I joined back in 1999 when Internet was pretty small and ICQ was the best instant messaging client around, unless you were hanging out on various IRC networks such [...]]]> For anyone living or having lived in Sweden, you have most likely been a member of the Lunarstorm community (or maybe even Stajlplejs before it changed name).

I joined back in 1999 when Internet was pretty small and ICQ was the best instant messaging client around, unless you were hanging out on various IRC networks such as DALNet.

“Blippo har besökt LunarStorm 1744 gånger. Han blev medlem 18 mar 1999.”

What it says is that I only visited 1,744 times between March 18, 1999 until August 9, 2010 (almost 4200 days). Some members have been visiting many many more times than me in a shorter period. I really wasn’t into that site for a long time (I moved to Finland and was more engaged in the national community IRC-Galleria).

I can’t say I will miss Lunarstorm, because I didn’t use that site for years and lately it had become way too passive to even have a remote chance to sucking me back in. That’s the reason the site had to be shut down in the first place. Not enough active users, everyone migrating to Bilddagboken and Facebook.

Lunarstorm predates all these new platforms and I will most likely not be joining any other new Swedish online community. I’m feel like in the generation passé and don’t think I will fit in, or that I wanna fit in.

So long Lunarstorm! You served your time, you had your times of glory. Now it’s time to die.
You won’t be missed too much, you will just be replaced. The culture of today is to erase anything old and replace it with new. Kids today don’t like antiques

Even after two month or let alone two [...]]]> You know, I watched the President’s speech on Youtube about his reactions on the BP oil spilll catastrophe and it all seems so surrea to mel. I wish I could be a on ship out there doing whatever I could do to help. Anyone need an inexperienced oil-disaster-fixer?

Even after two month or let alone two years, I don’t think this thing will just “go away” so I bet there’s plenty of need for people to come help. If I could operate some sort of machine that does something useful I would volunteer to do that job for no cost other than food and a place to sleep in for a few weeks or months. For more physical work I would require more payment, for example some water too
It would give a sort of good feeling when you know you are doing something to help the world. Also it would be nice to just get away from all this online business for a little while and hide, see, the point comes next:

My main concern for today was more IT related not oil…

The more I read about current supercomputers, superclusters and all the extreme computing power and storage capacity we have today, I get this sense of powerlessness. For example, Google’s new Caffeine index and how quickly they pull in new data into it:

Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day

We already have corporate networks with over 220,000 multicore computers  all working in tandem, with computing capability exceeding several peta-FLOPS, capable of table sorts and scans of terabytes of data in mere minutes or hours… Suddenly it feels like a totally laughable idea that my old computer could ever encrypt a message in a minute that one of those monster supercomputers wouldn’t be able to decrypt in less than a few minutes. Yea, ridiculous idea to imagine there is a way to keep top secret classified information for years to come. They (governments that have invested in this technology, academia and private businesses such as Google, Amazon etc. with huge computing clouds)  could brute-force you way before the data becomes declassified. Especially if you use any sort of short key length algorithms.

They say RSA 768 bits was cracked and that 1024 bits is already obsolete. So why not just use 4096 or 8192 bits? Can we use 16k bits or 32k, do these algorithms even extend this far? And would adding more bits matter the  slightest, for real? In a couple more years, there’s going to be even more raw computing power distributed over insane amounts of computer cores. If your life depends on it, use the maximum key length your algorithm allows and store the data in a safe, behind tons of concrete and steel. And armed security. And tanks. And preferably on another planet.

Maybe I should set up a password cracking business selling services at 20k / hour.
If I were to build a super computer for $ 350 million, it would pay itself back in a couple of years assuming it would be constantly operational at that price. Even at 80% sale rate and 10k / hour, it would still take about 5 years to become profitable business. But I bet the data centre would be nuked by opposing forces before any military secrets were cracked, so let’s add another hundred millions to the secret underground bunker. Or is this not enough?

Just better to stop using emails and chats, unless you can be sure Google and others don’t save all of it into a database forever.

Note to self: Vote for any political party that is pushing shorter maximum data retention periods. It’s ok if companies know me for a year or so, but not for 10 or 20. Keeping a life long register should (and probably is?) illegal in most countries. But there’s no way for us to really know how many magnetic tapes we’ve been backed up into thus so far, is there?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5258

It has a very dull name, “Embedded Objects”, but despite this little marketing fallacy it really is one awesome utility.

Now that Youtube increased their video quality, it also means file sizes went up and that my computer [...]]]> This is the second best Firefox add-on, ever! It shares the top spot with the other add-on previously mentioned:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5258

It has a very dull name, “Embedded Objects”, but despite this little marketing fallacy it really is one awesome utility.

Now that Youtube increased their video quality, it also means file sizes went up and that my computer has a hard time decoding these big H.264 encoded video files inside Firefox. Flash doesn’t seem to play them as fast as VLC media player. At least not on my old and slow Linux system. So for me the best option is to download the video from Youtube and other sites.

Before I used to get a Greasemonkey script to download videos, it worked fine in many circumstances. If there wasn’t a ready made script available, I had to create a custom one. Now this add-on comes to the rescue!

Open a site, any site, with embedded video. If the add-on icon (bottom right on your status bar) doesn’t come up, try pushing play inside the video player. Usually by then the add-on sniffs out the correct video URL and you can save it. Easy and convenient.

So far I only had problems with another site embedding the video site inside a frame, but that was easy enough to avoid. Right click on the frame -> open in new tab, and the add-on worked fine.

Who wouldn’t want it? Get it!

Never be Rick [...]]]> The AlertCheck add-on fixes a mozilla bug that has been open since 2000-11-23 (that’s 9.5 years now!). It allows you to disable infinitely blocking JavaScript alert loops, such as those used in evil scamming and virus sites, and most importantly it makes Rick Rolling pages easy to disable.

Who wouldn’t want it? Get it!

Never be Rick Rolled again or lose important work since you have to kill your browser of you get stuck in a nasty alert box hell.

Small things like this is why Firefox sucks, and Opera and Chrome rocks (because they had this shipped in their product long time ago!)

Without my knowledge, [...]]]> Seriously getting fed up with this piece of crap Operating System called Ubuntu/Kubuntu. Not one month goes by without me having to battle yet another failure situation. That’s not what I call a good system to maintain. Maybe it’s my own fault for not running software that is at least 2 generations old…?

Without my knowledge, my system had become unbootable because of some broken software install. Since I rarely reboot my system, it could basically have been anything. After Grub tries to load, I get the following serious error that halts the boot-up process:

Gave up waiting for root device. Common problems:
Alert! /dev/disk/by-uuid/0011<long sequence of numbers> does not exist. Dropping to a shell

Long story short. I don’t even remember upgrading my kernel or grub, but when I looked around for solutions there were several suggestions of adding a longer bootdelay=90 or changing the uuid= value to point directly to your harddrive /dev/sda5 etc. Nothing of them worked. System was still stuck. I was greeted with another not-so-friendly error:

mountall: symbol lookup error: mountall: undefined symbol:  udev_monitor_filter_add_match_subsytem_devtype
init: mountall main process (xxx) terminated with status 127

Just… Great….

Luckily I had another computer I could use, so I downloaded the  latest Kubuntu 10.04 alternative install disk, burned it on CD and booted into recovery mode with it. After mounting /dev/sda5 as root file system, I could run apt-get/aptitude and upgraded some packages. One of them triggered and ran initramfs and it seemed to be what was needed to get my system back running…

Almost, but not perfect.

After initramfs tools and libudev0 and whatnot other upgrades, system startup felt really quick. Wow… but how is that possible?

Now it seems the old style rcX.d folder structure has been abandoned, and the boot-up scripts are in /etc/init. Great, simple and easy! I like that. BUT WHY AREN’T MY Apache, Tomcat, MySQL etc. running? No wonder system is so fast, cause half of my applications never started!

There is no runlevel (asking for it gives “unknown”), and my vital server applications aren’t starting up properly. I do NOT want to fix stuff like this manually all the time. Aargh. I am losing patience with this. Why can’t things just work.

Here’s a good rant about the awfully implemented Upstart that doesn’t work as intended
http://ubuntu-virginia.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1412157

I am certainly not the only one: http://ubuntu-ky.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1355357

So anyway, now I have to upgrade rest of my packages on my Ubuntu system in hopes of getting everything working again, that means apt-get upgrade or even apt-get dist-upgrade… sigh. So much work, so many packages to upgrade still.

apt-get upgrade: 974 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 118 not upgraded.
apt-get dist-upgrade: 1091 upgraded, 228 newly installed, 14 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 861MB of archives.
After this operation, 771MB of additional disk space will be used.

*sigh again* and I already installed and removed dozens if not over a hundred packages while I was doing system recovery.

By the way, I am using Bootchart to log my system boot speed. Graphs and logs get stored in /var/log/bootchart/

“Facebook originally earned its core base of users by offering them simple and powerful controls over their personal information. As Facebook grew larger and became more important, it could have chosen to maintain or improve those controls. Instead, it’s slowly but surely helped itself — and its advertising and business partners — to more and [...]]]> http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timeline

“Facebook originally earned its core base of users by offering them simple and powerful controls over their personal information. As Facebook grew larger and became more important, it could have chosen to maintain or improve those controls. Instead, it’s slowly but surely helped itself — and its advertising and business partners — to more and more of its users’ information, while limiting the users’ options to control their own information.”

Insightful post:

One of the most important aspects of friendship is trust. A friend is not defined by by clicking the “friend” button on a website, a friend is someone that you share a bond of mutual understanding and respect with. Friends have always had privileged access to embarrassing information, stories and photos because they’re the people that you trust information like that with and sharing it strengthens those bonds.

Facebook doesn’t change the nature of friendship, it just provides new ways of communicating. Providing people that you don’t trust with information about your personal life is a poor idea, as it has always been. “Friending” someone changes the access that that person has to your personal information and such access should be granted on the basis of trust and respect.

http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1653454&cid=32220742

Not everyone on my friend list is a friend, they’re contacts, buddies and people I met or will meet. Managing a set of lists for each group on Facebook is very tedious and probably too much info will leak anyway, so it ends up with me not saying anything on Facebook. I speak differently with different “friends”, cause we have our special niches and inside jokes that don’t need to be shown to everyone

The last thing you’d need would be for “friends” to see that they weren’t “good friends.”

And now a lot of website look totally ugly! It’s quite revealing how many websites [...]]]> A couple months ago I decided I will set my Firefox default background color from bright white to a dimmed white/grayish of some sort. When opening text files or other unstyled content, I get a less brighter screen to look at.

And now a lot of website look totally ugly! It’s quite revealing how many websites out there are designed to be looked at with a default white background. Too bad their stylesheet css completely forgets to add body { background-color: white; } in those cases where white would be “required”, for instance when the site uses background gradients or icons that have a white matte color. Surprisingly many sites “break” when you don’t use the default white.

I doubt all that many people use a high contrast reverse color scheme on their operating system, but if they do, chances are a lot of sites look plain wrong for them also. Lessons learned then?

1. Don’t touch your browser default settings, or you will get frustrated….
2. Web designers have still some gaps in their knowledge. Reset the CSS properly, and style everything. Always remember to set both text and background color.

Link for today:

http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/

Ensure that foreground and background color combinations provide sufficient contrast when viewed by someone having color deficits or when viewed on a black and white screen. [Priority 2 for images, Priority 3 for text].

My Firefox stopped showing my other website correctly, text wasn’t drawn (rendered) at all, and showed blank where there was supposed to be something written. Copying the page and pasting it to another window revealed that text was actually there (and watching source code, the [...]]]> A quick mention about the annoying things Linux can do sometimes.

My Firefox stopped showing my other website correctly, text wasn’t drawn (rendered) at all, and showed blank where there was supposed to be something written. Copying the page and pasting it to another window revealed that text was actually there (and watching source code, the page was correct), so there was no error in the HTML or CSS for sure. I didn’t know where the error could have been, I didn’t get anything in the Firefox error console either. Not only that, Firefox became unresponsive and hung. It wasn’t a full crash, since the app was still running, but I could for no reason understand why it would hang on my site which has worked perfectly before.

Then it occurred to me I should check in .xsession-errors (which is located in your profile folder so the path is actually ~/.xsession-errors)

I found this interesting line

(firefox-bin:19031): Pango-WARNING **: shaping failure, expect ugly output. shape-engine='BasicEngineFc', font='Lucida Sans Bold 15.115234375', text=' '

Hmm, okay. I don’t know what Pango is, and how I had broken it (must have been because of something I updated from the Ubuntu repositories with apt-get.)

I updated all the Pango stuff that had updates:

sudo apt-get install libpango1.0-common

(I don’t remember if I installed other libraries too), and now Firefox seems to be working normally and my website is shown the way it should.

Installing Chromium (Chrome) on Ubuntu Linux

While I was trying to get Firefox to work, I took the opportunity to install Chromium on my system…. and man, is it blazing fast! I knew it would be faster than Firefox which is horrendously slow nowadays, especially when I got AdBlock Plus, Greasemonkey and another dozen of add-ons running. This speediness is really refreshing and I was surprised how snappy it actually is. I was expecting less of it to be honest for a “beta” Linux version. The importing of my bookmarks, saved passwords and browsing history worked very fine too, so it’s a great way to lure me in and convert to become a full-time Chromium user.

To get Chromium to my Ubuntu karmic I had to do some extra app installs:

First of all, I was missing the command add-apt-repository, so to get that I had to run

sudo apt-get install python-software-properties

After that I could add the Chromium dev version repository and then finally install the browser itself

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chromium-daily/dev
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install chromium-browser

Again, more MSN viruses, this time from facebook-pics.net:

http://www.networksolutions.com/whois-search/facebook-pics.net

which is a Windows type .exe file when you download the link. I sent the file to Virustotal for analysis, seems like a lot of virus scanners don’t recognize it just yet: Result: 7/42 (16.67%)

McAfee says “Artemis!AC20BF7EE912″,  F-Secure identifies [...]]]> Another breed of msn viruses is out in the wild.
This time it links to facebook-photo.org / image.php?=PIC…..JPG?

which is a Windows type .exe file when you download the link.
I sent the file to Virustotal for analysis, seems like a lot of virus scanners don’t recognize it just yet: Result: 7/42 (16.67%)

McAfee says “Artemis!AC20BF7EE912″,  F-Secure identifies it as “Trojan:W32/Agent.NRY”.

Whatever this nasty bugger does, DO NOT CLICK ON THE LINKS you get from your friends on MSN. And don’t be so stupid to actually install the .exe…

Since this file most certainly has no good intentions, the scan result SHOULD show lots more warnings… but it’s frightening that there aren’t more of them. But maybe some info will emerge in the next few days.

I know for sure Microsoft already blocks certain types of links or messages on their MSN network. I wonder if they have an infrastructure to block virus links like this? I assume it’s easy for them to blacklist a few keywords or text patterns and disable sending them via the MSN protocol. Yet, I’ve received numerous messages from my contacts during the course of the day containing this virus/trojan link.

It’s not even a holiday, what’s taking them (MSN and the virus scanner vendors) so long to fix this? Yes, I expect problems like this to be corrected in a few hours or even minutes, not 20 hours and counting! They are failing their duties.

Whois is Facebook-photo.org?
http://www.aawhois.com/facebook-photo.org