Author: sjan

Community

Snobbery hurting Linux migration?

An article at reallylinux.com points out the issue of Linux user elitism and snobbery – which seems to be putting some Windows users off of trying Linux.

I know it is something I’ve said before (although I’m not sure I have said it here) but it bears repeating: we all start out as a n00b but somewhere along the way we had some kind of assistance to get where we are. It is only if we are willing to share what we know that we can spread our knowledge for the “greater good.” Besides, if you don’t tell anyone what you know, you get no claim to being 1337.

CSS

Peter Nederlof’s whatever:hover to the rescue!

Well, I found a way to do CSS2 drop-down menus and force IE to accept them. It takes a little bit of JavaScript madness created by Peter Nederlof called which forces IE to accept the :hover psuedo-class for any element (as is the spec for CSS2).

While it uses IE specific tricks to make it work, it can be done in such a way as to not break in other browsers. (In other words, the changes are only applied if the browser is IE.)

There is a handy tutorial at SEOConsultants that was incredibly helpful.

Alaska

Speed vs. cool

I have been talking to my service provider, trying to get increased upstream bandwidth, but am shocked at the price. I find it unbelieveable that a carrier that doesn’t provide service in Anchorage can offer 768K up and down for much less than the carriers in Anchorage.

Anyhow, since it seems that upgrading my bandwidth isn’t likely to happen any time soon, I think I need to rework some elements of the site. The JS menus on the top bar and right-click currently use images for all of the elements. I will probably rework those to be text only. I would like to move away from JS menus and go to CSS menus, but they don’t work in Internet Explorer. Hmm.

So, for the short term, it looks like I need to pull some of the things that one of my co-workers describes as “way cool” and switch to something that will load faster for those who will notice it – which is anyone with a broadband connection. Of course, the provider says that 360K up is plenty, because I can keep 6 56K modems busy. I personally don’t know anyone who still connects to the internet via dial-up. I am sure there are some out there, and there are others who are on their cable or phone company’s “free” plan who get 56 or 128K cable or DSL connections, but I don’t personally know any of them either.

OS X

If they go one way . . .

I was reading over at Ted Leung ‘s blog that there is a rumor that VMWare is working on a MacOSX version. I have to wonder, could this be the impetus for Apple to release an OSX version that will run on non-Apple hardware, or will VMWare come up with a virtual machine that will look like Apple hardware to OSX? Either way, I would be running to grab my copy of OSX as quick as as I could.

OS X

Official Apple dual-boot Mac/Win software released

Computerworld is reporting today that Apple released a public beta of Boot Camp, a program that uses the GUI to partition the drive, burn an install CD with all the required drivers and install WindowsXP for dual booting on a MacX86. It is currently available as a limited time trial, but is reported to be included in the next version of OSX, 10.5 Leopard, which is to be released later this year.

This seems to be coming from Apple a lot quicker than anyone guessed. With that in mind, how much longer will it be before Apple releases a version of OSX that doesn’t require Apple hardware? Given that their business model involves selling the hardware on which to run their OS I doubt it could be anytime soon, although I really do hope they decide to take that route.

Despite the assertions of Apple’s senior vice president of worlwide marketing, Phillip Schiller, I don’t think that Apple necessarily has “superior hardware” nor do I think that the dual boot strategy makes me more apt to switch. I have long built my own PCs using the hardware I choose, or ordered from vendors where I can select the hardware to be installed, and I don’t intend to change that. I would not be surprised to find that I am not alone in hoping that Apple releases an “any X86 hardware” version of OSX.

Until then, I won’t hold my breath.

Development

When to upgrade?

I have a minor (or possibly major) problem with my favorite Java IDE, . It seems that even though version 5.5 Q-build has been promoted to Build 1, I still have issues with using version 4.

I was much more comfortable with the workings of version 3 and earlier, where setting up projects and working within projects seemed much simpler. I still find myself frustrated with version 4 and the need to explicitly import the libraries I routinely use. With version 3 and earlier I imported those libraries generically for all projects. I still haven’t figured out how to do that in version 4 or 5. So now that the world is moving on what am I to do? I guess I will just have to upgrade and bite the bullet.

Security

Comment Spam

While not usually on the top of the list of dangerous attacks, blog comment spam is a serious annoyance if nothing else. I just watched half a dozen spam comments pop up in the span of 30 seconds. Nice work by the bot, but a total pain in my rear.

So, I removed the spam comments and added the “magic word” pyBlosxom plugin available here. This is not perfect, but it should at least deter automated bots from generating comments.

A more serious type of comment spam was mentiond by Ted Leung – where a spammer uses the comment field to insert an entire email message including headers, which most comment mailers will simply pass through the open SMTP connection where the mail server will blithely parse and send out the message based on the headers contained. Ted’s workaround involves wrapping any To: From: and Subject: in the comment body in html tags so it will still display, but will be illegal as SMTP commands.

Once again, the arms race continues, but by taking the simplest methods of correction, we leave ourselves in a better position to later add more and different kinds of protection against attacks that (maybe) haven’t been invented yet.

Community

Community built VMs for VMWare Player

For those who are unaware, offers the free VMWare player. It’s an ok way to bridge the gap between not having any virtualization and a full-blown VMWare Workstation. There are only a limited number of pre-built Virtual Machines for VMWare player from the VMWare site, however.

There are instructions online on how to install a new OS in VMWare Player, but of course that means that you can’t install VMWare Tools.

The better solution (for the short term) is to allow those who have a full VMWare Workstation installed to create virtual machines for use in the player. Riding to the rescue on this front is vmwarez.com – a site that offers prebuilt virtual machines of Open Source OSes for use in VMWare Player. And I see that there are finally some community built machines showing up on the VMWare site now, as well.

I would, however, still recommend getting VMWare Workstation as soon as you can. It is more than worth it!

Database

Why PostgreSQL

This article about answers the five most common excuses people give for not trying PostgreSQL, or for sticking with their proprietary RDBMS (such as Oracle or SQL Server).