer), and the only thing holding me back was the impending release of Feisty on April 19th. (Check out the upcoming features.)

Then I ran into IEs4Linux. It runs your choice of IE 5, 5.5 or 6 (or all of the above) under wine, and it installed easily and flawlessly for me. I didn't expect that at all! My luck running apps under wine, especially MS ones, has been spotty at best. But this gave me no problems whatsoever. Either wine is becoming less irritating or this is an awesome install script. Or both.

I haven't tested it with whackloads of sites, but I don't really intend to. The idea is to test my own pages, not to actually (hahahaha) "surf with IE."

IEs4Linux installs Flash along with IE, if you develop in that. Support for IE 7 is in beta.

Now, the impending release of Feisty is the only thing holding me back from completely wiping Windows from the laptop.

(This post comes with ~~six~~ seven free parenthetical remarks. (No, seven!))

Daylight Saving Time begins at 2 a.m. Sunday

2007-03-09T20:06:00.000-08:00

Apparently this is a problem for Windows users. Ubuntu (Edgy) is fine. I don't know about Dapper or earlier versions, though. If you're nervous type zdump -v /etc/localtime | grep 2007 in the terminal.

galoot@cowbell:~$ zdump -v /etc/localtime | grep 2007

/etc/localtime  Sun Mar 11 09:59:59 2007 UTC = Sun Mar 11 01:59:59 2007 PST isdst=0 gmtoff=-28800
/etc/localtime  Sun Mar 11 10:00:00 2007 UTC = Sun Mar 11 03:00:00 2007 PDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-25200
/etc/localtime  Sun Nov  4 08:59:59 2007 UTC = Sun Nov  4 01:59:59 2007 PDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-25200
/etc/localtime  Sun Nov  4 09:00:00 2007 UTC = Sun Nov  4 01:00:00 2007 PST isdst=0 gmtoff=-28800

March 11. Yup. We're good.

Cheat Sheets

2007-03-09T02:23:00.000-08:00

I Googled for "Regular Expressions Cheat Sheet" and found a treasure trove. Cheat sheets for Ruby on Rails, ASP/VBScript, Javascript, MySQL, CSS and more. Suitable for printing. Great fun at parties.

Ubuntu

2007-03-01T02:51:00.000-08:00

Mrs. G's computer finally died, taking Win98 (I know) with it. When the dust finally settled, she had a better computer running Linux. She likes it.

Yeah! [fist-pump]

A day later, my Microsoft-loving geek friend, who is too old to be going through a mid-life crisis, called me up to ask "what version of Ubuntu should I install, 6.04 or 6.10?" Once I stopped sputtering, I recommended Dapper.

Yeah! [fist-pump]

PHP Arrays

2007-03-01T01:01:00.000-08:00

Some day I'm going to come back to these posts and laugh at myself for being such a newb. Those of you who already know all this stuff have the pleasure of laughing at me right now.

I finished the HTML/CSS course, and it was about as easy as I expected. Aside from being pissed off for a few hours during the final assignment before discovering the difference between quirks mode and strict mode (which wasn't addressed in the course), it wasn't difficult at all.

It would be less confusing to the student if they gave more robust example code, though. I had a bit of a time trying to get their code for vertical CSS buttons working right until I tried it in IE. Suddenly it worked. When I found the tiny bug and pointed it out, my instructor's response was, "too bad all browsers don't render the same." Yeah. Thanks. I know you require your students to use IE, but how hard would it be to support other browsers? When your target audience is people who want to learn open source languages, you can assume that a larger than normal percentage of them will be using an open source browser. It's not as though what you're teaching is complex enough to require special CSS hacks, it's all pretty basic stuff.

The only HTML I've used in the last couple of years has been in my blog templates, and while I came away from this course with a handful of new tricks, the main thing I got out of it was a chance to hone some rusty skills.

Still, I was happy with it. It's a well-written course.

Introduction to PHP, on the other hand, is not. It was very obviously written by a (messy) coder, not a teacher. The first five lessons consisted of a collection of little tricks buried in an ever-growing spaghetti bowl of ugly code. Each new concept was shoehorned into the same snowballing mess, regardless of whether it made sense to do so.

Teaching a neophyte this stuff is hard enough without tossing ugly and irrelevant code in front of him. The person who wrote the example code is probably proud of some of the little hacks in it, but when those hacks are extraneous to the lesson they're just distracting. It's a bit like trying to teach a kid about baseball and suddenly interrupting yourself to talk about valence levels. Yes, from the right perspective, it's related. But just offer up the most relevant material before going there.

I managed to simplify the examples enough so they made sense, then figure out the small hacks later, but it took a lot of needless slogging.

They finally dropped the tangled ugly mess of snowballing code and started fresh in lesson six, and it suddenly got easier. Which is good, because lesson six was arrays. Clean examples helped tremendously. I can't imagine if they'd tried to shoehorn arrays into that other crap.

I didn't like this section. I "get" arrays just fine, but one of the assignments involved traversing through a nested array, which is a lot easier if you're not using PHP 4 (the version they teach with), which lacks the array_walk_recursive() function. Of course it's doable, and I have to admit that I learned more figuring out how to work around the lack, but it ticked me off having to write twice the code I would have had to if I'd been using the version of PHP I have installed on my own fucking computer.

I'm not old-school enough. I can just hear the old dogs saying, "Son, in my day iterating through an array meant keeping track of the keys' addresses in memory. So you had to use a few ifs. Get over it."

To that, I say "shut the fuck up, old-timer." If I've got access to a post-hole auger I'm not going to be happy about having to spend three hours sweating with a clam-shell digger. Yes, yes, I know. I learned more by hacking around a missing feature than I would have if it had been handed to me. I appreciate that. I just didn't enjoy it.

And that, I see upon re-reading, is a big fat lie. I hated it when I was doing it, but having done it feels pretty good. You old dogs already knew I'd say that, didn't you? I can hear you chuckling to yourselves.

I'm not quite halfway through this course and I already enough to know that, at the end of it, I won't know anything. It'll be like spending two years in art school having learned nothing more than how to hold a pencil. Hopefully I'll know enough to confidently dig myself out of my own holes. (I didn't plan that last sentence when I wrote the bit up there about clam-shell diggers, but it worked out well, didn't it?)

I'd be extremely interested in hearing stories of what it was like for you to learn programming. What language did you start with? Would you have started with something else? What concepts baffled you, and what "aha" moments got you over the humps? What approach did you take? How long did it take for you to feel proficient? What would you have done differently? What did you do exactly right? What was your frustration:fun ratio back then, and what is it now?

Go ahead, get nostalgic.

Tiddlywiki

2007-02-23T14:16:00.000-08:00

I'd forgotten about my short affair with Tiddlywiki until recently. But, having switched away from Opera [twitch], I needed something to replace my much-loved Notes Panel. Tiddlywiki does so much more, I consider it a net win.

Thumbs up.

Another excellent day

2007-02-23T13:17:00.000-08:00

I feel like running around in the yard yelling "The new nerd books are here! The new nerd books are here!" Nobody would understand.

Learning stuff, need advice

2007-02-16T00:57:00.000-08:00

A timeline for folks who don't read my other blog (don't feel bad, because I don't read it either):

Last June I was injured at work.

I still hurt.

Worker's Compensation (WCB), for obvious reasons, wants me to go away.

Their policy is to see me employed at my pre-injury wage before they cut me off.

My most recent wage was exceptionally good.

I can't earn that same wage doing brainless labour any longer, because of the injury.

There aren't many ways to earn that wage doing light-duty work, but there are some.

WCB had two choices: Help me find light-duty work, or let me try to convince them that I'm a good candidate for retraining.

I convinced them. Yay!

As sucky as it is to have an injury that refuses to go away, this is a golden opportunity. After being Joe Lunchbox for most of my working life, getting the chance to retrain and having them pay for all of it, along with living expenses, is like winning a lottery to me. I liked some of the grunt work I've done over the years, but if I have one regret it's that I didn't go to school before starting a family, when I had the chance.

Because you're reading about it here, at Galootix, you can probably guess what line of work I'm training for. Programming or, more specifically, web programming.

This is so fucking cool.

They said "pick a school."

WCB strongly hinted that they'd be really happy if I chose BCIT because they'd dealt with them a lot in the past. I wanted to go with O'Reilly Learning, mainly because I've never picked up an O'Reilly book that didn't teach me something. I have craploads of respect for them.

Gambling, because I only had one shot to convince them, I proposed O'Reilly.

WCB said, "Well, we really want you to get a diploma or a certificate."

I said, "How about four?"

They said, "Four? You've only got six months before we cut you off. Are you sure? It'll take that long to get one through BCIT."

I said, "Yeah, what else do I have to do but sit on my ass all day? Besides, if you're paying, I'm gonna cram as much into my skull as I can without my eyes bleeding."

They said, "Alright. Want a laptop, too? And cable for half a year?"

Heh. "Yeah! One of those Ferrari laptops?"

"Don't push it."

Oh, hey, I titled this post Learning stuff, need advice, didn't I? You were wondering when I'd get to the point.

Here are the courses I'm taking.

HTML and CSS

Introduction to PHP

PHP/SQL 1: Introduction to Database Programming

CGI with Perl

SQL Databasing

Introduction to XML

JavaScript 1: Introduction to JavaScript

JavaScript 2: AJAX

Learn Object-Oriented Programming using Java

Unix for Web Programming

Linux/Unix System Administration 1: The Unix File System

Linux/Unix System Administration 2: Networking and DNS

Linux/Unix System Administration 3: Unix Services

Linux/Unix System Administration 4: Scripting for Administrators Sed, Awk, and Perl

I'm just finishing the HTML/CSS one (started with the easiest one I could). I'm thinking of taking them in the order listed. My question to you, Internet people, is "do you think this is the right, as in 'easiest and most efficient', order?" Would you rearrange things, or is that about right? Assume I know nothing. It's almost true.

I've listed the Linux/Unix courses last because they're really sort of peripheral to my goals, and I've already picked up dribs and drabs on my own, anyway. I'm not in a hurry to cover the material.

Thoughts?

(Hot diggity, this is exciting!)

Mixed news

2007-02-06T19:21:00.000-08:00

Good news: I'm typing this on my new laptop! That's pretty nifty for a guy whose first real calculator came with a belt pouch.
Bad news: This "Designed for Windows XP" label is rubbing against the little bone on the side of my wrist.

...Pardon me. Was.

Good news: I'll be adding Linux soon enough.
Bad news: I'll need access to IE, so I can't replace XP outright. I'll be stuck dual-booting.

Good news: I don't need access to IE that often.
Bad news: No more bad news.

Strange news: I'm typing this using Firefox. I haven't installed Opera, and even when I do I don't think I'll use it very much. (I wonder if Larry reads Galootix.) I'm going to miss a few things Opera did for me, but I think FF's going to offer a degree of flexibility I've never had before. With any luck, it won't be too too long before I can change something if I don't like it. Heh. Yeah.

What I'll miss most of all is Opera's mail client. I love it. Getting used to folders again (Thunderbird, not Outlook) will take some doing. Oh well. I've got lots of time.

P.S. Argh. I use XChat for IRC. Unlike the Linux version, the Windows version isn't free. :(

Google Earth for Linux

2006-07-16T16:01:00.000-07:00

I don't give a poot about Picasa, so I never really noticed when Google released a version of it for Linux in February. They didn't port it, they bundled it with a tweaked version of WINE. Good on them for making it simple for Linux users to install.

As far as I'm concerned, the real news is buried in the Picasa FAQ page. It sounds like they're at work on porting Google Earth over, not using WINE but rewriting it to run natively.

"If Picasa for Linux is successful, then other Google applications (and future versions of Picasa) may also be ported using Wine. (Google Earth won't be one of them, though; it will be a native Linux application.)"

I have just one thing to say about that.

YAY!

Dapper Drake

2006-06-13T23:57:00.000-07:00

One of the few good things about getting hurt is that I have some spare time again, time I've been using to upgrade Ubuntu from Breezy to Dapper. Actually, I didn't really upgrade so much as wipe the machine clean and install from CD.

I chose to go with Xubuntu instead of Ubuntu because it's even less resource hogging and I really like Xfce. Gnome and KDE are fine, I just prefer the zippy and clean Xfce.

As it turns out, Xubuntu is a very bare-bones distro. OpenOffice isn't installed by default, and neither are a lot of multimedia apps or games. I like that, as I can live without half the stuff my original Ubuntu installed, but I imagine a lot of people might feel differently about it. Of course, everything is still available in the repos.

Almost everything works well, but there are a few little hiccups here and there because Xfce 4.4 is still in beta. I occasionally run into issues with the panel that force me to kill and restart it, and that would trip up folks who are just starting with Linux. The right-click menu sometimes disappears, too. Still, it's a beta window manager atop a stable release, and I'm very pleased. The kinks aren't frustrating ones and I imagine they're quickly getting ironed out. And I love the new panel!

Larry is having some trouble, though, and I'm not sure how to help because I don't have the same issues. If you know your way around DHCP, maybe you can throw him a bone.

Why I might dual-boot to Windows (some day)

2006-05-03T03:53:00.000-07:00

Spore.

The buzz on this game started over a year ago, and it looks like EA is shooting for a February 2007 release date. If you haven't heard of it, this Google video should give you an idea.

Some time this year I hope to set this PC on fire and buy a new one. It's a bit old, you see, and though the dials and oscilloscope do look nifty, I wouldn't have a hope in hell of running something like Spore on it. Besides, there are other games I've been itching to play for a while now (like Half-Life 2) that also won't run on my current hardware.

Still, even with an upgrade, most commercial game developers aren't writing software for Linux. The better ones do eventually release their source code and game fans port it over, but generally the selection of current games for Linux sucks. After upgrading, I might just get a copy of Win-XP so I can play a few of the games not available for Linux.

As much as it galls me to buy an operating system when I have a perfectly good and and superior free one, I'm trying to look at Windows like a game console. We bought Playstations without being struck by lightning, right?

TiddlyWiki

2006-02-19T03:07:00.000-08:00

If there's anything that will make me me think twice about switching away from Opera it's a killer, easy to use, personal wiki that doesn't work in Opera. Something like TiddlyWiki - "a reusable non-linear personal web notebook" - would fit the bill.

Essentially, it's a personal wiki which you upload to a server. (Everything is contained in a single file.) When you read it the server doesn't DO anything but send you the text. There's no database, no back end work at all. All the magic is done client-side with javascript. You edit the wiki using your browser (javascript, remember?) and save the changes to your own hard drive. In other words, this isn't a collaborative tool like the wikis you know and love, it's a single-user experience.

The changes you make aren't saved on the server, which may seem pretty limiting, but if you need a quick way to create and publish content that doesn't need to be edited by your readers (blogs, manuals, quick synopses, FAQs) it's awesome. Build it locally and upload the single file to a server.

Just viewing the wiki downloads a local copy (to your cache), but if your right-click and view source you can save the entire wiki and all its contents anywhere you like. At the main site you can also download an empty shell of a wiki to play around with. It's very easy to get started.

Having your own personal wiki, on your own computer, can be immensely handy. I've used one (Newton) for almost a year now to keep track of snippets of documentation and code, Linux tricks, reading lists, shopping lists, etc. and I don't know how I lived without it. Tomboy is another good one. I'm seriously thinking of switching to TiddlyWiki, though, because I basically live in my browser.

The only catch is that it doesn't work very well with Opera. :( There are work-arounds, but they're kludgy. I'm going to give it a shot, though. If it doesn't work I might... no, never mind. Okay. I might switch browsers. [gasp]

TiddlyWiki's interface is very different from what most of us are used to. It's a bit like working with file cards, pulling out just the ones you need and spreading them on your desk. Every link you click opens onto the same page, which can be handier than hell for some kinds of content, but unsuitable for other sorts. It's not very well suited to long articles, for instance. It would be extremely useful for anyone who thinks in "outline style," keeps calendars and contact lists where they belong (not in Outlook), folks who need to take notes, or anyone who works with code snippets. I actually thought "Larry would probably like this" when I first saw it.

Neat trick: You can create a new blog on Blogspot and copy/paste your wiki into the template field. Google is now hosting your wiki. Cool? Cool. Later, if you decide to make changes, just edit it locally and update your blog template with the more recent file. ~~Here's an example~~, which is just a copy of the main TiddlyWiki page uploaded into a test blog I made for the purpose. I viewed the source at TiddlyWiki.com, then pasted it into the blog template. Voila!

Deconstructing IE 7 Beta 2

2006-02-03T05:13:00.000-08:00

Well, now. IE 7 Beta 2 is out. Isn't that special?

Let's see what it offers.

"The address bar now appears on the top and is not movable (relocating the bar is a common ploy among spyware and adware vendors)"
Good for IE. I don't remember spyware or adware messing with the always movable address bar in Opera or Firefox, though. Guess this just corrects an IE-specific problem, then.

"Also, the toolbar has been simplified to show only icons."
You mean you couldn't do that before? Opera and Firefox could.

"Also, the Favorites sidebar now has three tabs: one for Favorites, one for History, and one for RSS feeds."
Three! Holy moley! Wake the kids, honey, IE will have three tabs in the sidebar!
Opera's sidebar (we call it a "panel") can have as many tabs as you want. When you bookmark anything you can choose to add it to the panel.
Of course, there's the All-In-One Sidebar Firefox extension.

"Tabs"
Welcome to the Internet, Microsoft! Everybody does tabs. They've been doing it for years. For cryin' out loud, I have a text-based Linux browser that does them! Why do your users put up with you?
(Psst. Opera was first. :) )

"However, borrowing from what we've seen inside the Windows Vista prereleases, Microsoft has added the ability to visually display all open tabs. Unlike with Vista's IE 7, you can't mouse over the open tabs to see previews of each page, something that Firefox and Opera currently allow you to do."
First, Firefox has at least three extensions that show all open tabs; Firefox Showcase, Tab Catalog, and Viamatic FoXpose. You'll find them here. As for page previews when you mouse over the tabs themselves, Viamatic Tabnail does this, and it looks pretty cool.
Unfortunately, and it pains me greatly to say this, Opera doesn't do any of these things despite what the article says. We're nagging the developers, though.

"Another feature borrowed from Windows Vista is page zoom. You can wheel in or wheel out on a page"
"Borrowed from Vista" is really code for "borrowed from Opera." I use scrollwheel zooming all the time.
I don't think Firefox does this, but I'll bet there'll be an extension for it by the time IE7 is released. It'll be at least half a year, right?

"Shrink to print"
It's [ctrl]+[F11] in Opera. We call it "Fit to Width." You can browse that way, too, (while zoomed in if you like) so you don't have to scroll horizontally.
I dont know if FF has this.

"You also have the ability to print only the highlighted section of a Web page."
Something that neither Opera nor FF can do? For God's sake, TRUMPET THIS FEATURE!

"RSS"
Playing catchup again, eh? Opera's been doing this forever. FF has extensions to do this. I'm going to copy/paste these sentences to save myself some typing.

"Built-in search"
+yawn+ See above. Opera does it, FF does it.

"...when IE 7 imports your data from IE 6, it'll preserve your search engine preference"
I had to read half the article before reaching a line that basically says "it won't break stuff," and the only thing it promises not to break is your search engine preferences? That's good, I suppose, but it implies that it will break everything else on your system. Not that they need to imply anything. We already know IE will break everything else on your system.

"IE 7 will lock that preference so that installing toolbars won't automatically--and sometimes without your permission--change that preference."
You mean, before IE 7, things could automatically change your preferences against your will? Oh my gosh! Say it ain't so. Why didn't this make the news?

"Improved security"
No comment.

Re security: "While in the short term these (changes) may dissuade some criminal hackers, others may find other flaws within the venerable browser to exploit going forward."
This is reporting at its finest, don't you think? I'm eagerly awaiting his next prediction: "It's not unlikely that, if you lack an umbrella, you will become wet in the rain."

"Antiphishing
Using heuristics, or algorithms, rather than whitelists, Internet Explorer can analyze a given page and determine whether it's the real McCoy or a spoofed page. Should you land on a suspicious site, you'll see a golden bar across the top of the page."
Ah, yes. The old Golden Bar ploy. I've heard of that. Firefox, of course, already has its own solutions.

"Another very good change is the simplified Internet security settings options. Microsoft has raised the security bar, making the default setting Medium-High."
You can set it to "high" full time. Just uninstall IE.

"Microsoft has neutered all but the most essential ActiveX Controls."
In other words, "we were wrong."

"A new feature within IE 7 for XP SP2 adds an address bar to pop-up windows, allowing you to determine whether you want to view that content (advertising, for example)."
First off, you'll know if you want to view it by viewing it. You don't go looking for an address bar to determine if an ad's an ad, you look at it and say, "oh, that's an ad," and then you close it. What this really means is that "pop-up windows will continue to be a nuisance in IE, but at least you'll know where they're coming from."
Anyway, Opera already blocks pop-ups quite well and Firefox does it even better. Like the "new improved IE," Opera also displays the address bar in those windows/tabs. I assume Firefox does, too, but I'm not sure.

"IDN support"
Hey, this is the same "Golden Bar" link from above! (A year ago, remember?)
I don't know if Firefox has a solution for IDN spoofing. I'd assume so. MMM?

"Microsoft has finally made it easy for anyone to delete their browser history."
Yes, yes, that's nice dear. This is basic functionality in Opera and Firefox. Don't you have homework to do?

It's February, 2006. IE users, you're going to have to wait at least until this fall to get what everyone else on the Net has had all along. Why do this to yourselves? Make the switch. It's not like you don't have a lot of choices.

Poofyhairguy's Eye Candy Report

2006-01-30T20:14:00.000-08:00

Are you into translucent effects and drop shadows and other shiny stuff on your desktop? If so, Poofyhairguy's Eye Candy Report is a good blog to add to your list. Most of his tweaks are lightyears beyond what my machine can handle, but not everyone who reads Galootix is using a 566-MHz Celeron.

[sigh]

Go ahead, DOJ. TRY to track my Google searches!

2006-01-29T20:41:00.000-08:00

Because of recent news about the US Department of Justice's subpoena of Google, I've decided to get all kooky and learn more about surfing the net anonymously. I'm not a tin-foil hat kind of guy, but in the past few years I've become at least a little more interested in learning about how to protect my privacy. Thanks for that, Dubya.

First of all, so-called "anonymous proxies" are bunk. Don't use anonymous proxies! Many exist simply to allow bypassing the filters you may have at work or school (so you can browse Fark by going to a different site, for instance), and these pass your IP along to the server you're trying to reach. Using them, your search for "explosive terrorist teens" is still tied to your IP address. Many are, or could be used as, phishing scams. You have no idea what the proxy is logging. Many are in countries with no privacy protections at all (worse protections than in the United States, in other words), and those that are on American soil are just as vulnerable to DOJ subpoenas as Google is. You can be sure that Joe Hacker will bend to the pressure a lot quicker than Google has.

Enter Tor and Privoxy.

Tor is "The Onion Router" and Privoxy is a service you use to connect through Tor. I won't go into all the technical details, but you can find a lot about it at the link above, as well as at Wikipedia. I will say that it DOES work and that it is easy to set up.

When using Tor WhatIsMyIp.com reports that I am currently surfing from somewhere in Brazil.
GRC.com (the ShieldsUp guy) no longer sees me as a Shaw Cable subscriber.
Sites can be very nearly as fast to load as they ever were.
As an added bonus, Privoxy also acts as an ad blocker. It's catching ads that Opera normally lets slip through.

Excellent!

Tor traffic is routed through many different machines, and your data will occasionally pass through a slow one. In that case you will notice a drop in bandwidth. It can be a crap shoot. For now, it's the price you pay for (semi-)anonymity.

Unless you are a tin-foil hat wearer, you probably won't want to use this solution full time. And if you're that worried about your privacy you should also turn off Java and reject all cookies. Note the warning when you first installed Tor: "This is experimental software. Do not rely on it for strong anonymity." If you're trading nuclear secrets then Tor isn't for you.

Tip: Typing the following will get you a new Tor server if things are way too slow.

sudo /etc/init.d/tor restart

On the bright side, if you're a Firefox user there is a plugin called SwitchProxy that lets you quickly toggle between anonymous and normal surfing. (I haven't checked if there's anything similar for Opera yet.)

Most of the steps to get Tor/Privoxy running under Ubuntu are listed at the site.

Step 1 is here, but replace the commands "apt-get update" and "apt-get install tor" with "sudo apt-get update" and "sudo apt-get install tor privoxy".

Steps 2, 3, 4 & (optionally) 5 are here.

InstaLinux

2006-01-28T02:20:00.000-08:00

Wouldn't it be cool if you could just put a Linux disc into the drive, type "install," walk away and come back later to a working Linux system?

It'll probably never happen though. It's way too complicated to configu--cough--excuse me. It's way too compl--cough

Dammit!

Oh hell, maybe it isn't. Go to InstaLinux and see for yourself. Choose some basic options through the web interface and it generates a small (30MB or less) ISO image that can be used for a "hands-free" installation. You get to choose between an Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora or SuSE distro.

COOL!

It's based on LinuxCOE: "A CGI-based network install image generator" that was developed by Hewlett Packard and released under the GPL.

InstaLinux is a cheesy name, though.

Electric Sheep

2006-01-22T04:03:00.000-08:00

I like the Electric Sheep screensaver so much I toggled all the others off months ago and use Sheep exclusively. It's awesome and beautiful, and it appeals to my fractal-loving inner geek.

Scott Draves, the one who created the screensaver (and flame fractals), is soon to release "Dreams in High Definition." It'll be a stand-alone, limited edition, large screen, high resolution "video appliance". It'll be the 21st century equivalent of the Lava Lamp, except he's only making 40. :(

If I were rich I'd get one, but it'll be way out of my league.

Google Earth for Linux?

2006-01-19T16:52:00.000-08:00

Getting Google Earth to run on Linux is apparently a pain in the ass. I say "apparently" because I haven't even tried. My hardware isn't powerful enough.

However, there is some potentially good news ahead. I hear that the Mac version isn't built with Cocoa, but is linked to libqt instead. That's a good sign that Google may be preparing to release a Linux port. Yay for those with semi-modern hardware!

In the meantime, there is an open-source app called WW2D that might interest you. It's not 3D like Google Earth: therefore not as cool. But, unlike GE, it has plugin support, user-configurable layers, an unlimited cache, can work offline with cached data, and has binaries for Linux, OS X and Windows.

I still don't think my hardware could handle it, but I imagine anything faster than 1GHz would do okay.

FreeBSD or Linux?

2006-01-19T03:13:00.000-08:00

BSD is starting to really intrigue me.

When I finally decided to jump ship from Windows I went straight to Linux. The reasons are many but, aside from the security issues, the main factor in my decision was that I actually knew a bit about it. It's hard to be somewhat geeky and not know about Linux, right? Aside From Windows and OS-X, it's the most talked about OS (okay, kernel) on the Net. After that it was pretty easy to narrow it down to Ubuntu.

It's got a cute little mascot, too, but that didn't sway me.

I briefly considered FreeBSD, but I didn't know enough about it to commit to it as my full-time OS. All I knew was that it claimed to not be Linux, and that was enough for me. Linux gets all the press, and I wanted something widely used in case I ran into problems.

Now that I'm reading about Linux every day I often cross paths with BSD users. Both Linux and BSD are like Unix, so it's natural that the two sorts of users would occasionally hang out in the same places. BSD users go on about their operating system like I go on about Ubuntu. They don't merely tolerate their OS like Windows users often must, they love it like a Mac user loves OS-X.

What inspires such devotion to an OS? Security obviously plays a role, or it should, and so does stability. Linux has both of these, as does OS-X from what I understand. Customisability sure appeals to the geeks, too. You can tweak Linux 'til the cows come home. (I don't know how OS-X measures up in that regard so I won't comment.)

But I've come to learn in the past six months that, despite their similarities, there is a definite Linux camp and a definite BSD camp. And they are similar. Google for BSD screenshots if you want to see.

So why the divide? What's the difference between them if they're so similar?

Set aside an hour and read this: BSD vs Linux. You'll learn how the two philosophies differ.

Yeah. BSD is starting to really intrigue me. After reading that and poking around FreeBSD.org, the only reason I haven't switched is that Ubuntu ain't broke.

Dammit. I think.

======================================

BTW, tinkerers might be interested in looking at Arch Linux "an i686-optimized linux distribution targeted at competent linux users (read: not afraid of the commandline)." Those I know who've tried it like it a lot. It's apparently noticeably speedier than Ubuntu, too.

Renaming files

2006-01-17T20:47:00.000-08:00

Sometimes you acquire a collection of files that are stupidly named. I'm running into that at the moment with all my recent downloading of old DOS games and ROM images. Unlike Windows, Linux is case sensitive and sometimes it's easier to keep everything in lower (or upper) case.

Here's a quick perl hack that'll do this for every file in the current directory.

ls | perl -lne 'print "mv $_ ",lc($_)'

Warning: If you have a maliciously named file, like RM\ -RF *, you'll run into serious problems because you might actually execute this command.

Typing the above at the command line will give you a chance to look over the results, but it won't actually do anything to your files. If you like what you see, then do the same command again, but suffix it with | sh like this.

ls | perl -lne 'print "mv $_ ",lc($_)' | sh

Change lc to uc to convert everything to UPPER CASE.

Here's an example:

galoot@breezy:~/Images/temp$ ls                                              
NUBLU.GIF  PERIODIC_TABLE.PNG  UBUNTU_BUTTON_88X31.PNG  YOUR_ASS_IS_GRASS.JPG
galoot@breezy:~/Images/temp$ ls | perl -lne 'print "mv $_ ",lc($_)'          
mv NUBLU.GIF nublu.gif                                                       
mv PERIODIC_TABLE.PNG periodic_table.png                                     
mv UBUNTU_BUTTON_88X31.PNG ubuntu_button_88x31.png                           
mv YOUR_ASS_IS_GRASS.JPG your_ass_is_grass.jpg                               
galoot@breezy:~/Images/temp$ ls | perl -lne 'print "mv $_ ",lc($_)' | sh     
galoot@breezy:~/Images/temp$ ls                                              
nublu.gif  periodic_table.png  ubuntu_button_88x31.png  your_ass_is_grass.jpg

This little perl script isn't mine.

If you want to see what the command will do to a large directory before you commit to the changes, you can pipe it through "less" like this:

ls | perl -lne 'print "mv $_ ",lc($_)' | less

(Edit: This doesn't handle filenames with spaces in them. Can one of you hackers improve it?)

Tired of XMMS

2006-01-17T03:58:00.000-08:00

Looking for more features? Check out Wikipedia's Comparison of media players.

HOWTO: Get Stella Running under Breezy

2006-01-14T17:05:00.000-08:00

This is a simple HOWTO. Anyone who's ever compiled anything before likely won't need to read it. Anyone who hasn't compiled something from source, though, will see how easy the task can be.

Stella is an Atari 2600 emulator currently at version 2.0.1. The most obvious differences in the 2.x version are:

Added integrated GUI (you don't have to fiddle with the command line anymore)
Added ROM launcher (you don't have to quit/restart Stella every time you want to play a different game)
Added ZIP support (you can keep your ROMs zipped up tight)
But wait! There's more!

The version available through the Ubuntu (multiverse) repositories is 1.4.1. I don't think the Ubuntu Backports team will add it to Breezy because of dependency issues. Converting the available RPM to DEB using Alien didn't work for me. Luckily, I didn't run into any problems compiling Stella from source.

WARNING: It is illegal to use ROM images of games that you do not actually own. These games are still copyrighted.

DISCLAIMER: I am a total newb when it comes to compiling software. If this HOWTO doesn't work for you I doubt if I'll be able to help much. All I know is that these steps worked for me. If you try it and it works for you, too, let me know. If not, you might try asking at the Ubuntu Forums where someone more experienced may be able to help out.

(You could always spend $30 for 40 games and buy the Atari Flashback 2. I love mine! The fact that I actually have a chance at kicking my 14-year-old's butt appeals to me, too. But Mrs. G occasionally needs the TV, so...)
================================================

Here we go.

First you need to download the source code.

Now, fire up a terminal window. Henceforth, each line is a separate command.

Navigate to the directory where you saved the just-downloaded package. Unpack it using the following command:

tar zxvf stella-2.0.1-src.tar.gz

Your next step is to ensure you have the tools needed to actually compile something. To do this you must install the build-essential package.

sudo apt-get install build-essential

You now have the basic tools you'll need to compile stuff. But you will run into dependency issues while compiling Stella unless you also install the "libsdl1.2-dev" package. So do that next:

sudo apt-get install libsdl1.2-dev

This package itself also depends on other packages, but apt-get handles all that for you. Don't worry about it.

Now that you have the unpacked source code and the tools to compile with, it's simple. Change to the directory where you unpacked the Stella sources.

cd stella-2.0.1/

It's time to compile.

./configure

make

sudo make install

Ubuntu will complain if you don't prefix "make install" with "sudo."

That's it. You've now got Stella installed. Type "stella" at the command line (or hit [ALT]+[F2] and type it there) and follow the prompts to point it at the directory where you keep your ROMs.

If you don't have ROMs to use, I can't help you. The Stella site has some pointers. Hopefully you are aware of the legal issues involved before using Google to find some.

All the old posts are copied over

2006-01-14T14:29:00.000-08:00

I didn't copy over the comments, but they're still there over at that other blog. The post dates are the same.

Now I've got to try and fix this template. Larger images spill over onto the menu, which sucks.

Welcome to Galootix

2006-01-14T04:52:00.000-08:00

There's nothing here yet. Check back in a day or two.

I know a couple of you are running Ubuntu...

2006-01-07T14:00:00.000-08:00

...Are you running it optimally?

Type this at the command line:

     uname -a

If you see a string like "2.6.12-10-386" there, but you're running anything more recent than a Pentium Pro, you could probably do something to make Ubuntu a whole lot zippier. The more up-to-date your processor, the more difference choosing the appropriate kernel will make.

Read this Ubuntu Forums thread to find out how to speed things up fast enough that you can feel it.

It's not fair how Windows gets the press

2006-01-04T14:00:00.000-08:00

CNN never talks about Linux!

Ottawa keeps your data SAFE!

2005-12-19T14:00:00.000-08:00

Note: If you've already read my Unemployment Insurance Browser Spoofing post on Worth, don't bother reading this. It's a copy/paste of the whole damned thing.

Right now I am, as they say, "between jobs." For years I've contributed my taxes to the unemployment insurance pool but have never drawn from it. Today I began the long and grueling process of applying online for UI benefits.

It took me almost two hours just to make the darned government website accept my choice of browsers. As you know, I am the only person on the planet who thinks both Windows and IE are a bit...insecure. Certainly the Canadian government thinks they're safe! So safe, in fact, that they won't let me fill out their forms online using Opera.

See, browsers send a string to the servers they visit. Mine sends this by default:

Opera/8.51 (X11; Linux i686; U; en)

But that's bad. It's not Internet Explorer!

Okay. I can tell Opera to pretend it's Internet Explorer by clicking a button. Then it reads:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; X11; Linux i686; en) Opera 8.51

Now it looks like Internet Explorer, but still not enough. The website sniffs out that "Opera" at the end and says "your browser is insecure." Ottawa still won't risk it.

Cripes! Okay, fine. I've got Firefox installed, so I'll try that. It's more popular than Opera, so maybe the government will accept it as "safer." Here's the string Firefox sends. Note that there's no mention of Opera in there anywhere:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20051010 Firefox/1.0.7 (Ubuntu package 1.0.7)

So does Ottawa want to deal with me now? NO! I get a new message telling me Linux is insecure and unsupported. OMGWTF?! Do you know how hard it is to even find a virus scanner for Linux? It's like trying to find a snow shovel in Egypt. There's no market for them because there are no viruses worth worrying about.

Argh.

I searched around on the net and found a Firefox extension (User Agent Switcher) that will spoof not only the browser type but also the operating system name:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)

Bingo! I'm in.

After an hour and a half of diddling around I finally convinced them that I was no longer using Opera on Linux. Instead, I made them think I was downstairs on the family Windows PC--riddled with spyware, viruses, keyloggers and lord knows what else--logged on with IE. Now I'm on a secure connection, boyo!

They don't like Linux? Or Opera? I'll bet their servers run on Linux. Their IT guys would probably rather eat glass than run their site on a Windows server. And I'll bet they all go home at night and browse using Firefox or Opera or even Lynx rather than use IE.

Bah!

(Note: This isn't a pro-Opera/anti-Microsoft post, so don't go there. It's a pro-good-design/anti-idiot-webmaster post.)

GIMPShop and Alien

2005-12-17T14:00:00.000-08:00

First of all, thanks to Johnny for pointing this out. Here's his e-mail:

"I was listening to Leo Laporte on the radio this morning. A caller was talking about Photoshop and The Gimp. Anyway, Leo mentioned The Gimp and Gimpshop. I guess Gimpshop is a hack to The Gimp to make the menus look and work like Photoshop. Of course, I thought of you! Have you heard of this? Here's the link"

Naturally I had to give it a shot.

Caveat: I don't know Photoshop from my ass. I (used to) use Paintshop Pro. I'm not sure exactly how much Gimpshop compares to Photoshop interface-wise.

Hardcore Linux folks may be annoyed to learn that I don't like The Gimp (until they realize that my opinion shouldn't matter to them). Despite the power I keep hearing it has, I can't get past the interface enough to do more than fiddle around with it a bit. So I figured I'd try this Gimpshop thing out to see if it would change my mind.

If you use Ubuntu, or any other Debian-based Linux, you'll notice that Gimpshop isn't in the repositories, so you'll have to install it at the command line. You'll also find that the only two official distributions are source code or an RPM package. I'm not at the stage where I'm comfortable compiling from source yet, so I decided to fiddle with the RPM instead.

You can install many RPMs in Debian/Ubuntu/Whatever using the rpm utility available in the repositories, but you probably shouldn't. That's beause apt/aptitude/dpkg/whatever-you-use won't know about it, and ideally you want these programs to know about everything on your machine so they can fix things when something goes wrong.

Instead of using the rpm utility you can use Alien to convert the Gimpshop.RPM file to a Gimpshop.DEB file. Alien is available in the repositories. It doesn't always work out of the box but it's worth having around. In this case, it worked fine.

So go install Alien, then download the RPM file from freshmeat here.

Now go to your download directory and do this:

alien -k PACKAGENAME.RPM

(You may have to precede that command with "sudo" on your system.) It'll churn for a while and then, if all goes well, tell you it's generated a .deb package. You can install (and uninstall) this package using dpkg.

Type this to install it:

sudo dpkg -i PACKAGENAME.DEB

Note that Gimpshop is currently based on GIMP 2.2.4, so it may downgrade your more recent version. Your choice.

That's it. You're done. Fire up The GIMP and see if it acts a bit more like Photoshop. Some folks swear by it. I can't really tell the difference but, like I said, I don't know Photoshop very well. I'll keep it around, though, giving it a chance to grow on me.

Either way, even if I were still using Windows and PSP, I don't photoshop much these days. My monitor is slowly dying, getting to the point that I can't see details I know I added to certain chops a year ago.

Thanks for thinking of me, though. :D

Opera on Linux

2005-12-08T14:00:00.000-08:00

IF you use Opera, and IF you use Linux, and IF you use Gnome, you may have noticed that a lot of filetypes you used to be able to open with Opera for Windows (as opposed to save) simply don't...open anymore. You've got to save the file, navigate to the directory using a different program or in the terminal, and then open it from there. A pain in the ass, and one of the things I don't particularly like about Opera for Linux.

It took a lot of searching to find the solution (guaranteed only for Opera 8.51 running on Ubuntu 5.10 using Gnome, but I'll bet it works elsewhere with Gnome, too):

Open the Preferences menu [ALT-P]
Click the Advanced tab
Select "Downloads" in the left-hand pane
On the right-hand side, click the "Handlers for saved files" button
Under both "Files" and "Folders" change the program from "gnome-open exec" to simply "gnome-open"
Click OK on your way out of the menus

Now, clicking on a file located on your hard drive will actually open it using whatever your Gnome default program is, just as it should in any browser on any platform.

A Not-So-Quick Comparison

2005-12-07T14:00:00.000-08:00

Mrs. G and the kids use a different computer than I do, and it runs Windows 98. Yesterday the hard drive decided to finally stop fighting the inevitable and gave up the ghost. Nothing could be done to salvage it nor the data on it (and boy are my wife and daughter pissed about that). I was forced to buy a (moderately) new hard drive for their machine.

I tried hard to convince Mrs. G to let me install Ubuntu, but honesty forced me to admit that Linux sometimes has trouble with webcams, and even when it doesn't the chat programs that run on Linux don't fully support them. Okay, that's not completely true: there's a chat program called Mercury that does a good job, but it's a Java app which would run slower than molasses on their PC, and it seems a bit buggy.

Anyway, a webcam with my daughter's name on it happens to be sitting under the Christmas tree. She'll use it primarily for chat. So no Ubuntu for them.

To make a long story short, I had to rip out the old drive, install the new one, reformat it and install Windows from the ground up.

Ugh.

Guess how long it took to get the family PC running with Win98 plus the few programs for it everyone considers necessary--like Word, Mailwasher, Irfanview, Winamp and TextPad--starting from the fdisk stage (because the used drive needed to be converted to FAT32 so Win98 would see it).

You can safely assume I'm comfortable enough with fdisk that I don't have to sit there for an hour deciding what to do with it. You can also safely assume I've reinstalled Win98 on that machine a zillion times before (because a Win98 installation only has a half-life of six weeks) so I don't lack practise. You can further assume that I long ago burned a CD full of drivers and whatnot for that specific hardware configuration so I don't have to go hunting all over the net for them every time. You can also assume I had a box filled with MS-Office, Wacom, and HP printer disks, etc., within easy reach.

Have you made your guess as to how long it took yet?

It took seven friggin' hours to reinstall Win98. SEVEN! FRIGGIN'! HOURS! And it would have taken longer if I'd had any backup data to restore.

Granted, I could have chosen not to install Diskeeper, AVG, AdAware, and SpyBot. It would have saved 40 minutes or so. But sane people don't skip those steps on a Windows machine, especially a Win98 one.

Wanna guess how long it took to install Ubuntu a few days back, plus the programs I consider necessary--like OpenOffice.org, Opera (whose mail client is pretty good at filtering spam), picture viewers, XMMS (a Winamp work-alike) and a bunch of text editors, plus a crapload of games, media players, graphics editors, database managers, chat and IRC clients, programming tools, etc., which are good to have but not, strictly speaking, necessary--starting from the partitioning stage?

You can safely assume I've never partitioned a Linux disk before, so I stumbled around some while trying to decide how to go about it. You can also safely assume I've installed Linux only twice in my life, once many years back and once in August, so I seriously lack practise. You can further assume I don't have a disk filled with drivers, nor any disks filled with office-suite software, printer disks, etc., within easy reach^*.

Have you made your guess as to how long it took yet?

It took about two hours (counting the time it took to restore from my most recent data backup). ONLY! TWO! HOURS!

Granted, I could have spent more time looking for the Linux equivalents of programs like Diskeeper (Linux doesn't need a defrag program, so it would have taken a bit to find one), AVG (I hear they have a Linux version, though I doubt many people bother with it.), AdAware, and SpyBot (I've never heard of spyware on a Linux machine, but I'm sure it'll make the news when it happens). If I were so inclined, searching for them would have added a few hours until I gave it up as a fruitless waste of time because there's no need for things like that in Linux.

Huh. 2/7 the time to install an OS which is rock solid stable and secure. Funny, that.

I hate Windows with renewed, flaming passion.

I hate that I can't update a Windows98 system without first updating the browser, unlike Linux. I hate being scared to connect to the Net in order to download said browser updates because the only way to do that is with my not-yet-updated-and-thus-insecure browser (see the vicious circle there?), unlike with Linux. I hate that I must seek out updates for every installed program individually rather than having one small always-running program keep track of everything on my system, which notifies me when updates are available. Like in Linux. I hate having to search the Web for a program rather than having a trusted central repository filled with tens of thousands of them, one that I can access with one mouse-click, like in Linux. I hate putting my trust in some dork/corporation that might be able to program, that releases an application riddled with holes which nobody but the Black Hats know about, because the dork/corporation won't share the source code. I hate that a hole in any program exposes the entire system to abuse, unlike with Linux.

I hate that little pop-up with the checkbox beside "Always trust software from Microsoft."

Yes, I've gone from a rather strong dislike of Windows to outright loathing.

For what it's worth, though, I don't much like the fact that I sometimes forget I have to click an icon to eject a CD with Linux instead of just reaching for the button on the case.

Somehow I manage.

^* Actually, I lied. 95% of that stuff is already on the Ubuntu install CD. What isn't is grabbed from the net automatically.

If you're thinking "But what if I don't have a net connection, bucko? What then? Aha, I've gotcha there!" then realize the situation is no different than it is with your Windows CD. 95% of the generic drivers you might need are on it, too. It's the specialized ones that aren't. Because of that, installing either OS without Net access is a potential pain in the ass.

The difference, however, is that Linux will fetch those specialized drivers from the central repository as soon as it realizes it needs them. Windows makes you go online to Google for them. How did people install Windows before search engines were invented?

HOWTO Upgrade From Ubuntu Hoary to Ubuntu Breezy

2005-12-02T14:00:00.000-08:00

1. Open a terminal window

2. sudo su

3. cd /

4. tar cvpzf homebackup.tgz /home --exclude=/home/porn (Backup the home directory, but not the dirty pictures)

5. tar cvpf pornbackup.tar /home/porn (Backup dirty pics and movies using no compression--it's faster, and you can save them to "the other disk")

6. tar cvpzf etcbackup.tgz /etc (Backup this directory filled with things you may have tweaked and forgotten about, keep handy in case something doesn't work right)

7. Burn the above three files to CD or find some other way to save them.

8. Insert Breezy CD and reboot.

9. Partition hard drive to taste. This time, put /home on its own partition so you can skip the above steps next time you upgrade. Applaud your foresight, while conveniently ignoring your lack thereof when you first set up Ubuntu four months earlier.

10. Go for coffee.

11. Answer a few questions.

12. Remove CD, reboot, let computer find updates.

13. ~~Fire up browser, go here, read carefully, and download Automatix.~~

Edited 2005/12/07: Automatix is no longer supported by its creator, though it is still available for download at the above link and may be picked up again in the future. Should the most recent version (3.4.8) disappear from that location, ask me for a copy.
There is a forked version of Automatix called EasyBreezy available at this location. I haven't used it and can't vouch for it, but it may be a viable alternative.

Edited 2006/01/29: I can no longer recommend using Automatix. There may be security issues, which the author refuses to address. Do not use Automatix without a full understanding of the issues involved. I have struck through the references to this program.

14. ~~Run Automatix, which will automatically reinstall 90% of the things you used every day but forgot how you installed them in the first place. Be sure to check Install Opera.~~

15. Untar homebackup.tgz and pornbackup.tar into a temp directory and copy /temp/home/yourname/.opera/ to your /home/ directory, thus restoring your all-important Opera settings, bookmarks, e-mail addresses and messages. Now do the same for your dirty pictures.

16. Copy over any other directories and files that are important to you, and hang on to the rest. You'll be glad when, three months later, you need that my_resume_2005-10.doc file.

17. Don't do anything with etcbackup.tgz, just keep it around in case you need something from it.

18. Light a cigar and strut around the room while sneering a little. You've just upgraded your operating system.

(Note: If you don't have dirty pictures, steps 4, 5, and 15 will still be useful for backing up your Photoshop portfolio. But you do, don't you? And you backed them up, too, didn't you? You dog.)

BEAST.COM

2005-09-29T14:00:00.001-07:00

Here's one of those posts where I show my age by talking about obscure things which nobody but me really misses.

Remember BEAST.COM? No, not the website, the program. Back in the days before Michael Jackson got scary, ".com" meant "executable command file." There was no web.

If you do remember it, great! You're an old fart, too. If not, allow me to refresh your memory (or introduce you to one of those things old farts think about when their minds wander).

Remember now? Oh. Okay, what about this?

You're the blue diamond thingie, the Hs and funny double-Hs are beasts that chase you, and the green bits are walls which you can push around to trap or squish the beasts, sort of like Pengo (sorry, another old-timer reference). The beasts lay eggs, there are exploding walls... an amazing amount of fun for a mere 7.5kb package. I haven't played it since the 80s, but I'm hard pressed to remember any game that took up as much time as it did, then or since. Not DOOM, not Quake, not Myst. Maybe the Kroz games...maybe.

I finally got around to searching for a copy on the net. Here's one place you can find it. Their description is better than mine.

I installed the DOSBox emulator for Linux just so I could play it again, and it works flawlessly. (There are versions of DOSBox for OS/X and Windows, too.) I just finished a two-hour marathon session. Woo hoo!

There exists an updated Linux version of BEAST called Monster Masher. It's okay, and prettier, but it's not really the same. Still good though, if you want to try out something with actual graphics.

Anyway, if you want a taste of what kept geeks entertained in the 80s, you could do worse than installing BEAST.COM on your computer.

Hmmm. I wonder if I should try to track down the BASIC source code for HURKLE while I'm at it...

Computer Geek / Nerd Quiz

2005-09-29T14:00:00.000-07:00

Yeah, another dumb quiz. Imagine!

Breezy Badger

2005-09-22T14:00:00.000-07:00

Breezy is about to ship. Somebody tell Johnny!

I'm just sayin'!

2005-09-06T14:00:00.000-07:00

Uptime

2005-09-02T14:00:00.000-07:00

23 days and 16 hours since my last reboot. Linux rules! Of course, I came from Win98. Maybe XP is better in that regard.

Ubuntu's default file explorer (like Windows Explorer) is called Nautilus. It's a small thing, but it's really cool that you can highlight a file that's in the middle of downloading and watch the file-size increase on the status bar. Maybe XP does that too and I don't know about it, but it's new to me. I don't have to hit refresh to see changes in a folder or file as they occur. Neat!

...

I don't know if you spotted the deskcam over there in the menu, or if you even care. I was looking for a way to do for Linux what SCWebCam does for Windows, and I discovered this pair of scripts that neatly handle the job. Adding the timestamp on the bottom is fairly simple, too.

It doesn't automatically refresh (yet), but if you hit F5 often enough you might catch me staring at the asses of Worth.

...

My job is starting to wind down for the summer, and I'll probably be looking for something new by October. Hopefully I won't have to relive my old Wal-Mart days. Yeeugh.

INTERNET EXPLORER IS INSECURE?!

2005-08-31T14:00:00.000-07:00

Internet Explorer: "Currently, 20 out of 85 Secunia advisories, is marked as "Unpatched" in the Secunia database."
Firefox: "Currently, 3 out of 21 Secunia advisories, is marked as "Unpatched" in the Secunia database."
Opera: "Currently, 0 out of 7 Secunia advisories, is marked as "Unpatched" in the Secunia database."

No, this isn't a go-get-Opera rant (though they're still giving away registration codes as of this writing, and you don't even need to use your real e-mail if you don't want to). This is a don't-use-Explorer rant. Install Firefox if you want. It's nice, too.

Just stop using Explorer, already!

Tsk.

2005-08-20T14:00:00.000-07:00

MSN Spaces has a logo.

Ubuntu Linux has it, too, and had it longer.

One could argue that MSN lifted the idea from one of the rising stars in the Linux world. One could even pursue that argument in court, seeing as Ubuntu's logo is copyrighted.

But then again, if the Ubuntu folks actually did that, it would sort of go against the "share and share alike" ideal so common in the open source world.

Damn.

Fatal Windows error

2005-08-15T14:00:00.000-07:00

I finally bit the bullet. I've been whining about Windows since version 3.1. At first it was because I missed the DOS prompt and hated the mouse, and later it was because I hated the all-too-frequent crashes and lock-ups.

The beginning of the end happened when I gave up on Internet Explorer because of its secutity holes. At that time Firefox hadn't yet been released, and I hated Netscape more than IE, so I switched to Opera. The problem was that I was working for PsychicFreaks.com, and their writer's interface required Internet Explorer. No other browser would work on their site. I know because, besides trying with Opera, I set up a dual-boot Win/Linux system and tried various Linux browsers. Since most of my day was spent on TarotTurkey.com, I wound up spending most of my time in Windows, so the Linux never really got used. That was in 2002.

But I did like Linux a lot, and I vowed to chuck Windows altogether once I finished with that job.

Well, I did finish that job. And I did reformat the hard drive and toss Windows out the, er... window.

First I had to choose a distribution. The distro I used in 2002 was Mandrake, which I liked well enough. But I wanted to learn about what else was out there. It turns out that Mark Shuttleworth (the guy who made his millions selling Thawte to Verisign during the dot-com boom, then got on the news by becoming the first African to visit the space station) poured a whole lot of money into the development of a new Linux distribution named Ubuntu.

I read up on Ubuntu, read up on Shuttleworth and why he's pousing money down this particular hole, and I liked what I found in both cases. So I went with it.

As of about a month ago, I now have absolutely no commercial software installed on my computer (aside from Opera, the Linux version of which I haven't yet registered). No more MS-Office, no more Paintshop Pro, no more nothing! Ha! I'm learning my way through the Linux equivalents of my old Windows programs--OpenOffice and The Gimp in the above case--and having a ball doing so. Coming from Windows, the learning curve is negligible.

Some Linux equivalents I've not bothered with. No spyware scanners. No antivirus scanners. No defrag utilities. No firewall (the router's doing just fine at that job according to the software firewall I had running during the first three weeks). No problems. And everything is more stable and runs faster than ever before.

Sure I sweat bullets saying yes to the "Are you really, really, totally sure you want to reformat the Windows partition?" question, but it was worth it.

If you want to try Ubuntu for yourself they'll send you CDs for free (anywhere in the world, and they pay the shipping) via their Shipit program. One will be a live-CD, meaning you can pop it in and try out Ubuntu for yourself without it touching your Windows installation. You can check to see if it works with your hardware that way, too. On my system, everything worked right out of the box with no hassles.

Now if I could just end my love affair with Opera (never!) I'd have a totally free system.

Use Your Knowledge For Good

2005-01-24T14:00:00.000-08:00

If you have a BitTorrent client installed and can't find a site that has whatever you're looking for (Mandrake Linux, for example), typing something like Mandrakelinux filetype:torrent into Google will do the trick.

Doing the same thing with "Hellboy" in place of "Mandrakelinux" would be wrong, though.

So just don't.

eXeem. Tried it. Removed it.

2005-01-23T14:00:00.000-08:00

Well, eXeem went into public beta a few days back. (Thanks for letting me know, arsi.)

I installed it, along with its happy little spyware buddy, Cydoor.

One nice thing is that eXeem reports download speeds far above any other P2P app I've ever used.

One bad thing is it was either lying about those speeds or just plain wrong. My other network software told me it wasn't doing anything any faster than BitComet would. That same software agrees with everything else I run except eXeem.

One nice thing is that you can use it to search a "decentralized network" for files to download.

One bad thing is that, according to my firewall logs, you're no more anonymous on this decentralized network than you are with any other P2P software. I've got a list of every IP address contacted during the search, and every IP address I swapped files with (Knoppix, if you're curious). Each of those computers, if they keep logs, also has my IP address. Hi, MPAA! How ya doin'? The phrase "decentralized network" sounds good, but if you're thinking it means "anonymous" you're wrong.

One nice thing is that it can generate a list of new files added to the network in the last however-many-hours.

One bad thing is that this list means nothing. Clicking on a filename doesn't get me the file. It tells me it's out there, but not how to get it. I imagine that's either an issue on my end or something that'll be fixed as the software evolves past Beta, but right now it's just a feature that takes too long to tell me what I could have downloaded if only, uh... if only.

It seemed stable enough, especially for Beta software. I probably could have figured out the New Files thing eventually, but by that point I'd stopped caring.

I briefly considered different ways to cut Cydoor off at the nads while keeping eXeem working. I briefly considered installing eXeem Lite (which strips away the spyware) until I went to its page and saw that it's being slapped together by some knob in his basement who I trust about as much as I trust the Cydoor folks themselves. Maybe that person is respected in the file sharing community. Beats me. Never heard of him. And that wouldn't mean squat, anyway. Respected among thieves. Wow.

Then I took another look at my firewall's logs. I'd allowed eXeem (and Cydoor) privileged status to pass whatever the hell it wanted to pass between my PC and the Net while I had it installed. Why not? I'd done a backup of everything important only a day ago. The most anyone will learn about me through whatever they find on my PC is that I write psychic crap for a living. I don't have a credit card, and the most secret information on my machine is my library card number. Oh no! Don't steal my identity and rack up killer late fees!

Anyway, looking through my logs showed that, along with eleven standard BitTorrent ports, it opened over 500 ports all over my system.

I understand it's got to talk to other computers to swap data. It's got to search using different ports. And because it's "more than a BitTorrent client" it'll use still more ports. But 500 different ports scattered all the way from 1026 to 65042? That's nuts. I've seen no documentation telling me what it's doing on all those ports. And even if there are docs out there somewhere, it's documentation of
a) closed-source software which is
b) developed by a new company that partners itself with a known malware vendor and
c) fronted by a Slovenian highschool student known only as "Sloncek" who
d) is for some reason granted God Status because he ran a site that made the MPAA mad at him. (So what?)

Give me a break. No thanks.

I uninstalled eXeem after two hours and swept my PC for spyware. Cydoor wasn't removed with eXeem (surprise) so I deleted it. Then I deleted the cache files that Cydoor left behind which both Ad-Aware and Spybot somehow missed. I don't remember the name of the directory. C:\Windows\System\CACHE600 or something like that. Look for the banner ads and javascript files. Or use Windows' find tool and search for "Cydoor." You'll find it.

Speaking of Cydoor, aside from installing itself secretly it did seem fairly well behaved. It didn't pop up ads when eXeem was closed. It didn't send all my web requests through a proxy. It didn't hijack Internet Explorer (er, now that I think about it, maybe it did. I really ought to open up IE some day). It didn't take it upon itself to download and run executables without my knowledge. However, Cydoor can and has done ALL of those things to others. I have no desire to keep something like that on my system, hoping it will continue to play nice. "I promise, baby. I'll change! I promise!" Bullshit. Even Mr. highschool boy's assurances that it'll be fine, just fine, don't bring me much comfort.

eXeem seems like nothing more than a slightly better Kazaa to me. One that's getting a lot of press because of that kid from Slovenia.

But I can get the files I want just as easily (and just as "anonymously," har, har) via other methods without handing my keys over to Cydoor, Sloncek and whoever else they play with.

Oh. News flash: Loki Torrent has banned eXeem from their site as of 01/23.

How To Tweak BitTorrent For Speed

2005-01-17T14:00:00.001-08:00

How To Tweak BitTorrent For Speed

Alright! Have you downloaded a Bittorrent client yet? If not, there are a lot of choices.

The original BitTorrent does the job with no fuss. It's not pretty to look at, and it's not intuitive to tweak for faster downloads, but it's easy-breezy. It's sort of the MS-Paint of BitTorrent clients.

Everyone seems to like Azureus. It's Java-based, so it should run on Windows, Linux, MacOS X, Unix... basically anything that has Java installed. It's got all the bells and whistles that a stats-freak could ever want. It's a great program and I like it a lot. But all those features and settings are in your face and pretty confusing if you're just starting out. You probably don't want this to be your first client if you're brand new to Bittorrent. It'd be a great 2nd client, though. Because it's Java based it requires some extra overhead. It runs pretty slowly on my low-end machine, but nobody with a Real Computer seems to be complaining about it, so who cares? Azureus is the Photoshop of BitTorrent clients.

A good middle ground (for Windows users) is BitComet. It's pretty sleek even on my PC. BitComet would be the PaintShop Pro of clients. It's easy enough to figure out, but reasonably tweakable if you're the tweaking type. BitComet is the one I use. I love BitComet.

There's another client out there called BitLord that looks just like BitComet, and works like it too. That's because it's ripped off directly from BitComet. Even their webpage is stolen. It contains the same spelling errors as the BitComet page. BitLord is just stolen code with a new name slapped on. Avoid BitLord. [sarcasm] You don't want to support the thieves that stole BitComet's code while you're illegally downloading TV shows, do you? I didn't think so. [/sarcasm]

Here's a bigger list which I lifted from the forums over at Loki Torrent. I make no recommendations other than what you've already read.

ABC
Azureus
BitAnarch
BitBuddy
BitComet
~~BitLord~~ Look it up if you want to try it. I'm not linking to it.
BitSpirit
BitTornado
BitTorrent Experimental
BitTorrent Plus!
BT++
BTGetit
BTManager
BTQueue Manager
burst!
Comrade
CTorrent
Effusion
Epicea
Flash torrent!
G3 Torrent
Hive
m1lk
MarBitTorrent
MLdonkey
mlMac
MoonlightTorrent
NBT
Nova Torrent
Official BitTorrent
PTC
QTorrent
Shareaza
Simple BT
Snark
Sprout! Torrent
Tomato Torrent
TorrentStorm
TorrenTopia
TurboBT
Turbo Torrent
XanTorrent
XBT Client

There's only one real hurdle to using BitTorrent (aside from finding stuff to download, but you can figure that out), and that's tweaking it to get those huge speeds I talked about in the previous post. The default settings probably won't work for you because it's different for each system. Figuring it out isn't intuitive, but if you're scaaaaared you can always use some other P2P app and suck your downloads through a straw. ;)

First off, like I described earlier, you're swapping information with lots of people at the same time, not just one. In the normal day-to-day world you don't need to upload all that fast. As long as your requests to "send me another web page" get to the servers on the other end, all is good. But in BitTorrentLand, the faster you upload the faster you can download. You've got to allow your client to send lots of chunks to lots of other computers, and to receive other chunks from them. This means that instead of opening your door just a crack to pass a note to your neighbor, you've got to open it wider so you can pass a whole bunch of notes. In other words, you've got to tell your router or your software firewall (like ZoneAlarm) to open up some ports whenever you're using BitTorrent.

BitTorrent can use ports 6881-6999 to transfer files. If you're shy you can get by with just opening ports 6881-6889. That should do fine. I don't use a software firewall so I can't tell you how to set that up. It may be just a matter of clicking "let this program connect to the Internet" when your firewall program pops up a warning window. But if you can get to the innards of your firewall program, try to tell it to open up more than just one port. Ten of them (ports 6881-6889) should be good enough for most people, but even more is good, too.

Here's how I have my router set.

If you're sharing an Internet connection with other computers behind the same router, you'll want to set up "port forwarding" so that all the proper data goes to the proper computer. Basically, you've got to tell your router to always assign computer "A" one specific address, and computer "B" a different specific address. Those addresses shouldn't change. Then you tell it to send BitTorrent traffic on ports W through X to the first computer and BitTorrent traffic on ports Y through Z to the other one. That way everyone gets what they're supposed to be getting. There's information on how to do this for many different brands and models of router at the Port Forward site.

Note: If you're concerned about poking holes in your carefully set-up security, good. You should always be wary. Make sure the client you're using closes those ports when it's done with them (BitComet does). If you use ZoneAlarm, tell it to let only BitTorrent traffic through those ports.

Once you've got your firewall and router set up you still may not be getting screaming fast downloads with BitTorrent. There are several reasons why that might be. First of all, you must give to receive. If you're only squirting out data to others in your swarm at a measly 2kB/s, you're not contributing much. You won't get much in return.

Go into your program's settings and make some changes. Remember how I said I have a 3Mbps download/512kbps upload connection? Take that 512kbit figure and convert it to kBytes by dividing it by 8. This is your theoretical maximum upload speed. Mine is 64kB per second. Now I don't want to send out chunks of file *that* fast! Firstly, I have to leave room to send out "I got that last chunk, please send me a new one now" messages. And I'll be sending a lot of those. I also want to leave some room for normal web surfing, email sending and whatnot.

Allocating about 80% of your upload bandwidth to BitTorrent while you're connected is just about perfect. That still gives you plenty of wiggle-room for your other normal bandwidth usage. 80% of my 64kB/s is 51.2. I've set BitComet up to use 50kB/s for uploading.

That's it. Everything's tweaked. A lot of noobs who don't take the time to adjust their settings properly complain that their downloads crawl along at only 5 or 10kB/second. Some of them just give up on BitTorrent altogether. But when there are a lot of people connected to a swarm, I often download at 250kB/second.

If your downloads are still too slow it could be that the torrent is relatively new and there's not a lot of data out there to swap around. Stay connected! The speeds will likely start to climb higher and higher as more data gets uploaded to the swarm and as more people join in.

If interest in the file is low or dropping (nobody else is interested in downloading the Tom Waits' discography but you and some other unzercrazy guy), you might just have to deal with it and take what you can get.

If you see that a bunch of "peers" or "leeches" are connected (downloaders) but no "seeds" (people with an entire copy), you might be SOL, or all of the peers combined may have all the pieces you need. Stay connected for a while and see what happens. (Azureus lets you know if all the necessary parts are out there. BitComet doesn't.) It's common courtesy (or it SHOULD be!) to stay connected to the swarm of file traders until you've uploaded as much data as you've downloaded. That way everyone gets a fair shot at it.

Incidentally, there is no previewing of partial downloads. You're getting random chunks from random positions in the original file. Only once you've downloaded the whole thing will you be able to open it.

-----

Arsi mentioned Exeem as a possible contender for the next generation of P2P apps. They say it'll be anonymous and private. But it's still in closed Beta, meaning only a couple thousand people are testing it at the moment. Until it goes public, nobody will know if it does what it claims for BIG groups of people. There are also rumors (which are just that, so don't jump on me) that it's adware, meaning that someone will be making money from it. Meaning that the MPAA will have someone juicy to target. I've also heard rumors that it contains spyware. I don't know if that's true or not, but once it's released we'll all know for sure.

Other rumors are that the code is private rather than open source. That's not good, because the MPAA shutting down one company will shut down the whole Exeem network. If Exeem makes the code public then everyone will be writing their own ports. That would be a good thing, because not all of them will be tied to someone's physical bank account.

I'm eagerly awaiting Exeem, and I hope it's as good as they say it's going to be. But, for now, BitTorrent kicks Exeem's ass because, well, you can use BitTorrent and you can't use the other. :)

WTF is BitTorrent?

2005-01-17T14:00:00.000-08:00

I'm totally addicted to Bittorrent. As the hype builds, more and more mainstream people are hearing about it, which means more and more people are donating their bandwidth to the cause. (It also means the RIAA and the MPAA are getting more and more pissed off about it.)

If you're asking yourself WTF Bittorrent is, here's a quick run-down.

Bittorrent is for sharing files with other people, like Napster back in the day, or Kazaa. It's not a program, it's a protocol, like FTP. You use a Bittorrent client, like you'd use an FTP client.

I'll tell you how it works, but first a little background.

Your high-speed connection is really fast at downloading, but not so hot at uploading. That's why it takes longer to upload your 200k picture to a contest than it does to view a contest page full of pictures. For example, my cable connection ideally lets me download at 3 megabits per second (Mbps), but I can only upload at 512 kilobits/second (kbps), or 1/6 the speed. An upload takes six times longer than the equivalent download.

What if I have a big file that you want, and I'm sharing it through Napster? Your computer connects with mine and you start downloading. Simple. But you can't get it any faster than I can send it. So even if you have a super-fast cable connection, the best download speed you'll get is my 512kbps. That's 64kB (kilobytes) per second.

Actually, you can count on it going slower than that for a whole lot of reasons. I might be uploading that same file to other people (or totally different files), which eats into your download speed. I might be surfing the net, uploading my page requests to different websites. Mister_IQ might be watching me on my naughty webcam. Whatever. The point is that you won't be getting that big file from me any time soon, because I can only upload it to you so fast.

Now imagine fifty of you want my file. Ack! You'll be waiting a long time. I could get around that by uploading it to a big server that has more bandwidth than I do. You can download faster from the webspace my ISP provides than you can directly from my PC.

What if five thousand of you want it? Even the big servers are going to take a hit with 5000 people all trying to download a massive file at once. That's why it sucks trying to get the latest patch for your favorite game or OS.

Metaphor time. I've got a huge book, say it's the Encyclopedia Britannica, and you all want copies. I have to Xerox each page and send a copy to you, and to Joe-Bob, and to John-Boy, and to Fred... I'm doing a whole lot of sending, and I'm doing it slowly. And you, you lazy bum? You're doing nothing but screaming at me. "More! More! More!"

So why is Bittorrent any better? Because the guy who invented the protocol had one of those "why didn't I think of that?" moments.

Here it is in a nutshell. We'll stick with the Encyclopedia metaphor for a bit. I post an index card to a bulletin board. "I have an Encyclopedia I want to share. Call me at 555-1234 and I'll mail you a copy." Now, I can't afford the postage to Xerox all the books and ship all of them to all of you at once (low upload bandwidth) but I can afford to send each of you a copy of one book from the set of 26. So I send Volume A to Amos, and Volume B to Bob, and Volume C to Cindy... Pretty soon, you all have 1/26th of the book.

And it took forever. :(

But now for the magic. You all Xerox what you have and send that to each other. Gary sends a copy of Volume G to Hank. Hank sends a copy of Volume H to Isaac... What you're doing is agreeing to use some of your own postage (your own upload bandwidth) to ensure that you, and everyone else, gets a complete set of encyclopedias. I've sent the whole thing out once, and you're going to end up sending it out once, too. And when we're all done, everyone will have a copy.

Yay!

But it still took forever. :(

Well, yes. At first it does take a while. It takes just as long for ONE person to get a whole encyclopedia from me the old way, too. But it quickly speeds up! Imagine someone new joins the swarm of traders. "Hey guys, can I have some, too?" So everyone sends him 1/26th of their encyclopedias (as fast as they can) and he gets it really, really fast.

If he sticks around and helps out with sending, things will go even faster for the next people to join the swarm. Eventually, everyone's tiny upload speeds contribute to make for some really huge download speeds.

That's Bittorrent. Everyone takes lots of little chunks from everyone else, and sends a few little chunks back down the pipe, donating their upload bandwidth to the cause. It starts out slow, but in a little bit it starts accelerating. Soon, there's bandwidth to spare! Everyone's downloading at super-fast speeds.

There are a few catches, of course. That's life. Number one is you are not anonymous. To communicate, you have to swap addresses with other computers. It's probably easier for the RIAA and the MPAA to figure out who's swapping what (and who started it) with Bittorrent than with any other P2P network. Google for some news and you'll find there's a company already claiming to be able to figure out who was the first to upload the latest Metallica CD. Luckily, the lawyers seem to be targeting the initial uploaders way more than the rest of the sharers (makes sense, of course). You never were anonymous with Napster, either, but it makes a big difference now because of catch number two.

Catch number two is that, because you are helping to distribute files, if you're trading illegal stuff the RIAA/MPAA combo can target YOU. Before, you could leech files on Napster and let the guy sharing them take all the risk of getting caught. Now, just asking for a copy of Metallica's latest makes you guilty (of more than bad taste, I mean). It's not just "out there and you happened to pick it up" anymore. With Bittorrent you actively help trade it with others. It'll suck to be you when the band's lawyers come knocking.

Catch number three isn't so bad. It's common courtesy to donate as much bandwidth to the cause as you can. That means you DON'T download your giant file and then log off as soon as you've got it all. You're supposed to stay connected until you've uploaded as many bytes as you've downloaded, or be generous and upload even more. If nobody stayed connected the whole house of cards would come falling down. If you and everyone else has all the encyclopedia volumes except for Volume X, you're all screwed until someone who has that particular book joins in. So stick around. Let your Bittorrent client run in the background after you're done downloading. It'll help others get the same file, just like they all helped you! How would you feel if nobody helped you. Sad and lonely. Poor you. :(

So that's Bittorrent.

I've got a big file, a 1.8 GB, three-CD Linux distribution, for example. I tell my Bittorrent software to create a torrent file - an index that describes what I want to share. That torrent file is pretty small, maybe only 100KB. I upload that to a webserver somewhere and then tell a website that indexes such things about it and they spread the word. "Galoot's got a big one, and he wants you to see it!"

That website runs a tracker. which tells the Bittorrent clients of interested downloaders which parts to download from me and from each other. The tracker is sort of like a traffic cop. Soon, everyone has the giant file. The end.

Right now I'm seeding (uploading) a 208MB file. A legal one, of course. So far I've uploaded 284MB at a measly 50kB/s.

One guy already has 60% of the file.
Two have 46%.
Three have 35%.
Nine have between 10% and 30%.
Fifteen latecomers each have around 10%.

Overall, though I've only uploaded 284MB, over 600MB have already been swapped around between those other folks. Meaning that I didn't have to upload 600MB to the swarm to get all that data to all those people. And that 600MB figure is going to grow a lot faster than the 284MB figure will. If enough people want this file it will grow exponentially faster. 5000 people can have this file tomorrow while I've only uploaded it maybe five times. By then I can log off and it'll keep snowballing for as long as people are interested.

That's cool! That's why I love Bittorrent.

The bad news? It can't last. It's TOO efficient. Everyone's talking about it, which means the MPAA is already shutting sites down. They closed down some really big sites in the Bittorrent community late last year already, and they're still at it.

The good news? It's a genius of a protocol, and as soon as someone figures out how to remove the central server (the index of torrent files and the tracker/traffic-cop-program) from the equation, it'll be unstoppable. As it is, if you just want to swap with your buddies you can run your own tracker program and not tell the public.

In the meantime, if you have huge legal files to share (like Linux distros or Creative Commons licensed videos or music), or want to download them, Bittorrent is the best way to do it. Check out Legal Torrents for some neat stuff. If you're feeling sassy, you can find a list of Bittorrent sites indexing files that will make the MPAA and RIAA mad at you. btsites.tk has a list of places to start.

One site you may have already heard of is The Pirate Bay. They're the ones who received a legal threat from DreamWorks, based on the DMCA, after hosting a Shrek 2 torrent. They responded with:

"As you may or may not be aware, Sweden is not a state in the United States of America. Sweden is a country in northern Europe... US law does not apply here... no Swedish law is being violated."
and
"It is the opinion of us and our lawyers that you are fucking morons, and that you should please go sodomize yourself with retractable batons.

Please also note that your e-mail and letter will be published in full on http://www.thepiratebay.org.

Go fuck yourself."

Fun.

Next post: How to properly set up your Bittorrent client (or "Why I'm downloading at 250KB per second and the newbies are only downloading at 5 or 10").

Dialing up the past

2004-08-25T14:00:00.000-07:00

Every so often I drop this link where I think people will see it. BBSmates is like ClassMates.com for the old BBS crowd (minus the gawdawful, unkillable spam). Oh, and also unlike ClassMates, it's FREE. If you were a BBS user, drop in and look for some old friends.

I just reconnected with a whole bunch of folks from fifteen years back. I'm having the time of my life. GAWD, what a bunch of stupid geeky kids we were back then. We thought we knew everything.

Not like now. Now we DO know everything. :>

Hi to anyone from ViewLine BBS who bothered to follow the link to this crappy blog. Just keep on moving to Worth1000 (link's on the right, there) if you're hoping for actual entertainment. You won't find any of that here.

Well, except for the hidden porn link.