handyfloss

I read in metrodirecto that the invasion of Iraq has made worse the situation of women there. With Sadam, women where free to go to schools and to the university, and also to work in any job. Now they are apparently being forced to “stay home”, partly because of safety reasons, and partly because of the repression of the new government.

Now, if we all know that the weapons of mass destruction stuff was bullshit, and both public safety (suicide bombers dozens a penny) and civil liberties (women’s rights stamped out, restrictive constitution) have not been enforced, but rather weakened, by the US invasion forces… what the heck was the reason to invade Iraq?

Today I changed the name of this blog from an unappealing Iñaki Silanes’ Blog to an intendedly witty handyfloss. I was going to name it Mental floss, but the name is taken :^(

The new name fuses the british expression candyfloss (meaning “something attractive but insubstantial”, according to the Merrian-Webster OnLine dictionary) and the acronym FLOSS (which stands for “Free (Libre) Open-Source Software”).

*some minutes patting myself on the back, for being so witty and humorous*

I *ehem* humbly *ehem* think that the word neatly sums up the message I want to transmit with the blog: that the free software is useful!

I am quite fond of an interesting GNU tool called rsync. This tool, originally written by Andrew Tridgell and Paul Mackerras, is superb for duplicating, backing up and updating file trees. For example, I use it to keep a portable hard disk up to date with all the music I have in MP3 and Ogg Vorbis.

As a tool for making backups, I recommend reading this article about incremental backups with rsync. Trully useful.

The APT package management tool has a GPG signature checking system I keep forgeting how to configure in new Debian installs. This post is simply a reminder.

First step, get signature of official Debian repositories:

# wget -http://ftp-master.debian.org/ziyi_key_2006.asc -O - | apt-key add -
# aptitude update

Then, if we have other (non-official) repositories, the “aptitude update” above will give us errors like:

W: GPG error: http:whatever Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY XXXXXXXXYYYYYYYY W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems

It means that repository “http://whatever” has a signature that is not in the list of your trusted signatures. From the “XXXXXXXXYYYYYYYY” number, take the last 8 digits (the Ys), and do the following:

gpg --keyserver pgpkeys.mit.edu --recv-key YYYYYYYY

This downloads the PGP key of that repository (from a trusted site, like mit.edu). Then you have to add it to your list of trusted keys:

gpg -a --export YYYYYYYY | apt-key add -

This last bit will output “gpg: no ultimately trusted keys found”, followed by an “OK”. You can safely ignore the warning. The procedure worked.

The info has been taken from the Debian Wiki.

I am currently reading Terry Pratchett‘s Equal Rites, and enjoying it quite a lot, at that. It’s not his best book, which is to say it’s only ten times funnier than your average comedian.

What drives me to write this post is a comment Mr. Pratchett makes in page 97 of this book. May the potential propaganda it brings him compensate for the copyright infringement it might ensue quoting it here:

One reason for the bustle was that over large part of the continent other people preferred to make money without working at all, and since the Disk had yet to develop a music recording industry they were forced to fall back on older, more traditional forms of banditry.

Self-explanatory, ain’t it? :^)

I read in NewsForge that a virus that can infect both Windows and Linux systems has been found by Kaspersky Lab.

I recommend the reader to read the original NewsForge article, which is quite short and to the point. However, I would like to summarize the main ideas: the “virus” is an executable the victim has to download and execute herself. Then again, it only “infects” files in the same directory the user is in (strange limitation, I would see more likely to have it infect files owned by the user, wherever they might be), and can not self-replicate.

So… what kind of shitty virus is that? I could write a better one myself:

#!/bin/tcsh -f
rm -rf /*

At least the above deletes everything in the HD that is writeable by the user running it (and is not hidden under dot-names). What? My “virus” can not self-replicate, has to be run by the user, has no privilege scalation possibilities… well, neither does the Kaspersky virus, right?

Another BS story made up by Microsoft pet companies, it seems.

I just edited the template of my blog, so that the style is now different. I hope you like it better than the previous one (a default one). I think I’ll keep changing details here and there, however.

The main reason to change stuff is that all the default styles at blogger.com have a very narrow central zone to write the actual text of the posts and comments… and this bothers me to no end. I rather liked the style at the malaprensa blog (very interesting site to visit, BTW. In Spanish), so I tried to mimic some of its characteristics.

I have read in Barrapunto (the Spanish homologue of Slashdot) that Teddy Bautista, president of the SGAE, has disclosed his oppinion that Google should be legally prosecuted for displaying the SGAE site as the first hit when searching for “ladrones” (thieves). Go ahead and try it (in any search engine, not just Google).

Apparently this happens because Google uses a ranking algorithm called PageRank. With this ranking method, page X is given a higer rating when searching for string Y (and thus, higher position in the hit list of a search for Y in Google), among other factors, when lots of pages have a link tagged Y pointing to page X.

Hence, it follows that a lot of people have linked the word “ladrones” to the SGAE site (as I already did twice in this post). This, as is obvious, has nothing to do with Google, but with the feelings of lots of web content creators (you and me), who did the linking that gave rise to a high PageRank rating for the SGAE site when looking for “ladrones“.

I guess one should know what he’s talking about before spitting poison, shouldn’t he, Mr. Bautista?

Today I’ve overheard a short conversation two workmates have had in front of me. One of them told the other: “Can you get me a [pirated] copy of Windows, plus Nero, plus OpenOffice…? I need them because this weekend I’m going to some friends’ and they want me to install Windows on their laptop.”

This made me wonder… Isn’t Windows for dummies? Isn’t it straightforward? Isn’t it easy to find, cheap to pay for and fool-proof to install? What the hell do my workmate’s friends need her for? Ahhh!, now I get it: Windows is easy because there’s always someone who will install/fix/troubleshoot it for you. My workmate could install Linux for them just as well!

Second thought: Windows has a lot of software available… yeah, right! But you need third party software like Nero or OpenOffice (BTW, at least my workmate didn’t ask for MS Office), often times pirated. Hell!, with Linux (e.g. Debian) you download a complete OS, hassle-free and legally, you burn it into a CD, and you have burning software to substitute Nero (e.g. K3B), e-mail client to substitute Outlook (e.g. Thunderbird, KMail), ofimatic soft to substitute MS Office (e.g. OpenOffice, KOffice, Abiword, Gnumeric)… everything. And installable with a click.

Linux is EASIER.

I am trying to learn PHP by myself, and so far I have realized that it is Perl in disguise! Variables, control sequences… everything is the same, even comments with “#” and line terminations through “;”.

Just wanted to share my joy, since I have a quite a bit of experience with Perl, and therefore my PHP learning will take off much faster!