Five Albums I’m Listening To
For this installment of "Five Things", I have decided to talk about some of the albums that are on my playlist right now that I enjoy listening to.
Mute Math
Mute Math - 2006
Mute Math is difficult to fit into any one genre. While they have an electronica base, they also exhibit both rock and pop stylings. Their music goes from fast-paced trace to smooth downtempo, and is guaranteed to get your head bobbing to the beat. Although this is their first main release, they have also released an EP back in 2004 entitled Reset which is a phenomenal addition to their repertoire. If good music alone doesn't do it for you, they also have a phenomenal stage presence as demonstrated by their both their live performances and their music videos.
Queens Of The Stone Age
Era Vulgaris - 2007
Queens of the Stone Age have never fit into the mold, and their quirky music certainly shows this. Their odd style of music stands out from the crowd, but not so much that their music doesn't go mainstream. Their guitar styling is great to listen to, even if it sometimes isn't the most pleasing to the ears. Their rock styling with lyrics a-la-"Red Hot Chili Peppers" make this a unique band that shouldn't be passed up.
Cake
Comfort Eagle - 2001
Cake's music has always been something to chuckle at, and Comfort Eagle is no exception. Cake is an indie-style band with a sense of a humor and a way with words, and they enjoy using different instruments and effects in their songs. If you're looking for some music to put on while friends are over to hang out, consider this album (and their others) for some background listening. Other notable songs on other albums include the remake of the Muppets song Mahna, Mahna, and the Frank Sinatra song Strangers in the Night.
Royal Crown Revue
Passport to Australia - 2000
Royal Crown Revue is a rockabilly swing group with a knack for getting your feet tapping. Normally I steer clear of live albums because of all the screaming in them. This album is different; there is very little applauding and cheering in it, but is instead graced with the music that you paid for. The band is one of my favorite contemporary jazz groups for their unique sound and groove, and their live album Passport To Australia reaffirms my choice. If you pick up one rockabilly album, make it this one.
Pronobozo
Zero = One = Everything - 2007
Pronobozo is a phenomenal artist; his unique style redefines breakbeat music. After getting exposure on the internet podcast Hak5 by providing much of the music used on the show, he released his album to the masses under the Creative Commons license. The pressed version of his album is a limited quantity version, and is definitely worth picking up for a listen. This is currently my preferred album to listen to while I program; it has the perfect mix of downtempo stylings, breakbeat, and that instrumental "smoove" feel to keep you in the programming groove. What are you waiting for? Go buy this album. Now.
Testing Out Fedora 11
A few years ago, I made the switch on my laptop from Windows to Linux. If I had to summarize the experience, I'd say it's been...well...an experience. It's had its ups and downs as I tinkered around with more distributions than I can remember (I can think of 7, not including different architectures). I initially made the switch because the recovery disks I had burned for my Windows installation weren't working, and I needed a suitable alternative, preferably one that wouldn't bust the bank and would be easy to use. Linux satisfied (and in some cases, excelled) in both of these.
After much deliberation and testing, I finally decided on the Fedora distribution, which I am still with to this day. Ten days ago, they released their newest distribution, Fedora 11 (Codename Leonidas), which added a whole slew of new features. Although I only have a day or so with the new distribution, I've tested a lot of the new features. They are nicely separated into both Technical and Non-Technical.
Non-Technical
20-Second Boot Time
The first problem anyone seems to have with computers is that they take too long to boot up. Fedora 11 helps a lot with this by aiming for a 20-second boot time, from the time you start your computer until the time you log in. It was about 35 seconds for me on a 3 year old laptop, but regardless, that's a huge improvement over, say, Vista's 2-minute boot. If 35 seconds isn't fast enough for you, you might want to loosen up your schedule a little.
Improved Touchpad Support/Features
The one complaint I always here about touchpads on laptops is that people accidentally click on things while they're typing, moving the position of the cursor and inadvertently typing in the middle of a previous paragraph. The newest upgrades to the touchpad drivers are amazing. You have the option of disabling the touchpad while typing, and enabling or disabling mouse clicks by tapping on the touchpad.
My personal favorite, however, it the addition of Multi-Touch scrolling. Rather than having to run your finger along the side of the touchpad, two fingers can be used to scroll. You also have the option of enabling horizontal scrolling. The best part is you don't need a touchpad specifically designed for multi-touch; it works great on mine without any problems.
Nice Graphics
Ok, although a little technical, I'm still putting it in here because who doesn't like smooth-looking graphics with direct acceleration? Enabled from the kernel level, direct acceleration worked right out of the box for me, which means desktop effects work without any configuration. Those who are a little more tech-savvy can obviously look into the coveted Compiz installation.
Technical
ext4
Yeah, that's right: the ext4 filesystem is now standard on Fedora. The filesystem now supports filesystems over 1 exabyte and files up to 16 terabytes in size. If you're going to be creating filesystems or files that large, you don't need to read this review. There are a whole slew of improvements made over ext3, which should make for an overall more reliable experience.
2.6.29 Kernel
The new kernel runs great for me. There's been a lot of new features added, and far more than I can go into depth with. I have yet to have a crash yet, so that is always a good sign.
GNOME 2.26.1 and KDE 4.2.2
Those that have seen the older versions of KDE (ie. pre-4.0) I'm sure remember how "immature" it looked. I always got the impression that it was geared for pre-teens. KDE 4 changes all of that, and makes me seriously reconsider using it. Not only does it look nicer, but everything is well laid out in the menu, and the desktop widgets are integrated into the Desktop Environment. GNOME looks as regular as it always has, but makes some good strides in menu locations and the included applications.
Firefox 3.5b4 and Thunderbird 3
I have been waiting quite a while for both of these to appear in a distribution. Firefox 3.5 is great so far, and Thunderbird looks very promising as well.
Smaller Footprint
Gone are the days of yonder when a Fedora installation was a 3.5GB DVD download with the inability to test it out beforehand. Fedora has reduced the size of the installation media to a staggering 690MB LiveCD, reducing bandwidth usage and and letting you try the distro out before installing. This is one of the best things Fedora has done, and I'm really glad they made the switch.
Afterthoughts
I'm so far really happy with this new release. It's been stable and a lot of new features have been added which helps affirm my decision to stick with Fedora. If you happen to be considering making the switch from Windows, I recommend checking it out. The LiveCD allows you to try things out before installation, which will let you test the waters before plunging in to the deep end.
Technical Difficulties
So, I've had quite a string of bad luck with technology as of late. One incident involved my personal server at home, and the other involved my website.
I spend quite a bit of time on the bus for getting around, mainly because the places I need to get to the most have pretty good service, and also because the price of gasoline is atrocious. Because I spend so much time on the bus, I want to be able to use my time to accomplish something. Although I sometimes use the time to study, I also have used the time for writing on my blog. Sometimes an event inspires writing, and I'd rather start brainstorming immediately than forget what happened.
A few days ago I happened to be writing about the great weather (sounds boring, I know - more on that later), and I wanted to upload the draft on to the blog. Unfortunately, during that process I lost all of my work. Annoyed, I started to rewrite the post, only for it to happen a second time. Those of you who are sharper than normal may have noticed the lack of a post this past Monday; that's why.
When I got home that same day, which happened to be a scorcher of a day, my mother suggested I move my server into another room for the summer. Normally I would ignore anything my mother says about computers, but she raised a valid point about cutting down the temperature in my room. With all the gear running in my room, namely a desktop, server, network switch, TV, and home theatre system, my room is hot in the dead of winter. You can imagine how hot it gets in my west-facing room during the summer.
After finding a suitable spot in the adjacent room, I powered up my server and hooked it up to the network. When I tried to access the server after booting up, I couldn't. A quick look at the network switch told me the network connection wasn't working. My geek instinct kicked in, and I started trying to figure out the problem. I was worried I had damaged my server while moving it, since I plugged the network cable into my laptop and the network was working fine. I ended up making a foolish mistake with the order in which I hooked everything up. In short, my server does not use the network manager service, so if the network cable is not plugged in upon boot, it won't connect to the network.
I guess all I can hope for is that my string of bad luck ends. So far, things seem to be going well with both the install of the new iPod Touch 3.0 firmware and Fedora 11 (updates to be posted about both soon!), so let's hope that things continue on the good streak.
The Schedule
When I started this blog up a short while ago, I was presented with a number of pieces of advice to ensure the so-called "success" of my blog. For a site such as mine, I'm not sure how one might measure success. Monetarily, the site can't be a success since there is no form of income (aside: I sincerely hope that, one day, I will be able to eat those words and the site may provide me with a source of income). I suppose that, for a non-profit, one-man-show style website, one can only hope to be known well enough to be publically recognised. I don't expect that to happen, so I'll settle for being a well-visited blog. I'll consider my first milestone to be 500 unique visitors in a single day, at which point I will not only be happy, but I will set myself a loftier goal which will seem just as unlikely for me to reach.
But I digress. Advice, right? One of the most logical pieces of advice I received was to have a regular schedule that I would regularly update to. Although I toyed around with the idea of updating three times a week, I came to the conclusion that is probably infeasible in the long run. Unfortunately, I don't have the intension of updating frequently enough so that my university marks suffer. So, after much deliberation, I have decided that an update schedule of every Monday and Friday is a reasonable goal to uphold.
This is obviously all dependent on whether I feel like I have something to say, though. Although I don't think it will be much of an issue, there always is the potential of hitting a bit of writer's block. There always is the possibility, though. Because my classes this semester are not computer science courses, I will find it hard to refer to those courses without straying too far off topic (unless one of my professors makes another bone-headed comment again). The fall won't present me with much more inspiration: at least, not directly. If everything goes according to plan, I will have an intern job with a firm involved in computer science, one of which, if I get the job, will not legally allow me to discuss what I do.
That being said, my development work, addiction to music, and everyday experiences I'm sure will provide me with ample fodder for you to stuff your brains with. Plus a little feedback here and there from you guys might give me some incentives to post a little more.
Of course, I might be a little more inclined to post three times a week if I hit 1000 visitors a day...
Going Open Source
The first time I wrote a full website, I made a lot of mistakes. A LOT.
Although not completely obvious from looking at it on the outside, H2H Security Group is built on a pretty shoddy content management system (CMS). There are bugs, there are incomplete sections of the site, and there is little administration that doesn’t require direct database access. I’ve stopped development on the current CMS and decided to go for a complete overhaul. That’s right: I’m completely re-building the system, H2H CMS, from the ground up.
Normally, this would be a preposterous idea, and perhaps it’s not the most efficient route for me to take, but I won’t be walking away from the CMS empty handed. It was an amazing experience working on it. Despite it being terribly designed, I’ve grown a lot as a programmer since I first started. I’ve learned about things like classes, hierarchies, debugging tools, exceptions, mysqli, more advanced MySQL statements, and caching. I've learned about the differences between versions of software such as PHP, which had monumental changes from PHP4 to PHP5. Most importantly, I learned proper software development in a university course. Looking back, every mistake I made during the design of the old CMS I have learned from, and I’m willing to make a mistake if it means that I learn from it.
Another big change I’m making is that I am going Open Source: letting anyone take a look at the source code. I’m sticking with a Creative Commons license, which allows anyone to take the code, modify it, and redistribute it for free, providing they give me credit for the original work. I think it’s the right choice to make, sticking with the hacker mentality and whatnot. With a goal of distributing knowledge and information to the masses, I think the open source route is a logical step to achieving that.
I started off the development of the new CMS quite differently than before; rather than jumping straight into the coding, I started off old-school: with a pen and paper. Design before development helped ensure everything stayed organized this time. Developing class-by-class, piece by piece allowed for logical places to start and stop work.
The part about this CMS that I am most proud of, however, is that security is added and implemented standard - not as an afterthought. Being interested in security, this seemed like a no-brainer, but it seemed to be either non-existant, poorly implemented, or at the expense of efficiency in other systems available. By considering both security and efficiency at the same time, I hope to develop a system that maintains both equally.
I always like to see people become involved in my projects. If someone is interested in helping with the development, let me know, and maybe something can be arranged.
Ohloh Page: http://ohloh.net/p/h2h-cms/
Project Trac Page: http://dj-bri-t.servehttp.com/projects/cms/
Five Web Comics I’m Reading
Something that I will try to do every once in a while is give a review of five of something that I think is particularly noteworthy to take a look at. It could be plugins, software utilities, websites, photos, or, web comics, like today. Today’s installment of Five Things is about five web comics that I make a point of reading whenever they update.
1. Everyday Decay
Everyday Decay takes place in a post-apocalyptic zombie survival scenario, updating Mondays and Fridays. The art is quite impressive, with an interesting story line including drama, comedy, and “a healthy dose of WTF”. If you like zombies (and who doesn’t?), this is definitely one to check out.
2. Cyanide & Happiness
If you’re looking for a daily giggle involving plays on words, take a look over here. The art isn’t amazing, but it’s always worth reading for the comic relief, and there’s no story line so you can pick up at any point without feeling that you’re missing some key point brought up a year and a half ago.
3. Optipess
This is currently one of my favorites that I never miss. Kristian Nygård from Norway does a great job with each comic he makes. The name, Optipess, comes from the combination of two opposite words, optimism and pessimism. And, as Kristian puts it, “the comic is devoid of continuity, character development, story arcs, logic and wit”. Despite that he thinks that his art isn’t great, I disagree. Optipess updates every Monday and Friday.
4. Least I Could Do
LICD is not for the prudish. Its quirky story lines and abundant sexual humor are great for an open mind. The stories are great, the art is fantastic, and it updates every day. Seriously. Check it out.
5. Return on Insanity
Return on Insanity is a comic starting out by my good friend Tyler. It’s had its ups and downs trying to get itself started, but it’s doing great now. There’s a committed artist helping out, and I help with the web design. The story lines have departed nicely from reality, and center around Tyler getting started with his first business endeavor. The art and story has improved ten-fold over the past year as you can see from the archives, and this is one comic not worth passing up.
Education, Please
Sometimes it scares me how woefully uninformed some people are.
I realize that this sounds like I’m bashing people for not knowing about [insert subject here]. I don’t mean that. Really.What I mean by this is that it worries me how some people will talk about topics like they are educated about a topic clearly without doing any prior research about it. More specifically, it worries me how some people who are in positions of teaching, say, as my professor, will talk about some of these topics.
I’m sitting in my economics class one day, and we happen to be discussing monopolies in microeconomics. At some point, my professor starts discussing examples of monopolies, and happens to bring up Microsoft as a monopoly. Now, me being me, I am quick to object and quickly raise my hand, politely correcting her that Microsoft hasn’t been a monopoly for several years; rather, it still (disappointingly) holds a majority share of the market. (Aside: although Windows is on about 55% of servers, I couldn't find any recent numbers for desktops. Let me know if you find it). She continues on like I didn’t mention anything.
The crème de la crop, however, happens to be her discussion about the Microsoft legal battle regarding patents a few years ago. For those of you which have not heard about this (and there’s nothing wrong with that – providing you’re not talking about it like you do), Microsoft faced a legal battle regarding patent issues with its Microsoft product Word. Rather than having done this research before, my professor instead decided to describe it in her own words, which came out something like this: “Microsoft was sued for putting special codes in the programs that they made so that people who didn’t use Windows couldn’t use the programs, and Microsoft refused to release the special codes”.
This seemed about the right time for a strong face-palm. It doesn’t take a third-year computer science student as I am to figure out that she has no idea what she is talking about; rather, anyone who has an idea about how computer programs are made knows that she hasn’t said anything right. If she had done her research about the legal case, which certainly isn’t hard to do with our good friend Google, she would have found that not only that she wasn’t saying anything right about source code, but that what she described was not even what the legal case was about.
I have no qualms about those who have a fact or two slightly off when talking about a particular subject which doesn’t happen to be their forte, but I feel it increasingly hard to sympathize with people who talk about topics in which they have no real knowledge. For clarification, the “special codes” that my professor described is called “source code” which is how people write programs, keeping a program closed source (ie. Not releasing the source code) is perfectly legal, and a company is under absolutely no obligation to compile their software to work with all operating systems on the market.
Perhaps the lack of knowledge of how programs are made is a moot point, seeing as how the legal case didn’t even involve programming at all. I guess my point, if one even has one when rhetorically ranting to the world, is that it frustrates me when those in a knowledge-distributing position (ie. A professor) distributes information without doing the proper research on it. The only part of the legal battle that my professor had right was that Microsoft was involved. I realize that this is a monumental, nay impossible, problem to combat, yet it still feels like a rantable topic. Rest assured, when I pass along information to the masses, you won’t need to put a [citation needed] tag after everything I write. [citation needed]
Meat In A Tin
Over the past week or so, I've found that one of my other websites, H2H Security Group, has been getting a lot of spam. Unfortunately, it's not just the random ads from bots. Bots I can deal with, and it's unlikely that they'll ever get past registration because there's a reCAPTCHA in the registration. No, I have to deal with credit card spam.
Most people I know get spam in their email; it happens to almost all of us if we have a presence on the web with that email address. If any of you have read the spam before, usually it's just a random string of words with a few links in them. Heck, some of them are just downright amusing. But credit card spam is more of a problem; not only is a nuisance, but it's highly illegal. Not something that you want on a legitimate website.
The first problem was determining if the spam was automated (ie. from a bot), or a person who was posting the spam. The easiest way to do this was to install the reCAPTCHA system as I mentioned above. If you've signed up for any major service recently, chances are you've encountered a CAPTCHA of some sort. CAPTCHAs are the images with random numbers and letters which is supposed to be hard to read by an automated system, but fairly easy for a human. They are specifically designed to prevent bots from accessing the system. Although the reCAPTCHA system I installed stopped some of the spam, it didn't stop all of it.
Stopping spam requires ruling your web site with an iron fist. Some automated scripts will help minimize it, but on a long enough timeline, spam will get through. It's bound to happen. Currently the only way I've found to stop the spam is to start blocking IP addresses. In the case of this incident, I was forced to block an entire subnet of IP addresses. I found that ISP in Vietnam was producing a lot of the spam that I received. Despite numerous emails to their abuse department I found out that they deleted the emails without reading them, and made the decision to block the entire ISP from my web site.
Doing so is a bit of a double-edged knife. On one hand, the spam has stopped since I've done this (although I only did this two days ago - let's see what happens!). On the other hand, I have pretty much cut off an entire country from visiting my site. Granted, the primary language there is not my primary target for my site, but still has the problem of cutting off legitimate users.
Of course, this is not a foolproof solution. There's no reason that a person on that ISP couldn't use a proxy to access my site and post more spam, but I'm taking a proactive approach to preventing this spam, and that's about all one can do. Perhaps an interesting project would be to keep a central repository of known spamming IP addresses so that those IPs could be blocked by many websites around the world, and not just by a single server. Allowing a group of servers who pick up spam regularly to add IPs to the list for a number of days, and then many servers could download a list. It’s maybe something to consider to stop the spread of spam across the world.
I Caved…
I vowed never again to use WordPress, but here I am.
Why, do you ask? Mostly because I got sick of having a domain just sitting there and not doing anything. When my own software is developed, I will probably swap it out again for my own custom software.
Ok, I'm getting WAY too far ahead of myself here. Who am I, and why do you care? Well, you probably don't. I'm one more person with an opinion. But I will hopefully discuss some interesting things from time to time, both about life, computing, technology, and anything else that happens to strike my fancy from time to time. Hopefully, I will be able to update regularly. And hopefully I might say something that may get the cogs turning and provoke some thought. I'm sure my blog will most likely be about programming and the like, but will hopefully also discuss my other interests such as music and photography.
Stay tuned, San Diego,
--Brian
I Am
- Brian
- Computer Science Student
- Swing Dancer
- Photographer
- Recreational Security Analyst
- brian [at] dj-bri-t [dot] net
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- The Best Ways to De-Stink Your Stuff http://t.co/0VCirOs2
- Student Makes Real-Life Portal Turret - Slashdot http://t.co/dl1IVDIp
- Faith in humanity restored: "What is the nicest thing you've ever done that no one knows about?" [Reddit] http://t.co/k9FfMxc8
