A Man and his Penguin

I got some physical spam in my letterbox today from the PMH foundation. I only opened it to check what weekend the Big Walk was going to be on this year. Still the same weekend as the Rottnest Marathon, which is dumb because there are a lot of people who would do the walk if it was a week earlier or later.

I had a quick glance at the ad, and to my horror it’s now a "new route" around the bridges from Burswood!

I’m going to speak my mind here and sorry if this offends anybody.

Changing the route away from Perth -> Fremantle is the most ignorant thing that’s ever been done in this event! It is tradition that the walk goes from Perth to Fremantle, full-stop. You don’t break with tradition. Anybody who has done the walk a few times would keep the route the way it is - what can compare with the excitement of walking over the Fremantle traffic bridge? What about the bragging rights you get after the event - "Yesterday I walked to Fremantle!". There’s even a certain indescribable feeling you get just after you go under the Narrows, knowing that you just need to keep walking in this direction for another 3 hours. You end off feeling that you’ve accomplished a great journey. With the new route, you end off where you started. FAIL.

Also, there’s a hell of a lot more to do in Fremantle after the walk than bloody Burswood. Families make a big day of it - do the walk then go to the markets and have lunch. What will they do now - go play the pokies afterwards? What about the Freo businesses that have their busiest day of the year on Big Walk day?

More issues: It’s easy to catch a train to the Perth Esplanade, get off, and you’re right at the start line. There is a train station at Burswood, but you could get lost finding your way from Burswood Station to the start line. It’s also on the Armadale line, which is Perth’s most dangerous line for commuters AND is often closed for trackworks.

Come on. Admit it, nobody thought this through. Nobody involved in the decision has done the walk more than once. I might do the walk this year, but I’m so disappointed because I loved the Big Walk, and now it’s been completely ruined.

If you’ve got any brains, at the end of the event this year you’ll realise that attendence was down and that the walk doesn’t have the same feel now; and you’ll change it back. You have to, otherwise you will have destroyed a Perth institution.

Australian gold medal diver: "I’m the only gay in the Olympic village!"

At work we had some 20 inch LCD TVs, for $199 each. Yeah I know, that’s ridiculously cheap! We had 40 of them, and allocated them all literally within 24 hours. I got one, originally because I was going to sell it for a fat profit, but I’ve now realised that the TV in my bedroom is only a 14 inch, so the new LCD will replace that as soon as I get a hand lifting the old one off.

Remember my colleague who bought a hand-built computer from me with Ubuntu preinstalled? She’s been talking to one of her friends (who I used to work with) about Ubuntu, and how it doesn’t need an anti-virus program. Now this friend wants me to install Ubuntu on her notebook. I’m not sure of the wisdom of switching operating system just so you don’t have to buy an anti-virus program, but I know that my colleague is happy with Ubuntu as a whole. In any case, I’m going around there tomorrow night to check compatibility, back up her data and then install Ubuntu, so I’ll bring along the live CD and she can have a play around with that to see if she still likes it.

She’s a computer novice (I taught her how to copy and paste), so on a superficial level Linux should be pretty similar. I can always adjust Gnome to make it more Windows-like if she really wants.

Yesterday after work, my Dad and I went to Chopin’s cafe in Joondalup. They make a nice coffee that doesn’t upset my insides, and I urge you to try their fruit slice. It’s more of a European cafe than those Australian ones with all the wooden panelling and stuff. They’ve won awards. Chopin’s is on Grand Boulevard, Joondalup, and is open 7 days - I think it’s open from 7am to 5pm.

Lots of people use Amarok. Lots use Banshee, Rhythmbox, Exaile, Quod Libet, Songbird, JuK, or Audacious. Some even prefer "lightweight" solutions such as mpd or xfmedia.

Poppycock. The perfect audio player for Linux is none of these. It’s not even very well known, but it has a huge install-base. It’s called Play. But don’t go typing "sudo apt-get install play", because it comes packaged with a very useful program called Sox.

A quick "sudo apt-get install sox libsox-fmt-all" will get it for you. Once it’s installed, it’s so easy to run:

• play "Britney Spears - I’m A Slave For You.mp3"

(assuming you have an even less credible taste in music than me)

Play, or rather your X terminal window, supports drag and drop:

• play <drag your file in and press enter>

Play supports the playback of multiple files in sequence, much like a playlist:

• play "JS Bach - Organ Fugure in G Minor (little).mp3" "Hi5 - The Alphabet Song.ogg" "Judas Priest - You’ve Got Another Thing Coming.wav"

To stop playback when playing a single file, press Control-C. When playing a playlist, press Control-C to go to the next track, or press it twice quickly to completely stop playback. To pause, press Control-Z, and to resume type "fg" and press Enter. (actually, that sentence is true for all programs started on the terminal - try it some time!)

Play supports a huge variety of formats, including many obscure ones that you haven’t heard of, and theoretically any audio file that ffmpeg supports (use the -t ffmpeg option before the filename). Co-incidentally (or not), anything that sox can accept as input can be played. The unfortunate exception appears to be WMA files - the ones I have would only play if I put them through ffmpeg, and even then they were stuttery.

Still, WMA isn’t a popular audio format for Linux, for obvious reasons.

Play even allows you to add cool effect filters to your playback, including echo, chorus, flanging, karaoke and fade-ins/fade-outs. There’s even an "earwax" effect where, when you’re wearing headphones, that makes it still sound like the audio is coming from speakers in front of you. I haven’t tried this one myself, but it sounds interesting.

You get all these top-notch features, yet Play is still lightweight, and if you start playback on the Alt-F1 terminal, it will continue to play even if X crashes! In fact, you don’t even need X, much less GTK or Qt. The interface is simple and uncluttered, and very easy to use.

Why not try Play today?

EDIT: I just discovered how to pause and resume playback. Welcome to the FS Daily readers!

Probably in response to the Surf The Channel competition for the person who posts the most links within the competition period, some awesome person has located and posted links for a bunch of the missing episodes of What I Like About You!

There’s just one unusual thing. I watched episode 2 of WILAY, which was posted on one of those Chinese video sites. There was a different theme song! Not a bad song by any means, but I mean the show is the name of the usual theme song, so what gives?

Maybe in some countries they couldn’t get the copyrights to use the normal theme song, so they had to substitute it.

Once again a good episode, especially because Amanda steps out of a mudbath and her clothes cling to her body

Today I also worked a bit on Massive Burn, and I think I realise now why Blacklight was slow and kept crashing. Design issue, not implementation issue. I’ll try switching the threading design and hope it works.

I also went to Joondalup. On a whim, I drove around looking for a nice little park where I once chilled out and read a book. I want to have a quiet place where I can go again. I found it, and discovered that the street actually has some little cafes and other businesses! So I guess it would be nice to go there for lunch or dinner. It’s Regents Park Street, Joondalup. My new quiet place.

Other than that, not much to report. I’m feeling a bit lonely lately, and also lacking in self-confidence. I feel depressed about the situation, and don’t feel like I can do anything to help myself. I also dislike that I’m not excercising, but I never seem to get around to doing anything before it’s time to go to bed. I’ve also been very tired recently, but I’ll try going to bed earlier.

Oh well, all I can do is what I can do. I’ll try again tomorrow to get some excercise done, and we’ll see about the other thing too.

I’ve actually created a rickroll myself, just now. I’ve uploaded it to Youtube and it’s still processing.

Next to its icon, it says "Matched third-party content". Clicking the link brings me to a page that says it contains content that is owned by SonyBMG, but that they have allowed distribution of this content in return for being made aware of its ratings and statistics.

So, that gives you some indication of how good Youtube’s content detection is (or its Rickroll detection is!) and that SonyBMG doesn’t mind the song being used in this way.

Oh, it’s a great Rickroll!

I noticed on Surf The Channel that they had a new video - a Doctor Who short that I must say was incredibly boring. I looked in the Related LInks on Youtube and there was an actual news story about the making of the video. I clicked that and found it to be even more boring than the short.

Then in the related links, there was a video called "DAVID TENNANT AND BILLIE PIPER SHAGGING IN THE TARDIS SET". Three and a half minutes long. With a heading like that, how could I resist clicking on it?

——-

I’d been toying with the idea of writing a sort of Hypercard, to enable easy application development. But I’ve been beaten to it - www.tilestack.com is a free-as-in-beer, web-based Hypercard player and editor. It actually converts the Hypertalk language to Javascript so you can run stacks on any web browser/OS combo that supports Javascript (pretty much anything).

Very cool. It’s invitation-only at the moment while they finalise some stuff, but you can request an account with them all the same. I hope to give it a full run-down. They are also talking about it being deployable through Gears too, later down the track - but I guess you could just save the web page?

Microsoft Windows XP (and Vista) have interapplication communication systems - they allow programs to identify and talk to eachother. Very useful. With Vista, Microsoft put in a complex security system that prevents lower privileged programs from talking to higher privileged programs, with the aim that trojans wouldn’t be able to gain admin privilege just by talking to admin services.

There was a flaw found in it, but I’ve heard that it would be a bitch to exploit, and it would require a flaw in the targetted service too.

Mac OS X also has an interapplication communication system called Applescript. You can actually also use it as a scripting language. Applescript has been around since System 7 on the Classic Mac OS, and then for some reason it was shoehorned into OS X (which has a Unix-y security system).

Applescript doesn’t take notice of what permissions each program is running with, so any program can communicate with any other Applescript-aware program. This isn’t a good thing, but it’s not a bad thing. Any program that uses the Cocoa or Carbon APIs is also automatically Applescript-aware with at least a small vocab of commands. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

One of the Applescript commands available is "run shell script". A program can send an Applescript command to another program, telling it to execute a particular string as a shell script. Pointless? Yes. Useful? No. Dangerous? FUCKING HELL YES IT’S FUCKING DANGEROUS!

Any Cocoa or Carbon program running on your Mac OS X system can tell any other Cocoa or Carbon program running as root to execute a shell script, WITH ROOT PERMISSIONS. This is pretty bad, until you realise that Apple ships a Cocoa program with Mac OS X that is setuid root; in other words, when it runs, it runs as root.

Yes. Any program you run can become root in just one line of easy-to-understand code. Any program you are running that has a remote exploit can run this Applescript code to give a remote attacker access to your entire system.

Oh, this must be a flaw in Unix, right? Wrong. Unix is working perfectly well, it’s the overlying operating system that has a bad flaw in its design. Migrating a scripting language designed to run on a single-user system, over to a multi-user Unix system, was just asking for trouble.

This must be a recent problem? No, the basic problem has existed since OS 10.0. Apple has been aware of it for four years. Yeah, but it must be getting fixed for 10.6 Snow Leopard?  No, Apple has shown no interest in fixing either the basic problem (the "run shell script" command) or the immediate problem (shipping a Cocoa program that runs as setuid when it doesn’t need to), and it is still present in development builds of 10.6.

THERE IS NO SIMILAR FLAW FOR VISTA. If there are local admin vulnerabilities in Vista, they require a fair bit of knowledge and a fair few lines of code to exploit. Nothing you could accidentally stumble into. But I can see somebody accidentally exploiting the OS X vulnerability when trying to do some Applescripting.

Microsoft’s security department absolutely pwns Apple’s.

I don’t need to worry about it, because I don’t use an operating system that’s been designed by a monkey and engineered by a git, but if you use Mac OS X you should be afraid. Very afraid. Who knows what other "beige box" vulnerabilities there are yet to be discovered?

Here’s just a quick update.

I went over to the person’s house and set up her computer. It’s got a Pentium D with 2 gigabytes of RAM, so it runs Vista quite well. Once you turn off all the warnings.

I tried to find where to set a 15-minute timeout for UAC, like Sudo, but I honestly could not find where to do it. Some of the help files described options that weren’t there either, and the control panels referred to buttons that were actually just items in popup menus.

A bit of a jumble, but I got through it. Vista does feel odd to me, but then I guess XP does too.

My protest against the Beijing Olympics continues, and I’m successfully not standing around watching it when things are slow at work. Apparantly, the girl at the opening ceremony who sang the song was just doing a Milli Vanilli - the real singer was apparantly deemed too ugly to appear. Bloody commies. I also heard that *all* the judges for the shooting were Chinese, and awarded hits to the Chinese shooter when he was actually missing.

I bought a Big Mac today and discovered that it came with a free Coca Cola glass. I thought this was pretty wicked… until I got it home and found the Beijing Olympics logo on the other side of it. I’ll still keep it.

My workmate asked me if a particular Pinnacle TV tuner works with Linux, so I did some research and found that it does. Even the remote can be made to work the way it should… or you can pull pranks on someone by reassigning the buttons to different actions like "play fart.wav" or "firefox http://goatse.cz". My workmate put in an order and the stock should be arriving soon. I decided to get one as well, so I’ve got an excuse to install MythTV.

Guitar Hero? I finished it on Medium, and since then I haven’t touched it. I really need games that are not shallow and cannot be completed within 6 hours. Unfortunately, few Wii games seem to have the same depth as something like Bully. I’ve seen Zelda Twighlight Princess second-hand at my local EB Games and I guess I should get it some time. Not to run Linux or homebrew on my Wii, I swear - just so I can play a game that I won’t complete in two days.

Another week, another blog post by somebody who, although probably a nice person, really hasn’t taken much time to look at Ubuntu before pronouncing it "Not ready for the desktop".

This week, we have Christaroz.

I was forced to go find and install them myself, which wouldn’t be an
issue if Ubuntu made sense when it installed things, but it’ doesn’t,
because  programs don’t install into a main folder like they do with
Windows.

Why does it matter where the programs get installed to, when they:

a. Appear in your Applications menu
b. Are launchable by typing their name into the Alt-F2 "Run" dialog
c. Disclose their location inside Synaptic, for the people who really really want to look for some unusual reason

I don’t know. On Linux, you do not need to know where any programs get installed to. So why complain when, with good reason, they install to locations where other Linux programs can easily find them?

Then there’s customization issue. Windows ships with at least a handful
of different themes and backgrounds. Not so with Ubuntu. Want to change
a theme? Good luck. Background? No so hard, but you’ll have to find the
picture yourself.

Ubuntu ships with a handful of different themes. Here’s a list:

1. Clearlooks
2. Human
3. Crux
4. Glider
5. Glossy
6. High Contrast
7. High Contrast (Big Icons)
8. Mist

Windows comes with three - Luna, Olive, and the metal one. Oh, and the Windows 95 theme that is still available in Vista for some reason.

Go to System > Preferences > Appearance and you get a list and sample of them all. Click each one to see it apply in real-time to your desktop. It’s not so much "If you want to change a theme, good luck" as "If you want to complain about Linux, good luck trying to claim that theme-changing is hard".

Installing new themes is ridiculously easy, too. Download a theme package to your hard disk. Drag it onto the Appearance window. You’re done. You simply cannot get more intuitive than that. For those Windows users who haven’t realised you can drag and drop, there’s also an "Install Theme…" button in Appearance.

There are only two desktop backgrounds, but you can add more exactly the same as with the themes.

Screen saver? There are several to choose from, but they’re horrible.

I think Windows’ preinstalled screensavers are crap too; the guy who wrote "Pipes" must’ve been smoking a few of them. But if I was to carefully make a case that Windows is a terrible operating system, I wouldn’t even mention the preinstalled screensavers. Screensavers are useless these days, and the idea behind the screen-saver is that *it only runs when you’re away from your computer*. Who cares what it looks like? Especially since most people just turn off their monitors when they’re not in use.

I don’t have a lot of objection to the rest of the article, but unfortunately there’s not a lot else in the article. I guess it goes to prove my theory: If inconsequential complaints that "xyz is different to Windows" are the worst that these people can come up with, then it truly means that GNU/Linux can be used by all.

Side note: I met a guy on Sunday who tried Ubuntu and then found he didn’t like it because - the only reason he gave - "It doesn’t open the application menu when you press Windows-Escape". Which apparantly happens on Windows. Sabayon is his favourite Linux distribution for this reason, but he just uses Windows. With the Windows 95 theme. Oh, and he has both a 160 gig Tivo and a 500 gigabyte twin-HD Blu-ray recorder; when I pointed out that the Tivo was redundant, he said that he wanted the Tivo because it gives him suggestions of what to watch. I didn’t bother to point out that he doesn’t need Blu-ray because his TV is a 51cm CRT…

I changed my system theme from SlicknesS to Human Ultracompact, but I was annoyed that there seemed to be no compact window themes that matched the Human look.

And then I found a marvellous window theme where there is actually no title bar at all! If you take the normal Human window theme and look at how the bottom edge of the window turns out, and then imagine that at the top of the window too, then you’ve got a pretty good idea of the look.

How do I move windows? Easy - I hold down the Alt key and drag the window itself. How do I close windows, move them to other workspaces or keep them on top? Simple - I either click anywhere on the top edge, or I press Alt-Spacebar, and the window menu pops up where I can perform those tasks.

I love it.

I’ve also discovered that there seems to be only one program on Linux for simultaneous CD/DVD burning to multiple drives. That program is command-line only and it’s a bit of a PITA from my experience; certainly not something I could give to a less-than-experienced colleague who has Linux and will shortly have a second burner.

You can open up two instances of Gnomebaker, but that’s clunky.

So I’m going to write a full-featured program for burning ISO disk images to multiple drives simultaneously. You’ll be able to set how many copies you want and which burners you want to use, and then it’ll just burn through as many discs as you can feed it until the job is done.

Once again I’ll use my good friend Pythoncard, with a brief appearance by HAL so my program knows what burners are available and what they’re called.

Tonight I’m going to someone’s house to set up their Vista computer and install programs as they want. They got given this computer by a family member, which annoys me somewhat - if she had made the decision to get a new computer she would have asked me, and I could have built her one :-(   Oh well, at least I’ll get a bit of extra cashflow.