A Man and his Penguin

RIght now I’m installing Unreal Anthology into Wine on Linux. My system monitor shows the memory consumption increasing by the second - when I started watching it, it was 400 megabytes… it has slowly increased to over 600! Fortunately the games have finished installing now and memory usage has stopped at 605 megs, but I was a little bit anxious and hoping that the installation would be finished before the memory use got to 2 gigabytes… I have no swap partition…

The train simulator I bought for my father for his birthday (which he has barely used) works quite well in Wine. There’s just a problem with the fonts - almost none of the text is readable, so really the game is unplayable. But you can still drive around, which is all I ever did on it anyway

I love this computer.

EDIT: As soon as I quit Wine, the memory usage went down to 287 megabytes. Ahh.

I wrote a long post to tell you all about how I went and bought the parts this morning and 6 hours later I had a fully-functional computer, but Friendster chewed up the post.

Let’s just say that my father is thrilled to be getting my old computer, and I’m thrilled to have a new computer, and I’m looking forward to putting "Linux Computer Builder" onto my business card.

I am using a CVS (mid-development) version of Kdenlive to edit the Hi-5 Carols By Candlelight video and put onto Youtube.

As a video editor, it is performing very nicely. There are one or two parts of the interface that feel a little strange to me, but then video editing interfaces are not a precise art. It does everything I’m asking it to do, which admittedly is very simple, but I can feel that if I asked it to do something more demanding it would still work just as well.

As a video encoding system, it is also very good. It doesn’t appear to use the installed Mencoder or Transcode systems; Top is reporting a process named "kdenlive_render". It’s possible that this is a rebranded Mencoder/Transcode though, as some of the command-line options look familiar to me. Encoding is fast, the files are small, the estimated time is accurate, and you can edit the command-line options for more flexibility.

I’m loving this. It’s an example of open-source at its best.

<n00b>It’s not as easy to use as iMovie!</n00b>

No, I guess not; but I’d rather use something that works well and actually lets me make decisions about my movie, than something that is easy to use because it gives you very limited options. iMovie 1 was a pile of shit in this regard; I haven’t used subsequent versions but I know the Apple mindset.

I’m not sure if I’ve told you all, but I’m going to buy some parts and put together my own computer. I’m getting quite psyched about it, and the best thing is that the last two Windows-only tasks (video editing and MP3 player-management) are now completely accomplishable on Linux due to Kdenlive and my Sony Walkman, respectively.

I’m currently using Firefox 3 beta 2. The clever dudes at Mozilla created a self-contained binary of it for 32-bit Linux, so you just extract it into your home directory and it works!

I like how it integrates with the Gnome theme, except that the Human theme looks a bit strange on some web pages. I never really noticed that Firefox 2 didn’t integrate very well, but now I’m *really* noticing that the FF3 beta does!

Saving tabs is different, some of my favourite extensions don’t work :-(  No more Youtube downloading for me, unfortunately. All the beta testers seem to hate the History interface - it’s now a PITA to delete all the history for a particular day (if you don’t want other users to know what you’ve been looking at). You can’t just bring up the sidebar and select "delete" for the day - that doesn’t do anything. You have to go into the Places Manager and select all the pages there; but they’re not delimited by the date.

Still, eveything else seems to be working fine, and after I broke my Debian Alternatives system and fixed it*, links automatically open in Firefox 3 beta. After using Firefox 3 beta, you can’t go back to 2, because it forgets ALL your passwords (even the ones that were remembered when you used Firefox 2). That’s a bit of a pain too, but Firefox 3 is stable enough already for daily use. It’s just the darn incompatible extensions.

*Whenever I clicked on a link to a web page from some other sort of program, it would open in Konqueror, since Konqueror was the last web browser I installed. This used to happen under Dapper too, but I never worried about it. When Konqueror is installed, it creates a link to itself under /usr/bin/x-www-browser, and any programs which use the Debian Alternatives system for selecting a web browser (sensible-browser) will open links in Konqueror. This is because sensible-browser really just passes URLs to whatever browser is linked to in /usr/bin/x-www-browser.

I didn’t realise this, however, and I stuffed around with update-alternatives program until sensible-browser and x-www-browser stopped working. Finally I realised that all the alternatives were also linked at /usr/bin, so I created the link to Firefox 3 there and everything worked out alright.

Moral of the story: Don’t stuff around with your alternatives unless you know what you’re doing!

Or, in this case, I took the first train to Mandurah this morning!

I got onto the train at Greenwood at about 11:10am, noting that it had "Mandurah" on the front (rather than "Esplanade"). After a couple of stops, the driver made an announcement, congratulating us for being on the first Mandurah train.

It was a reasonably busy train already, and the situation got much worse when it arrived at Perth. Every man and their dog decided that they wanted to be on that train! We were packed in quite tightly, and I don’t think many people were able to get on after Esplanade.

The route was quite scenic for the first part, with the river on the right-hand side. Going over the Narrows and the Mount Henry Bridge were nice too.

Just before we reached Bull Creek station, the train suddenly applied brakes and came to a complete standstill. Then it started moving away again, very slowly. The driver came onto the intercom and said that, not due to anything on her part, the train had automatically applied the brakes, but that it seemed to be alright again. It’s just teething problems, I think.

As we went through Cockburn Central, I noticed the Cockburn Central shopping centre on the right. I made a mental note to get off there on the way back and have a look.

The last part of the journey was boring; not scenic, not interesting. We finally got into Mandurah, and there was a rush of people going to a bus service that I think was taking people to the foreshore. I declined; instead I picked up some souvineers (a commemorative flag, badge, card, and a timetable) and hopped back onto the train. This time it wasn’t anywhere near as busy.

I did get off at Cockburn, and walked to that shopping centre. There’s a Dick Smith’s there which was quite big, with heaps of products; also there’s a Big W and a Sanity where I bought 3 DVDs for $40 (Team Hi-5, Travelling Circus, and Jimeoin & Bob Live At The Famous Spiegeltent).

I also came across an award-winning bakery, where I had a meat pie and an LA Maxi Ice. It’s exceedingly rare to find places that sell 600ml bottles of LA Ice, and the last place I saw one was in Melbourne! So I was pleased about that.

The Sanity didn’t really have many CDs. It mostly had little plastic cards with the CD title and tracklist on it, and you take it to a kiosk which burns a CD for you. What’s really completely dumbass is that it’s the same price as buying a real copy of the CD in the first place, and it’s not like you can buy a digitally-downloaded CD as a present! You can also bet that they compress the music too, making it useless for listening on a Dolby Pro-logic compatible surround sound system.

That’s my day. Oh, a few minutes ago another Chinese chick tried to practice her English with me on Skype, but I wasn’t in the mood to deal with these Chinese girls again, and I started talking non-stop about sex. She’s not responding anymore.

The iPhone is insecure, the iPod is unreliable, and OS X is a virus target waiting to happen. But that’s not all.

If you have been running Mac OS X since 10.2.8 or before, and your password has more than 8 characters, your upgrade to Leopard will cause you to lose access to your user account. That means booting up into single-user mode.

How on earth did:

a. This bug get introduced
b. This bug not get detected at some point during development
c. Anything change in password management between the 10.2 and 10.3 series?

My alternate password has 9 characters, so if I was a Mac user I’d pretty much be buggered. I thought the "Industrial-strength Unix base" would follow Unix convention and put hashed passwords into /etc/shadow with an appropriate salt. Now that I’m thinking about it, the whole thing sounds like a 1-number-out programmer error is to blame when determining the salt to use, but I still can’t imagine how any Apple developer would even touch such a time-tested authentication system; unless of course it was "enhanced" (crippled) by Apple at some point for some godforsaken reason.

We all know that Apple was going to lock down the iPhone until hackers made a mockery of its "closed platform"; well now Apple wants to lock down your entire computer so you don’t have administrative access. More likely is that their shithouse modifications to the authentication system have completely buggered up the sudoers file too, converting the default administrator account to a standard account.

Sigh. And Apple wonders why only Mac zealots want to run OS X on servers.

The article where I learnt about these security-related problems also yields some very telling comments from readers:

I currently have one account on my PowerBook G4, which is an admin
account. I know, I should really run as a standard user, but it’s
tiring having to enter a password every time I install a new app or
move something in the hdd folder. So, should I create a second admin
account?

No, moron! You’re already logging into one too many administrator accounts. STOP LOGGING IN AS ROOT. Log in as ordinary user and accept that you have to enter your password occasionally. Security through obscurity (PPC chip) has saved you thus far, but don’t push your luck; if you downloaded a virus or some sort of malicious script tonight, your computer would be completely compromised, and many late Unix veterans would be spinning in their graves.

And as for your suggestion of creating a second admin account: Well, you’re doubling your chances of getting your passwords cracked. It’s a really dumb idea to have two admin accounts for one user, for this purpose (and for others).

My accounts disappeared and they each had a 1 character password.  I haven’t seen this mentioned anywhere so far.

Congratulations, you get my vote for non-Windows-computing dumbass of the year. What is the point of a password if it’s one character? It can be cracked in less than a quarter of a second, even if it’s not alphanumeric. You wouldn’t have known this, but various hashing techniques can be dehashed fairly easily too if it’s just hiding one character. I hope for your sake that Apple uses a salt to make the hashing stronger.

No websites will let you have a password that is less than 4 characters; didn’t it occur to you to use the same password for the web as you do for the computer, and therefore have a stronger computer password?

Today, the weather meant that two of the TVs at our shop couldn’t recieve the digital signals, so I decided to plug an upsampling DVD player into one of the plasmas so they would be displaying an image. I intended to loop out the signal from the plasma to an LCD that was playing up.

But I couldn’t do it. The LCD was insisting that there was no signal in. Was the input defective? Was the plasma’s output completely buggered? Should I send them back to their manufacturers for repair?

I had the DVD player hooked up via HDMI, so it looks like the plasma had disabled its "Monitor Out" output on purpose to honor HDCP. So yes, the plasma is defective: Defective By Design.

Lots of people have virtually forgotten about HDCP and PCP because they can’t currently see any situations where they’d be affected by it. Well, I’m one of the early affected. As a result, one of the TVs here is displaying "No Signal", which doesn’t reflect well on us or our products! How on earth do I explain to customers that the TVs are defective (by design)?

A couple of days ago I saw that Myer was advertising the Asus EeePC, so today I went down to my old store and had a look.

Not bad, not bad. I didn’t get the opportunity to use the proper KDE environment side of it; I was just using the At-Ease-style interface for it. But OOo Writer launched in 7 seconds (pretty good), and it was responsive. The reports are correct: The keyboard is incredibly difficult to type on. It’s probably okay for hunt-and-peck’ers (the target market?), but a touch-typist like myself really struggled to hit the right keys.

I even had a little play on Planet Penguin Racer; the machine struggled there, the game was almost unplayable. I also noticed that Bubble Bobble and Crack Attack were installed. There is an included KDE program for looking at the webcam; the webcam’s quality is very good to my untrained eye, and actually better than the webcam I bought last week.

Weight-wise, the thing is quite light with a pretty good distribution of weight. I don’t imagine it will do backflips off your lap. The computer also didn’t seem to be putting out a lot of heat either.

The final thing I noticed was an "Anti-virus" program on the machine! I don’t know if it was using the ClamAV backend, or if it was possibly a placebo, but the About box says that it was developed by Xandros. I imagine it’s there more as a placebo - otherwise people would buy the computer, be worried that there’s no anti-virus on it, and then try to load Norton’s onto it (and/or ring up Asus and complain). Still, there’s nothing on there that suggests anti-spyware - maybe they’ll still get complaints?

All in all, I’d love to own one of these things. After the short time I spent with the machine I simply couldn’t get it out of my head, but unfortunately I can’t justify spending $500 on it. I don’t have a wireless router, I don’t travel, and my main computer is always free for me to use; and I’d rather wait until the post-Christmas sales and then learn to build a faster computer for myself.

Still, if you’re looking for a computer to give as a present, you can’t go wrong with the EeePC!

(EDIT: Is there an open-source alternative to Xandros’ EeePC program launcher interface? If not, why not?)

So, how are my Youtube videos going?

In last place for popularity is "Italy’s Big Kev", with only 122 views, one rating (of 5 stars) and one comment.

Next is "Where did my program go on Ubuntu?", with still a paltry 478 views, three ratings (5 stars) and 13 comments.

Top of the list, proving that the dirtiest humour is also the most popular, is "Accidental Goatse reference in advertisement". This one has 3,561 views, 20 ratings (4 stars), and 14 comments.

If you haven’t looked at them, please check them out, leave ratings and comments, and also leave comments on this blog for your Youtube videos too.

I’m currently reading the Computer Stupidities website, and I thought I’d relate some "Technology Stupidities" that I’ve heard.

Customer: I’m interested in the Sony Bravia XBR series.
Me: That’s not a problem, but you do know that the only differences between the X and the XBR are that the XBR is more expensive, and the frame around it looks different?
Customer: My son told me I should get the XBR series, because it’s got a faster motor.

(This is wrong on so many levels; firstly, the "Bravia Engine" that he was referring to is a picture enhancement chip on all models; secondly, the thing that is "faster" on the higher models is the frame rate; and thirdly the X and the XBR have exactly the same frame rate).

Friend: Whenever I try to check my e-mail, the same three e-mails come in. I think I’ve got a virus.

Grandad: Can you teach me how to send air mail?

Customer: Will I need to buy a digital DVD player?

Errr… what do you think the first D stands for?

Tanja: Can you install this virus for me?

(I think I’ve mentioned that one a lot

Boss: You-bun-too. It sounds a bit like an African word.

Me: It *is* an African word!

Gruff lady: My set-box turns off every afternoon at 2:15!

I dive into the settings and find that the "off-timer" has been set, so I disable it.

Me: For some reason, there was an off-time set; that is, at some point someone has told the set-top-box to turn off at that particular time. I’ve disabled the off-time now, so you shouldn’t encounter the problem again.

Gruff lady: Show me how to do that.

I talk her through the menu system; press Menu, then press the down arrow until it gets to System, then press Enter, then press the down arrow until it gets to Time Settings, then press Enter, then press the down arrow twice, then press the right arrow, then press the down arrow, then press what time you want it to be, then press Enter.

Gruff lady: I must’ve pressed a wrong button.

I resisted the urge to tell this very rude old lady that she would have to press 18 wrong buttons in order to set the off-timer.

Customer: I heard Channel 10 will start broadcasting in digital on Sunday.

We get a lot of people who want to buy something to be able to watch one show while recording another, in High Definition digital, and output the result to DVD. When we tell them that such a machine doesn’t exist yet, they tell me that they’ll "keep looking". Its non-existence doesn’t necessarily mean that they can’t buy one?