Trolltech's Green phone

iPhone? Puh-leeze.

I'd rather spend several hundred dollars on an unlocked phone that can run any apps I want.

backgrounds for Microsoft Virtual Desktop Manager

For a long time, virtual desktops were the exclusive realm of Linux users, but Microsoft released their own "Windows XP MSVDM Power Toy" a few years ago. I use virtual desktops on all my computers now, regardless of operating system (i.e. Mac OS X, Ubuntu and XP)-- but there's one feature about the MSVDM Power Toy that sets it apart from the other utilities I use, and that's the ability to set different desktop wallpapers for each virtual desktop.

To that end, I've created a very spartan series of desktop backgrounds specifically for MSVDM-- nothing fancy, just plain dark grey background with a large number in the center to help folks who are new to the whole virtual desktop paradigm keep track of which desktop they are actually looking at in the present moment. Feel free to use, modify, pass around, ignore, etc.

Back the [DATA] up!

I was reading Lifehacker one morning a few days ago and came to realize that my "backup strategy" for my iBook was not as robust as it could be. I can copy my data to my external USB hard drive . . . but if something should ever happen to my iBook's hard drive (e.g. power failure? botched effort to repartition prior to an Ubuntu install??), it's not like my old PowerPC iBook will allow me to boot up over the USB port. No, I'd be forced to reinstall my OS from scratch, then reinstall all my apps, and only then would I be able to restore my data. Older PowerPC iBooks can only boot up over drives connected via Firewire.

It was time to find a new external hard drive that used Firewire (aka 1394). Microcenter, Circuit City, Best Buy, etc. -- all of them disappointed me.

The overwhelming majority of external drives were only USB, and the one or two exceptions with Firewire were outrageously expensive presumably because they had larger storage capacities. I even kicked around the idea of purchasing one of those "DIY" hard drive enclosure kits with Firewire ports and adding a smaller/less costly hard drive myself. No go there either, because the only enclosure kit I could find with Firewire on the shelves was over $50 from MacAlly.

That's when I decided I was going to purchase my next backup solution online.

Would you believe even trying to find a good deal with Froogle was complicated? No matter what search terms I used, it seemed impossible to separate the external hard drive results from the external enclosure kits. If I found something that looked promising, I'd click through the reseller link and find that the item was either no longer available or some kind of "mix up." After several hours of searching off and on, I finally wound up settling for a 160 GB IDE hard drive and a halfway decent "Metal Gear" drive enclosure.

I think I managed to get a good deal on this buy, because when I do a search for comparably priced external hard drives, the storage sizes are all coming up as 120 GB.

But wait . . . there's more!

The irony of all this is that some of the folks in my organization's IT department have suddenly decided they are unhappy with the weekly backup process we jointly came up with five months ago. Go figure-- first they say that backing up the data on the web servers isn't in their realm of capability or responsibility. Then, after you sit down and work out the details of how you can take up that responsibility, they come back several months later and tell you that you are not permitted to do it that way any more.

Typical. (rolls eyes)

The good news, however, is that once I get my new personal backup solution up and running at home, I can redeploy my old external USB drive as my new backup alternative solution at work.

Blogging, Talking, and so on.

I hate blogging.

I know, sounds crazy-- but you've got to admit, it would explain why I've all but stopped blogging. And I've certainly stopped blogging anything truly meaningful for months.

Why do I hate blogging?

Well, let's see: it's like talking and being misunderstood, except worse, because the being misunderstood happens even more frequently and it is more permanent.

Black list versus white list

About a year ago, while I was still working for my previous organization, I was put on a committee to help address the issues of people installing unauthorized software on the computers in our enterprise. The main concern was malware and spyware that could be used to gather passwords and/or sensitive data, but the approach to the problem was pretty random-- pretty much a black list of the top twenty malware programs to scan for over the network. Since malware programs appear/disappear/evolve on a daily basis, there's a good chance that we would miss something.

Naturally, I suggested inverting the paradigm and using a "white list" approach. In other words, come up with a list of authorized programs and treat anything that wasn't on that list as a matter for further investigation. If it wound up being a benevolent program (i.e. they are using OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office), then it gets put on our "white list" and will be ignored next time.

Naturally, my idea was shot down before it was even given a fair shake . . . it was too difficult for our organization to come up with a "white list" of authorized programs, blah blah blah.

Needless to say, (but I will anyway) Symantec is now saying that the paradigm for Internet Security should shift from a "black list" approach-- which has the potential to be infinite-- to a "white list" approach (which could be large, but should still remain finite).

Three words: Told. You. So.

The days are getting cooler . . .

Summer is definitely over. The past three mornings, I've had to run the defroster in my car to clear the windows.

Ubuntu

Ubuntu? Maybe they should consider renaming it to Ubiquntu. (as in, "you can't swing a dead cat without hitting someone that's using it.")

I've tried Ubuntu off and on over the past year, downloading the Live CD and test driving it on X86 and PPC. It had a very polished desktop and package of applications, but there were always these minor issues (i.e. unsupported model of wireless, or having to backup my hard drive and repartition in order to turn my laptop into a dual booting Xp/Ubuntu laptop, etc.) that kept me from making any long term use of it.

Well, this weekend, due to a combination of two factors, I've decided to give Ubuntu a longer trial period.

One: Thanks to a wonderful little installer/hack called Wubi, I was able to install Ubuntu as a boot up option without the inconvenience of backing up, repartioning and restoring my Windows hard drive. It basically creates a linux partition inside of a large file (4 or 5 GB) on the Windows partition. Very slick. I don't know why this tool hasn't gotten more buzz than it has, because I think it's pure genius.

Two: Although Ubuntu uses 2.6.x kernel, it still didn't seem to find the Dell TrueMobile 1350/Broadcom chipset WiFi card quite correctly enough to give me wireless functionality. Fortunately, uber-geek David Watson had the same problem last May and was thoughtful enough to post his solution for anyone else who might come along with the same problem in the future. Once I followed those directions, my wireless card sprung to life and started working flawlessly (including, I might add, support for WPA2 on my home access point).

For sheer ease of use out of the box, I think Puppy is still the distribution to beat . . . but Ubuntu offers a heck of a lot without the child's bike/training wheels feeling that I get from Puppy.

Puppy Linux . . . Wow!

Okay, I've spent several days wrestling with Damn Small Linux. It's a very cool distribution, but unfortunately, I could not get the wireless card in my laptop to work with it. It's one of those Broadcom chipset based wireless cards, unfortunately, and Broadcom never saw fit to release their specifications with the Linux community.

I even tried using NDISWrapper to get Linux to trick out the Windows drivers, but that didn't work either. It is entirely possible, of course, that I did it incorrectly since I'm pretty much a total noob at this.

I wound up finding out that there was a reverse engineered driver for the Dell 1350/Broadcom wireless, but it was integrated in with version 2.6 of the Linux Kernel, and DSL was still using the old 2.4 kernel. So, either I had to find a way to hack the DSL kernel on my bootable USB drive (yeah, good luck with that, noob!) or switch to a distribution that used the newer 2.6 kernel instead.

So, I went back through my list of live CD distros and found . . . Puppy Linux. I know, what's up with the name? The Linux mascot is supposed to be a penguin, not a puppy. Still, it sounded promising based on everything that I had read, plus it had the 2.6 kernel in it, so it should support my wireless card.

I had to burn the .iso file to a CD in order to create the bootable USB key, but I have got to say that this Puppy Linux distro has been amazing. I sort of suspect it's Linux with big old training wheels on it, but I was able to download it, get it installed on my USB key, booting my computer, etc. and all the network related stuff (find and activate the wireless card, use WPA2 to get on my locked down network) in less than an hour. Oh, yeah-- and Puppy has a mechanism that lets you save the state of your session across reboots.

It looks like, for the time being at least, that Puppy Linux is the (don't say it, don't say it) . . . top dog.