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.

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.

There is probably a small number of you out there who have seen a little bit about the Google phone on the web.  You probably won’t see TV commercials for it for a little while, because they want supplies to last for a particular demographic who this phone is being targeted towards:  the geek (specifically, software developers).  I’ve been drooling over this phone and stressing out over the fact that I don’t qualify for the $179 price tag that new T-Mobile users are going to be able to take advantage of.  I, on the other hand, would have to shell out $300 for the phone.  And as much as I would love to have this phone in my hands on October 22nd, I won’t feel down about the fact that it’s not going to happen for me.  And probably won’t happen for another year (which is when my current T-Mobile upgrade contract expires and will allow me to take advantage of a contract discount offer).

So why will I not feel so sad about the fact that I won’t soon be playing with the wicked GPS enabled software, the 3 mega-pixel camera, the open-source Android Linux operating system, the Wi-Fi network capabilities and all that other jazz?  Because something better is right around the corner, and the phone I currently have (a Motorola K1 KRZR) suits my needs quite nicely for now.  I can browse the web with it, send and receive e-mail, look up directions with Google Maps, and a few other neat things.  Though it’s all through a tiny screen using slow typing T9 to enter web addresses that aren’t in any dictionary… you know how much of a pain in the ass that is?  Still, it gets me by and is still classy looking (anything shiny is classy to me).

Speaking of Motorola, I’ve learned that they are currently headhunting for 350 new employees to focus exclusively on developing Android Linux capable phones.  LG and Samsung have made similar announcements of intentions to have Android phones on the market by Q3 of next year, which means we’re going to have a ape shit throwing storm of competition that will result in insane price drops.  Remember when Motorola came out with their first RAZR which debuted at $300, and less than a year later it was considered one of the cheapest pieces of crap for sale on eBay?  I don’t think the G1 will suffer than kind of rapid obsolescence, but it will certainly be outpaced with newer phones that run faster.  Hence, I can’t wait to see what the G2 will have in store (hopefully with an actual USB port and not that proprietary HTC ExtUSB crap).

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.

So my girlfriend and I decided to get a puppy dog!  Meet my new dog, Coda.  Her name has a few different dimensions to it that I think fit perfectly for the times that be.  In the Italian sense, it means “tail”, which is funny because she happens to have a pretty long tail on her.  In another sense it refers to the often ending riff of a song (or what writers might equate with the last stunning conclusion chapter in a great book; being treated as a spoiler of sorts by the readers).  It’s also similar to the word Eschaton, which is Greek for “The Last Thing,” so there ya go you 2012 apocalypse junkies.  ; )

For being a puppy of 9 weeks of age, she is pretty well behaved.  It takes patience, but it’s not too hard.  We spent a little time with the rest of the litter and picked her because she was the most healthy looking and because her temper was very mellow by comparison to every other dog around.  It’s events like adopting a dog with such potential that makes you do things a little different through your day.  It’s probably not too dissimilar to raising a kid… except it’s quite a bit cheaper.  It’s still just as fun an exercice of sorts. It’s like a form mediation by working your patience to the point where you build greater and greater tolerance for silly behavior. Speaking of silly behavior, the Vice-Presidential debates will be next Thursday, October the 2nd, so be sure to set your Tivo’s and home-made DVR’s to record that highly anticipated SNL spoof.

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.

Bob Church is the father of my girlfriend Kristin.  He will be celebrating his 61st birthday today and with quite a circus of friends and family around him (including my own parents and sisters).  We are all up here in Moberly, Missouri and it will be quite a day to remember (I brought the camera for the parts of the day I’m unable to remember due to alcohol consumption).  Bob has been diagnosed with multiple forms of cancer and has been on chemotherapy for the last 2 months. It has been a very difficult time for all of us who know him. The above picture was taken by me back in July while he, his daughters and I played a game of Spades.

His true passion, second to his family of course, is writing.  As mentioned before (and linked permanently to the left in my “blogroll”), he has quite a blog full of brilliant short stories, humorous tall tales and exquisite poetry that you can find here:

http://not-quite-right-bubba.blogspot.com/

If you didn’t visit it before, I encourage you to do so right now and leave him your best comments and birthday wishes.  And while you’re there, you might want to purchase a copy of this magazine that Bob has been published in:

Trust me, it’s worth the money.

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?

Yesterday I opened up the new Prymal Rhythm website at www.prymalrhythm.com.  It’s not completely finished, but we had to get something out the door fast.  There will be additional content, such as a photo gallery added in the future.  But otherwise the site is pretty much done.  Check it out, sign up for their news letter, pre-order an autographed CD.  And if you live in Denver or Ft. Colins, grab some tickets to one of their shows.