I’ve made quite a bit of use out of the wikipedia in recent years. I know it has it’s flaws (I’ve run across some first hand), but I’ve found typos in textbooks as well. However that doesn’t mean that it can’t be a very useful reference. In fact, in some of my browsing I’ve gone through the spanish language version of the wikipedia putting some of my spanish reading skills to the test. Anyway, in the last couple days I became curious for various reasons about actually downloading a copy and installing the wikipedia locally. Now, I know one of the benefits of the wikipedia is that it’s collaborative and this way I’ll miss out on current and changing/improving/updating articles. But I can see some reasons to want to have a “snapshot”.
Tag: support
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Recording online streams (real / wma) to mp3 format (or ogg) with mplayer
So, I’ve been looking back over my list of “scripts” that are pulling in audio from various news sources online for the onlineradiotv.com site. It’s also got me doing a bit more spanish language listening than I had been. In the car, I usually use an mp3 player (the nexia) with a small FM transmitter to listen. One of the problems is that I only have a very short list of sources that I can actually download an mp3 from. The rest are streams only. Some are mms (Windows media) streams, others are (rtsp) real server streams… yet others are “playlist” style asf, or ram files that point to other files (rm or asx/wma)…
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Running Google Earth under Wine on linux
A while back I talked about Google Earth under Codeweavers wine almost working (or at least I think I mentioned it here, I KNOW I tried it…) Well, I tried with vanilla wine as well and couldn’t get it to work, BUT… I’ve just finished a successful run of it. How you might ask? Here are some of the details…
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Oracle updates
I normally don’t follow updates for Oracle, as I don’t have an installation running Oracle to support. Right now, I’m quite glad of that… The Security Fix is talking about the 82 patches they released Tuesday in their quarterly patch release. The fact that they released 82 patches is not what’s disturbing though. According to the article, Oracle claims that 75% of their patches come from internally reported vulnerabilities….
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Microsoft Support extensions for XP
Good news for Windows XP users (especially XP Home). Microsoft has extended the support period for XP Home and Pro. Originally, security patch related support was expected to end December 31st of this year. According to the article for XP Home…
So for the consumer versions of Windows XP, mainstream support was going to end on December 31, 2006 and there was no guarantee of any security hot-fixes beyond that time. Microsoft has now extended the mainstream support deadline for the consumer versions to an undefined date that is two years after the release of the follow-on operating system.
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Microsoft’s speed to get security patches out
Brian Krebs at the Security Fix has done an interesting study related to how long it takes Microsoft to release a security fix for a problem, starting from the time they are notified of the security vulnerability. For the most part, 134.5 days has been the window between notification and vulnerability patching for the last 2 years from Microsoft. (That is for vulnerabilities that were submitted to Microsoft through the normal process…)
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WMF vulnerability advisory update
Microsoft has updated their security bulletin on the WMF vulnerability to note a couple things. One, they acknowledge that embedded images within a document can trigger the exploit. Previously they said this needed further investigation. Second, they are seconding what I’ve been finding that Windows 98 and other pre-XP systems are not as critically at risk for this vulnerability….
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What is a Ping?
The word “ping” is used in computer networking. It’s usually used to test and see if a machine is able to be “reached” or “talked to” over a network. The terminology reminds me of the concept of radar systems. I have a tendency to think of it as “bouncing a test” off the other machine. Most every operating system that has networking support can ping, or should be able to answer a ping request. Many times it’s used as a basic test of the ability to access the internet.
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XP Home support period
This is something you should consider if you are looking to abandoned a pre-Winxp operating system in favor of a flavor of XP. The product life cycle. In their infinite wisdom, Microsoft has different support plans for consumer products than “business-products”. As such… arstechnica.com has a post explaining why support for Windows XP Home will end the end of this year 12/31/06 and Windows XP Pro will continue to be supported perhaps as long as December of 2013.
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Moving from Evolution to Konqueror
After several weeks of good behaviour from Evolution 2.4 since the Mandriva 2006 upgrade, I started getting a wierd error on sending messages *(Mail From response Error Unknown). Nothing within my settings for Evolution had changed since the night before when things worked… I tested with Kontact and was able to send mail, closed it, opened it, bonobo-slay’ed it… still getting the error, so… since I was on the fence as to whether or not I was going to migrate to Kontact, I went ahead with it. I’ve already covered moving the calendar and contact (addressbook) information in a previous post. So this will be on moving the messages.