This Old Blog

I don't know how, but I've bumbled into a new (to me anyway) Compiz feature, a Coverflow-like ability to view multiple windows on a desktop. I installed KSnapshot in order to get a delayed screenshot of the effect, shown below. Note the black bar running horizontally across the center of the image. This is an artifact of KSnapshot. It's not a part of the desktop. The effect is triggered by the key combination [Windows][Tab], or [Command][Tab] on the Apple keyboard. When you release the [Window] key on the keyboard then the window in the center is the upper window on the desktop. Very very cool. This is a Compiz feature worth having enabled. And the movement is very smooth, tight, professional, and fast without the crazy wobbles that first afflicted Compiz. And to think all this is running on a slow (1.8GHz) 32-bit Athlon XP with only 512MB of DRAM. I am properly impressed! Update It's available under the CompizConfig Settings Manager (ccsm), which you have to install vi...

When I upgraded my 7.10 installation to 8.04 , audio support broke during the process. When I went Googling for possible causes (and hopeful fixes) I ran across the rather snarky comment from a developer that 8.04 was an alpha, and as such if you wanted everything To Just Work then you needed to install outright rather than upgrade. Considering that technically he was correct (but flying in the face of personal positive experience with past upgrades) I stuck the 8.04 beta CD in rhea and performed a completely new install. And sure enough, sound support worked again. The problem was the video screen. I have, up until this release, never had any problems with configuring high resolution after Ubuntu was installed. We're not talking about successful guessing with the Live CD, we're talking about a complete installation (or upgrade) with all the proper bits. And I'm talking about alphas, betas, and final releases. Until now, that is, with Ubuntu 8.04. I run my monitor, an ancie...

The last notebook left unbeaten in the Pwn 2 Own contest is a VAIO VGN-TZ37CN running Ubuntu 7.10. The other two, a MacBook Air and a Fujitsu U810 running Vista Ultimate SP1, have fallen. The MacBook was the first and fastest to fall via a Safari exploit. The Vista machine fell due to a bug in Java. I have no idea what version of Java that was, but it's disturbing that (1) we still have security problems with Java after all these years and (2) Vista would allow a compromise in Java to compromise the operating system. The fact that Ubuntu hasn't been hacked yet does not prove Ubuntu's superiority to either Mac OS X or Vista. There was this interesting comment from the show: Some of the show's 400 attendees had found bugs in the Linux operating system, she said, but many of them didn't want to put the work into developing the exploit code that would be required to win the contest. So the bugs are there ready to be exploited. All somebody...

From the article " Study sees Microsoft brand in sharp decline ". Microsoft's brand power has been in sharp decline over the past four years, an indication the company is losing credibility and mindshare with U.S. business users, according to a recent study by market research firm CoreBrand. According to the CoreBrand Power 100 2007 study, which polled about 12,000 U.S. business decision-makers, Microsoft dropped from number 12 in the ranking of the most powerful U.S. company brands in 2004 to number 59 last year . In 1996, the company ranked number 1 in brand power among 1,200 top companies in about 50 industries, said James Gregory, CEO of CoreBrand. ... Gregory said that a decline in and of itself is not indicative that a company is losing its mindshare or reputation among customers. However, what's significant in Microsoft's case is that the decline has been consistent over a number of years, and has plunged dramatically in a brief time. "When you see so...

With all the lame FUD being slung about how Apple is "forcing" Safari on poor unsuspecting Windows users, and how the EULA only allowed for one copy of Safari (just one!) to be installed only on Apple machines ( which has now been fixed ), you'd think that it couldn't get worse, PR wise, for Safari and Apple. Unfortunately it can. A contestant at the CanSecWest security conference's PWN 2 OWN hacking contest broke into a MacBook Air using a Safari exploit in just two minutes. This is no different than last year, when a MacBook was hacked and broken into via a - you guessed it - Safari exploit. Yes, I know that those exploits are on the Mac, and I'm talking about Safari on Windows. But those kind of exploits on one platform (Mac OS X) make me take pause about running it on Windows. I can already get that kind of security with Internet Explorer. But I want better, which is why I use Firefox. Having said that, I hope that Mozilla's upper management can ge...

In a post titled " Question to Mozilla CEO: what do you fear? ", blogger Dennis "Howler Monkey" Howlett tries to back up a very important question with out-and-out gross distortions of the facts. For example, in the first paragraph: The kerfuffle over Apple’s decision to include the Safari 3.1 ‘update’ with an iTunes update installer for Windows made me smile. John Lilly, CEO Mozilla Foundation seems outraged at Apple’s decision. It only adds to the hilarity. Why? In enterprise land, neither browser is likely to be the number one choice down at the PC/laptop image factory. Not even close. Check the stats at W3schools to see what I mean. Mozilla comes in at a miniscule 1.1% while Safari has just hit the 2% mark. I did check the stats over at W3schools, and you know what I found? Mozilla (Moz) does indeed come in with a mizerly 1.1%. But look over to the left column next to it labeled Fx (for Firefox) and you see that Firefox has a 36.5% share. Add the two together a...

It's been a while since I played with Google's Android SDK (and I do mean play), so after after it surfaced recently in the tech press I decided to crank it back up and see what was different. So I downloaded the latest Eclipse release (3.3.2) and the latest Android SDK (M5 RC15), installed everything, and fired Eclipse IDE back up again. First, before you can use the SDK in the IDE you have to install the Eclipse Android plugins, which are at https://dl-ssl.google.com/android/eclipse. If you've worked any with Eclipse then you know you have to add the https address as a new remote site, then install all plugins found there. One of the two sets of plugins, the editors, requires the Eclipse WTP (Web Tools Platform) plugins as well, so when you go to install new features select the Google Android site as well as teh Europa Discovery Site. When you select both the Google entries the editors selection will have an error indicator. Click WTP. then the "Select Required...