JDPFu.com 2025

If you have broadband internet service in the USA, chances are you already pay for commercial antivirus programs. AT&T, Verizon and Comcast all provide commercial AV with their broadband services. Here are the links:

• http://security.comcast.net/
• http://admin.stage.att.net/bellsouth/s/s.dll?spage=cg/yis/sec/vir.htm&is=sec&iss=vir
• http://www22.verizon.com/ResidentialHelp/HighSpeed/Troubleshooting/Security/QuestionsOne/85304.htm

Microsoft also has entered this market with a very competitive free download http://www.microsoft.com/Security_Essentials/. The reviews so far are good. I can’t recommend it myself, it needs time to prove it works. However, I have switched to using it since it came out of Beta. I don’t use Windows much, so my risk is very low.

In short, since you’re already paying for these commercial antivirus programs, why spend money on them again? Use the free versions that your ISP provides.

So, a few of you may have noticed that the front page to this blog hadn’t been updated in about a week, then suddenly, there were a bunch of articles. RSS users didn’t see any issues. You really, really should use the RSS feed.

So, I searched around a little and didn’t find anything that worked. Eventually, I decided to drop into the IRC support area and asked my question:

<me> Typo 5.3 has stopped displaying recent artcles on the main page.
[09:45] <neuro`> damn
[09:45] <me> RSS feeds are fine.
[09:45] <neuro`> remove the cached index.html manually
[09:46] <neuro`> then run rake sweep_cache
[09:46] <me> tmp/cache is empty.
[09:46] <neuro`> public/index.html
[09:47] <me> THANKS.

Then I did what he suggested and everything seems to be working again. Less than 2 min. There were about 10 people in the channel. Talk about support.

Below is a script that will playback a group of audio files in order, grouped by day. Suppose you have files named like this

File-1×01.mp3

   .

File-1×12.mp3

File-2×01.mp3

   .

File-2×10.mp3

File-3×01.mp3

   .

File-3×10.mp3

   .

File-7×10.mp3

File-8×01.mp3

   .

File-8×10.mp3

and want to play group Yx1-6 followed by group Yx6-12 daily. If you just wanted to do this for 1 set of files, it would be easier to just use `at` to play them. But you might have 10-50 files like this and only want to worry about setting up playback once a month or so.

Here’s the bonehead shell script that I’m using to accomplish this.

#!/bin/sh


	
Program to playback  audio tapes in order
	
based on day of the month – best to start on 1st.

#
	
It isn’t pretty, but it works assuming you want to cover
	
half a lesson each day. The filenames look like this:
	

	
File-8×10.mp3

MP=/usr/bin/mplayer

DIR=/Data/Audio/Session1

FILE_ROOT=File

DATE=`date “+%d”` # Returns the day of the month

ODD=`expr $DATE % 2`

START_GRP=`expr 1 + $DATE / 2` # pick a start date

ODD_START_NO=“01 02 03 04 05 06”

EVEN_START_NO=“06 07 08 09 10 11 12”

FILE_EXT=mp3

	
Changing the 0 to a 1 will toggle which group of files to begin

if [ $ODD = “0” ] ; then

  START_NO=$ODD_START_NO

else

  START_NO=$EVEN_START_NO

fi

for count in $START_NO; do

   afile=“$DIR/$FILE_ROOT-${START_GRP}x$count.$FILE_EXT”

   if [ -f “$afile” ] ; then

      $MP “$afile”

   else

      echo " File missing: $afile"

 fi

done

exit;

So, it isn’t very pretty and it is dependent on starting the script on the first of the month. Since today happens to be Oct 31 and I just finished the first group, I tweaked the EVEN/ODD and date modulus to jump 1 day ahead tomorrow – Nov 1. It will fail when a month roles over to the next month.

A fix to that problem would be to convert the date into a Julian day of the year, DOTY, and subtract off the current DOTY from the starting date. Check out date "+%j" for more on Julian dates. Of course, then it will break at the new year, so perhaps getting the number of seconds since epoch and performing calculations based on that would be even better? Even that method will break in 2038. At some point, the complexity outweighs the difficulty to implement.

Lastly, we need to setup crontab to run the script, playing the file.

1 6 * * * /home/jp/bin/daily_audio.sh

Enjoy.

Last year, the owner of CodeWeavers, a commercial Windows Interface Layer for Linux called CrossOver-Office, was forced to backup his President Bush hate speak with a fairly large software giveaway. I don’t recall the exact bet he made, but something like I’ll give my products away if any of these 3 things happen. One of them was related to the price of gasoline. At least one of them did happen and he manned up and gave away his products for a few days or weeks. WINE is the free version of this product, just a few months or years behind on compatibility.

Anyone could get a copy, installed it on their Linux machine and use it with support for a year. I did this things, but only used it a little. Perhaps … er … twice. I never used them again. I don’t recall why I didn’t use them more now. Perhaps it was that if every windows program didn’t work or didn’t work perfectly under CrossOver Office, so I still needed to keep a Windows VM anyway. Regardless, it never crossed my mind to use CO.

This morning, an email arrived with a reminder that support was ending in about a week. I should renew my support, if I want the new versions that are coming out soon. I suppose I should go down load the current versions (it has been a year after all) and install them and see if the improvements help with the Windows programs that I use and would like to use under Linux. Those are:

• Quicken 2009
• Investors Toolkit
• MS-Office 2007
• MS-Visio 2007
• then I have a bunch of Windows-only computer secure tools and network scanning tools.

If you work in a structured environment with very specific tools that don’t change very often, you could and should install these tools to validate how well they work. There’s a real savings in using them across an enterprise. but note that patching may not be possible.

I’ll need a Windows VM for the other tools, so I probably won’t remember to use CO. Further, since there is no way to portable install MS-Office, it is a hassle to install it under multiple instances and it could be in violation of the license agreement. I do own an MS-Office 2003 license and work provides an MS-Office 2007 license, so being legal isn’t a problem, provided I don’t install the same version in both places. Sadly, we’ve standardized on 2007 and 2003 won’t read the new file formats. OpenOffice, which runs ever where, does a fairly good job with all the new formats, provided you aren’t collaborating and constantly going back and forth with others. It really would be easier to standardize on OpenOffice. Seriously.

A few links:

• http://www.openoffice.org/
• http://www.codeweavers.com/
• http://www.winehq.org/

If you got in on the deal a year ago, check your email for the 50% coupon code.

On Tuesday and Wednesday this week, there were a few Alfresco Meetups in Atlanta that I attended.

Tuesday was just a few hours to begin the organization of the informal group. Wednesday was an all day event with sponsors, presentations, and vendors. For what each of these were, they were well organized and cut to the core for experienced Alfresco users and developers.

My main takeaways were:

1. There is no upgrade path from v2.9b —> v3.×. v2.9x was a dead development tree.
2. If you aren’t a paid, enterprise customer and elect to use the 1 or 2 suggested community edition releases, you are on your own. Sometimes the company chooses to drop community releases. When I asked for suggestions to ensure we weren’t caught again with no upgrade path, there was no answer, just silence.
3. Alfresco is a Java Application running on Tomcat (by default). It is just a normal Tomcat app, so if you want to customize it, you’ll be best served by Java development. Some fairly trivial view modifications may be possible with view changes using the template engine that Alfresco uses. However, I’d never heard of this markup – must be a java thing.
4. Alfresco is an impressive OSS product that competes with many commercial applications that charge $50K – $1.5M for deployment licenses, They make money by selling enterprise licenses and providing support contracts. Deployments are usually performed (98% of the time) by VARs. This means they need to concentrate on supporting paid customers and may trial different techniques on the Community Edition. Sometimes it isn’t very stable and sometimes core functions are broken in the community edition.
5. Most of the attendees were using the enterprise version or were VARs who, by contract, were only allowed to deploy the enterprise version. If you are an Alfresco Partner, I understand you cannot support the community edition for your customers.
6. If you deploy Alfresco, think of it as a content container back end, not a complete solution unless everything you see out of the box is exactly what you want. Almost every user of the tool creates customizations for their environment.
7. CMIS is an emerging standard for communicating with ECM, DMS, WCM systems. A number of vendors have signed up. Alfresco is saying it is like SQL for content management systems. Both RESTful and WSDL interfaces are provided with this standard and it should allow customized front ends to communicate using a standard language to CMS back ends regardless of vendor. EMC, IBM, Microsoft, SAP, and Alfresco were listed as backers.
8. The Alfresco folks were really nice, but couldn’t really help me. This community appears to be made up of folks that do ECM for their primary jobs and not just 1/20th of their responsibilities like me.
9. Alfresco is an extremely capable platform, mainly suitable for normal DMS requirements. Less so for WCM based on the Best Practices session. The BPM parts appear to be very powerful, but only when you customize with Java.

I plan to stay 1 revision behind the currently recommended Alfresco release. So, right now, v3.2r is recommended. That means I’ll be re-deploying v3.1 when I get around to dropping the current install and re-importing.

I was in way over my head with all levels of the conversation. The terms used were Alfresco and java specific, neither of those are my skill set. What I need is a newcomers’ introduction to Alfresco, Best Practices for the FOSS version, and how to determine when it is time to pay for the enterprise supported version.

I wrote this summary quickly as a dump when I got home and didn’t proof it. Some of it could be inaccurate to what actually happened. I am prone to selective memory when I’m frustrated.

This guy get’s it. He wrote an article on deploying cloud computing inside your company and why the new Ubuntu Server release needs to be considered.

There are other options, but Ubuntu has the most compelling thing in my mind – APT. APT makes using and deploying applications nearly trivial.

I’ve been in RPM hell with the competition, so it really isn’t much of an option to me.

VMware has compelling solutions, if you have $4K to spend for every 2-3 servers. Uh…. no thanks.

You all know I use Ubuntu heavily. I love the application management and update scheme used – APT.
A new version of Ubuntu is scheduled for release this week – 9.10. While this isn’t an LTS – Long Term Support release, so it isn’t suitable for production servers, it does have enough new and useful things to be worth migration consideration.

I plan to migrate my main desktop to it, but I’ll really be waiting for xubuntu, the lighter weight GUI version.

As I consider the new features included and made significantly easier, I came across an article where someone compared the so-called new features in Windows7 with other OSes.

Big new features in Ubuntu 9.10, from my point of view?

• EXT4 – this will be the default file system. Testing has shown it to be faster than most other alternatives. I’ll be staying with JFS on physical hardware and ext3 on virtual hardware. IMHO, more time is needed before I’ll risk my data. I really want ZFS, but since the license isn’t working with GNU, my best hope is btrfs at some future date. Linus is running btrfs on his daily workstation, so that’s a good sign.
• Cloud Computing infrastructure with Eucalyptus. Eucalyptus was introduced in an earlier release, but I didn’t use it. Ok, so it isn’t new, but it is_ new to me._ This is both compute and storage infrastructure that is compatible with Amazon EC2 and S3. Ubuntu has decided to call this UEC going forward. Very nice.
• KVM – Ubuntu has decided to leave my beloved Xen for KVM. That means it will be easier for me to change from Xen to KVM for virtual servers with the next LTS server release. I’ll need a few months to get ready and test.
• Easy HOME directory encryption – Don’t know that I’ll use this, but I will encrypt a subdirectory. Yes, I know TrueCrypt has been available for a long time and is cross platform. Ubuntu adds an auto-mount / dis-mount as you log in and out of your account. The resulting encryption can be moved, but only with the key provided at create time.
• Bluetooth tethering with cell phones. This means you’ll be able to use a cell data connection from your laptop, fairly easily. Great if you travel much.
• New kernel – In every new kernel, there are lots of new features that don’t matter to most of us and a few new features that matter a bunch. My kernels are so old that there are many, many new to me features. Some are security and others are performance related. KVM is built-into the kernel now. That’s better than getting Xen updates that don’t get tested well enough and occasionally break.

Ubuntu is also excited about free cloud storage they will offer. Of course, there’s a storage amount that will force a payment, but ease of use will make this useful to many people. Even if all you do is share your desktop settings or back them up to the cloud, you’ll be better off.

Anyway – Look for bittorrent downloads on 10/29 and get yours running. Seed after you complete for the entire weekend to help your fellow users out, please.

It is really simple to end all the personal data leaks that we read about all the time, make the penalty of the leak so high that no company would ever allow it to happen. Further, make the fine be paid directly to the impacted persons, so it isn’t the class action lawyer or some neutral party being paid.

A few years ago, my college leaked 20,000 transcripts on the internet. Mine was not one of the leaked, but if I were going to cost $2,000, per instance, for the fine, I suspect my University would be more careful. That fine would have cost them $40M. Yep, they wouldn’t leak anything, that’s for certain.

There are a number of systems out now that are known to leak private data, MySpace, Facebook, and Paypal are constantly found to be deficient with security practices. If there was a $2,000 fine for each failure, I bet they’d fix it or refuse all private data. Or, they’d go out of business, which would give them an opportunity to come back with better security after bankruptcy. Further, venture capitol would demand excellent security processes to prevent any private data breaches.

How is any of this bad? I suppose the companies (slime?) who make money offering bogus privacy insurance would be harmed. They would convert into audit companies or fold. I suspect lawsuits against Microsoft for common program breaches would increase, forcing them to create a secure OS if they wanted to retain customers. I can get behind that. The people and companies certifying private data won’t be leaked will be held accountable if their system fails too.

Is financial data the only private data or is anything not found in either the telephone book or government documents to be considered private? Is there an expectation of privacy for all other information that should be protected?

Every once in a while, I need to create instructions that someone else can follow. A few screen shots would be very helpful. Windows7 includes a program called psr that captures the entire desktop and describes which mouse clicks were entered as they happen. Every mouse click captures another screen shot. Very handy for creating a step-by-step instruction document or to help recreate steps to cause a problem. When you stop recording, it packages the file(s) into a ZIP ready to share.

This can also be used to report bugs, since it captures widget clicks too and adds the description of them into a web page along with the screen captures.

I can also report that it captures virtual machine screen shots and clicks too, but not for internal to the processes. It just knows that you clicked on something inside the VM.

To run this tool,

Start —> Run —> psr

It may work in Vista and there may be a download for older systems like WinXP, but I can’t confirm that.

The other downside to this tool is that it creates MHTML (mht) files, which don’t display without coaxing except with IE. Opera Browser will display the resulting files, but Firefox 3.5.x refused to open it.

http://ninite.com/ helps make installation of commonly used applications easy. Lifehacker covered this tool nicely.

If you install test and virtual machines, this is a real time saver. A few clicks to select your apps, I selected about 10, then about 5 minutes of downloads and installs. Only once did I have to “Accept”, but that was a Windows7 UAC.

Have you seen any issues with this solution? Let us know.

For example, I did have to decrease the security so ninite could create and download the custom installation package, but that was expected. That part was expected AND necessary. After all the installations were completed, I removed it from my trusted sites. Good enough.

Some of the installed apps were not the latest and had updates available. Doing an update rather than searching for the apps, downloading, installing, is much quicker. Of course, addons for Firefox still needed to be added.

Which apps did I install?

1. Firefox
2. Thunderbird
3. OpenOffice
4. Opera
5. Skype
6. IrfanView
7. KMplayer
8. VLC
9. Java 6
10. Foxit
11. WinSCP
12. Putty
13. Notepad++

Which Firefox addons did I install?

• NoScript
• Sage (Sage Too forbids AdBlock)
• AdBlock Plus
• Scroogle
• Tree Style Tab

You don’t want too many firefox addons or it will get slow.