ruquay k calloway

I wanted to upgrade Ubuntu to 12.04 right when it came out.  Because upgrading from a current install has never worked well for me, I actually install on a new partition and set things up from there.

Over time I built up the strategy of mounting a separate partition on /home/, so that all my data just moves along with me on the new install.  Having tried multiple distributions in the past, I started to notice that some incompatibilities happen as programs start to read & write hidden files to  the home directory, and these files must sometimes have compatibility changes.  That’s the reason I moved away from Banshee some time ago: the database files were upgraded by a later version, and then I couldn’t even start Banshee from the older operating system.  Still, there are lots of other programs that use these hidden “dot” files.  VirtualBox hides the entire virtual machine files in a “.VirtualBox” folder.

My first install attempt I tried the usual route: mount /dev/sda1 on /home, mount /dev/sdb1 home /home.backup, and install my OS on /dev/sdc8.  The installation for Ubuntu 12.04 was indeed very slick, as commented by many others.  And indeed, it allowed me to easily setup my mounts as I wished.  Congrats to the dev team for all that.

The problem came when I tried to log in.  The screen blanked, and returned to the login.  There was no message about an incorrect password, but I figured that must have been the problem.  After multiple attempts, I thought something else must be going on.  I moved away from the GUI to one of the terminals (Ctrl+Alt+F1) and tried to log in… some error about permissions that I didn’t write down or remember came up, and that was that.  I probably should have written it down and reported it, but in those moments I’m more likely to move on to actually get done what I want (plus I always feel some amount of blame for not being a “normal” user, customizing stuff and installing servers and crap).

Here is how I’ve solved my problems this time around, plus some issues I’ve run into:

• my normal home drive is mounted on /home.drive/, my backup on /home.backup/ (backup runs via rsync every hour or so)
• I deleted the standard folders “Music”, “Pictures”, etc. and made symlinks to the old folders, e.g. “Documents -> /home.drive/ruquay/Documents”
• For programs that I actually want to use the hidden files, I am linking them as they come up.  So far, my files .hgrc and .emacs are linked, and the directories .ssh and .VirtualBox.
• Thunderbird: I manually edited my “~/.thunderbird/profiles.ini” file.  There is a [Profile0] section, in which I changed “IsRelative=1″ to “IsRelative=0″ and the “Path” setting to point directly to “/home.drive/ruquay/.thunderbird/….” directory containing my profile.  It was totally awesome that, after this small change, Thunderbird went on working exactly as I expected, no changes required.
• Firefox: as above for Thunderbird, there is a “~/.mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini” file.  I just pointed this to the profile directory located on my /home.drive/, and everything worked.  Firebug is back, saved passwords are back, everything seems to be back and well.
• Compiz Grid still doesn’t work “right” (to my opinion) by default, and the one thing that’s most annoyed me ever since Ubuntu 11.10 (I think that’s the version it changed in).  Luckily, someone created a comment with instructions to downgrade Grid that worked for me (after a restart, if I recall) here:

  https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/compiz-plugins-main/+bug/897575

  I still had to use CCSM (CompizConfig Settings Manager) to re-bind the grid keys, because they weren’t working.  While I was at it, I removed the (annoying, for me) “Edges” feature of Grid, which I think was copied from Windows (Vista? 7?) which makes a window take up half/all the screen when it’s dragged all the way to the side or top edge.  I can’t stand that feature, and it seems inferior to the 1/2-1/3-1/4-3/4-2/3 toggling rotation of the older version of Grid.  If there is anything Ubuntu could do to appease both those used to the old Grid behaviour, as well as adherents to the new Unity interface, it would be this:

• reinstate the “Put Left” and “Put Right” behaviour, but with optional toggling
• by default, keep the current style of only the 1/2 proportions.  This would remove the confusing (I guess) toggle behaviour for those who don’t like it.
• make a checkbox to disable the “Edge” grid feature entirely.  Currently, you have to disable each edge individually.
• in CCSM, add some checkboxes for opening up other fractional parts for horizontal toggling: we can select 2/3, 3/4, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4
• the ultimate would be to have some kind of drag & drop interface for these fractions in two lists (used & unused).  the “used” list would show the used fractional parts that will be iterated through, in the order they will be iterated.  Someone like me would have a “used” list of “2/3″, “1/2″, “1/3″, because those are the proportions that work well for my current monitor.
• Getting Emacs to start up in true fullscreen mode: after installation, find the Emacs start icon and drag it to the desktop.  This creates and “emacs23.desktop” file in the Desktop folder.  Edit the Properties->Command of the icon (or the Exec property of the file) to add the “-fs” parameter.
• Put myself in the group “www-data”.  Some old junk for web development has permission issues.  It would be wonderful to develop things in the future running only on FCGI, with the server process running with the permissions of the owner.  Alas, such is not the case.

To end on a positive note, some things I’ve really liked about 12.04:

• Remmina is back as the default remote desktop client
• Rhythmbox is back as the default music player.  If only Banshee had implemented genre-browsing, there would have never been a reason for me to uninstall it.
• Some things just seem faster.  I don’t know if they are, or it’s some UI trickery to make me perceive things as faster.  Which, it actually doesn’t really matter which of those things are true.

I am no longer plagued by spam mails, thank goodness those days are over.  Now with MS Online Services (forced to use it, for now), I instead get an email telling me I have spam, and I delete this message instead of deleting the original spam.  At least it’s limited to once a day, I suppose.

Dear ruquay@myworkaddress.com: You have 1 NEW spam messages as of December 4, 2011 4:52 AM (UTC)

The following is a list of messages that have been stopped by the Spam Quarantine email filtering service.

To recover a message to your Inbox, click the “Move to Inbox” link.

Messages are automatically deleted from Spam Quarantine after 15 days.

*The ‘Not Junk’ feature is not available for items filtered due to custom spam filter settings or for those who do not have permission to access Spam Quarantine.

Sender	Subject	Date (UTC)	Size	Move to Inbox
“Paradise Club Betting” <e@etb.net.co>	Großzügiger Willkommens-Bonus bedeutet g	Dec 5, 2011 8:21 AM	3841	Move to Inbox

Now I get blog spam, which are apparently the only kind of comments I get on my blog.  They almost invariably include some kind of spelling “error” which has of course been programmed in by whoever thinks this kind of thing is fun.

 You know what, I’m very much ilncined to agree.

That’s, uh, “Jalene”, whose home page is apparently www.bing.com.  Of course, all the Googlers are keeping up with my writings as well:

Until I found this I thought I’d have to spend the day isinde.  –Tracy

It’s much esaeir to understand when you put it that way!  –Lilian

Keep it cmonig, writers, this is good stuff. –Taran

And a few more others, supposedly from Bing and Facebook:

Just do me a favor and keep wrtinig such trenchant analyses, OK? –Maggie (bing.com)

That’s really tnhkiing out of the box. Thanks!  –Kaylea

Surprisingly well-written and ifonrmative for a free online article.  –Keylon

If I ever “get the time”, I’ll have to make a tutorial about how to make a bot that makes comments like these, but I don’t know if I’ll ever actually dredge up motivation for that exercise.

Anyway, that’s just the latest round of comments.  The first round was a steaming pile of Viagra spam, SEO spam, and the one comment that stands a chance of being legitimate:

yy7lver xysf06q qklu4tg gnf9xny y3i1nzj.

But I doubt it.

UPDATE: within a few hours of this post going live, sure enough, another intelligent and witty commenter appeared:

I got what you mean, thanks for swing up. Woh I am pleased to effort this website finished google. Thanks For Share Spam ruquay’s blog.

What can I say, LA Weight Loss, but that I got what you mean, Boh am I gruntled to struggle this comment finished yahoo.co.uk.  And as for the spam — well, thank you.

UPDATE 2: finally, I seem to have scored some Russian spam:

Оригинальная идея. Только вот интересно сколько время на это потрачено?

(The original idea. Just been wondering how much time is spent? — via Google Translate)

Keep it coming!

UPDATE 3: possibly my favourite piece of spam ever (via email, 13th of April 2012):

Your order for our air commuter services has been taken and processed. The rotorcraft will be at your disposal from 3.00 friday to 1.15 a.m. saturday. Once again, the rates are as follows:
1 hour in the air: 858$
Takeoff / Landing: 255$
1 hour standstill on the ground: 136$
Longest fly-time is 3 hours.
When flying for longer distances, a second pilot is needed, and the cost accordingly increases by 157$ per hour.

Bill you will be find in the attachment.(Open with Internet Explorer Only)

With respect
Stephany Hampton

MD5 check sum: f2b72946338072b72bafd6333807d680

As soon as I got this, I delighted in the thought of flying around Munich in a helicopter, maybe dashing off to the Alps for lunch. It might be the first spam that ever improved my day!

Ever since I read that article by Cory Doctorow, I stopped using the same password for everything “unimportant” and started using different passwords for every single site.  I randomly generate them, and save them in an encrypted file with a very log password that I’ve never uttered to a single soul.  Which, of course, means that I can’t log into anything without having the file (and, because it’s TrueCrypt, root privileges).

Having written an internal application that has survived a move from our internal servers (which only required a passphrase to access) to an external web server (which authenticates via SSL certificates), and then an integration with HTTP Digest Authentication, I’ve had to work on different authentication schemes.  And that was just the internal stuff.  Some external software we are rolling out uses OpenID to integrate two totally different web applications with a single sign-on.  We did a lot of work to make sure that our customers can just click a button to securely jump to another application.  Doing that made me see that OpenID really is the way to go (at least for nerdheads like me).

And so when I stumbled upon the WordPress plugin for OpenID authentication, I installed it and linked my Google account (two-factor authentication there, kudos for that, Google).  And that is how I was able to log in even when I’ve left my encrypted password file at home.

I came across an article on The Register today about Richard Stallman’s continued comments on Steve Jobs.  After reading both it and the original posting by Richard Stallman I started wondering just how much was written by the author.  I thought it would be nice to see in color the parts from Richard Stallman and Anna Leach.  Of course, perhaps ironically, pretty much this entire post is also not written by me, the sole purpose being merely to add visual information to the original article on The Register.  In the following quote, everything Stallman wrote is coloured in red:

As if Richard Stallman’s first pot shot at Steve Jobs didn’t cause enough outrage, the founder of the Free Software Foundation has decided to clarify his stance – with some more criticism. Apple products digitally handcuff their users, Stallman observes. And the fact that they are pretty just makes it worse.

According to the bearded firebrand, the important thing to remember about Jobs is how he directed those who are still alive: the billionaire iPhone baron told Apple staff to “make general purpose computers with digital handcuffs more controlling and unjust than ever before”.

“He designed them to refuse even to let users install their own choice of applications — and installing free (freedom-respecting) applications is entirely forbidden,” wrote Stallman.

“He even tried to make it illegal to install software not approved by Apple.”

In Stallman’s opinion, Jobs’ achievement of making his computers smooth and pleasurable only masked their true nature:

Jobs saw how to make these computers stylish and smooth. That would normally be positive, but not in this case, since it has the paradoxical effect of making their controlling nature seem acceptable.

And responsibility for one of technology’s greatest challenges lies at Steve’s feet: the ongoing patent wars, a situation that Stallman sees as a by-product of Jobs’ rage towards Android.

Jobs also made it a personal crusade to attack Android with software patents. In practice, Android is not entirely free software, but it is a big step closer compared with the iPhone. If Apple’s guns hit Android, they could wipe out all possibility of free software portable devices that are attractive to use. Jobs’ final legacy may be the patent disaster we have warned about for 20 years.

Oh and all those journalists blabbering on about how great the iPhone is are just making everything worse, for everyone:

Jobs’ death inspired a flood of articles lauding him for these very devices. That further increases their potential for harm, which is why now more than ever we must focus attention on it. We must not let secondary considerations about Apple or Jobs distract us from this threat until we have thwarted it.

We look forward to more. ®

Somehow, I often wind up at The Register without remembering how I got there, and it’s not one of the (admittedly few) sites that I navigate directly to.  I suppose this article is one of many that are largely modifications of existing text.  What I can’t seem to tease out of this article is any sense of either condemnation or support of Stallman.  What does that last sentence, “We look forward to more”, mean?  More from Stallman?  More articles about how great the iPhone is?

I try to open up a site I’m responsible for managing, and get a page with the text “[an error occurred while processing this directive]“.  OK, looks like I’ve somehow misconfigured Apache, although I haven’t changed anything since it last worked?!?!

Maybe I fargled the htdigest file that our PHP app has direct access to (to manage users and groups on web server level)?  No, they look normal.  Can’t think of anything new or out of the ordinary.

Time to look at the Apache logs… nothing.  As in, NO log entries at all for the request in the error log file.  How could I have screwed up so badly that Apache can’t even log its own errors?

Let’s try removing the path COMPLETELY from the domain name and see what we get.  Ahah… it’s clear now… mistyped domain.  My worldview is safe, for now…

Have you ever been trying to debug URL rewriting rules from the wonderful mod_rewrite?  The logs put in a LOT of information with each line, and if you’re the only one making requests during intense debugging, you can ignore most of it.

Here’s what you do:

That’ll show you the most relevant information, small enough to fit in an emacs buffer in the same screen as the Apache configuration file you’re editing.  Then, it’ll truncate the log for the next round.

Somehow I always seem to forget about cut.

This was in my Inbox today:

Dear Ruquay,

New earning opportunities are now available for viewing.

Plus, in recognition of the 10th anniversary of 9/11,
be sure to view a special offer from the USO. Honor
our troops by donating to the USO today and earn
100 bonus miles.

Simply copy and paste the link below and you’ll be
forwarded directly to your Member homepage on the
e-Miles website.

Sincerely,
The e-Miles Team

Heute habe ich versucht, meine gesammelte Payback Punkte einzulösen.  Man bekommt aber von der Payback Webseite nicht den Eindruck, dass es überhaupt möglich sei, die Punkte als Barauszahlung einzulösen.  Ich war mir aber sicher, ich habe dies schon mal gemacht.  Glücklicherweise hat Google die Seite gefunden.  Man muss nach “payback punkte bargeld” oder änliches suchen.

Es hat mich gewundert aber… wieso ist es gut versteckt?  Kann es sein, dass Payback nicht möchte, dass die Kunden die Punkte als Barauszahlung einlösen?  Nach vielen erfolgslosen Versuchen, den Weg zum Formular ohne Hilfe von Google festzustellen, habe ich folgende Mail per Kontaktformular an Payback gesendet:

Hallo,
Ich versuche ab und zu meine Punkte als Barauszahlung einzulösen.  Das Formular, womit ich dies machen kann, scheint aber ganz gut versteckt zu sein.
Warum steht dieses Formular nicht direkt als Einlösemöglichkeit unter der Kategorie “Punkte Einlösen”?
Ich musste per Google auf das Formular kommen, da es *nicht* von “Punkte Einlösen” verlinkt war!

Leider gibt es immer ein paar Fehler, wenn ich auf Deutsch schreibe, aber ich glaube die Payback Webseite hat einen grösseren Fehler gemacht:

In the standard Gnome desktop with Ubuntu, there’s a button on the upper right panel that looks like an on/off switch:

When you click on that, you get a drop-down menu of further options, including log out, shut down, etc.  It looks like this:

In my case, however, there is some frustrating bug which is causing the on/off button to completely disappear.  It is replaced with an apparent duplicate of the username button just to the left:

I have no clue about Gnome panels and programming them (though I do know a little bit about configuring them), so I don’t really know what is causing this.  It’s one of those small experiences that makes me wonder whether GNU/Linux can ever make for a good desktop system.  Of course the bug has nothing to do with Linux itself, and I’m sure someone out there knows – or at least has a damned good idea – why this happens.  Maybe it’s even fixed in a later distribution (but in the later distributions I’ve tried, something else is much more broken).

The typical computer user does not care about the details, does NOT want to open a terminal and type “gnome-panel –replace” (and is thinking, “How in the hell was I supposed to know to do that?”) or “sudo shutdown -h now”, and might just resort to holding down the (physical) off button until it’s over.

In a way this is worse than getting a one-time BSOD¹, because at least in that case you know something is very wrong, and you can feel justified in “improperly” shutting down your computer.  But in this case, everything seems to be working normally, there’s just no apparent way to shut down the computer.

1. blue (or black) screen of death [↩]

The other day I got a newsletter from Mozilla.  Here is the first paragraph:

This newsletter is called Firefox & You, so it’s obviously always about you, but this month it’s even more about you. It’s you-er. It’s focused on how you use the Web and ways you can customize Firefox exactly the way you like it and make it your own, like with some custom Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2 Personas. It’s basically the You Show starring You!

There are two scenarios that I can imagine: that nobody really thought about the impression this text would make, or that somebody really did think about the impression the text would make and targeted that.  The first scenario I can forgive, maybe writing on a deadline, etc.  The second scenario creeps me out a bit.

Perhaps the effect stems from a recent re-reading of Enough by John Naish, a book of interesting philosophical reflections on excess.  Chapter 6, “Enough Happiness” starts with his thoughts after seeing an Intel advertisement with the slogan, “More Computing Power Means More You”:

… Intel’s snappy slogan would, however, have been condemned as darkly satanic in the fifteenth century, when the spiritually proper approach meant declaring ‘Less me’.

Anyway, that last line of the Firefox & You newsletter, “It’s basically the You Show starring You!” kind of struck a nerve with me… it seems to openly appeal to undiluted narcissism.  Of course, the rest of the newsletter goes on to offer truly helpful advice for customizing Firefox, which is clearly a good thing.  Being able to control your software and make it fit your needs is great, and I’m thankful that Firefox is such a great browser.

But probably the last thing I’d ever want is a me show, or a show starring me, and the thought that a reader would get excited to be more self-centered is… baffling.