I’ve stayed away from politics on this site, the main reason is I figure the surest way to offend visitors is politically, these days so many people seem so starkly divided into one political camp or the other, that it seems very easy to step on peoples political sensibilities. I am, however going to talk about politics, but mainly in the general sense to illustrate something I’ve thought about for quite a while and something that is grossly absent in most news coverage of polls and elections. With all science there are assumptions, things that you “assume” to be true so you can proceed with evaluating everything. In the science of polling, the words Sampling and turnout are quite relevant. (What?) In regards to polls, sampling is deciding what the makeup of your poll sample is, (percentage makeup by party affiliation) and trying to match that to expected turnout. But how do you predict turnout? Let’s take the following example of cartoonia….
Month: October 2006
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ftp access problems with lulu.com
As I’ve mentioned, in the last week, I’ve released a CD through lulu.com and I’ve also done a calendar, one of the frustrations I’ve had was the inability to do an ftpupload. My username and password were continually rejected. Well, after contacting support and being told someone would be back in touch with me in a few days, I just figured out the issue. I had a character in my password (#) that they didn’t like, I changed my password to something without the # sign and was immediately able to log in. So, IF you’re trying to ftp into ftpupload.lulu.com and are sure you have the login/password right, but still are being denied try changing to a password that JUST has a mix of numbers and letters (preferrably a good mix of upper/lower case as well.)
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Time, value, ROI, Google and this site…. Googlebummed
This is a fairly significant “state of this site” type post and well… if you’re a usual visitor you might want to read/skim this one. It’s been about 15 months or so since the last big redesign of this site and as some long time lurkers may know, the updates were FEW and far between before moving to WordPress and this new layout. I mean, a year or so between updates was not uncommon. In the last year+ I’ve had a few spans where a month or so has gone by without posting, but in many cases I’ve been posting multiple (in other cases MANY MANY) posts in a single day.
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WordPress “siblings” released… bbpress and mupress
There are a couple new software packages in wordpress’ family: MuPress which is a multiuser (and multi-site) wordpress archicture… is available. IF that had been available a year ago, I might have based my sites on it, because it sounds as though you could have one backend for several sites. I may yet play around with it, but…. let’s see.. the other entry is bbpress which is a bulletin board backend that integrates with the wordpress user management system (shared user name/passwords/single login kind of stuff..) Good to see these releases and continuing development.
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Scanning over the network, or sharing a scanner on a network
I remember the question from long ago, we had just shared a printer across a windows network and…. wait for it…. “oh, well could I share my scanner too?” On windows the typical answer was NO, at least not unless there was a driver from the scanner manufacturer that supported it, but on linux the answer is an unqualified YES as long as the scanner is supported under linux (so many are..) Using SANE (which is the linux scanner driver backend) you can share out scanners across a network and tips.linux.com has an article on just that topic. I’ve set it up before on my network and it was relatively easy to do and VERY convenient. At that time, I don’t recall a good functional windows client for the SANE driver, but it may have matured a bit by now (last I looked into it was 3-4 years ago.)
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Wireless exploits coming to Metasploit 3…
and the script kiddies rejoiced… It reads as though Metasploit 3 will make it easier than ever for script kiddies everywhere to take full advantage of the local wireless hotspots. Of course, metasploit has it’s good uses by people legitimately testing systems that they are responsible for, for vulnerabilities. But, it does make it very easy for the less skilled to pull off some exploits.
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Lightscribe writing under linux
Lacie has released a tool to write the back of cds using HP’s lightscribe technology under linux. I seem to recall there being a possibility of future support in k3b, but I don’t think that has been done yet. From what I remember about lightscribe is that it would require that you buy specially made cds that support being written using lightscribe. They were a bit more expensive than a standard cdr, but it is an impressive effect.
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IE 7 address bar spoofing issue
Another issue was reported with the new IE 7 and confirmed by Microsoft. It seems that it’s possible for a malicious link to spoof the information in the address bar (make it look like you’re at a site that you’re NOT at.) Incidents.org gives the following possible workaround…
As a quick workaround you may want to configure MSIE 7.0 to open new windows in a new tab. In order to do this, Tools -> Internet Options -> Tabs Settings -> When a pop-up is encountered: Always open pop-ups in a new tab.
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Ubuntu Edgy Eft 6.10 out…
The newest Ubuntu (K/X/Edu as well) is out, Edgy Eft 6.10 is finalized and will be supported for 18 months. (Longer support/users seeking stable proven base should stick with Dapper Drake…) One of the biggest changes I can see from reports is the init process replacement. It sounds like they’ve yielded some good bootup improvements and I’m looking forward to downloading and trying it out. I found it interesting to see that the plan for the 7.04 release of Ubuntu is to include native support for Autopackage which is another approach to making “just any” old program trivial to install on any linux variant.
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The CD is dead….
I’m tempted to say “long live the cd…”, but… EMI’s CEO has declared that the CD is dead. He does point out that you’re not likely to give your Aunt an iTunes download, so “dead” just means “in decline” in this parlance. However, I can’t help but laugh to myself of the notion that I release a cd through lulu of hymns and within the week the CD is declared dead. No, seriously… I haven’t bought a cd in quite a while myself. Mainly because I don’t want to put up with all the DRM restrictions these days. I want to be able to have a simple cd that I can extract to another player IF I WANT. But I want the original CD as a “high quality archived original” in comparison to the mp3 that might be lost when a flash drive or hard drive dies and isn’t quite as high quality.