Dave’s Tech Blog
A Third Eye on Technology

Just wait for the very end. 

Hey, Ubuntu freaks!  I’m going to have another Terminal tutorial coming out on Wednesday with an introduction to creating bash scripts.  Sit tight!

Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) was officially released yesterday.  Boosh!!  Often with each new release comes a spike in the number of people who are trying it out for the very first time.  So to help the new users out, I’ve written this guide to introduce you to this popular Linux-based operating system and some of the cool software you can install on it.

Here’s what we’re going to go over:

1. Customize the appearance of Ubuntu (wallpaper, theme, fonts, dockbars, etc.)
2. Run Update Manager.
3. Install Flash, Java, Windows Media Codecs and MS fonts with just 4 clicks!
4. Install Compiz Fusion Advanced Settings Manager with one more click.
5. Install WINE with one more click and use it to run Windows based software.
6. Reveal Archive Manager in the Accessories menu and use it to create zip archives.
7. Install the libdvdcss2 decoder so you can watch DVD’s.
8. Install Skype from a *.deb file.
9. Install Google Earth using Terminal.
10. Install Virtualbox.

1.) Customize Your Ubuntu Desktop
Difficultly: Very Easy

The first thing anybody should want to do with their own computer is make it look the way they want it to look.  Who wants an OS that forces its users to conform to one particular layout over another?  With Ubuntu, you have a lot of flexability.  You even have the option to use a different desktop environment.  GNOME is the default environment for Ubuntu; KDE (which looks very similar to Windows XP/Vista/7) is the default environment for Kubuntu;  xfce is the default for the lightweight Xubuntu.  There are others, such as Fluxbox and IceWM, that are geared towards being minimalistic in resource usage and makes them perfect for older, slower machines.  These alternate environments are beyond the scope of this guide so we won’t be taking a look at them for now.

Below is a screenshot I took of my own desktop shortly after upgrading my computer from 8.04 to 8.10.

You may or may not like the looks of the default desktop.  If you don’t, that’s okay because you can modify the interface in so many different ways the possibilities are endless.  Check out this small gallery of Ubuntu screenshots I put together to see some examples of what you can do to your own Ubuntu desktop.

The best way to explain how to customize your desktop is to show you a video (albeit, from an older version of Ubuntu) that demonstrates how you can modify the following things:

• Changing Wallpapers
• Changing Screensavers
• Panel Properties (Location/Auto-hide/Background)
• Changing/Adding Desktop Themes
• Adding/Moving Launcher Shortcuts to your Panel/Desktop
• Modifying Menu Layouts
• Adding Applets to your Panels
• Modifying your About Me user info
• Customizing your Login screen layouts/themes
• Using Multiple Workspaces

The video makes use of http://art.gnome.org/ during it’s demonstration of changing wallpapers and themes, but another noteworthy site you should check for such things is http://www.gnome-look.org/. My personal favorite website for wallpapers is InterfaceLift Wallpapers.  You should also check this site out for wallpapers, too.

You might have noticed in some screenshots of Ubuntu that some people have added a dockbar (similar to the one used in Mac OS X) to their Ubuntu installation.  Below is a picture of one in action.

Check out this guide I’ve written about adding Cairo-Dock to your Ubuntu install as it is one of the best available for Ubuntu (in my opinion).

2.) Run Update Manager
Difficultly: Very Easy

Typically, Ubuntu ISO images are a tad bit older than the current status of the distribution. So often times after a fresh install, your Linux Kernel might be out of date along with a lot of other software. Running Update manager manually after installing can bring your system up to date with the latest security and software patches.  While Update Manager does check for updates automatically, it often doesn’t do it immediately after you login.  So after a fresh install it is a good idea to force it to check for updates.  To do this:

• Click System>Administration>Update Manager
• Click on the “Check” button to check for updates

If there are updates available, you simply click “Install” to install them. Piece of cake.

*Note: If you’re having hardware issues (e.g., 3D video acceleration not working, wireless adapter not in use, etc.) after installing all available updates, you should check in System>Administration>Hardware Drivers to see if there are any proprietary drivers that need to be enabled.

3.) Install Flash, Java and Win32 Video Codecs in just four clicks!
Difficultly: Very Easy

In order to get the best multimedia experience out of our computer, we need to install a few programs and plugins.  Most of you out there are familiar with Flash, Java and multimedia file formats like Divx, Xvid, MP3, ASF, Apple Quicktime, etc. Installing decoders to open these types of files has been made simple by bundling them all together into one package.  And installing it is very easy.  To get started, do the following:

• Click Applications>Add/Remove.  A new window will appear (see below)
• Change the “Show:” drop menu in the upper right corner to “All Available Applications”
• Search for the word “restricted”

• Once the search returns its results, check off the box next to “Ubuntu Restricted Extras”
• Sit tight. Don’t click the Apply Changes button just yet.  We’re going to check off a few more things

4.) Install Compiz Fusion Advanced Settings Manager
Difficultly: Very Easy

Compiz Fusion (the program responsible for the dazzling eye-candy on Ubuntu) is included by default, but its advanced control panel is not. Need of this advanced control panel comes up if you are a power user who wants to use the 3D window management features to the MAX, which means turning your desktop into a rotating cube, among other nerdy things. You can also greatly customize your special effect animations and window behaviors using this control panel. So let install it!

• After you’ve checked off Ubuntu Restricted Extras in the above step, do another search for the word “compiz”

• Check off “Advanced Desktop Effects Settings” (shown above)
• Sit tight, and don’t click apply just yet.  There’s more we’re going to search for and check off.

Once the control panel applet is installed, it can be found in System>Preferences>Advanced Desktop Effects Settings.

*Notice: You will want to make sure you have Compiz enabled in System>Preferences>Appearence>Visual Effects before using the above control panel you’ve installed.  Otherwise changes you make with it will not be seen.

5.) Install WINE for running Windows-based software in Ubuntu
Difficultly: Very Easy

WINE is a program that acts as a sort of emulator for Windows programs to run on top of.  Instead of needing to use Windows for running that favorite application or game, you can run the program right in Ubuntu with the help of WINE.  The only catch is that not all Windows program run on WINE yet.  So you should search the WINE applications database to see if a program you’re wanting to use works with WINE.  Below is a screenshot of Half-Life 2 running in Ubuntu, thanks to WINE!

To install WINE:

• In the Add/Remove Applications applet (should still be open from the previous step), search for “wine” and then check off the box next to WINE in the results window.
• Click Apply in the lower right corner to install WINE, as well as the other programs you’ve already checked off in Add/Remove.

To run a windows program with WINE, simply double-click on the executable (typically something like setup.exe) and it should run just as it would in Windows (provided the WINE AppDB shows that the program you are trying to use works with WINE).  Shortcuts created by software installers are typically added to the Applications>Wine>Programs menu.  You can read more about using WINE here.

6.) Enable (reveal) your Archive Manager and create zip files
Difficultly: Very Easy

Some of you might be wondering: How can I create a zip file? The answer is with the included Archive Manager. This tool (for some weird reason) isn’t shown in the Applications>Accessories menu by default. But we can reveal it very easily by doing the following:

• Click System>Preferences>Main Menu
• Click on the Accessories menu in the left panel, then check off the Archive Manager (see below). Then click Close.

That it! Now when you open your accessories menu, you’ll be presented with a new shortcut to your Archive Manager. You can use this utility to create zip files. Keep in mind that it can also create other types of archives, such as tar.gz, so you should specify your desired file type when you create a new archive.

The included archive manager can create zip and tar.gz archives, and a few others (not RAR).  To explore the possibilities, click Applications>Accessories>Archive Manager.  Once open, click New in the upper left corner and take a look at the bottom of the window where you can specify archive file type, password locking and spliting.  After you create a new archive, you simply drag and drop files into the archive manager and it will add them to the new archive.

7.) Install the libdvdcss2 decoder for DVD playback
Difficultly: Medium

Click Applications>Accessories>Terminal.  This will open a new terminal window.  (If you would like to know more about Terminal, check out my Terminal for Beginners guide). Copy the following command and paste it into the Terminal window:

• sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/intrepid.list –output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list

This will add the Medibuntu repositories to your 3rd party software sources (in other words, this tells Update manager to check one additional server when it looks for system updates).  Next, paste this command into Terminal:

• sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get update

This will add the GPG encryption keys to your system so you are able to accept encrypted downloads from the medibuntu servers.  Finally, type this into terminal:

• sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2 && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

This will install the libdvdcss2 package, check for updates again and install them.  Once all the updates are installed, you should be able to watch a DVD simply by inserting a disc into the computer.  Also, you may have heard a rumor that installing this decoder is illegal. If you live in the US and someone tells you this, refer them to 17 U.S.C. Sec. 1201(f). The binaries to crack the DVD video stream encryption are not illegal if you have a license to the content.  In other words, if you have purchased your own legal/legit DVD, then that means you have license to watch it.  After all, the content must be decrypted in order to make the content usable.  However, the law is not the same in all countries so you should check your local laws to see.

8.) Install Skype
Difficultly: Very Easy

Skype is a very popular Voice Over IP application that allows you to make cheap phone calls from your computer.  They ask you for 10 bucks for your first set of calls and send special offers your way from time to time.  I happened to get in on a great deal paying 30 bucks for one year of unlimited calls to anywhere in the United States, so that’s a pretty good deal if you ask me.  It also features webcam capabilities and conference calling.

Installing Skype is easy.  All you have to do is download the deb file from Skype.com.  Here is a direct link:

http://www.skype.com/go/getskype-linux-ubuntu

Once the deb file is finished downloading, double-click on it.  An installer window will appear with a “Install Package” button in the upper right corner of the window.  Click that button, and when it’s finished, you’ll find Skype in Applications>Internet.

9.) Install Google Earth
Difficultly: Medium

First thing you have to do is download Google Earth. To do that, visit this link: http://earth.google.com/download-earth.html

After you agree to the license, you’ll be taken to a new page where an automatic download will begin and ask you what you want to do with a file called GoogleEarthLinux.bin. Simply save this file to your Desktop for now.

Next we’ll need to open up a terminal window. To open Terminal:

• Click Applications>Accessories>Terminal

When you first open terminal you’ll be given a prompt where you can enter commands. You also will be sitting in your Home Folder. If you type in the letters “ls” (That’s ls, short for the word “list”, in lowercase), you’ll be shown the files and folders in your home folder. Notice that one of them is called “Desktop”. We need to change our directory so we can run our GoogleEarthLinux.bin file. To do this:

• Type “cd Desktop” (no quotes) and hit enter.

In the world of Linux, everything is case-sensitive, so be sure to capitalize the word “Desktop” in the above command. This command will bring you to your Desktop folder. If you type “ls” again and hit enter, you’ll see the files which reside on your desktop right now. Listed in it somewhere should be the bin file you just downloaded.

Now for the magic!

• In terminal, type: “sh GoogleEarthLinux.bin” (no quotes) and hit enter.

After you press enter, the following window will appear, and begin to install Google Earth for you:

Shortly after the above screen appears, you’ll get another one that says the program successfully installed. You’ll then be given the option to run Google Earth right away. If you don’t want to, you can just click Quit, and start it later by going to Applications>Internet>Google Earth.

Note:  Google Earth runs best on PCs that are equiped with 3D graphics acceleration cards/chipsets.  Some video cards require you to have their proprietary drivers enabled in order for them to be utilized by the system.  You can check to see if you need to enable any such drivers by clicking System>Administration>Hardware Drivers.

10.) Install Virtualbox
Difficultly: Medium

Virtualbox is a popular application used on many different operating systems that allows you to create Virtual Machines, upon which you can install any number of operating system.  So, for instance, you could be running Windows XP inside of a window on top of Ubuntu.  This is good for users who are trying to migrate from Windows to Ubuntu but are not quite ready to take the big leap or are being held back by one or two applications that won’t run in Ubuntu.

So here’s what you need to do:

 

1. Download the Virtualbox deb file for your particular processor architecture (i386 or AMD64) from here.
2. Double-click on the the deb file you downloaded to start the installer.  Click “Install Package” to install Virtualbox.
3. Once that is finished, you will need to add yourself to the vboxusers group.  To do this quickly, open up a Terminal window (Applications>Accessories>Terminal).  Once Terminal is open, paste in the exact text and press the enter key:  sudo adduser $USER vboxusers
4. Reboot the PC.

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Well, that wraps up this list of things to do. There are plenty of other very cool applications out there worth installing, such as Audacity, Avidemux, VLC, Amarok, DeVeDe and many more. Most of these programs can be installed using the Add/Remove applet which we used to install our Ubuntu Restricted Extras package. Simply searching for the program name will produce a result that you can check off install with a couple clicks, and that sure beats the hell out of looking through a filing cabnet for a software CD or a serial number.

 

Another cool thing you can do is add scripts to your Nautilus file browser that will give you new abilities when you right-click on something.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy your new Ubuntu Linux operating system!

I was browsing over Ubuntu Forums yesterday and came across a cool thread filled with uploaded screenshots users have taken of their desktops.  You’ll find this thread here, but please note that you need to login if you wish to see all the uploads in the thread.  Below is a small selection of some of my favorites.

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.

Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) Beta was just released and it is a routine event that precedes the fast approaching final release of the next major upgrade to Ubuntu Linux.  A lot of hype and speculation has been generated over the last 6 months about what new features and changes would be included with Ibex.  One change that users have been hoping to see since before the release of 8.04 was a new appearance theme that would look a little glossier and polished.  There are a couple reasons this hasn’t really happened yet and won’t happen for at least another 6 months.  For one, it has met resistance from users who don’t think extra resources should be allocated to eye candy at the expense of system performance.  Compiz is an exception to this, mostly because it can easily be shut off and even when it’s running it barely uses the CPU.  The other reason a visual, thematic overhaul of the interface hasn’t occurred yet is because, simply put, there are more important things to worry about right now.

So you shouldn’t look forward to a major visual upgrade to your Ubuntu system, although such an improvement is not entirely out of the cards.  After all, there will be newer appearance themes included with Ubuntu for you to select from, and that might be all the freshness you feel is necessary with your current installation.  And of course, there will be many other significant improvements made to Ubuntu.

Here are some of the new features you can expect to find in Ubuntu 8.10 -

Encrypted Private Directory

A new folder will be available in your Home Folder that will encrypt any data you place into it.  This is a great security feature for people who have a lot of stuff on their PC that has to remain absolutely confidential, even in the unfortunate event of theft.  Because all of the data is encrypted and locked with your account password, it can only be accessed by you (or, more correctly, by anyone who knows your password).  Pretty nifty feature, if you ask me.

A New Guest Account

One of the features that most Windows users are familiar with is the ability to turn on a Guest account.  This allows people who do not have their own account on the PC to use the computer with the most limited permissions.  They do not have any administrative privileges, nor do they have an account password.  This allows you the ability to let strangers, or otherwise annoying computer illiterate relatives with an affinity for breaking things to use the computer with no worries about them accidentally fouling up the system.  It’s a convenient idiot-proof account in other words.

Faster Booting and Logging In

Once again, as was achieved with the upgrade from 7.10 to 8.04, the upgrade to 8.10 will incorporate even faster booting and user login times.

Flash 10 Player

Ubuntu 8.10 will include Flash 10 RC, which includes drastic performance improvements as well as solves many technical issues involving Pulse Audio.  Full screen flash videos play much more smoothly too.

Built-in BBC News Stream Player

Totem Movie Player will have a new plugin added to it that will allow you the ability to stream content from BBC’s website.

A “remember my password” Checkbox for Root/Sudo Dependent Tasks

Now when you open up something like Update Manager or Synaptic, and you are asked to type in your password so as to grant yourself root privileges, you will be presented with a box that says, “Remember my password” that will type your password in for you for all future sudo password prompts for the remainder of your session.

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There are other more technical upgrades being included with Ibex, such as the improved Samba networking services, GNOME 2.24, Xorg 7.4 (which is said to completely eliminate the need for the xorg.conf file; no more manual tweaking necessary), and a lot of other minor things (like an eject button being placed next to removable/ejectable devices).  Oh, and don’t forget Linux Kernel 2.6.27 which is a big leap forward in the hardware compatibility department.  So, not a whole lot on the surface that most users will be able to see and appreciate, but there is a LOT under the hood that is being upgraded which will provide new users with a better first impression of the OS than before.

Ubuntu Linux 8.10 is scheduled to be released October 30th.

For those of you out there who use Ubuntu Linux (or any Linux distro for that matter), recent events on the Ubuntu Forums might intrigue you.  Ever since I became acquainted with this online community, I have paid many a visit to their “off topic” forum, originally dubbed “The Backyard”.  This forum was intended to be a place for people to post threads that had either absolutely nothing to do with Ubuntu, or in fact caused controversy (often on a political or social level).  Apparently, over the last few months, some posts in this forum have required moderator intervention.  In fact, a lot of threads have required moderator intervention lately.

As you can imagine, the variety of topics in this forum are often all over the place and unpredictable, and of the threads that are closed: often they are closed justifiably.  This is nothing new.  But lately, most of these threads have been closed, not because of the original topic at hand, but because of one or two assholes who don’t know how to act a little more civilized, when debating something controversial or sensitive, show up and spoil the discussion with personally degrading insults.  Rather than ban such users and let the conversations continue, the mods have thought the best thing would be closing the thread.  This has caused a lot of their time to be wasted because the same problems have been repeating more frequently, and they’ve finally gotten fed up with having to spend so much time censoring the forum.  They’ve been hearing opinions from users about the possible closing of the forum for the last few weeks and I always thought that, while the tone of the moderators threatening to close the forum has been stern, you wouldn’t have believed it… until now.

Recently, a new policy has been enacted by the moderators, which allows members to continue visiting the forum and posting in already existing threads, but prevent people from posting new threads.  The theory is that this will cause interest in the forum to dwindle down to a more controllable murmur, as well as experiment to see what the result of closing the forum might be without actually closing the forum cold turkey.

Having discovered this today (a little too late), I wrote the following in a thread that originally suggested the idea of disallowing new threads forever:

It seems I am unable to post a new thread in OMGPP.

This saddens me because:

1. Despite the abuse the forum gets and the trouble moderators have dealt with in an effort to keep things clean and inviting to new Ubuntu forum users, it stands to silence a lot of relevant, healthy debate.

2. The motto, “Anywhere but here” sounds rather the opposite of what open-source communities are supposed to be proud of: being open.

3. The moderators can close the forum if they’d like, but there will be consequences down the road. One consequence is the need to continue closing unwanted threads that land in forums outside of OMGPP at a higher frequency because new users might think it would be acceptable. The community cafe would be forced to absorb the traffic that used to come here.

Idea: Stealing from the comments management system on digg and reddit, why not make the posts on this forum vote-able, and anybody who gets a certain number of negative votes will have their post “muted” or something to that effect. You could even impose a minimum age requirement if you’re concerned about offending easily offended individuals.

Why do I suggest this?! Because I don’t think the moderators have provided the users a way to more easily self-moderate the forum themselves. You have a “report” button. Super! Does it work? Not for the moderators; they work for that button. Why can’t they create a few more buttons that work for them and the rest of us at the same time?

It will be interesting to wait and see what kind of feedback this late suggestion gets, now that some whiny moderators have got the ball rolling on closing it down.  But I have to say that it just seems rather outrageous to see other tech forum websites (like techguy.org and their “Civilized Debate” forum which are dominated with Windows users) exhibit more ability to tolerate or manage “offensive” users/posts/threads than Ubuntu forum users and moderators can tolerate.  What a bunch of thumb sucking babies.  Now, if I had said something like that in the forum that used to be called the Backyard, I’d probably get some sort of silly reprimand from a moderator because it made someone cry (if I had said something more insulting, I would expect to be fairly repremanded… but it feels like things have gotten more and more childish lately).  Of course, making someone cry isn’t my goal in posting in that forum.  My goal would be to express opinions that may very well be more justified than the opinions of someone who would prefer to self-censor what they read and think via complaining to moderators about being “offended.”

Now, I can’t say anything bad about the rest of the forum or the community as a whole.  My hats off to developers, the mods and the forum community users.  And I know that the general consensus says the forum does not get much traffic and thus, won’t be a great loss to the rest of the community.  But I get this feeling that some of what’s going on in this forum lately is being done because someone perceives the Backyard/OGMPP forum as being an embarrassment to the community, or worse, Ubuntu (the operating system) itself.  How pretentious do we have to be?  Well, enough that the forum is going to be officially closed on October the 1st.  It remains to be seen how the rest of the community will react when they find their backyard water-cooler hangout was closed down because Dennis the Menace and Bart Simpson broke in wielding silly string and water pistols and nobody could come up with a decent solution to the problem.  ”Let’s just close the forum!”  What kind of a solution is that?  Oh well.  Like they say, no great loss… but it’s still a loss.

One user stepped up to create a replacement forum on his own server.  You can find it here:

http://grubbn.org/omgpp

Unforuantely, this alternative forum only has about 70 members in it so far, compared to Ubuntu forums ~67,000 active members (~671,000 registered members).  I’m not saying 67,000 made use out of the soon to be killed Backyard forum, but it was at least convenient for them in the off chance they felt like talking with other fellow Ubuntu fans about something other than Ubuntu.  I’ll never be allowed to post a new thread about my puppy dog, or ask people if they think the economy is going to collapse or poll people on how much longer they think Sarah Palin will be able to go without answering a difficult questions.  These topics are not offensive, and I really appreciated the quality of interaction I got from the Ubuntu community over any one of many random topics.  And now it’s about to be locked up and demolished with nothing to replace it, making Ubuntu Forums a dry, less emotional place to be.  I mean this with all due respect, but I sincerely feel the moderators at Ubuntu Forums has failed the community they govern.  Though their take is that the community failed them! That’s pretty rich, I have to tell you.

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?

Ubuntu on a phone.  Too cool!

Wow, it’s been over a week since I last posted in here.  Having been so long since I last posted, I had to muddle through over 100 comments, 99.5% of which were spam and maybe one legit comment… though it’s hard to say really because I wasn’t paying very close attention when I marked them all as spam.  So, sorry if you actually posted one recently and it didn’t end up on the site.

The Business…

I recently got my apology/bribe money from the government and I’ve been looking forward to investing that money into some business related expenses (such as advertising, because it would probably just offend someone to death if I spent it all on silly things made in China).  I’ve also been waiting on a friend of mine to declare whether or not he would be able to participate in a business venture with me, and it turns out he won’t be available.  The ideal role for him would have been project management and accounting (a boring desk job).  If I were him, I would have said no too (but in truth, he really will not have extra time to spare for it).  He’s going to be working a lot of overtime with a new employer this coming year so I’ll have to wait and see if he’ll ever be able to participate with me some time later.

On the bright side I have two other associates ready for work — one a web developer/programmer and the other a graphics artist.  My hope is to combine all of our skills to offer a new slew of online and offline services.  One project we hope to take on very soon is designing a new website for a rural K-8 school; it being the first site that shall utilize content management software.  The goal is to have a powerful interactive website that will allow teachers to administer their own mini-sites for each class, with students also able to put content on the site (provided their stuff is given approval by each respective teacher in advanced).  It is an ambitious project and we’ll have plenty of time over the summer to kick it around the sandbox.  We also intend to create websites in advanced and approach small and medium sized businesses with a site that’s more or less been designed for them.  We’ll also combine this with ready-made advertising packages which can even include original logos we custom design.  Toss in Ubuntu Linux-based office PCs custom built and serviced by me and we’ll have an attractive, versatile selection of tools many businesses will probably be interested in using.

No more CCNA?

A while back, I got into this habit of writing about wanting to get my CCNA networking certification.  I’ve lost the motivation to continue writing about this for the time being, mostly because I think it’s really boring (no, really!).  There are many aspects about computer networking that I love, but there’s also a good chunk that I don’t have a practical use for right now.  I’m not desperately attempting to secure a desk job somewhere so I can map subnets in Microsoft Visio, configure VLANs on serial interfaces, setup ACLs to filter network traffic and perhaps occasionally arm-wrestle with some absurdly obtuse/self-righteous HR department.  Computer networking is not an intimidating field of study and understanding the basics is about as complicated as understanding how the Post Office works.  But Cisco seems a little full of themselves at times.  You’ll know what I mean by this after you’re waist deep in the plethora of rediculous acronyms Cisco is continually pulling out of its ass.  Cheap excuses to procrastinate aside, I’m now more interested in web design and Linux.  The diploma I’ve already got and passing the tests necessary to get it is certification enough for now.

What’s new with Ubuntu?

I’ve been meaning to create a new video to show off Ubuntu 8.04, but very little about it stands out when compared to 7.10 (with exception to performance improvements, which are very noticeable).  One of the most hyped features, Pulse Audio, has turned out to be something of a disappointment (though this is just my opinion).  The decision to include it with 8.04 by default was likely made so as to help get the kinks ironed out before the next major release of Ubuntu in October, which is rumored to be sporting a sexy new theme that will compliment the impressive collection of special effects rendered by Compiz Fusion.  By then, the soon to be developed “glitch-free” version of Pulse Audio should already be in place.

What’s new with Dave?

Believe it or not, I’m reading Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero with a Thousand Faces“.  The book takes a deep look at the multitude of mythologies that have existed world wide throughout human history and highlights the similarities between them instead of the superficial differences.  I probably shouldn’t comment on it further until I’ve finished reading (which will probably take quite some time).  Ancient human history is something I’ve been interested in for a few years and the topic of mythology adds an informative and sometimes entertaining layer.  After finishing it, I hope to plow through Julian Jaynes’ “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”.

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