The first problem is the most concerning to me; when you sign up it emails you the account information, password and all. That’s right; it sends you the password in clear text. How a startup in 2008 is able to get away with this is beyond me. A password should never be able to be decrypted and much less sent via an insecure method such as email.

The widget also needs quite a bit more customization options. The biggest option I would like to see is the ability to separate the footer into two lines instead of having the width of the sidebar break the line in an odd place. A checkbox in the customization panel to change this would be a great addition.

Another issue I personally had was how do you suggest a topic? You click the text on the top of the widget, but it took me over 5 minutes to figure this out. I was searching around on the skribit site and finally found the answer by randomly clicking around finally hitting the top text. I think that a little hover option over the top text would solve that issue. If when you put the mouse over that section it says something like “Click here to suggest a topic” it would have been that much easier.

There is also not an easy way that I am aware of to add a suggestion to your own site without using the widget. I would have liked to be able to add a few topics to start out in the back end panel so that it wasn’t just an empty box.

The final issue is really just for those of us who are security paranoid and block javascript by default. If you do not allow javascript from skribit then you get a wonderful little message that says “The page you were looking for doesn’t exist. You may have mistyped the address or the page may have moved.” The best part is that if you do a soft page refresh with javascript enabled it doesn’t go away. You have to do a hard refresh to get the widget working. Not pretty.

As much as this sounds like I hate this widget I don’t. It is really one of the best tools I’ve seen for online writers. The reason for writing this post is in hopes that someone will find it and be able to make it even better for everyone.

First, you have to understand the various settings on the camera. You can go out and use auto mode, but you might as well just have a point in shoot camera. To get the most out of a camera you should really learn it inside and out. This is like any other technical project. Understand the hardware so its just second nature.

The next major geek factor is the fact that you have to be very precise in your work. To shoot a good picture you need to know what your subject is going to do prior to doing it. For example if you are shooting a car race; you need to know where the car will be to get the exact picture you are looking for. It may sound easy, but when you are trying to focus the camera at the exact right spot it can be very tedious.

Once the picture is taken there is this entire world of post processing. To really make the shot look great you need to use a piece of software to alter it. Change the contrast, white-balance, sharpness, and so many other factors. There are very few photographs today that have not been processed in some way shape or form. With Adobe Lightroom and Apple Aperture you can easily organize your work while also being able to easily tweak the images.

Even more than all of these technical reasons photography gives us a reason to get outside. Most geeks live on their computers and to have a hobby that includes going outside its a nice change of pace. it is relaxing go take some pictures. Even though your brain does not fully shut off, you are using a different section. For someone who is artistically challenged it is a very nice change of pace to see some of your work that actually looks decent.

BashPodder Reloaded 0.1

Basic Operation
The first step is to list each of your podcast’s RSS feeds you want downloaded in bp.conf. I’ve left a few in there so that you can test out the script with known working feeds.

This next step is optional, but recommended. Run refresh.sh from the command line. This script will update all of the rss feeds without downloading any of the content. It is a way to only download the latest podcasts in the future. If you follow over 100 podcasts like myself this is really a necessary step. Downloading the last 10 items in 100 feeds will take days, I tried and finally gave up and wrote this portion of the script.

To run the actual download script all you need to do is run bashpodder_reloaded.sh and let it do its job. If you ran refresh.sh then nothing will be downloaded here. You may want to edit podcast.log so that it will download a podcast.

This script is designed to run via a cronjob and will update at any interval that you prefer. I’ve got the script running in 15 minute intervals and it seems to be the ideal time. Much quicker and you risk the script overwriting the log files.

A few Warnings
This does require wget which is not included with OS X by default. You can either install it through MacPorts or install the source yourself. Installing the source is probably the simpilest solution (./configure && make && sudo make install) if you do not already have MacPorts installed on your system.

The script is designed to be threaded. This means that it will download every single item in every single feed at the same time. I had my system lock up multiple times while working on this script do to a few thousand wget processes being created. When ran correctly it should work rather smoothly, but if there is a ton of content to download you may feel some latency in your network connection.

I have not tested this script on any OS besides OS X 10.5.2 and can not guarantee that it will work. There is nothing in the script that should prevent it from functioning on any *NIX system, but it has not been tested at this point in time.

Feedback
I always welcome feedback. If the script does not work for you or would like to see additional features please leave a comment and let me know.

The fix to this problem is to use only two DNS servers. I choose OpenDNS as their servers are reliable. I don’t like the ads they put on the pages when you type a domain wrong, but the benefits are good enough to look over this issue.

1. Upgrade to the newest version legally and without paying money

I can not argue with this, most Linux distributions are 100% free. Great start

2. Have the latest version of the operating system run faster than the previous version on the same hardware

Are you saying that my 10+ year old computer is going to run the latest and greatest version of Ubuntu without any problems? And its going to run it faster than any previous version? Wow, I had no idea.

3. Easily install and run different graphical interfaces if I don’t like the default setup

Who besides geeks actually care about doing this? Giving the average computer user this choice is just plain confusing. Having a single option for most people is almost always the best option. By giving most non-technical users a choice you are just creating pain for the person who has to support them. Oh wait, you totally forgot about supporting users. That’s right, you did not think of actual end users needing support.

4. Install twenty programs with one command

Why does the average computer user need to do that? Being a geek I can understand the need to install a bunch of things at once. For the normal non-geek this option will not be used.

5. Have the system automatically update all my installed programs for me.

Very valid point. Only problem, what about software not in the software repositories? It will update most of your software, but not all in that case. (Yes, I am reaching here, but it is a very valid point.)

6. Install the same copy of my OS (Ubuntu) on multiple computers without worrying about license restrictions or activation keys

This is the same exact point as number one.

7. Give away copies of the operating system and other programs that run on it without breaking any laws, governmental or ethical or moral, because it was all intended to be used this way

Once again, same as number one and six.

8. Have full control over my computer hardware and know that there are no secret back doors in my software, put there by malicious software companies or governments

Are you actually auditing all of your software to verify this? Yes having open source software will give you the option to verify that it is not backdoored, but do does the end user have the know how to actually do this? Some will argue that the software being open source will allow others to audit the software. This is very true, but has nothing to do with control on your computer.

9. Run without using a virus scanner, adware/spyware protection, and not reboot my computer for months, even when I do keep up with all of the latest security updates

I don’t run any of that software myself either. On the Windows side I know how to browse safe and on the Mac side it is not needed either. The end user does need this kind of software on a Windows machine, but not a Mac.

10. Run my computer without needing to defragment my hard drive, ever

This too is a Windows only problem. There is software to defrag both Linux and OS X, both are useless.

11. Try out software, decide I don’t like it, uninstall it, and know that it didn’t leave little bits of stuff in a registry that can build up and slow down my machine

Once again, the registry is a Windows thing. OS X is actually cleaner than Linux when it comes to most software. All of the preferences are stored inside the application install directory and therefore when you remove the software it is also gone. To remove software from OS X you just drag the folder which looks like an application into the trash.

12. Make a major mistake that requires a complete reinstallation and be able to do it in less than an hour, because I put all of my data on a separate partition from the operating system and program files

Since OS X is based on UNIX you can do the same thing. It is not the default as that is just confusing to anyone without some *NIX background. Heck, its kind of hard to even do that in Ubuntu as they’ve hidden the setting in the installer for the same reason.

13. Boot into a desktop with flash and effects as cool as Windows Vista on a three year old computer…in less than 40 seconds, including the time it takes me to type my username and password to login

Not without some major tweaking. Linux by default is the slowest booting OSs around. You can certainly speed up this process, but it is not by any means speedy. On my test vista box the bootup time was about 30 seconds including 5 seconds of waiting for grub to time out.

14. Customize anything I want, legally, including my favorite programs. I can even track down the software developers to ask them questions, contribute ideas, and get involved in the actual design/software writing process if I want to

Who actually does this outisde of geeks? No one. Having all of these options are great, but they are time consuming and confusing.

15. Have 4+ word processor windows open working on papers, listen to music, play with flashy desktop effects, have contact with a largely happy community and have firefox, instant messaging, and email clients all open at the same time, without ever having had to beg someone for a code to make my os work, and without the system running so slow it is useless

What I’ve got open at this very second on XP: Firefox with 7 tabs, Thunderbird, MS Word 2007, Pidgin, VLC playing music, 2 ssh sessions open via PuTTY. This computer is speedy and using very little resources.

16. Use the command “dpkg –get-selections > pkg.list” to make a full, detailed list of all software I have installed, backup my /etc and /home directories on a separate partition, and you are able to recover your system any time, easily

All this really means is that you’ve got too much software installed on your computer. If you can’t easily remember the software that you have installed then you clearly have too much. Its also mentioned that this is used for reinstalling after a reformat. With timemachine on Leopard all of the software is backed up and you can restore everything during the install. It is a fairly slow process, but I did it a few months back just to test it. Worked perfectly.

17. Run multiple desktops simultaneously, or even allow multiple users to log in and use the computer simultaneously

I see the benefit of this as a geek, but can the average person set it up? Most people would rather spend the extra money to buy another computer than to figure this out. You still need a keyboard, mouse, and monitor for this to function correctly. Why not just take the extra step get the computer?

18. Resize a hard disk partition without having to delete it and without losing the data on it

gParted will resize an ntfs partion and you can do the same thing in OS X.

19. Use the same hardware for more than 5 years before it really needs to be replaced…I have some hardware that is nearly 10 years old, running Linux, and still useful

See number 2.

20. Browse the web while the OS is being installed!

Now this is stretching if I have ever seen it.  Installing an OS using a live CD is actually slower than using a text based installer. Since the computer has to process all of the graphics for what you are doing instead of focusing on the install it slows down the process.

21. Use almost any hardware and have a driver for it included with the operating system…eliminating the need to scour the internet to find the hardware manufacturer’s website to locate one

The current trend in computing is to smaller and smaller devices. Most users spend more time on a laptop than desktop. Now lets say one of these users wants to have 5.1 surround sound when they are at home. The problem is that almost all laptops do not support this, you need some external piece of hardware. The first logical option would be to get a USB sound card that supports surround sound. Wait, there is almost no support for USB audio in Linux.

22. Get the source code for almost anything, including the OS kernel and most of my applications

Once again, who does this? Having the source code is great if you are a geek and you actually know how to program. For someone who is neither that does this matter. Most Linux advocates state open source as Linux’s huge feature. The problem is the majority of people just don’t care. Almost every end user I talk to wants one thing, ease of use. And that right there is the problem with Linux. For the average computer user there are just too many options when it comes to Linux.

Linux is a timesink and a real problem when it comes to productivity. You have all of these different options and it just takes a bunch of time to set anything up. I gave up running Linux on my machines as I was spending way too much time trying to tweak every little setting to get it just right. My primary home machine run OS X and it allows me to get things done without having to think about every little thing.  I actually find XP to be better than Linux when it comes to productivity as it does have fewer options to tweak with than Linux.

In my geekyness I decided to give the latest nightly build a run, massive mistake. They’ve totally removed all normal functionality from typing in URLs. It is now a search bar and not a URL bar. For example, today I was trying to access the webmail for my works domain to test out a reported problem. I type in the letter W and what comes up? Nothing useful. I typed in the URL no less then 2 hours before and would expect it to show up, instead I got a bunch of www domains.

In my search to find a solution I found my original post on the subject to be 6 pages long and no one has a real answer to the issue. Everyone is saying that you will have to use an extension to fix this. Fine, I installed an extension called oldbar which is supposed to fix it. One small problem, it only fixes the GUI (the part I really could care less about) and the results are still the same.

At this point in time there is no fix that I am aware of for ths URL bar. The awesome bar is a piece of crap and its pretty much a show stopper for me. If this does not get fixed I will not be able to use Firefox 3.

 If anyone has a fix for this massive flaw I would love to hear about it.

The first step is to add the following to lighttpd.conf for the domain:

server.error-handler-404 = “/index.php?error=404″

The next step is to make sure your actual 404 page gives the 404 error. In your templates 404.php you need to add the following to the top of the file:

 <?php header(”HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found”); ?>

Once you get these two settings in place you will be able to set the custom permalinks to whatever you would like.

Links to posts are going to change quite a bit from the old version. At the moment I’ve not taken the time to use lighttpd rewrites as of the moment. I would suggest not bookmarking anything for the next few days as they will likely break.

For RSS subscribers nothing should change. I’ve been running feedburer for a long time and it should continue to work. You might want to verify that your feed is pointing to http://feeds.zacgarrett.com/tech-geek.

If you notice any massive problems please feel free to contact me.

The book starts out with a story in the prologue about how the author met with some people in Boston who showed him that IT could be a utility. It asserted that this was his idea from some previous book he wrote. The story itself was boring and meaningless. It didn’t grab my attention nor was there any good information to keep me reading.

Hoping that the prologue was just something that would not give a grasp on the rest of the book I continued reading to see where this was going. The author asserts that there is this new there is a new technology that would allow the entire IT department to be outsourced. I don’t understand, how this is a new technology? Companies have been outsourcing this department for over ten years now. The Carr does not explain himself in any fashion to prove his theory.

The next problem I saw was the order in which content was presented. For example, the author mentions placing an order on Amazon’s site and doing so on dial up services. The very next paragraph it talks about the spread of broadband and how it has changed everything. Amazon did not become popular until broadband was in use. Most people did not order anything online until after they had broadband. People would go into work and order items online due to the fact they had broadband at work.

The final straw for me was when the author mentioned Napster. The book states that Napster was created by a college dropout and that it started Web 2.0. Napster was started by Shawn Fanning while he was attending college. He later dropped out after the success of this software. The software was still in the first dotcom bubble. The technology might have shown people how to create the services we use today; but it did not start web 2.0.

The author clearly does not know technology and should not be writing about it. I’ve only read the first chapter of this book and will not read any more; it’s worthless to me. The book first section of this book is boring and filled with inaccuracies, it is like a bad business blog trying to write about technology – so bad its almost humorous.

The reason for going with Ubuntu was that it is the most popular Linux distro today. Normally I would go with something a little more customizable such as debian or gentoo. This time I wanted to take a look at exactly what everyone says is the easiest Linux distro ever. Okay, that is really up for debate, but most people are talking about Ubuntu today.

Installation

For me the install of Ubuntu was far from painless. The graphics card in the computer is too good or some may say too new. I was not greeted with the normal live CD goodness that I am used to when installing in VMWare or even on my old laptop. Instead I was greeted with a warning saying that the system was not able to detect my graphics card and monitor. It did give me the option to change my resolution, there was just one small problem; it didn’t work for me.

When I changed the resolution the xorg server would stop functioning. It would just show the list of items that had been started while booting. When I issued the startx command it resulted in a great error message. After about ten minutes of tweaking with xorg.conf I gave up and just rebooted the computer. Once again I tried to change the resolution to something better than 640×480; no luck.

Finally I decided to install with the low res options and fix it later. The actual install process was fairly painless. It should be noted that installing Vista and Server 2008 are actually easier now. There are fewer options and the install process seems to be faster. Those OSs use image files to install the OS which is extremely efficient. This is not a complaint, just an observation.

Once installed I got a great error from my BIOS, no master boot record found. The installer decided to install grub on one of the secondary drives instead of the same one the OS. It didn’t even install on the Windows XP drive; it installed on my file storage drive. There is only backed up files on this drive; no OSs. After changing the boot order of the hard drives I was back in business.

X11 Problems

Well, I was on to my next challenge; no login screen.The normal GUI didn’t show up; instead a great flashing screen of xorg trying to start and failing. Good ol’ GDM was continuly trying to start and would fail resulting in the flashing screen. After around a minute it gave an error stating that X had some sort of error and was not able to start and it would try again in three minutes. There I was, on the command line login screen with GDM going to try and start X again in three minutes.

I quickly was able to get a working xorg.conf file to get gnome up and running with startx. After three minutes GDM decided to try again even though I was already running X. It failed again and made the screen flash on me. I didn’t realize what was going on exactly until about the third time and then I was able to shut down GDM (sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop).

The next step was to install the proprietary NVIDIA drivers. Once again, another roadblock; my graphics card is not supported via the standard Ubuntu way. I had to install the driver directly from NVIDIA which needed the kernel source and quite a few other compiling tools to allow it to be installed. Following the tutorial it was a fairly easy process; I’ve done the same thing many times in the past.

After this process I restarted the computer to make sure everything was working. GDM still didn’t work. Instead of troubleshooting the problem I uninstalled GDM (sudo apt-get remove gdm) and just used startx instead.

Wine Gaming

I’ve been hearing great things about wine as of late being able to run game at full speed. So, my next step was to get Team Fortress 2 running under wine. After finding a tutorial on the subject I went at it. The install process of Steam was fairly simple and I was able to copy all of my games over from my NTFS partition so no major download was needed.

The game started up with an error stating that my graphics card could not handle the game. I ignored the error as I knew that it could; a 8800GT can clearly handle the game. The game loaded and looked surprisingly good. Of course I hit another snag; when I hit the options menu in the game and it froze. I had to end the process the hard way (killall -9 hl2.exe).

After starting the game again I just hit the find server option and clicked on a server to join. Frozen once again. After a little bit of analysis I saw an error about my USB sound card not functioning. After two hours of trying to get it functioning I gave up and just used the onboard sound card to see if I could get something working. Audio worked but the game still did not.

To see if any game would work I tried Half-Life 2, a game that has been out since 2004 and should be better supported. Once again the game froze. All temperatures on the computer were fine, nothing was overheating the game just wouldn’t load.

Conclusion

This right here is the reason Linux will never be a viable desktop solution. I have over three years of Linux experience on both the desktop and server and look at all of the problems I had. I was able to get around most of them by knowing what was going on and what it took to find the solution.

I’ve now booted out of Linux and am in the XP partition of the computer. I really thought I missed Linux as my primary desktop. Today I remembered why I got a Mac instead; all of the *NIX power with the ease of use of an Apple product.

My time is now actually worth something now and I need a computer that works without constantly needing attention. This test rules out Linux and with all of the badware on Windows the best option for me is OS X. If you run Linux as your primary OS, the more power to you. I just no longer have the energy to put up with the hassle.