http://www.nyunews.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2005/12/09/4399264e25c89
So now you know, Coke really is evil.
Coca Cola in Columbia had their union organisers murdered. After refusing to give in to demands of a third party investigation, New York University has decided to remove all Coke machines from its campus.
This site is unreal. It’s like a todo list for personal goals and achievements. Think of a place where everyone in the world can place what they want to do and get feedback from it. The site has a zeigheist of what the worlds most impotant ‘things’ are.
http://43things.com/
http://a9.com/-/company/help.jsp#column-history
I like a9.com. Its a search engine thats run by Amazon. It uses Google’s search engine for web based searches so the results are of good quality. It also lets you search a plethora of other sources (some 200 and counting)
The trick is that the results from different sources appear in multiple panes in your browser, all at the same time. This helps by showing you different perspectives of your search term and a broader scope of what your search means to different sites. Therefore you can write better searches and find what you want quicker with little effort.
Initially I thought it was just another gimmicky engine trying to catch the search engine train until I realised the usefulness of the multi-engine search. I got started with it because a9 users get a small discount on Amazon purchases just by signing in and using the search engine (the discount kicks in after a couple of weeks of use)
There is a toolbar for both Firefox and Internet Explorer which does the sign in automatically so you’ll be eligible for that discount in no-time. The other aspect is that the system has a diary, bookmarks and history features that are computer independent which means that you can have a very fast & portable online lifestyle. Today I realised that a9 had been tracing my browsing history for the past 6 months. Many would feel this is a risk of their privacy, but more so I found it useful. Any firefox browser on any platform can install the a9 toolbar. Those using a desktop search tool to keep tabs on their browsing history are no longer restricted to a single platform.
The Art of Change: Breaking a Habit
An article about procrastination that I found through 43things.com
This Novell Cool Solutions page begins a trail on figuring out how to get Samba working with the SuseFirewall switched on. It explains all the key components well and provides references to further reading.
Although a solution is provided, it only covers the situation that you will never be using one of the interfaces and talks about using other software to manipulate the iptables system (the kernal level firewall if you will). I wanted to keep things simple and thought I’d try to champion a way, or at least build reasoning on enabling SMB over the firewall using the standard Yast tools, without opening the share up to who knows what on the big bad Internet.
It actually led me to read Chapter 23 of the Suse Linux Reference Guide about Security in Linux. It’s a well written doc that explains how the operating system uses iptables to manipulate packets that flow through a machine. The other key concept explained in this doc, are the firewall zones, internal, external and DMZ (demilatarised zone) which may be new to you if you are coming from using a mainstream firewall in a Windows OS. Each interface is associated with one zone only.
The internal zone consists of interfaces that are usually plugged into each other – places on a local LAN you can trust. You have an external zone consisting of the Internet and other untrusted sources. Suse’s default setup is to place both your network interfaces in the external zone. The yast wizard is very leading and the only place you can dictate allowed services with minimal effort is in the external zone.
I think SuSEFirewall makes the assumption that you are connecting one port directly to a dsl modem (ppp interface) and you have a seperate network cable going out to your local server. One interface is external and the other internal and thus you can specify what services can run between LAN machines and what services can run between internet machines seperately.
When researching this problem, I noticed that writers of firewall articles were careful to emphasise the importance of setting the zones correcly and that is another piece of the puzzle. If all your interfaces and services run out of the external zone, but the external zone merely represents a connection to a router than its your routers responsibility to be the firewall for your network.
There is still more to read, and I’ll edit this blog as I get to them.
Ways to configure SuSEfirewall
Consider SuSEFirewall as an interface to the iptables that the operating system uses to dictate its packet filtering. SuSEFirewall can be configured with Yast’s Security->Firewall component which provides wizards for ‘ease-of-use’ setup. The only problem is that there is no specific SMB Client rule and the SMB Server rule doesn’t appear to work.
/etc/sysconfig/SUSEfirewall2 is the controlling file of the firewall. Its a good config file to read as it explains all the paramaters with examples. This file is what the Yast module actually writes to once you’ve made changes to the firewall. I found that you can also manipulate this file via the /etc/sysconfig module in Yast which just wraps the comments and their paramaters up in a nifty GUI.
Having used various *nix desktops, I’ve grown accustom to the everything you select, goes to the clipboard. Using either a middle or right click, or CTRL-V will paste the contents where its intended.
What I didn’t realise is that there are actually 2 clipboards. One for the keyboard shortcut method and one for the selection. As per the Klipper documenation:
The X Window System® uses two separate clipboard buffers: the “selection” and the “clipboard”. Text is placed in the selection buffer by simply selecting it, and can be pasted with the middle mouse button. To place text in the clipboard buffer, select it and press Ctrl-X or Ctrl-C. Text from the clipboard buffer is pasted using Ctrl-V or by selecting Edit->Paste.
There is a setting in the Klipper preferences to either keep the clipboards seperate (default) or automatically synchronise them. Selecting the former led me back to my happy, select text anywhere and paste with CTRL-V as well as middle mouse button. As I grow to become more of a haXor, I may see the benefit in two clipboards, but for now…
Old Windows habbits die hard
A quick guide to installing packages from the packman online source
At present I’m trying to solve an issue with the wireless lan causing the entire system to freeze up at the point it picks up an IP address.
Still yet to find anywhere online that mentions the problem, but it would be nice to see me rip the guts out of it and start again.
The site above though did provide a good intro to wireless components on linux. I’m starting to get my head around the wireless tools commands (they are in /usr/sbin instead of regular /sbin/
I did try a variety of things. The only thing I could pinpoint was that I could establish a connection to the Access Point, it was only freezing on obtaining an IP address. I had made a change to my router as well specifying the DNS addresses to divy out instead of relying on the defaults that I get from PPPoE session it establishes automatically – Could that be causing the problem? Well, not really, because I was still getting freezes when I was on the train… perhaps picking up someone else’s access point, not uncommon on my train line.
Initially the device was set to activate At Boot Time which is why I couldn’t even launch KDE with the wireless card switched on. After starting the laptop with the wireless card switched off, changing the start device to MANUAL alieviated the boot time crash.
Using YAST, I changed a few more settings. First I specified a static IP address. I noticed that the MTU setting had been removed entirely, so I set that back to 1500 (not sure of the suitability of this value on a wireless connection but oh well). I changed the activation to Hot Plug which is close enough to AtBootTime but the documentation claims to be a bit less of a crybaby when things go wrong. Because I suspected the DNS to be the problem to, I specified the DNS servers in the Host and Routing prefs rather than let DHCP find them.
Using Kinternet, I reestablished the connection. To my suprise it connected, used the IP’s I had assigned it. The only problem was that I couldn’t resolve domain names, I could only ping my router and computers on my network.
I went back in, set the DNS to obtain values via DHCP and so far, so good.
http://www.turnoffyourtv.com/international/bbc.html
I have heard this before, but I had never really read into it till now. What most people take for granted around the world is a liberty that most Britain’s don’t have. Free TV.
You see, whilst I adore the BBC media coverage and documentaries, there has been a governmental clause from day dot that the public pay for a license to contribute to the cost of running a radio/TV station.
Fair enough, the pay for use system does have its advantages. Less ads, arguably better content and less skew from the interests of big business are some examples. But the problem is what happens if you don’t watch TV, or rather you choose not to watch the BBC related programming.
TV Licenses in Britain earn a great deal of revenue for the BBC. In order to enforce the collection of licenses, a TV Licensing agency manages the collection of annual dues and uses various techniques to tell whether the occupier of a house is using a Television set or not. There are large fines for not owning up to having a TV & much like car registration, when a television changes hands, be it from a dealer or the 2nd hand market, then the change must also be noted and the new owners must get a license also.
The problem seems to be that if you don’t own a TV, or choose not to watch it, you are consistently asked every 2 years, to prove your non-use of the TV. It appears that simply stating that you don’t like TV isn’t enough, rather if you have a TV just for watching DVD’s for arguments sake, you must get the set neutered by an electrician such that it cannot pick up TV signals.
I have not heard of such a thing anywhere else in the ‘free’ world. Whilst most governments seem to be concerned about censorship to the media as a whole, the UK appear to be forcing you to watch their censored view.
My view of the BBC to date has been that their news is much less biased than most local news so that is one plus, but the fact that you are suspected of TV watching until proven innocent seems rather strange. Mainly because Britains have let their government get away with it for so long shows what can happen when leadership is let to go unchecked and unquestioned.
http://www.bravia-advert.com/
This TV ad has been on for a week or so now. Thousands of coloured balls bouncing down a hilly street. 
At first you don’t know what its for, something techy looking and I thought it was a printer commercial. As it turns out Sony has an ad for their newest TV. But while all these balls are bouncing down the street, there is this an acoustic soundtrack in the background and its very catchy…. I’ll say again, that amazing soundtrack in the background is extremely amazing. Metaphorically something inside me wants to say, “the song resonates across many planes of existence, drawing upon a common purpose we are all trying to rise up to.”
So with my new found fanaticism, some web research brings that Sony has dedicated a website to this commercial, which explains the making of it and most importantly, the track that’s played in the background.
If finding the website almost instantly wasn’t co-incidental enough, finding the artist Jose Gonzalez web presence, shows he is playing a show in my city in 10 days time.
After listening to Jose Gonzalez’s Myspace site with Dee, it is unanimously decided that we go to the Northcote Social Club, Nov 29. Here is hoping for a hot night out with a few drinks chilling out to this guys tunes.
Can’t capture enough the feeling that this guy has left. For myself, who is normally into metal, this acoustic act is a unique unexplainable deviance. But I know that I’m good at overtalking things up, lets see how he actually performs. 😉
