Dave’s Tech Blog
A Third Eye on Technology

Wikipedia, hailed as the shining zenith of collective human knowledge (and critizised as a “knock off” educational institution by those who fear their job will one day be replaced by it) has decided to switch over to Ubuntu for it’s server infrastructure.  You can read a lot more about it in this article.  The switch will help expose Ubuntu Server’s capabilities to the world, supporting demand as high as 50,000 clicks a second at peek traffic.  This system wide migration (the servers previously ran on Red Hat Linux and Fedora Linux) to Ubuntu will help make the task of administration of the complex website more simple.

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 hypthetical 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…

So we’re getting down to the final days of testing before the official release of Ubuntu 8.04.  There are several new features included with it, but we’re only going to take a look at just a couple of them before the official release in just six days!

I have been testing out the Beta version of Ubuntu 8.04 for roughly the past two weeks and put an end to it last night by removing it and replacing it with Ubuntu 8.04 Release Candidate, a preview version of the official release.  A lot of performance improvements have been made to this latest edition of my favorite operating system.  Firefox 3 Beta 5 and Open Office 2.4 are included with Ubuntu 8.04 by default.  Firefox in particular has made major memory usage improvements which translates into faster load times for the user.  And overall, Hardy Heron users report snappier performance.

A new feature called Pulse Audio is being ushered in with Ubuntu 8.04 which stands to bring ease to sound card configuration and make obsolete certain hardware limitations of some cards.  Pulse Audio is a sound server and you can do a lot of cool stuff with it, such as set one computer up to accept sound from another computer over a network.  You could imagine having a Home Theater PC receiving sound from a wireless laptop in the same room.  And it is actually surprisingly easy to configure that scenario I just made up.

There are still a couple of small drawbacks about Pulse Audio that I must mention:

• Pulse Audio has not yet integrated any sort of EQ into its mixer, so you can’t adjust bass or treble on your speakers with it just yet.
• Pulse Audio does not support surround sound channel level adjustment just yet, so only your two front stereo speakers will work for now.

For some people, this isn’t much of a big deal.  Not everybody has a surround sound system connected to their computer, and two speakers is all they could ever ask for.  But for people like me, it’s a bit of a disappointment.  Though… they had to implement it at some point.  So I’ll stop crying about it for now.  I am sure additional mixers will soon be integrated in with Pulse Audio.  In most cases, the technical problems it will solve outweighs its weaknesses.

Wubi - What is it?

Wubi is a new installer that is part of the Ubuntu Live CD.  Wubi allows Windows user to install Ubuntu on their system in a manor similar to installing any other program.

To start Ubuntu after installing, you restart your computer and select “Ubuntu”.  If you want to boot back into Windows, you restart and select Windows.  If you’d like to remove Wubi/Ubuntu from your computer, you can go into Control Panel>Add/Remove Programs, and simply uninstall it.  Now that’s easy!

These are two of the biggest advancements made outside of Ubuntu’s already impressive boost to system wide performance and stability.  All of which are preparation for a dramatic face-lift set to take place when 8.10 is released in October.

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.