Source Guru

For all those who can, I’d urge you to pick up a copy of Linux Format tomorrow.

A couple of months ago, I pitched an article to the editor of Linux Format and it was accepted. Tomorrow, the magazine will be on the shelf. While I’ve already seen the PDF for the article, I’m going to be up early to make sure I can get my hands on the physical copy. For some reason, it won’t seem real until I can run the paper through my fingers and smell the ink.

Here’s a sneak preview:-

Way back in the early days of dial-up, the internet mostly contained library catalogues, military secrets, and students’ Dungeons and Dragons spec sheets.  Now there are websites for people, their pets, their friends and family, and their businesses.  However, while most people are happy to use a free hosting provider, or to pay a company to host their websites for them, the more dedicated web master tends to plump up for a dedicated server, or a Virtual Private Server (VPS).

Running your own server means that you have to be aware of the multitude of potential security issues you’re exposed to on the internet, though.  These days, most home computers have a firewall in place, or connect through a router that can protect them from the dangers lurking on the web.  If you own a server, you’ll still need a firewall, but there’s much more you can do to be safe online and we’ll show you how.

I hope that anyone who reads the article in full will find it useful, and please, do send me feedback if you’ve read it!

The big question now is, what do I pitch for my next article?

So, recently (the last couple of months), I’ve been involved with the Birmingham Hackspace (aka FizzPop), and I’ve found it a great community to be part of. For those who aren’t in the know, a HackSpace is a place where a group of people interested in Hacking (and that’s not the bad sense of the word, nor just the coding sense of the word – there’s a lot of Hardware hacking going on ) can get together, share a space, share knowledge, and come up with some mad and cool inventions!

Anyway, one of the group’s main leaders, Antonio Roberts is very very arty, but is also pretty much your classic computer geek too. It’s been interesting talking to him of late regarding his journey into the FLOSS world, and how he’s coping with that, and integrating it into his artwork.

For all those interested, he’s doing a talk at the Birmingham LUG tomorrow about FLOSS and the art community tomorrow (Thursday 18th June), and you’ll be able to watch his talk Live on the internet. The talk is starting at approximately 7:30 UK time. You’ll also be able to interact with us on IRC, we’re on the Freenode Network, in the channel #sblug, and for those of you who miss it, a video of the talk will be available online at some point after the talk on my Video site. (where you can also find videos of past talks, including Dave Walker’s talk about Mythbuntu, and Scott James Remnant’s talk about Upstart)

So, because of my work for an online Mobile Phone Accessories Site – I recently installed a Pagerank Plugin for Firefox.

I was pleasantly surprised when I loaded up my blog and found that I had a PageRank of 5. I’ve never done any “SEO” work on my site, and until recently, it was a bog-standard wordpress installation. (now I have a theme, and I point at feedburner, as I was curious about statistics)

It’s kind of nice to know that a simple blog can achieve a decent PageRank, without actually doing anything special

I think what mystifies me more, however, is the fact that googling for my name brings up my site within the first page of results, even though my name isn’t mentioned anywhere on the site (I guess I can blame the planets for that though!)

I’ve got to admit, I’m quite happy that even though a famous author shares my name, I’m still on the first page of results in Google.

So, this morning (or yesterday morning, as it is now!), my attention got drawn to Wolfgang’s post regarding VB.Net. While I understand his point, I’m not too sure whether I agree with it in it’s entirity.

When I first started programming, I learnt how to write Basic. I don’t mean Basic as it stands nowadays, but Basic as it was back then (or should that be BASIC?). I learnt to code while I was wheelchair bound, as my father thought it’d be something interesting for me to do. It taught me the basics of programming, and I stemmed from there, moving on to learn Perl, then PHP, then C, etc etc etc.

The first time I ever wrote an application for a Modern computer, I wrote it in Visual Basic. I loved it. It was so simple to use, and I could use everything I’d learnt (apart from stuff like Music Envelopes etc etc) with ease in it.

Since then however, the world of programming has moved on. People have discovered Object Oriented programming, and found new and better ways of describing the data structures and logic behind an application. I have also moved on, I no longer write my own code in Visual Basic. I’ll generally use a tool more suited to the task.

I do, however, have to maintain some VB.Net code. In fact, it’s the code that Wolfgang mentions in his article. I can fully understand why the original subject’s response was “Urgh!” – the code is horrid.

I don’t neccesarily, however, think that this is because of the coders themselves. While this may have contributed (I’ve had many a “WTF” moment) – I think that the main problem behind it is the fact that it’s an Object Oriented design written in a language that’s tried to shoehorn Object Orientation into it’s core functionality, where the core functionality should probably never have had something like that done to it. It sits in my mind like some bad genetic experience resulting in some sort of mutated behemoth.

VB.Net, to me, just seems like a poorly made implementation of something it was never originally designed for. Wolfgang mentions that the ease of use of the Basic Language allows a user to start working without having to dive straight into OO programming, as would be forced onto you using something like C#, and in a way, I agree. The thing is, that Basic, as Wolfgang rightly said, is meant for beginners, after all, it was originally an acronym. “Beginners All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code”. This, in my opinion, is where it should stay. Basic is great for beginners, and VB6 was amazing. But, the advent of VB.Net means that programmers are going to start writing OO code in Basic, something it was never designed for, and to that end, fall into pitfalls and misconceptions where they have been led to believe that the VB.Net way of doing something is the de-facto standard. When they come to start working in another language, they have to re-learn things from scratch. If their experience is in a corporate environment, then their skills are only transferrable to something also written in VB.Net, and rarely anything else.

Basic is for beginners, it was never designed for the more complex stuff, which should probably be left to languages that were designed to handle it.

I’m looking for a “Soundboard” application for Linux (preferably that works with Jack)

Does anyone know of one?

My latest blog post about PPA Keys has had a few comments already. Having just returned from visiting my parents, I’ve noticed an email asking me to approve a Pingback.

The pingback was to a Portuguese site which had taken my post and written it into a tutorial.

I’ve got to say, my portuguese may not be up to scratch, but it’s obvious that this is a well written tutorial. I’m very impressed by this site, and the way that they’ve written, and illustrated this tutorial.

All I can say is, great site Claudio! Keep up the good work! Something like this site in English would be an asset to the ubuntu community. It’s well thought out, and well written

After reading Alan Pope’s recent post on installing GPG keys for PPAs easily, I thought I’d have a bit of a hack around.

Personally, I regularly add PPAs to my system, whether it be for Chromium Daily Builds, Bazaar, Gwibber, or anything else. I’ve found the most annoying thing is the installation of the GPG keys.

Now, I wouldn’t reccomend this for everyone, but, for some, it might be exactly what you’ve been looking for.

Here’s what I did:-

Firstly, I saved the Script that Alan linked to as /usr/local/bin/ppakeys and chmod’d it to 755. I then created a new file, “/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/05ppa” containing the following line

APT::Update::Pre-Invoke { "if [ -x /usr/local/bin/ppakeys ]; then /usr/local/bin/ppakeys; fi"; };

Now, every time I do a “sudo apt-get update” – it’ll check for new keys that I need, and install them as neccessary.

Magic!

<edit> Please make sure the quotes are correct if you copy and paste this!</edit>

So, SHA-1 has potential exploits, but you know what? I only use it for signing plain text things. Email, change files… I’ve no reason to use it for encryption, as I don’t encrypt things

Surely, if anyone is going to make something that collides with a valid signature of mine, it’s going to either a) be noticable to the person reading it (random characters in an email?) or b) not be processable by whatever automated sytem is using it.

I’ve yet to hear of any exploit that could affect the way I use SHA-1 in a meaningful way. Ok, yes, I’m not going to be using it to hash passwords in future (well, GPG uses it to hash passwords, but generally, to be able to crack that, someone would have to have my secret key anyway, which I would count as being compromised!)

If someone can give me a real world example of how this can be used against me, I might go out of my way to replace my key, but for now, I don’t see the need. Ok, I might take the next time I meet up with a fellow Debian Developer as a chance to replace my key, but I’m not going to go out of my way to do so (as I had to for getting my key signed by my first Debian/Ubuntu Developer in the first place)

When Kubuntu switched to KDE4 as it’s main desktop, I was disheartened. KDE 4, at the time was just, well, pretty unusable for me. It kept crashing, I couldn’t do the things that I wanted to, and I spent more time fighting with KDE than I did actually doing work. After about a week, I’d had enough, and I switched to Gnome.

Now, a lot of people are probably going to respond to this with Gnome vs KDE flames, but let me explain my viewpoint on the whole “Desktop Environment” war

I prefer KDE, but if a desktop will let me do the work I need to do without getting in my way and causing issues, then I can learn to use it.

The above is possibly the reason that I can get along ok with Windows XP, but if I have to use Vista, I’ll end up wanting to throw the machine out of the window.

So, for possibly the last year or so (I’m not too sure on the timescale!) I’ve been using Gnome in Ubuntu, and I must say, I’ve liked it. the fact that I can login, and instantly get access to my servers without having to type in my SSH key password (yes, insecure I know!), and that everything seems to integrate in a nice way, well.. it’s been fun.

But still, my heart lies with KDE, and I’ve been flipping back to it to see how KDE4 is coming along on a regular basis.

So far, I’ve seen it gradually improving, and well, it looks damned sexy to be honest, but there were a few things that I felt it was missing. The ability to have multiple rows of apps on the task switcher was a big one for me. I generally have a lot of windows open, and I don’t like the “Grouping” functionality. So when I get more than a few apps open, I could only see the icons. That’s been fixed in KDE4.2, and it does it in a nicer way than Gnome does it (only switching to two rows once there are a certain amount of windows open.

Next on the list is the whole password management thing. Gnome does a GREAT job at this. I login, and it unlocks the default keyring, sets up the SSH agent, adds my key, unlocking it from the keyring, and I don’t have to do anything but login with my normal user and password (though I intend to switch that to biometric login once I can be bothered to setup the fingerprint reader).

I’ve fixed that little issue (well, for SSH) by setting up an autostart script using ksshaskpass to add my SSH key when I login.

So far, KDE seems pretty usable for me now, but then, I’m quite happy to plod along on my Laptop and try things out. I’m feeling a bit lost with all the new functionality, and wishing that the Ubuntu Gnome Notifications (from pidgin, which I use as my IM client) didn’t look so ugly in the new sexy KDE Desktop (in fact, if anyone knows a way to get pidgin to use the Jaunty style notifications in KDE, let me know, as they’d fit in quite well under the new KDE look ) – I’d like to see some sort of common ground for notifications across the desktops, but who knows when that’s going to happen!

I’ll also try using it at work, if I can use it there without it getting in the way, then I will happily switch back permanently, but that’s the ultimate test.

I’m pretty sure that KDE 4 will be usable for me soon, and I’ll let you know if that’s now

Ok, so at work, pretty much the whole company uses Windows, of some sort. The web team, however, are pretty adamant that they use the best tools available for them, and we use Ubuntu because of this (because it’s the easiest option that we all have the same distro, and as long as it’s Linux, we don’t mind)

Anyway, at the moment we’re working through the process of moving all our internal business applications from Visual Basic.NET (urgh!) to PHP + a web based app. The “Product Owner” for this is one of the bosses, who currently uses Windows Vista.

He has, however, seen us all using Ubuntu and it’s got him interested in using it. He’s said that he wants to try using Ubuntu, and see whether he can get his work done on that, and slowly transition to it, as obviously, he needs to be able to use Windows for the .NET stuff (which sadly, doesn’t work well under WINE).

So, we set him up a Virtual Machine, and he got to grips with what he was doing, great. Except for the fact that he had to allocate memory to it, switching back and forth between windows and Ubuntu was a pain. He eventually gave up on this idea, and got a spare machine, a spare monitor, and set it up next to his machine.

Still, however, it was a bit of a pain, he’d have to switch position on his desk, start using a different keyboard and mouse, and i was all a bit of hassle.

Recently, we’ve gotten a “big screen” (which isn’t actually that big!) for the Web Team to monitor the servers, our order download service, etc etc. We were showing our manager some of the stuff we could do with it, and he asked the question “So, how do you control it” – to which my response was to move my mouse off of the edge of my screen, and onto the big screen. “So is that a third monitor?” he asked. “No” I replied, it’s another machine.

Enter Synergy

So this is the point where I explained to our manager exactly what synergy is. Trying to explain it however, is a bit of a hassle, so I’ll try my best here. Synergy is an application that allows you to control another machine’s keyboard and mouse from your own PC. It’s a bit of a mix between a KVM switch, and Remote Desktop, but it doesn’t require extra hardware, and you dont have to relay the video across the network to show it on your screen too.

At this point, our boss got a glint in his eye

“Does it work in Windows?” he asked. At this point, I didn’t realise that he had a seperate machine for Ubuntu. I told him it did anyway, but I wasn’t too sure whether it worked with Vista

“Lets give it a go anyway”

So we went over to his machine, and I installed quicksynergy on his ubuntu box, while he downloaded the Windows installer for Synergy. 5 minutes later, he was grinning like a maniac as he moved his mouse from one machine to another.

Now he’s happily using Ubuntu without any hassle, it’s just a third screen to him – with different stuff on it.

I think the moral here is, there are different ways to get people to be able to use Linux, and Synergy is one of those great tools that enable people to use Linux without having all the hassle that comes with switching over.

I think also, a quote from m manager sums it up.

This is one of the best things I’ve seen all year. I thought it’d take forever to setup, but it was so quick. I can be so much more productive now

I hope that this will be one of the turning points for my manager, and we’ll have another convert by the end of the year