The following options have to be changed or added in about:config. Those tweaks can of course be achieved through extensions, but by setting them directly you can abandon some extensions and hopefully conserve some memory. In order to open a bookmark-folder with mid-click in tabs without overwriting the current tabs change: browser.tabs.loadFolderAndReplace=false To remove the close buttons on the tabs (they still can be closed by mid-clicking on them): browser.tabs.closeButtons=2 Enable the spellchecker for inputfields and textareas (default is textareas only): layout.spellcheckDefault=2 To override the useragent string: general.useragent.override=foobrowser And the last one really made my day: Open lastfm://-links directly in amarok:

network.protocol-handler.app.lastfm=amarok
network.protocol-handler.external.lastfm=true
BTW: Shouldn’t firef*cough* iceweasel open the composer of your mailclient when clicking on mailto-links?

I've just noticed that some debconf7 registrations close this week. Yes, this week - a full two months before national rail advance tickets go on sale. What's that about? [...] Jon Dowland replied

"MJ, the debconf7 travel page has far more flight information on it than anything else because it has been put together primarily by people who are figuring out international travel arrangements which will require flights."

International travel does not necessarily require flights. Intercontinental travel probably does, due to time constraints, or maybe even cross-continent, but I've seen DDs from nearby countries posting about booking their flights, and putting the deadlines before land tickets are even on sale is really shameful.

"It could certainly use some more information for people travelling more locally. If you have some advice on how to get there from Europe or the UK without flying, please contribute it: the site is a wiki, you can sign up for an account and edit the page yourself."

As I've posted elsewhere, it's a mediawiki rather than a wiki, so once I get around to installing mvs, I can sign up and edit it. (Bring back patches in the mail...) However, I'm not sure how best to get to Edinburgh without flying yet, because most tickets aren't on sale yet, which is where I started, remember? David Moreno Garza replied

"in 3rd world countries, some things like technology, travelling or taking care of the environment are not a matter of choice, unfortunately. [...]"

Sure, if people are travelling from 3rd world countries to Edinburgh, then flying is probably the only practical way, but surely people from nearby countries can get to Scotland without dumping CO2 into our sky?

I had this planned for over a year, but for whatever reasons, I didn't get around to doing it until last week - Knowing that my Institute was moving to almost the opposite edge of Ciudad Universitaria, and would now be located at over 3Km from home (from around 300m that it was before), I decided to get a bike. And, after having it in my to-buy list, I bought it last Sunday (January 21), and Nadezhda got one for herself as well.
I had had a bike before, over 15 years ago, and we rode a bit when we were in Amsterdam, but that was back in 1996. Since then, I cannot recall using a bike - So, of course, I was quite shaky and afraid to begin with. I must admit, I envied Nadezhda, as she seems to be natural - While I was still trying to get the bike moving without crashing into something, she was literally making circles around me.
On Sunday, we went for a short ride in the main circuit of UNAM. On Monday night, we went most of the way to the gym/running lanes where we go to make our excercises - Yes, mostly uphill, and I managed! (she had already done that road earlier the same Monday). Thursday and Friday, I rolled early to do my excercise, and we basically crossed each other on the way. On Saturday, finally, we came all the way to the new Institute.
Sunday was amazing: We went with her family (two sisters, one brother and five pedalling nephews, plus one nephew in a basket in his mother's bike) along the Ciclopista. The Ciclopista goes on the path that used to be the Mexico-Cuernavaca railroad, and starting at Contreras, it goes uphill to cross the Ajusco/Chichinahutzin ridge. I cannot find a decent map, and I don't have a clue on what distance we rode, but it was just great - We crossed basically all of the Magdalena Contreras part of the Ciclopista and part of Tlalpan, until maybe 500m past the market at Calle 8. Of course, after the ride, we feasted with quesadillas at the market, plus some tacos of a delicious chicharr n prepared by Nadezhda's mother. It was a long ride anyway - I got quite tired, and the way back (fortunately, downhill) was still long. We had promised the four year old nephews to take them to the zoo that same day, although we counted on them being tired by that time - Well, a child's will is stronger than being tired, so we still went to Chapultepec to dive in a sea of people and look at some nice animals ;-)
...Finally, yesterday and today I have come by bike to the Institute. There are a couple of hard parts, and I still have not mastered the techniques for being an effective rider, but the way back is just delicious. Besides, yesterday I made 15 minutes on my way back, today it was 20 minutes coming here - almost the same time that going by car! Oh, and on the way back, I get to enjoy a beautiful view of my beloved volcanos, Popocat petl and Iztacc huatl. And, as Mauricio already pointed out, thanks to the light rains we had in the previous days... They just look amazing, covered in snow from their very bases.
Not much to add to it... But I'm delighted :)

MJ, in 3rd world countries, some things like technology, travelling or taking care of the environment are not a matter of choice, unfortunately. When some of the basic needs for humans to live are easily covered and people do not have to worry about, suchs as daily eating, it’s way more easy to develop a country and have people concerning about unimportant stuff. Even free software is a luxury matter on some countries! You know, human beings have an stupid custom acquired since they were born, most of them, and that’s the need for eating, how weaks! I think you get my point. Yours, an international traveller flying between the UK.

idproxy.net is a spanking-new service that lets people use their Yahoo! identity as an OpenID. Yahoo! released the API for their BBAuth service last fall, but it doesn't support any of the existing identity standards. So idproxy.net uses BBAuth to allow users to authenticate, and then use that identity to create OpenID URLs in the idproxy.net domain. I think this is a great idea -- I'm bitterly jealous that I didn't think of it. I've been experimenting with BBAuth since it came out, and I've wanted to make a plugin for MediaWiki that would use BBAuth to allow Yahoo! users to log into Wikitravel, but at this point I don't think I'll bother. Simon Willison has more info on his motivations for starting idproxy. Good luck to him. tags: idproxy openid simon willison yahoo bbauth

Sound Juicer "Let's Kill First The Banker" 2.16.3 is out. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Loads of fixes!

• Fix install target (Christian Persch)
• Set urgency hint on completed dialog (Sebastien Bacher)
• Add man page
• Ensure playback is stopped when media is removed (Luca Cavalli)
• Source cleanups (Adam Petaccia)

On thinkwiki.org I found 2 articles how to get rid of the IBM BIOS Bootsplash and your own working. One for Windows and one for Linux.

At first, you need 1ruj35us.exe or newer. With

# cabextract -F "*.IMG" 1ruj35us.exe

you will get a “1RUJ35US.IMG”, which is a floppy image. Next you need to create a 16 color 640×480 BMP and save it as “/tmp/logo.bmp”. Now we need to mount the floppy, let the “logo.bmp” take place there and generate a “logo.mod”:

# mkdir /tmp/floppy
# mount -o loop,umask=000 /tmp/1RUJ35US.IMG /tmp/floppy
# cp /tmp/logo.bmp /tmp/floppy/ && cd /tmp/floppy/
# wine prepare.exe logo.scr
# cd && umount /tmp/floppy/

If you don’t have wine, but a running windows in place, use Virtual Floppy Drive like described in the Windows instruction to get the picture on the disk image.
Now you only need to burn a CD(-RW) with “1RUJ35US.IMG” as boot image. This can be easily done with k3b or on console:

# mkisofs -b 1RUJ35US.IMG 1RUJ35US.IMG  cdrecord dev=<device> -

You only need to boot your Thinkpad from CD(-RW) by pressing F12 on boot and flashing new firmware with customer image. You are done! My bootsplash image can be found here, an ‘unbranded’ one here. hardware hacking, planet, thinkpad

Devil's Pie (someones favourite window manipulation tool) 0.20.1 is out. Brown paper bag release, whoops!

• Fix parsing (Lars Damerow)
• Fix test suite

Downloads are in the usual place.

Devil's Pie (someones favourite window manipulation tool) 0.20.2 is out. Brown paper bag release, whoops!

• Fix window_workspace (Andrew Yates)

Downloads are in the usual place.

I was recently asked to help someone understand the OpenSource movement, and the effects it might have on companies such as Oracle or SAP. I talked a bit that these companies can benefit from being independant of big vendors like Microsoft, while still not having to do everything themselves. But also on how opensource alternatives to their products will threaten their business in the long run and force them to be more innovative and constantly improve their product. I then talked about the 'viral' aspects in OpenSource; not about that GPL licensing bullshit (just read the licenses of stuff you want to use, and don't use them if you don't like the license...; this virality is highly overrated due to Microsofts FUD), but a very different kind of virality: Let's say you are supposed to evaluate different CMS solutions. So you install one or another that sounds promising. Most likely you'll install an opensource database like MySQL or Postgresql. And when you've decided upon a solution, you are quite likely to go with this database, and say to yourself: "if MySQL doesn't scale up well enough for our needs, we can still but an Oracle license". This would be probably different if you had had installed Oracle in the first place. Say a demo or so. But the demo versions of the CMS you tried already made you comfortable in using MySQL; it's easy to install (most likely included with your system anyway), and it just works. But would you have tried a CMS in first place that actuall required you to setup Oracle? Anyway, this "social" virality brought me to another point: developers and administrators. When you see numbers on the market share of Microsoft, they're still huge. Some 95% of users are using Microsoft as their primary operation system (I'm discounting the fact that a huge share of DSL modems here is running Linux, so actually many people are Linux users, and I'm also discounting the use of www.google.com, which would make 99.9% of people Linux users...). But these are the average users. But they aren't on their own. The software choice of the "average user" is influenced by a couple of factors, including:

• if anything goes wrong, whom can I call for help?
• company (administrative, security) policies
• word of mouth and (software) recommendations

But if you look at the computer geeks around you, what are they using? A huge share of the people I know are using Linux. Not everyone is using Linux as their main desktop system, but many are. Others are using Linux just for their development stuff, some only on servers. It doesn't really matter, Linux is huge with the geeks. When I look at the sofware my mom has installed on her Windows system (which also dual-boots Linux, and interestingly is the primary choice for watching a movie - Windows doesn't playback sound with some videos...): half of it is opensource. There is OpenOffice.org, Gimp, Gaim, Firefox, Thunderbird, Inkscape, LyX, Mplayer and a couple others. He favourite game? PySol. My dad already has switched to Linux as his main operating system. So why did they switch to so much opensource software? Because it's what I recommended them, and where I can help them. My mom needed a software to record something for her blog (yes, she's "podcasting" now) - of course I recommended her an opensource application, audacity. My mom is giving private lessons in math and physics; she's very successful at that. When one of her students got herself a laptop, she of course was given all kinds of (opensource!) software. For her highschool thesis she needed a vector graphics program - she ended up with inkscape. Now if my parents have some problem with Windows, who are they going to ask? I didn't manage to solve the video playback issues, my mom by herself switched to Linux for watching movies. It didn't work with Windows, I couldn't help her - she switched to something where she knews she'd get more support (and where the problem by chance didn't occur). Now let's have a look at the university. Our computer pool for the students is all Linux. There are a few windows systems for legacy purposes, I never found out if they are accessible to regular students; I only know they're supposed to exist. When doing some assignment, you're very often required to use some opensource software. For a thesis, you'll very likely be building upon some opensource system. The mathematics institute is still on solaris, but recently Gnome was installed there. Physics and electrical engineering also have mostly Linux systems, I've heard. For software development, it's pretty much a "develop on Linux, run anywhere", whereas Windows-only developers usually need to port their applications (or trust on Wine being able to run them good enough on Linux). So more and more people start developing on Linux, and get to love it's great development environment (after all, Linux was pretty much completely done by software developers...). And that is how Microsoft might already have lost the desktop war: developers, technical students and administrators (who usually also love their Linux boxes). They're only a small share of the userbase, but they're influential. In fact, other users rely on them being able to eventually fix their systems for them. But since these are using Windows much less already, they will be less capable of assisting others with Windows. They'll be putting Linux systems everywhere, and keep on encouraging them to make the switch. Of course it will still take some years, but you can expect more and more companies (and cities) to switch over, like the city of Munich. Windows support staff on the other hand might even become more expensive. I don't know of any numbers on the MCSE programme (Minesweeper Consultant, Solitaire Expert) - does anyone have numbers on "graduates" for that?

Disjointed: Busy weekend: A brief trip to Glasgow, a lot of rat-lovin’ and a few minutes to hack on CFEngine package automation. I discovered insane performance problems with running Ruby on Rails applications under libapache2-mod-fastcgi so I switched to Apache2, mod_proxy & mongrel. The process wasn’t as painless as I’d expected - so I might write it up shortly. In other rails-news: I can’t get typo running on Etch. Migration from wordpress 2 fails in strange ways. Help?! In other news xmms on my AMD64 machine, reading /home/mp3 over an NFS share locks up every couple of days. Not sure if this is an AMD64 bit problem, or if the NFS usage is responsible. I should investigate. (The GUI is visible and responsible; but hitting “next”, “play”, etc, result in no action. I usually have to “kill” it - then restart.)

Disjointed: Busy weekend: A brief trip to Glasgow, a lot of rat-lovin’ and a few minutes to hack on CFEngine package automation. I discovered insane performance problems with running Ruby on Rails applications under libapache2-mod-fastcgi so I switched to Apache2, mod_proxy & mongrel. The process wasn’t as painless as I’d expected - so I might write it up shortly. In other rails-news: I can’t get typo running on Etch. Migration from wordpress 2 fails in strange ways. Help?! In other news xmms on my AMD64 machine, reading /home/mp3 over an NFS share locks up every couple of days. Not sure if this is an AMD64 bit problem, or if the NFS usage is responsible. I should investigate. (The GUI is visible and responsible; but hitting “next”, “play”, etc, result in no action. I usually have to “kill” it - then restart.)

Disjointed: Busy weekend: A brief trip to Glasgow, a lot of rat-lovin’ and a few minutes to hack on CFEngine package automation. I discovered insane performance problems with running Ruby on Rails applications under libapache2-mod-fastcgi so I switched to Apache2, mod_proxy & mongrel. The process wasn’t as painless as I’d expected – so I might write it up shortly. In other rails-news: I can’t get typo running on Etch. Migration from wordpress 2 fails in strange ways. Help?! In other news xmms on my AMD64 machine, reading /home/mp3 over an NFS share locks up every couple of days. Not sure if this is an AMD64 bit problem, or if the NFS usage is responsible. I should investigate. (The GUI is visible and responsible; but hitting “next”, “play”, etc, result in no action. I usually have to “kill” it – then restart.)

I got some email from Dan Brickley on Friday asking for some help getting the MediaWiki OpenID extension working. It looks like the FOAF wiki now allows you to login with OpenID. Cool beans on that! tags: wiki foaf mediawiki openid

Wikicalc Speaking of people whose names match the production "Dan Brick*", Dan Bricklin just releases WikiCalc 1.0. WikiCalc is an awesome piece of software that provides shared spreadsheets with a Wiki flavor. I'm interested in using it for some new projects, so I'm really glad Dan's worked so hard on it. Congratulations to him and to sponsor SocialText for such good work. tags: wiki wikicalc socialtext dan bricklin

Lucinda I'm excited to see that one of my favorite people in Montreal has set up a blog. Lucinda Catchlove is a Montreal writer, and also a good friend with a clear voice and an honest opinion. I'm looking forward to seeing what her blog will have to offer. tags: friends montreal lucinda catchlove

Google in Montreal It's probably not an overstatement to say that Montreal's digerati are a-twitter with gossip that Google will be opening a small office in Montreal (note: link in French). It's only space for a dozen or so people in downtown, but more tantalizing is the prospect that they're shopping for commercial real estate capable of handling 200-300 employees. The blogosph re (or is it the blogod me...? I get those confused all the time) here is pretty excited about the news, but a post by star podcaster Julien Smith has been more controversial. In Montreal... Needs... Brains... he says that he thinks the Montreal tech scene isn't as dynamic and interdependent as in other cities. He thinks the city needs a Google office as a shot-in-the-arm for developing our technology culture. I don't believe that this is the case. Montreal has a vibrant tech scene with a lot of cross-pollination. There are a lot of formal and informal venues for discussion in Montreal. We have the monthly Yulblog and Wiki Wednesday, last year's BarCampMontreal and the upcoming BarCampMontreal2, as well as RoCoCo. There's also the quarterly Montreal Creative Commons Salon. On the informal side, Seb Paquet's had a few group lunches with some of the most interesting people in town, and le Sans Fil gives us great hotspots like La ka and L'Utopik for serendipitous or on-purpose path-crossings. I guess my main point is that Montreal's got a great Scene, and I don't think it needs a big infusion of Googloids to make it better. Is there more that could be done? Sure. I think we need to get a Web Montag going to pull together the various sub-cultures forming. And we should probably be using SAT more -- it's a great space. But I think we're doing pretty good overall. Side notes: Hugh MacGuire has a quick list of Montreals doing stuff, and Robin Millette has some ideas about Montreal Action. tags: montreal technology scene google

I’ve always wondered why ill-intentioned hackers don’t set up fake free WiFi hotspots in public places like airports to collect passwords and other personal information. As it turns out, they do:

Authentium did an in-depth survey of the ad hoc networks found at O’Hare, visiting on three different occasions. It found more than 20 ad hoc networks each time, with 80% of them advertising free Wi-Fi access. The company also found that many of the networks were displaying fake or misleading MAC addresses, a clear sign that they were bent on mischief.

The Computerworld article focuses on the dangers of associating with ad-hoc (peer-to-peer) wireless networks and provides a number of tips for Windows users to avoid unintentionally connecting to an ad-hoc network. It seems to me just a matter of time, though, before malicious agents set up “real” (infrastructure-mode) access points in public places to collect such data. In fact, based on the airport study above, I would be shocked if it weren’t already happening. Numerous trivial variations could be very difficult to detect for the average user: for example, someone could set up a WiFi access point advertising itself as a T-Mobile HotSpot, and copy the T-Mobile web interface. If they wanted to be especially crafty, they could sit outside a Starbucks (or other known T-Mobile HotSpot) and simply use a different channel than the existing hot spot. Even a sophisticated user might have trouble telling the difference. The lesson is that you need to expect that all network traffic is insecure if not encrypted and signed at both ends. Although even in that case there are possible man-in-the-middle attacks, at least we have a cryptographic certificate/certificate authority infrastructure to mitigate the risk. (That sort of attack is also a bit more difficult to pull off, thus perhaps deterring the simplest “script-kiddie” type attackers.)

I’ve always wondered why ill-intentioned hackers don’t set up fake free WiFi hotspots in public places like airports to collect passwords and other personal information. As it turns out, they do:

Authentium did an in-depth survey of the ad hoc networks found at O’Hare, visiting on three different occasions. It found more than 20 ad hoc networks each time, with 80% of them advertising free Wi-Fi access. The company also found that many of the networks were displaying fake or misleading MAC addresses, a clear sign that they were bent on mischief.

The Computerworld article focuses on the dangers of associating with ad-hoc (peer-to-peer) wireless networks and provides a number of tips for Windows users to avoid unintentionally connecting to an ad-hoc network. It seems to me just a matter of time, though, before malicious agents set up “real” (infrastructure-mode) access points in public places to collect such data. In fact, based on the airport study above, I would be shocked if it weren’t already happening. Numerous trivial variations could be very difficult to detect for the average user: for example, someone could set up a WiFi access point advertising itself as a T-Mobile HotSpot, and copy the T-Mobile web interface. If they wanted to be especially crafty, they could sit outside a Starbucks (or other known T-Mobile HotSpot) and simply use a different channel than the existing hot spot. Even a sophisticated user might have trouble telling the difference. The lesson is that you need to expect that all network traffic is insecure if not encrypted and signed at both ends. Although even in that case there are possible man-in-the-middle attacks, at least we have a cryptographic certificate/certificate authority infrastructure to mitigate the risk. (That sort of attack is also a bit more difficult to pull off, thus perhaps deterring the simplest “script-kiddie” type attackers.)

Recently I complained about using dial-up in PR and I believe in response to my post, Joey Hess provided some great tips for making the dial-up experience a little more bearable. He, of course, was providing a set of solution to constraints, which is what the likes of Joey Hess do a lot of their waking (and according to a recent IRC conversation, even dreaming) hours. I as an academic am not involved so much in the business of finding real hard solutions but when I go to Puerto Rico, that is what I DO spend a lot of time doing. And I came up with 3 solutions this year, 2 of which I was particularly proud of (one of which may be useful to the blog readers), so I thought I would share them here: As I wrote about a few weeks ago, my mom has been plagued with a problem of choking on her saliva because she is not swallowing. It causes her and those around her a lot of angst. I tired many things but when I stopped trying and just started watching and observing to see when it seemed to be worse, I finally noticed that if she wore her dentures, the problem, while not totally resolved, was like 70-80% better. With her dentures, she would never choke on her spit and often times there would be not spit. I think the dentures changes the shape of her mouth so that she can swallow with less effort. I was pretty proud to notice this because it was the overwhelming problem of the season. Now, there is, of course, another problem. She loathes wearing those teeth and well, it has been a battle to convince her it helps (I think she sort of knows but does not want to admit it) but she is wearing them a lot more than she used to…. Maybe I will come up with a long-term solution to that problem later but I have failed in all of my attempts while still there which stretched from begging, to coy deception, to outright bribery. So in PR, we have an awesome mutt, who goes by one of three names, Isabela, Gordita (look at her tummy in the pictures to see why we call her chubster ) and Pucha. She is literally the joy of the house and she truly revels in this role. She is, in fact, like a hovercraft of love , in the sense that she will hover over you, as you are, for example, trying to get work done, and she will whimper, or lift her little paw, or more audaciously butt her head against your hand, until you assume the position and pet her, or preferably hug her. And she wants demands this sort of attention for as long as you can humanely sustain it. Ok this is not the problem part (though it can be a problem when trying to complete work and I usually just give up and give in to her or kick her out of the room). The problem was that the pucha would routinely despoil the same spot on the floor, usually every day, usually in dramatic response to leaving her in the house alone for more than 10 minutes. And I know this is willful because she is otherwise quite potty trained. She just likes to remind those who shower her with affection and love that she wants it to rain harder. The problem was that she was soaking and thus really rotting the wooden trimming (and poking around led me to discovering the third huge problem, termites, but more on that soon) and this had just had to stop. Giving her a light whallop in her chubby behind never helped (maybe she was too well padded?) and obedience school seemed like way too much effort and money. Eventually, I just threw her little bed right where she peed, and vualla, she stopped peeing there and thankfully she did not have the cojones to find another spot. I am not sure if this is long-term solution, but for now I am satisfied. Through the pucha, I found out that the wooden trimming in our house was ingested with termites. This caused a mini-heart attack, because well, termintes are a bitch to eradicate and they are a real problem in the tropics. I called the exterminators just to find out some information on termites and they assured me that once I ripped out the molding (which was my low-tech solution), I would not be putting the other wood in danger by accidentally flinging one of the little chubby white grubs over to another piece of wood and there is a lot of wood at home. Thankfully, since that is unlikely, with some help , I proceeded to tear most of the molding out only to disover a cornupia of bugs living there. It was so so so so so gross, really, gross that of course I am not replacing the trimming with wood but with some other bug-resistanant material. But that will have to wait till another trip.

Maj woke me up at 6:41AM this morning. "Amita slept through the entire night in her big girl bed," she whispered. We've been co-sleeping since Amita was born, but over the last month we've been trying to do night weaning, which means Amita goes to sleep in her own bed in her own room now. But that doesn't usually last past 1AM-2AM. "Did you check her breathing?" I asked. "Yeah, I just did." "Wow. Our little girl is a woman now." "Well, a toddler at least." "Our little weaning toddler." Pause. "Our little weaner!" I drifted back off to sleep, but I got poked again about 10 minutes later. "I'm going to go check her breathing again." "OK. Lemme know how the weanie is doing." tags: amitajune maj weaning sleep

Other developmental milestones Amita and I had our day together on Wednesday, and we were playing cars in the living room when apropos of nothing she started saying "Pok". "Pok! Pok!" I didn't know what was up until she came over and pulled up the sleeve of my t-shirt and pointed to my upper right arm. "Pok!" I picked her up and hugged her. "That's right, honey. That's where I have my tattoo of Spock. Good girl!" tags: spock amitajune tattoo

RecentChangesCamp So, I'm excited about next week's 2007 RecentChangesCamp. I'd normally be on board to go, but a) we've got RoCoCo coming up in May here, and I should probably concentrate my energies on that, and b) I've already committed to going to the LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit in the middle of February. It just doesn't make sense to do more than one conference per month, unless you're on the circuit professionally. But I hope that RCC in Portland goes well. A lot of friends will be there, and it's always good to know that friends and colleagues are having interesting conversations and making new decisions. tags: recentchangescamp rococo linuxworld lwoss