Dave's Tech Blog
A Third Eye on Technology

It’s hard to say just how long I’ve been waiting for this phone to come out.  Scheduled to be on sale just in time for the holidays (can’t we agree that Halloween is twice as fun as Christmas?), this phone is dead set on absolutely killing the iPhone.  I mean, just look at it!  It’s got a freaking keyboard (read: “Tactile Response” you iPhone suckers)!!  What’s even better is that IT RUNS ANDROID LINUX!  An open-source cell phone?  Get outta here!!  And it’s only going to cost $179?  You may proceed to salivate.

Now I could try and write up a bunch of original content describing all of the super cool features this phone will carry with it right out of the box, but other websites have already done this.  Why waste my time?  So for starts, check out this Gizmodo article: Android’s 10 most exciting apps.  With this being an open-source platform, there is no telling how many more cool FREE applications will be developed after the phone hits shelves.  You can pre-order it right now at T-Mobile.com.

There will be a few minor drawbacks about this device.  For starts, it’s vendor locked with T-Mobile.  And at the moment, not all of T-Mobile’s coverage areas provide 3G Internet speeds (3G coverage maps are available on T-Mobile’s website so you can check and see for yourself).  They are also planing on limiting your download speeds after you’ve sucked up a whole gigabyte of data per month (do you really need to download a whole gigabyte of data while you’re away from your computer?).  This will likely change in the future as more users join T-Mobile and provide them with the extra funds needed to expand their networks and relax bandwidth limitations. (Update: T-mobile has killed the bandwidth limit).

Any further complaints you see about it on the net are likely being generated by jealous iPhone customers who are stuck on an expensive contract with AT&T (this much seems obvious).  But if you’re willing to spend time arm wrestling with AT&T, there is a way to cancel your contract without paying the Early Termination Fee.  You can watch an informative video about doing this here.

There’s a lot of buzz in the media today over Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin whose Yahoo! Mail account was recently compromised by an anonymous individual.  The breach occurred just before dawn on Tuesday, with many screenshots uploaded to the image forum website 4chan.org.  Unfortunately for those of you who are hoping for something juicy to fall out of this and into public scrutiny, there was nothing controversial to be found (so far).  So how did this happen?

An anonymous person, using nothing more than Google, Wikipedia and the “I forgot my password” questionnaire on Yahoo! Mail’s website was all it took.  Simple questions like, “What’s your birthday?” and “What’s your zip code” are examples.  A slightly more difficult question was, “Where did you meet your spouse?”, which took a little digging and some minor trial and error.  After about 45 minutes (according to the original poster), the account was compromised, the password changed to “popcorn” and then posted on 4chan’s /b/ forum for others to login to and confirm as being real.

So now everybody feels obligated to find someone to blame for this breach of security/violation of privacy.  Of course we could point blame at a nameless, faceless person who isn’t admittedly affiliated with any political party… but what’s the point?  You either know who the person is or you don’t and there’s even a chance they don’t even live in the United States (making it difficult to impossible to enforce the law).  In the meantime, we should start by noting that the questions that the attacker had to answer were rather easy, and that they were selected by Palin herself when the account was created.  Considering the fact that when the account was created she was already involved in politics (which mostly involves increasing your celebrity status), she should have thought to select more difficult, personal questions for the purposes of recovering a lost password.

The incident does bring up something broader:  Those of us who use the Internet for social purposes often leave behind a paper trail of fun facts that might be found with something as simple as a Google search.  I shouldn’t have to go on any further to tell you what info you probably shouldn’t post about yourself in a blog or forum somewhere.  Nor should I have to tell you, much less a government official, what questions should be selected during registration in the event you lose your password (of course, most people who are in the government have their own government hosted e-mail accounts that are subject to much stricter security policies… apparently Alaska didn’t get the memo).

So now you know how it happened and how it could happen to you if you ever plan to become famous or just have some half-assed blog like this one that almost nobody reads (except for Google’s robots).  We should be glad the emails that have leaked didn’t contain anything sensitive to national security (then again, you think she’s ever had access to such information?), and I’m betting Palin is literally counting her blessings for that very reason right now.  Not just because she lucked out on having her emails stolen by strangers located in who knows what country, but also because she can notch this up as legitimate experience with regard to national security (it’s practically a step up from claiming you know all about foreign policy because you can see Russia from your house).

Update:  An article detailing where the law stands on all of this can be found here:

DOJ View on Email Privacy May Hamper Prosecution of Palin Hackers

I should also throw out the ever so hypothetical rhetorical question:  Why was having this email account necessary in the first place?

Seemingly by surprise to most Internet users, Google has launched a release of a new Internet web browser dubbed Google Chrome.  I have been using it for about five minutes on my super slow computer at work (it only has 256 megs of ram in the damn thing) and the first thing I’ve noticed with Chrome is that it is freaking FAST!  No joke.  My first instinct was to take a look at the task manager in Windows to see how much memory Chrome was actually using, and what I found was a little puzzling.  There was only one web browser window open, but 4 seperate instances of the Chrome.exe process running.  Interesting… So I decided to start digging into why it’s so fast, and what the deal was with these multiple instances.  Here’s what I learned:

If you do a search for Google Chrome, you’ll discover a little comic book that was put together by Google to help illustrate what they had in mind when they first started designing this browser and how it should function differently from other popular browsers like Firefox and Internet Explorer.  The most telling is on page 3:  ”When we started this project, the Gears Guys were saying that one of the problems with browsers is that they’re inherently single-threaded.  For example, once you have Javascript executing, it’s going to keep going, and the browser can’t do anything else until Javascript returns control to the browser.  So developers write APIs that are asyncronous — and every now and then the browser locks up because Javascript is hung up on something.”

In plain english, the way other browsers currently function is about as efficient as an HR department in a hospital.  The chain of programs (or people, if you continue the hospital analogy) is long and weak in that if one link fails, the whole thing snaps and everybody puts their arms in the air to say, “Not my fault.  Tough shit.”   The way Chrome funtions instead is to create multiple processes for all the different tabs as well as additional processes (such as Javascript, or other web plugins) that run seperately, and basicly decentralize everything.  This adds a great deal of speed and stability to loading web pages and running web applications.  It will also help reduce memory bloat that comes from lots of long term use of a web browser, because you can allocate different processes their own memory space.

One of my favorite features is probably something you’ll grow to take for granted: the New Tab Page, seen above.  When ever you open a new tab, it is an intential act persuant to going some place on the Internet.  The tab page is dynamically created based upon your browsing behavior.  Your 9 favorite websites appear with thumbnail previews of each one, for instance.  So after a while, it really becomes YOUR browser.  Which might not sound great to someone who’s trying to keep their birthday gift shopping or porn addiction a secret.  That’s why there’s Incognito Mode!

Another cool feature is the way pop-ups are managed and blocked.  If something is trying to pop-up, you’ll only see a little notification at the bottom of the window, and if it’s something you want, you just drag it up and out.

Anyway, I’d love to write more about this but I’m waiting for an important call that’s going to take me a while and wanted to get something written about this exciting new web browser.  I think it’s going to have a big impact on the way web browser function and we’ll likely see Firefox and eventually Internet Explorer.  The only drawback about this browser that I’ve found so far (other than the fact that they can’t “sandbox” plugins to a lower security level…nobody can yet) is the fact that it’s for Windows only.  There are also some websites with minor functionalities that don’t seem to work just yet (Java, not Javascript, comes to mind).  I am sure that will change rapidly though, as the browser is open-source…which means it will likely be ported over to just about every OS you can imagine.  Until then, I highly recommend this browser to Windows users.

The video will explain…

Less than a year ago when I first started writing this blog, I threw a couple posts out there (Part 1 and Part 2) that talked about the history of our existence.  Not the existence of mere humans, but of the existence of reality as we have come to know it so far.  The basic premise is that when the Universe was created, the state that it was in was that of the most simple form of energy you could find:  A white-hot plasma.  As time passed (in the scale of billions of years), the plasma began to cool, take shape, form matter, eventually solar systems and planets, later the building blocks of biological life, and then complex forms of life began to emerge out of that and so on. It’s been snowballing down the proverbial mountain ever since the beginning of time, gaining speed, momentum and novelty along the way.

My use of the word “novelty” (as well as a lot of the inspiration for these posts) comes from the late Terence McKenna.  Terence described and quantified novelty as newness, density of complexification and dynamic change as opposed to static habituation.  Others, most notably Ray Kurzweil, have echoed and expanded upon this idea a great deal (albeit on more of a scientific/mathematical basis instead of McKenna’s cosmological perspective).  There is plenty to be said about this steady and predictable trend of technological advancements in particular, which is where Kurzweil roots a majority of his observations and predictions (while McKenna takes on a more broad perspective).  Here’s a video of Ray Kurzweil talking about some of his predictions for the future of technology at a TED conference to help set the mood:

In a more broad sense, everything from the telescopic complexification of plasma into different forms of matter, to the birth and rapid acceleration of computer technology, are examples of an accelerating increase in novelty throughout history.  So is the birth of the Internet and the explosion of information it continues to deliver to us and make increasingly easier to access.  As is our ever increasing and eventual co-dependence upon it the Internet as we move closer to creating a mental symbiosis with it.  That is to say that we will eventually come to depend upon the Internet just as much as it currently depends on us for its existence and relevancy, and that our dependence on it is accelerating.

So what is “The Great Singularity”?   McKenna had a few different theories, the most interesting to me being the possible invention of a time travel, which would effectively cause the future collapse into the present and we would be immersed into a timeless “hyperspace”.  Kurzweil takes on a more technical prediction of things to come with no consideration for such a radical leap, basing his predictions mostly on math in a similar fashion to the way Gordon E. Moore estimated the anticipated speed and cost of computer processors in the future.

Personally, I feel the underestimated wild card in this deck is Artificial Intelligence.  I say underestimated because I feel that it will arrive a little sooner than Kurzweil anticipates and the impact it will have will probably represent something greater than your soon-to-be-daily paradigm shifting technological breakthrough.  We make small breakthroughs of increasing significance all the time it seems, taking them for granted. But A.I. really won’t be worth much to us until it’s smart enough to improve itself without aid.  There’s a lot of groundwork to yet be laid, and the foundation is the Internet itself.  A quote from McKenna that simplifies it all is, “The future is mental.”  And if you give some slack to his notion of time travel, it could just as well be some other form of paradigm shifting technology that would stand to be as equally jaw dropping.  Imagine how predictions about the future might be if one day such a thing as a sentient, self-advancing computer-based supraintelligence actually existed.

The Internet is like an embryo in a state of gestation, developing at our own hands until it ultimately births Artificial Intelligence.  But it’s not completely artificial because its source of information, its genetic construction if you will, is a product of our own human minds and experiences.  So in a very real sense, the Internet and our mental selves are gradually becoming one and the same.

I came across a TED video yesterday that got me back into mood of writing about this kind of stuff.  It was a talk given by Kevin Kelly, who is the executive editor of Wired Magazine.  In it, he points out that the capabilities of Internet technology as it exists today were once thought to be totally unfeasible just 5000 days ago.  And that in truth, we have seen it grow into something truly impressive in a very short span of time, achieving some of our wildest dreams (yet we are not impressed).  There is no reason to believe this process of development is anywhere close to being finished.

I have a confession to make. I have been using Ubuntu Linux for over a year now. No, wait.. let me correct that. I started with a 3rd party distro of Ubuntu called Ubuntu Ultimate Edition, which at that time had included many different “power applications” pre-installed with it, most of which I had no immediate use for (several apps in the Programming menu come to mind…). There was a particular application in the Sound & Video category that I gave a short look but never really bothered to give it a GOOD look. That program was Amarok.

Forgive me, Linux community, for I have sinned! [dramatic pause... sound of thunder in the distance] But please, do not fret or pity me, my friend. For I have been saved. Behold! My new great Icon:

Ok, dogma jokes aside: If you have Ubuntu, or pretty much ANY distribution of Linux, INSTALL THIS APP! Would you like to have a few thousand Internet radio stations in HUNDREDS of different genres at your finger tips? Well that’s just ONE feature of many that make up Amarok. Here are some others that really stand out:

• Synchronizing, retrieving, playing, or uploading music to the following digital music players: iPod, iriver iFP, Creative NOMAD, Creative ZEN, MTP, Rio Karma and USB devices with VFAT (generic MP3 players) support.
• Creating and editing play-lists, including smart and dynamic playlists. The dynamic play-lists can use such information as the “score” given to a song by an Amarok script, and the playcount which is stored with the song.
• Playing media files in various formats including but not limited to (depending on the setup) FLAC, Ogg, MP3, AAC, WAV, Windows Media Audio, Apple Lossless, WavPack, TTA and Musepack. Amarok does not play digital music files embedded with DRM.
• Last.fm support, including submitting played tracks (including those played on some digital music players) to Last.fm, retrieving similar artists, and playing Last.fm streams.
• Version 2 (in the works right now) will support iTunes Online Music Store, as well as support Windows and Mac OS.
• Thousands of free Internet radio stations, presorted in over 285+ musical (and spoken word) genres. WOW!

I feel sorry for you Windows and Mac users. You have been forsaken….for now. You’ll have to wait a little bit longer for your musical savior to enlighten you, when version 2 is released. Unfortunately, it’s only in its first alpha phase, so it will be several months before a final release (or even a stable beta) can be expected. But keep your eyes peeled. This is a wonderful application!

To install Amarok in Ubuntu

Click Applications>Add/Remove. Then search for “Amarok”, check off the box next to the search result “Amarok”, and then click the Apply button. You’re done! Install takes just a few minutes (depending on your Internet connection and download capabilities).

The program is pretty easy to get used to. Unfortunately, I’m not in much of a position to give an full review of the program. Being as I myself just “rediscovered my music” with this app, I don’t have much more to say about it other than the MASSIVE collection of radio stations already included with its play-list collection is absolutely jaw dropping. There must have been over 40 stations listed in the Oldies genre alone! Now that’s insane. Even for the Internet.

Ok. Nuff said. Download, Install, Enjoy!

To install Amarok in Other Linux Distros, you can check out one of the links below.

Kubuntu	openSUSE	Fedora
Gentoo	Arch	Ark Linux
Debian	Mandriva Linux	PCLinuxOS
	Other (FreeBSD, Yoper, etc.)

Recently, I wrote about Creative Labs going after a certain community software modder whose sin was to make his audio drivers work the way they’re supposed to work. Here’s an excerpt of what he had to say about it:

—–

Creative Labs is causing a stir among open-source developers and Windows Vista users alike. Apparently there have been a lot of driver issues happening exclusively within Windows Vista with many Sound Blaster cards made by Creative Labs. In response to this, many Vista users have resorted to a user modified (hacked) version of Creative Labs’ set of Vista drivers, which enable and fix many flaws with the company sanctioned drivers.

The sound card manufacturers response to this act has caused an uproar, as it appears they do not want users to modify the drivers in such a way as to make them…what’s the word?….FUNCTIONAL!?

Responses from users have varied…

Here’s a great link if you would like to read more about all this in great detail.

This blog is divided into four parts:

1. Setting up your wired Internet Connection.
2. Troubleshooting wired Connections.
3. Setting up your wireless adapter.
4. Installing Firestarter Firewall.

Let’s get started with the first topic.

Internet Connection Setup in Ubuntu (Wired)

Before I go into this detailed technical babble, I want to go over a basic check list for connectivity to the Internet.

• Cable/DSL modem is powered on and is authenticated with your ISP (meaning, the “Cable” or “DSL” light on the front is on solid, and you have a good connection to your ISP).
• Your cable modem is directly attached to your PC Ethernet port via a Cat5 Ethernet cable. If you have more than one PC in your house and you own a router see the next item:
• Your Cable/DSL modem is attached to your router’s up link port via a Cat5 cable, and your PC is attached to one of the routers down link ports.
• Once again: DOUBLE CHECK YOUR PHYSICAL LAYER and make sure everything is correctly connected.

Kind of like this:

The above is the standard connection scheme of a home network. If you have done the above, shoot for the moon and try to open Firefox and visit www.google.com. If it says the page can’t be displayed, try clicking (inside of Firefox) Edit>Preferences and then select the Advanced catagory at the top-far-right, and then click the Network tab (see below).

From there, click on the Settings button within the Connection zone of the window. This window will then appear:

From here, make sure the “Auto-Detect Proxy Settings” radio button is selected (as above). Then hit OK.

Now, close Firefox, restart it and attempt to visit www.google.com again. If it still doesn’t work, read below to troubleshoot your connection:

Connection Troubleshooting
(skip if you’re not having any problems)

Typical Internet users have to have the following equipment in order to get access to the Internet:

1. A modem (Could be dial up, could be DSL, could be cable. All three perform the same basic function: Modulate and demodulate data as it is sent to and received from your Internet Service Provider, as well as assign you one single IP address).
2. An Ethernet Adapter.
3. A Router (required if you have more than one computer in the house and you want them to access the Internet simultaneously).

Another networking device that is similar to a router, but inadequate for Internet connection management between more than one computer, is a Hub. Hubs are devices that do absolutely no routing of traffic with IP address, but instead, can only route traffic based on MAC addresses. Hubs were originally designed for LAN networks that did not need Internet access; only shared access between local, in-house computers. Hubs are also bad for security reasons, since they are nothing more than repeaters that echo all traffic out of every port on the device.

Basic Internet connectivity requires IP address routing capability (a router, in other words), as well as default gateway and DNS addresses to either be known in advanced, or (much more often) auto-configured by the modem/router using DHCP. In Ubuntu, DHCP is enabled on all Ethernet devices by default. This means that when you turn your computer on, it should ask the router (or cable/DSL modem) “What is my IP address, subnet mask, and default gateway supposed to be?” And the router replies and assigns the client PC an unused IP address along with the rest of the requested information. In this way, multiple computers on a LAN can be dynamically assigned IP addresses by the router as they are needed.

So the first thing you should check is if your computer is being assigned an IP address by the router at all. A quick way to do this is to open Applications>Accessories>Terminal, and once it is open, type in “ifconfig” (which is short for Interface Config). The readout will look similar to this:

In the above screenshot, you’ll see interface names listed down the left side (in this case, there are only two shown: eth0 and lo — which stands for “loopback”). These names vary depending on the type of networking device you are using. Another example: if you had more than one Ethernet adapter in your computer, you would likely see the second one listed here as “eth1″.

To the right of “eth0″ we see a lot of information written out for us. The “inet addr:” is your Local IP address. (In the above example, the IP address assigned to the computer is 192.168.73.129). If you have an address here, then that means your router/modem properly assigned you an address while booting your PC. If you don’t see an ip address here, you can attempt to force your router to assign you one by typing in “dhcpcd eth0″ and pressing enter.  (Note: dhcpcd is not installed by default.  To installed it from terminal, type “sudo apt-get install dhcpcd”).

An alternative place to check and see if you are being assigned an IP address is System>Administration>Network Tools applet:

Unlike the ifconfig command, you can only view the IP addressing information for one network device at a time in here. And other than that, you can’t do much here when it comes to setting up your device.

The other place to check your network settings is in System>Administrator>Network. In here, you should select your Ethernet device and make sure it is in “Roaming Mode”, which places the device into DHCP mode.

If you’re still not able to get an IP address assigned to your networking interface then the cause might be a bad cable, the modem/router may need to be reset or your network interface is broken or unsupported (rare). E-mail me if you are still having trouble.

Setting up a wireless adapter

Wireless adapters in the world of Linux have a history of incompatibility looming over them that still makes people hesitant to bother even trying Linux out because it’s thought the probability of their wireless adapter working out of the box is low. That presumption is gradually moving further and further away from the truth, and thanks to Ubuntu’s Restricted Drivers Manager, it’s moving by leaps and bounds.

For starts, check your Update Manager to ensure your system is running with the latest set of drivers and kernel headers, as well as updated software. You can do this by running System>Administrator>Update Manager. The next thing you’ll want to do is check System>Administrator>Restricted Drivers Manager to see if your wireless device uses proprietary binary drivers that need to be enabled. That might sound like a bunch of Greek, but after you open Restricted Drivers Manager, all you have to do is check off any un-checked items, and restart your computer. In most cases your device will work instantly upon reboot.

The next step to getting your wireless device connected to a wireless network is to tell it which one you want to connect to. A program that makes this simple is called WiFi Radar and it allows you to browse the airwaves for nearby access points and authenticate with them if you have the proper encryption key.

The fastest way to install Wifi Radar is to open a Terminal window and type in the following:

• sudo apt-get install wifi-radar

You can now open WiFi Radar by clicking Applications>Internet>WiFi Radar.

Once you have WiFi Radar loaded, all you have to do select the WiFi Network you would like to connect to from a list of detected networks, click connect, and then type in any necessary WEP/WPA encryption passwords. I would strongly recommend you configure your router to use WPA encryption, as WEP is an old, obsolete encryption method which can be hacked in a matter of minutes. WPA is much stronger.

SPECIAL NOTE ON WIRELESS LAPTOPS: If you have a laptop with a wireless adapter built in, check your BIOS settings to make sure the device is enabled when the computer is first turned on, and that the ability to switch it on and off can be done by the operating system, and not by the user. A friend of mine once brought me a Dell Dimensions 1300 and we couldn’t figure out why his wireless adapter was being detected, but no wireless networks were being displayed for us to select from. I was stumped when I first came across this problem, but after changing the BIOS settings as noted above, I had no problems with it after that. In most cases, wireless devices on some laptops can be controlled by what’s called a soft-switch, usually a keyboard combination like Functionkey-F2, a media button or a physical switch to enable and disable the card.

I can’t go into much detail about setting up your wireless router, but I can give you a check list of things to do to help you set it up and secure it. Configuring these settings into your router will be up to you, so consult with the manual of your router to find out how you can configure it manually. In most cases, you have to type “192.168.1.1″ or a similar IP address into the address bar in a web browser like Firefox, and then enter the default Admin password.

Here are some tips to keep in mind when setting up your wireless network:

• Use WPA encryption if possible, and not WEP.
• Consider adding MAC address filters to prevent unwanted users from attaching to your router.
• Once you have your wireless adapter configured to connect to your wireless network correctly, disable ESSID broadcasting.
• Change the routers Administrator password. For added security, make it something different from your WPA encryption password.
• Write your WPA and Admin passwords down on a post-it note and stick it to the bottom of your router. (This sounds self-defeating in terms of security, but if a person can physically touch your router and you don’t want them messing with it, you should find a better place to put it. Because all they have to do to give you a headache is press the reset button).

Installing and Running Firestarter Firewall Software

Firestarter is an effective, lightweight and easy to use firewall administration program that allows you to monitor active connections between your computer and others, set access rules and otherwise help make your system more secure. Firestarter also allows you to easily setup Internet Connection Sharing if you have multiple networking devices available.

To install Firestarter, type the following into terminal:

• sudo apt-get install firestarter

Once installed, you can find this application in your System>Administration menu. The program has documentation located here, including a simple introductory tutorial.  To get it to run when you boot, click System>Preferences>Session. Click on the Add button, then in the “command” line, type “firestarter” all lower-case, and you should also name it firestarter as well. Once you have those two fields populated, click ok, and that’s it!

As always, drop me a comment or e-mail if you have questions or feedback.

Tomorrow, I’ll show you how to edit your Grub boot menu so you can change your default OS!