Show us the code!

Nice idea here: since Microsoft claimed that Linux violates few patents they have, the community is asking wich patents Linux is violating in order to re-write that code.

Curiously, there were no answers from Microsoft yet.

Go and digg the news to give it more visibility.

http://showusthecode.com/
http://digg.com/linux_unix/Show_Us_the_Code_An_Open_Letter_to_Steve_Ballmer/

Linux network configuration

Why it is so difficult to get the networking working under Linux? I mean, it’s not difficult to me but it is to my girlfriend without super user permissions and without typing commands on the terminal. Why Linux doesn’t have a easy graphical user interface to define new networks or choose the one you want to use?

There is, for example, the NetworkManager tool which is amazing: it discovers new networks, auto-configure the network cards, keeps track of used networks. It is wonderful, but it doesn’t work. Gnome has its networking configuration menu, but it needs super user permissions. Debian uses the /etc/network/interfaces file to configure the network, but what happen if the access point is down while my laptop boots? Nothing, because the wireless network can’t get an address from the dhcp server.

Why is everything that complex to use? Why everything just sucks when you need it?

In my opinion it should work as follow:

1. If there is an active and working connection, the system must be aware of it, check if it already knows this network configuration and, if it doesn’t know this network configuration, it must ask to the user if he or she wants to save current network configuration.
2. If there is not any active working connection, the system must try among the previously saved network configuration if there is any working configuration and, in that case, it must ask the user if he or she wants to use one of the working configuration.
3. If there is not any active working connection and the system can’t find any working configuration among the previously saved one, the system should search for any working connection (searching among the wireless connections present, trying to discover any dchp server, …) and if it finds any working connection, it asks the user if he or she wants to use it and add it to the known configurations.

The system must give the possibility to choose between the profiles even if the user doesn’t have administrator privileges.

If anything that could bring new network connections happen(for instance a cable is plugged or a wireless network interface is connected to the system), the system should check if new connections are available and in that case, it should notify the user and ask if he or she wants to change the network configuration.

Get the facts!

I found out the Bruce Schneier’s facts. i just love them.

Ok, this may be a bit geek, but all in all I’m a security guy.

“For Bruce Schneier, SHA-1 is merely a compression algorithm”

Back to civilization

The meeting is over and I’m back to civilization.

It has been quite a long meeting and after having been in the middle of nowhere for a whole week, coming back to life is quite nice.

It has been a nice meeting, though. Sometimes I has the feeling we could have been more productive, but these meetings rarely are very productive. It’s much more about ideas sharing and plannings for future.

At least I had the chance to understand how a couple of things in the project should be and I had few fresh news about Xen.

Nowhere

I’m having a project meeting with all the partners. Someone decided that it would have been much more productive if we had meetings far away from any kind of distraction, so, here we are: in the middle of nowhere.

We are hosted in this resort surrounded by forests and lakes somewhere in Germany. We sleep here, work here, havebreakfast, lunch and dinner here. And after dinner, we have the so called “meeting at the bar”.

We also have a very very crappy Internet connection which works half of the day and is very very slow.

Moreover we had huge troubels to reach this place.

Anyway the view from the room window is wonderful.

Almost deaf, but happy

I just wasted half an hour of my day because I didn’t find any nice tutorial to explain me how to listen to mp3 with mplayer on my Ubuntu.

I was searching creative commons licensed music and I find this wonderful site; I played a song and I heard a terrible loud white noise in my hears… it was horrible. Obviously I had to fix this problem and it took me more than half an hour .

I really think that Linux applications need easier and more automatic configuration.

Mp3

Sound Juicer in Ubuntu doesn’t come with mp3 support. I know that ogg is much better, but my crappy iPod only plays mp3 or Apple’s proprietary format, so I must extract mp3 from my CDs.

Adding mp3 support to Sound Juicer is quite easy:

$ sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse

open Sound Juicer then Edit -> Preferences click on “Edit Profiles…” button at the bottom of the window then New and call the profile Mp3 (or anything else…). Click on the profile just created and then edit it. You can give any profile name and profile description you want. In GStreamer Pipeline you must type:

audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lame name=enc bitrate=192 mode=0 ! id3v2mux

where bitrate=192 is the bit rate you want to use for encoding (smart, hein?) and id3v2mux tells GStreamer to use old tags (which are read by every player).

Finally you must type mp3 as extension and check the “Active?” check box.

Now restart Sound Juicer and.. ta-da… it should work.

Resume a large scp transfer

Today I was tyring to transfer a huge file over a ssh connection. Everything was working fine, but at 94% the connection stalled and the transfer has been interrupted. $#!”&%, I thought, but luckily joen.dk helped me a lot!

If you need to resume an scp transfer, try with rsync:

rsync --partial --progress --rsh=ssh user@host:remote_file local_file


She is fake

I just found out on wired that lonelygirl15 is fake. One can not even trust a 15 years old lonely girl these days… what a shame.

Vista

I’ve just seen this wonderful video by David Pogues: it is so funny, but so sad at the same time. Well, yes, sad for those who, just like me, live into computer science and their lives depend on what happens into this world. I mean, for those people the huge diffusion of Microsoft’s crap is a curse because somehow we are forced to interact with that crap and, given that te crap doesn’t want to interact with us at all, it is a pain in the ass.

The video shows a bit how a lot of the features of new Microsoft’s Vista are copied from MacOsX. Well, I think that Apple made a little revolution with its MacOsX and it’s natural that everyone tries to be inspired by their work, but there’s a big gap between inspiration and plagiarism.
David Pogues is ironical enough to be funny, but it’s so sad thinking that Microsoft is about to impose to the world a 5-years-old OS that will force people to buy new hardware and deal with “evil” TC and the users will greet this new-old OS like the most advanced one.