In a previous post (and in some others scattered around this blog, search is your friend), I’ve spoken about copyright, the rendering into oblivion of the distribution industry, and some related stuff. Now, I’ve found this:

Instead of publishing this book in a traditional form (i.e., as a print product), I have decided to try something new and offer The End of Control online, for free, with a new chapter released every week. I may ultimately still offer a “real” printed version, but for now, this is my next book — just subscribe to the RSS feed and get my latest “chapter” as soon as I publish it. Or listen to the podcasts or watch the videos (coming soon).

One chapter a week (quite a few out by now), and the first impression is positive, hence me sharing it

EDIT: as I was re-reading the second chapter, I came across this quote:

Consider this: What good is the idea of a copy of digital content — and of the exclusive right of the author to allow that copy to be made in the first place — when in fact every single transmission of digital content, and every use of a computer, inadvertently creates multiple and perfect copies along the way? This inadvertence essentially creates serial copyright infringers [sic] every nanosecond.

Take that, assholes!

If this video does not scare you, well it should!!

Even Google knows when it has gone too far

http://clients.arranschlosberg.com/chuck/index.htm?query 

Ok, to be fair, I must say that the first thing I’m about to say, I’m not sure it applies only to Gutsy (most likely it is valid also for previous Ubuntus…, or even other Linuxes) but I’ve only found out now, that you can run (K)Ubuntu without an xorg.conf:

$ ll /etc/X11/xorg.conf
ls: /etc/X11/xorg.conf: No such file or directory

Not warped enough? Then how about this one: it works better like this! Of course that’s because I have the self-imposed misfortune of owning an ATi graphics card, whose support for Linux is worse than none at all: it’s a real piece of crap!

Moving on, the problem with this scenario (other than those mentioned two posts below) is that now I get random crashes aka total PC freezes :S oh well I guess there truly is no such thing as a free lunch… I’ll just keep enjoying Death Note

I had previously talked about changes in this blog’s title. And back then, I said I was thinking about changing the image header too. Well, that finally happened: inspiration stroke when looking at this blog, which I had found in a Wikipedia page, that I came across when I looking for the article of blook. And yes, I though of using a fractal image for the header, but then I looked at the subtitle (life, the universe, etc) and thought “and why not use a night sky image?” After some googling, I found the image you can currently see there (glad I changed the blog name, night sky and day haze, now that’s a conundrum!)

Easy my ass… first, I (tried) to follow the instructions given here. Problem: The button labelled ‘Version Upgrade’, insisted on not showing up. After a reboot (thought some of the updated packages may need a reboot to get into place, e.g. kernel related stuff…) and some tweaking, I finally got the damn to button to show up. The next problem was that when I clicked it, it kept throwing different error messages. After some trying, it finally worked (not sure of why though…) and the rest of the upgrade went smoothly.

That lasted until the very last step: booting onto the newly upgraded OS-> all I got was a black screen. A quick glance at logs showed that nothing serious was going on: all the services started normally. But all I kept getting was that damned black screen. Eventually I found why: ATi nightmares came back to haunt me. Long story short, I had to delete the old xorg.conf to make the system generate a new one with the default driver. The bad side: no 3D accel and booting up the system now takes longer to start the graphical system, not sure why…

The good side: for some time now I’ve been trying to watch an Anime series called Death Note, but it kept crashing Xine, audio and video in mplayer were out of sync, and VLC showed it in bad quality (weird codec). Now it plays fine in XIne! (which incindently means that the Xine crash was due to the ATi driver previously being used… man I do have to buy an nvidia one of these days…)

This post is not about terrorism (a quick search in this blog will tell you what my opinions are in that regard), nor is it about American derision. It’s about good old frickin’ humour. So relax, get a coup of coffee (or whatever suits you), relax, and enjoy Achmed the Dead Terrorist:

PS: many thanks to my friend WeB for pointing this out for me.Kudos for you!

Everyone has heard of md5 checksums, that’s almost a given. But I must say that I did not use it except for very large files (iso’s and ilk…) because manually comparing the checksums was very cumbersome to do a lot of times.

Of course that if you have various files, you dump the checksums and files names into another file, and do something like this:

$ md5sum -c filename

where filename must contain one line for each file to check, in the following format:

<checksum value><TWO WHITESPACES><name of file to be checked>

Pay special attention to the fact that separation must be exactly two spaces, anything else will yield the cryptic error message:

no properly formatted MD5 checksum lines found

That said, if all have is one file and checksum to check, you can always do this:

$ echo ‘<checksum value><TWO SPACES><file to check>’ | md5sum -c

Note that the single quotes are necessary because otherwise echo will just put one space, and eliminate the extra space, thus making md5sum fail.

As an endnote, I found the two spaces thing by trying (and it not working) and with the help of Google. Unbelievably, in the md5sum manpage, while it says that you can put checksum and file name in a file as shown above, it gives no mention of the two spaces detail! I eventually found it to be the culprit of my successive failed attempts, and that’s the reason for writing this post: so you don’t have to waste as much time as I did.

EDIT 15/11/2008:

The exact same technique (two spaces included) works for SHA1 checksums, just replace (in Linux) ‘md5sum’ with ’sha1sum’:

$ echo ‘<checksum value><TWO SPACES><file to check>’ | sha1sum -c

This morning, as I was glancing through the new (November) issue of Linux Journal, I found a tech tip introducing the showdate program: it will give you the date (i.e. day, month, and year, and even time) corresponding to an offset (into the past or the future) respective to the current time. Some examples are given below. You can obtain a copy of the source here. Extract and rename the file to showdate.c (if needed) and then compile it like this:

gcc showdate.c -o showdate

It should compile without any warning or error. Then, if you run the program without any options, you should get something like this:

usage: showdate
[-y [+|-]years]
[-m [+|-]months]
[-d [+|-]days]
[-h [+|-]hours]
[-M [+|-]minutes]
[-s [+|-]seconds]
[-e | -f format]

Now for instance, if you want to now the date of 5 years and 2 months into the future, you do like this (the first command is to show the current time):

$ ./showdate -m 0
Tue Oct 16 11:55:50 2007
$ ./showdate -y 5 -m 2
Sun Dec 16 10:55:55 2012

A couple more of trials should familiarize with the application. Pretty neat, ãh?

In a previous post, I wrote about software patents. Now I remembered a page I came across some time ago, and in the credits section, there was something that I found inspiring, and that quote here:

Anti-credits

Recently, people start to try to enrich themself by confusing other people to think, that they own them money for nothing. This confusion is spread by patent lobbists. There is nothing wrong, with their aim to rip of money from others by doing nothing. Unfortunately, this aim is orthangonal to my idea of a how a prosperous environment for creative minds looks like.

In cryptography, there is a minefield of patents. Ciphers, cipher modes, generic construction guidelines are found in patent applications. Not only, that the idea of the possession of ideas is fundamentally flawed, it also hurts free software.

If you like my software, my efforts, or my documentation, I don’t request you to pay me anything. I write software because thinking does not hurt and it’s fun to create and realise ideas. I share software because I’m not afraid that I will ever run out of ideas — I’m actually afraid that I will run out of time before I can realise only the most important friction of them.

Creativity is driven by intrinsic motivation. I request you pick your favorite of the following two futures: a world where this creativity can sprout and many people’s ideas can create something bigger than the sum of their parts, or either a world where creativity is hampered by contracts, lawyers and money transfers and where thinking must be something that hurts and therefore has to be rewarded with money.

I picked my favorite. And I voted for my favorite with my vallet. FFII is a European organisation lobbying for a patent-free Europe. If you like to follow this example, you may do so at their donation page. These folks also have to pay their printer paper, fax machine and air tickets.