Showing headlines posted by jhansonxi

Ubuntu recovery mode is a basic boot configuration for repairing a broken system. In this mode it skips most configuration files and daemons in order to achieve a functioning root prompt. For the security-conscious administrator this itself is a problem.

App stores are booming, but there may not be enough applications to fill them all... Even in the hot smartphone app space, manufacturers of the most-used platforms are struggling to attract developers.

I've been doing a lot of shell scripting lately with Dash and Bash. Complicated scripts with lots of text handling make debugging difficult, especially when they are being used in sub-shells which obfuscate line numbers in error messages. One of my more common mistakes is an unmatched quote. These can be rather difficult to find so I wrote quote-count, a simple analysis tool that counts quotes in lines.

I just came across this Java movie trailer. It was released a few months back. It's brilliant.

I reduced the DansGuardian user account and blacklist maintenance hassles with my previous two utilities but while working on whitelisting I found the need for a few more.

Content filtering is a requirement of the home desktop system configuration build I'm working on. Young children are part of the client base so it's mandatory. DansGuardian is basically the only free option available. It's a server daemon so it has command-line configuration only. Once it's running parents don't need to mess with the basic settings but they need to be able to set filtering controls for children without a lot of hassle. On Ubuntu it doesn't come with any blacklists but third-party lists are available. Shalla Secure Services has one of the most comprehensive list that's free for home use but installing and updating it is also a hassle. I wrote a pair of scripts to solve both of these problems.

It’s the official HTML5 test that praises IE9's HTML5 features. The W3C has spoken, the IE9 is the best HTML5 browser. But my question is: How credible can the test be, if you discredit it yourself and if you quietly change the results?

Uncomplicated Firewall (ufw) is a front-end to iptables on Ubuntu. One of its features are "application profiles" that make firewall port configuration easy. Unfortunately there are relatively few profiles available. I just wrote 192 of them for various application and game servers. Enjoy.

This new type of touch screen, which was demonstrated for the first time at a tech conference in New York this week, uses a small static force to control friction between a user's finger and the touch screen. "It's kind of like a buzzing or a vibration. It has the same effect as a buzz," said Chris Harrison, one of the Disney researchers and a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University. "But if you carefully tune the frequency and the vibration of the panel you can actually create things that feel like sandpaper or rubber or a wall."

[Not FOSS related but very cool. - Scott]

Host-connected image scanners can be shared through saned (part of sane-utils in Ubuntu). It can be run continuously as a daemon or on-demand through Inetd. Basic configuration for either mode is simple and generic but adding the network address to the saned.conf file in CIDR notation is not. When you are setting up systems for multiple clients on different networks and IP ranges, this is a bit of a nuisance. To automate this I wrote saned-subnet-conf which will automatically add an entry for whatever network the host connects to through Network Manager or the ifupdown utilities directly.

Apple Inc. is challenging a federal jury's order that it pay $625.5 million in damages for violating a small technology company's patents. If upheld, the verdict would be one of the largest in a patent lawsuit. Last Friday, the jury in Tyler, Texas, found that Apple infringed on three patents held by Mirror Worlds LLC, a company founded by Yale University computer science professor David Gelernter to commercialize his ideas. The patents cover characteristic features on Apple's Macintosh computers, iPods and iPhones. The technologies include Cover Flow, which lets users flip through album covers and other content as if through a stack of cards; Time Machine, which performs automatic backups; and Spotlight, which is software for searching computer hard drives.

There is a problem with scanner device permissions on Ubuntu. Regular users (UID>999) can access libsane applications like Xsane and Simple Scan without problems. Linux Scanner Server, which is running in Apache as www-data, can't access them without a chmod o+rw on each scanner device. Nobody seems to know how the permissions work so this has to be fixed manually in a terminal. This is not n00b friendly so I created a GUI application that automatically changes the permissions of every scanner device.

I just spent several days testing, fixing bugs, and adding features to Linux Scanner Server v1.2 Beta1. LSS is an easy way to share a non-networkable scanner through a web server. While the interface doesn't allow cropping like Xsane or Simple Scan it does support multiple file outputs, printing, and OCR through Tesseract. Development has stalled with the beta and I encountered some bugs when testing it on Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx). Instead of complaining about it, I fixed them.

I'm working on a new Ubuntu configuration to deploy for friends and family. One of the capabilities I wanted to add was simple remote webcam viewing. While webcam-server is old it met my requirements but it's a command-line application. To deploy webcam-server I had to make it more friendly which meant making a video device selection dialog for it. My current programming hammer is BASH shell scripting but to make a GUI I turned to utilities that can produce dialogs and provide feedback to command-line applications. There are many to choose from but for different environments I had to make custom versions of the script, select the dialoger with a script parameter, or try to select it dynamically. In the great tradition of overdesign I chose the latter.

Once in a while a Linux PC technician will encounter a system that has problems with lockups (a.k.a. hanging or freezing). Sometimes it is failing hardware but other times it's a software problem. Here are the common causes for this and how to identify which is the source of your problems. While I predominantly use Ubuntu (and some Mandriva) these tests are valid for most any distribution.

We have seen many ports of different kinds to all of our Windows Mobile devices, but what about porting a different OS to Android? XDA member and legend mamaich has brought us two emulators for Android devices, which will allow Android users to boot Windows 95.

[The obvious question is WHY? - jhansonxi]

Microsoft's creaking Internet Explorer 6 is more secure and popular than either Google's Chrome or Opera US banking giant Chase has determined. The bank's therefore decided its online baking services will continue to support aging the IE 6 but drop support for Chrome and Opera.

[Take this as a reminder to close or migrate your Chase/Washington Mutual savings accounts and credit cards. - jhansonxi]

This week’s installment of the regular Windows Update pack seems to have included more than Microsoft has disclosed to consumers. On Tuesday, Firefox users began reporting on the mozillaZine forums that a “Search Helper Extension” had been mysteriously added to their browser upon restarting the application after the Windows Update installation.

I'm building a pair of Ubuntu systems for kids. For a variety of reasons, including lack of time and hardware problems, this has taken far longer than expected and I ended up with one running 9.10 (Karmic Koala) and the other 10.04 (Lucid Lynx). Since the Karmic system has the most testing effort into it (reviewing games for stability and kid appropriateness) I needed a way to duplicate the selection of games on the Lucid system while filtering out everything else since some packages are release-specific.

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) – Crashing machines, slow boot times, and agony dealing with technical support have Digital Age people suffering from Computer Stress Syndrome, a study available online Tuesday found. "Today's digitally-dependent consumers are increasingly overwhelmed and upset with technical glitches and problems in their daily lives," a communications industry think tank said in a report entitled "Combating Computer Stress Syndrome." The report identified sources of peoples' pain as "frustrating, complex computers and devices, technical failures, viral infections, and long waits to resolve support issues."

[I know my computer related stress has gone down permanently since switching to Linux and becoming my own tech support.. - Scott]