A Man and his Penguin

http://www.siteadvisor.com/quizzes/phishing_0707/

Take this Phishing quiz. Identify which are the screenshots of the genuine sites, and which are evil phishing scams.

There are also two text questions at the end.

I got 10/10!

I wonder what the percentage of Linux users who got it right would be, versus the percentage of Windows/Mac users? I reckon Linux users would probably do better on average.

http://www.siteadvisor.com/quizzes/phishing_0707/

Take this Phishing quiz. Identify which are the screenshots of the genuine sites, and which are evil phishing scams.

There are also two text questions at the end.

I got 10/10!

I wonder what the percentage of Linux users who got it right would be, versus the percentage of Windows/Mac users? I reckon Linux users would probably do better on average.

http://www.siteadvisor.com/quizzes/phishing_0707/

Take this Phishing quiz. Identify which are the screenshots of the genuine sites, and which are evil phishing scams.

There are also two text questions at the end.

I got 10/10!

I wonder what the percentage of Linux users who got it right would be, versus the percentage of Windows/Mac users? I reckon Linux users would probably do better on average.

I just switched over my theme, from Aurora Midnight to Phenix. Lately I’d forgotten that the Aurora theme engine uses a fair bit of processing power, so it was a pleasant surprise to find my computer performing much snappier when I went back to Phenix.

Maybe the permanently-transparent cube will work properly now?

In other news, I bought the DVDs of Hot Fuzz and Man About The House Series 2. I plan to rip the latter and play it on the DVD player in my bedroom.

I’m thinking that I was meant to go to the LG roadshow; I had skipped it because I was feeling a bit tired. But now I don’t feel like "something’s about to happen" that I felt earlier. And since that day I’ve been sex-obsessed. This probably isn’t a good sign of anything.

EDIT: The permanently-transparent cube makes my windows wobble very slowly, so I’ll forget about it until I get a better 3D card

Lots of people post to the Ubuntu forums, asking this:

"I downloaded a program from Synaptic and it installed, but it’s not come up in the menu! I tried going to the main menu editor and looking through the filesystem for the program, but I don’t know where it was installed so I couldn’t make a menu item for it."

This throws a lot of people. You’ve got two problems here:

1. Due to bad packaging or bad program development (either will do!), the program does not put an item in the menu.
2. Newbies don’t realise that you don’t have to specify an exact location for the program in the menu editor; that you can just have its name as the command and that will work perfectly well.

So here’s a Youtube video that will illuminate things perfectly, showing you how to find out the name of the executable and add it to the menu.

Youtube video
 

As some of you might know, I have a personal religion, involving a god with limited powers who watches out for me, and can influence events for purposes that aren’t above our understanding.

When I was in university, I felt his presence a lot. I now understand a lot of what happened during those years. There’s still a lot that I don’t understand, but I am pleased with how I observed things turn out.

When I left university, I felt Hugh’s (my god’s) influence a lot less. It was still there, but maybe I didn’t have the time to think about things that I did on those big bike rides or train trips that I did during university, or maybe there was much less micromanagement involved on his part.

From time to time though, I feel that things are being influenced in a particular direction, and I start to wonder what the purpose of that influence is. Now is such a time. About a week ago I met a lovely girl online who is definitely my type. I can’t figure out how I got her e-mail address or how she got mine, but one day I went into Gaim and found here there. Extremely unusual. NOW, Sonia (a girl from my past, I won’t bother explaining because there’d be too much to explain!) has sent an e-mail to all her Perth friends, including me, that illuminates a certain something for me.

In addition, there are avenues that have recently closed, people who I don’t see online, an unusual failure of strangers to reply to my messages on Faceparty, and an event that made me feel bad (which I told you about in my previous posting). The timing of all this is impeccable. Something is happening or about to happen that will either change things, or literally force them down the same path that they have already been following.

I fear that guessing what they are will lower the chance of them occurring, or lessen their impact. In case it’s something good, and I feel that it is good, then I understandably don’t want to stuff it up!

Watch this space.

I have only one computer-related thing to tell you tonight. XGL and Beryl 0.2.0. My desktop has eye candy at last. Enough said.

In this morning’s paper, there was a little article about some theatre director who was doing a play about "first sexual encounters", offering free tickets to people who could prove to a hypnotist that they were virgins.

Said this guy: "There are more virgin-tickets than there are virgins in New York".

This idiot should go back to his previous unpaid job, manning the other end of gloryholes, because virgins have it tough enough without cocksuckers like him making fun of them. Virgins are missing out on sexual experiences, usually through no fault of their own. They know they’re missing out. They know they are different in this shallow world. It’s just nasty to rub it in.

You know what? I’ve had opportunity to lose my virginity. I could’ve raped a girl. I could’ve gone to a brothel. I could’ve taken advantage of vulnerable people who I knew. I’m a better person than to do those things, and I’ve been unlucky in relationships, so if you want to make fun make sure you do it behind my back, or you’ll find some steel-capped boots suddenly lodged in an unfortunate place that you can’t see without a mirror.

When I finally have sex for the first time, it will (with any luck) be with someone who I know and like, and who likes me too; it won’t be an isolated incident, it will be within a relationship. And that’s how it should be.

In this morning’s paper, there was a little article about some theatre director who was doing a play about "first sexual encounters", offering free tickets to people who could prove to a hypnotist that they were virgins.

Said this guy: "There are more virgin-tickets than there are virgins in New York".

This idiot should go back to his previous unpaid job, manning the other end of gloryholes, because virgins have it tough enough without cocksuckers like him making fun of them. Virgins are missing out on sexual experiences, usually through no fault of their own. They know they’re missing out. They know they are different in this shallow world. It’s just nasty to rub it in.

You know what? I’ve had opportunity to lose my virginity. I could’ve raped a girl. I could’ve gone to a brothel. I could’ve taken advantage of vulnerable people who I knew. I’m a better person than to do those things, and I’ve been unlucky in relationships, so if you want to make fun make sure you do it behind my back, or you’ll find some steel-capped boots suddenly lodged in an unfortunate place that you can’t see without a mirror.

When I finally have sex for the first time, it will (with any luck) be with someone who I know and like, and who likes me too; it won’t be an isolated incident, it will be within a relationship. And that’s how it should be.

In this morning’s paper, there was a little article about some theatre director who was doing a play about "first sexual encounters", offering free tickets to people who could prove to a hypnotist that they were virgins.

Said this guy: "There are more virgin-tickets than there are virgins in New York".

This idiot should go back to his previous unpaid job, manning the other end of gloryholes, because virgins have it tough enough without cocksuckers like him making fun of them. Virgins are missing out on sexual experiences, usually through no fault of their own. They know they’re missing out. They know they are different in this shallow world. It’s just nasty to rub it in.

You know what? I’ve had opportunity to lose my virginity. I could’ve raped a girl. I could’ve gone to a brothel. I could’ve taken advantage of vulnerable people who I knew. I’m a better person than to do those things, and I’ve been unlucky in relationships, so if you want to make fun make sure you do it behind my back, or you’ll find some steel-capped boots suddenly lodged in an unfortunate place that you can’t see without a mirror.

When I finally have sex for the first time, it will (with any luck) be with someone who I know and like, and who likes me too; it won’t be an isolated incident, it will be within a relationship. And that’s how it should be.

Today I finally got Audacity 1.3.2 beta to compile on my Dapper VM. Unfortunately I had to disable Nyquist, but then I don’t think many Dapper users would depend on that anyway.

The problem before was that I was getting "permission denied" errors during "make". As I had copied the source files from my home directory, where they had all been used, they didn’t have the execute permission for my virtual machine’s user account. But when I tried building with Nyquist support, it gave me an error message that glibc was too old a version. So disabling Nyquist worked, and the package works, and the program works too!

Earlier today I was reading about a game in development called Thunder And Lightning, and I was thinking "Geez, that looks cool!". But then today I went out and bought the latest Linux Format magazine, where TaL is on the coverdisc! Talk about good timing! The magazine is great - it actually tests Ubuntu’s commercial support, and Canonical passes the test better than Novell! Next month’s issue looks great too.

But anyway, Thunder And Lightning is supplied as a binary on the coverdisk, but in its component folders! So, you could just unpack the archive over your filesystem and everything would turn out hunky-dory. The magazine says you can just run it from your home directory, but you can’t - it won’t find a library it needs. So I thought "Hey, it’s already in the component folders, all I need to do is write a DEBIAN/control file for it and run dpkg-deb, and then it’s a real Debian package!

I haven’t tried running the program yet, but I created a Deb in two minutes flat. Awesome stuff. See, Debian packaging IS useful, even if my particular package is unlikely to make it into Debian anytime soon (the description I put for the package is "Thunder and Lightning is a flight-simulator. It’s also a bugger to install :-)"