I change my desktop backgrounds frequently - this one has made it to my 8400 desktop for the month of August!
The scene is Spitfire Lake (Adirondack Park, NY) taken by Will Forbes. You can download the wallpaper from National Geographic's Photo of the Day webpage. There's something calming (almost soothing) about this picture - it's simple composition produces a stunning visual impact.
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It seems that the story linking Internet Explorer users with lower IQ was "an elaborate hoax" - no surprise there!
What is surprising is how easily a "number of media organisations" were duped into reporting the story. Sometimes it seems as if there just isn't enough real news to fill all the space.
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Mark Shuttleworth isn't alone in having concerns about GNOME 3: according to The Register, "Linus Torvalds has dropped GNOME 3 in favor of the Xfce graphical desktop interface, dubbing GNOME 3 an "unholy mess""
I'm the first to acknowledge that my opinion is worthless in the presence of two such Linux heavyweights but I'm still unsure about which direction my journey will take over the next couple of years. If GNOME really is the "unholy mess" that Torvalds claims, then future versions of Ubuntu are probably not for me: I don't care too much for the current state of Unity and was holding out for a GNOME alternative.
Oh well, uncertainty often makes for a more exciting future!
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Yesterday I decided to explore python, a cross-platfom, object-oriented, programming language and in so doing discovered something that SciTE can't do!
Whilst I have a working knowledge of html and a distant memory of using Visual Basic, I could never claim to have anything other than rudimentary programming skills and I've decided that it's time to correct this deficiency. Usually I would head straight over to Amazon and buy a book that guides me through the process, but recent events have taught me that there are plenty of free resources online that are just as good as the commercial offerings if you're prepared to look for them. So, I thought that I'd make my adventure even more interesting by taking a less structured approach and only using free resources.
Fortunately the Python website provides links to some excellent tutorials for the programming n00b and ironically, I chose to go with Derrick Wolters' Learning Python (for the complete n00b). Using SciTE as my text editor, I raced through the first couple of tutorials and was soon saying hello to the world and manipulating simple numbers. However, when it came to user input variables, SciTE proved less than co-operative. Here's a simple example:
print "What is your name?"
name=raw_input()
print "Hello", name.
This is simple stuff, the interpreter simply displays (prints) What is your name? on the screen and waits for a user to input a text string. Once the user has input his name, the interpreter says hello. Unfortunately, SciTE can't handle user input in the python language: it hits an end of file condition without reading any data and returns an error. This is a problem that's been around for a while!
Fortunately, you can download IDLE from the Ubuntu Software Centre. IDLE handles user input variables with ease - here's the same code (with the text string Jogga added as the user input variable:
It's unlikely that SciTE will be fixed anytime soon, but IDLE fills the hole (or blanks!) very nicely!
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You can always tell when it's a slow news day and they usually happen when Parliament has finished for the Summer break!
The BBC is running a story today (on its Technology page, if you can believe that!) reporting on a study that suggest Internet Explorer users have a lower than average IQ score. In fact, the authors of the study suggest that IE users IQ averages around 80.
UK citizens that have a television are obliged by law to pay for a licence (the fee goes to fund the BBC) - worth every penny (not!)
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Ok, time for something a little lighter than of late! This post isn't really anything to do with Linux or Ubuntu (or even computing really), but the concept intrigued me so much that I thought that I'd follow my curiosity and see where it led!
Recently I've been wondering about those strange glyphs that appear next to commenters' names on Wordpress blogs (I've also seen them used in adverts). It turns out that they're called identicons and they are graphical representations of hash values. Someone called Don Park devised the concept (in 2007) to represent IP addresses whilst maintaining user confidentiality - so far, so good: however, it seems to me that there are a couple of inherent flaws with this thinking:
No problem, just use the hash value of an email address to link an identicon to a person and you're good to go!
Well, maybe...
I can think of a couple of potential problems with this approach. But, let's not dwell on the negative; if you want to create your own identicon, you can sign up to a service like Gravatar and register your email address. Here's what mine look like:
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There are other providers or, if you're feeling brave, you can download the source code. Once you've created your account, you can link to your own identicon using:
< img src="http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/HASH" />
Where, HASH is the md5 hash sum of your registered email address (and the img tags are properly closed, unlike the above). The easiest way to get the hash (if you don't want to use the online tool) is to install GtkHash from the Ubuntu Software Centre.
Recently I discovered Cryptkeeper in the Ubuntu Software Centre - it's a front-end for EncFS that sits in the system tray providing hassle-free access to your encrypted directories. Whilst this is undoubtedly a useful applet, it suffers from problems of memory leaks and segmentation faults and, despite the fact that there is a patch available, I've no idea how to fix the problem!
However, like most graphical interfaces, Cryptkeeper is really just a bridge between the user and the command line and the command line is often a "faster and more powerful" way to get things done. So, when I experienced a segfault earlier today, I thought that I'd explore EncFS's options using a terminal. In this post I'll outline the basic commands for creating, mounting, & unmounting an encrypted directory.
Creating an encrypted directory is simple - the command takes the form:encfs /path/.dir_name /path/dir_name
Let's assume that I want to create an encrypted directory in my /home/usr_name directory called, crypt, my command is:encfs /home/jogga/.crypt /home/jogga/crypt
I'll be notified that these directories don't exist and prompted to create them - at each prompt, I type y and press enter. I get the following output:
Creating new encrypted volume.
Please choose from one of the following options:
enter "x" for expert configuration mode,
enter "p" for pre-configured paranoia mode,
anything else, or an empty line will select standard mode.
?>
Selecting the standard configurations results in the following output:
Standard configuration selected.
Configuration finished. The filesystem to be created has the following properties:
Filesystem cipher: "ssl/aes", version 2:2:1
Filename encoding: "nameio/block", version 3:0:1
Key Size: 192 bits
Block Size: 1024 bytes
Each file contains 8 byte header with unique IV data.
Filenames encoded using IV chaining mode.
File holes passed through to ciphertext.
Now you will need to enter a password for your filesystem.
You will need to remember this password, as there is absolutely
no recovery mechanism. However, the password can be changed
later using encfsctl.
New Encfs Password:
Verify Encfs Password:
The new directories are created and mounted - that's it! Mouting existing directories takes the same form as above:encfs /path/.dir_name /path/dir_name
Now I'll only be prompted for the password and my directory will be open and available to browse using Nautilus. However, if I want to limit the time a directory can remain open, I can add a switch to umount the directory automatically after a period of inactivity:encfs --idle=time_min /path/.dir_name /path/dir_name
Where time_min is an integer of 1 or more.
Unmounting an encrypted directory takes the form:
fusermount -u /path/dir_name
Having the option to use a terminal should Cryptkeeper crash is useful and saves the trouble of having to reboot the system. Moreover, it's a great way to learn how things work in Linux.
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