There is a (Spanish) initiative to gather info from Windows users who are trying to migrate to Linux (e.g. Debian Linux), and are speciencing dificulties.
Their objective is to make a ranking of “most annoying” or difficult subjects, so that Linux developers can work on ironing them out.
You can read more about it, and contribute yourself, at their blog (Spanish).
It’s getting old already. Not Firefox, mind you. What upsets, bores, or downright outrages me, are those “impartial” vulnerability reports that newspapers, blogs and web sites publish, regarding both IE and Firefox bugs and exploits.
The last one, so far, I found at menéame. Their source of info is an article at Hispasec. In the name of “political correctness”, they reveal a bug in IE, and another one in Firefox. The reader gets the impression, not only that no browser is perfect (which is true), but that both have comparable vulnerabilities, which is a screaming lie.
The IE vulnerability they report is that a web page with specially crafted OBJECT tags can stop IE from working, and leave it in a state where arbitrary code could be injected into it and then executed. Pretty scary news, if the second part is true.
The Firefox vulnerability, on the other hand, consists on a JavaScript code piece than can crash Firefox. The code snippet can be found here, or directly tested visiting this page. Beware that the latter will cause your Firefox to crash.
Now, they are comparing apples to oranges again. The IE vulnerability can render it in a potentially dangerous state, whereas the Firefox bug merely crashes it. Yes, it is grave. Yes, it is annoying. But it is not risky for your computer. Secondly, I visited the link above, and… hey! nothing happens here! What is this bug they talk about? Well, as it happens, I have the NoScript extension installed, so the rogue page could not execute its malicious JavaScript code and make my browser crash. I had to manually accept the site in the list of sites that my Firefox accepts JavaScript to be executed from, in order to have it crash my browser.
Which bug would you prefear to bear with, even not taking into account that the Firefox bug will be fixed much faster?
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 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!
I just set up Apache2 in my computer! Just one hour ago I knew nothing about web servers, and now I have one running! I am so excited… and it was sooo easy.
I reckon there must be a whole lot to learn, but the bare basics are almost trivial, at least under Debian. I don’t plan to use this computer as web server, since there’s no way I’m opening access to port 80 in the computer I work on… but at least I’ll be able to learn PHP using it locally.
Now I’ll go home and watch CSI…
Just as in the USA they have the RIAA, here we have the SGAE, which “takes care” of the artists , composers, writers and so on. In the suspicion that what they defend are the interests of discography lobbys, and fed up with the whole “music business”, I turned my eyes to the music released under a Creative Commons (CC) license.
So far I haven’t had time to dive too deep in this world, but I have come across a very interesting resource for such music, namely a French site called Jamendo. All the music there is free to download, hear, burn, share, and probably broadcast (there are different CC licenses, some more restricting than others). Go ahead and give it a try, folks!
