Posts
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Spyware in Ubuntu!
Although Richard Stallman's tone is often too confrontational and absolute, this time it's rather shocking news: According to him, in some versions of Ubuntu, any file searches you do are sent to Canonical, and from there to Amazon, to customize ads (like Google does with email). The details are few, such as which search interface we're talking about, which versions of Ubuntu are affected, and how to actually turn this off (I looked in what I thought were likely places in the System Settings app of Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS without any luck), but if this has actually reached mainline releases it's bye, bye Ubuntu! Sending user information to somewhere which doesn't provide a service which that user has requested is wrong, and sending it to a third party is just despicable.
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Review: Liars and Outliers by Bruce Schneier
tl;dr An enormously important book about understanding and optimizing security in the 21st century.
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Ubuntu Unity 3D first impressions
Today, for the first time ever, one of my computers was able to start Ubuntu Unity "standard." I guess it had to happen sometime - I only had to try 11.04, 11.10 and 12.04, with open source and AMD proprietary drivers, on four different computers before the magic happened and I actually got a functional desktop (that is, not just garbage graphics, crashes back to the login screen or a crash so bad even the Magic SysRq key sequence didn't work). I've no idea what they just updated to fix it, but let's see what's in the box...
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stackexchange.com abbreviation
Wouldn't it be nice if there was a short form for stackexchange.com? Like sexchange.com or simply sex.com? Imagine trying to convince the sysadmin that you really need access to security.sex.com...
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HDMI audio output hell
This is a gigantic PITA. I can't believe some people still think proprietary software has good support for proprietary hardware - Even with a relatively simple setup like this, many hours of searching forums, installing and reinstalling drivers, fiddling with the BIOS and sound settings still hasn't produced any sound.
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Ultimate unit of time
Everyone knows Y2K (or else you wouldn't be reading past this parentesis), but there's also Y2K38 (32-bit Unix timestamps run out) and the Y292B277M026K596 problem. Why not get rid of these problems through the power of science?
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Fix Git repository after Subversion conversion
After converting a Git repository from Subversion with svn2git, all was well. At least until I wanted to squash some of the oldest commits with the excellent interactive rebase. Full of fail, I realized that I might have to do some cleanup before going on such a bold expedition. Here's a couple tricks for "post-processing" a converted repository.
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Regarding finger scan as part of IELTS identity verification
Verbatim email to ielts@britishcouncil.ch:
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Mein Kampf at OSL
No, this is not some tastelessly titled travel story. During a routine book store stop at Oslo Airport Gardermoen, I felt surprised and slightly uncomfortable seeing Mein Kampf for sale. Two paperback copies, side by side, both with that familiar crumpled back caused by heavyhanded customers checking out random pages. But it's the sign of a properly civilized society to trust that people will read such a book knowing its significance, and act accordingly. For me the significance is simply this: Anyone who follows a person or book without question is a dangerous, untrustworthy fool.
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Delicious data loss
After many years, it looks like Delicious will never have support for excluding tags from a search, so when I saw that they had added a "Remove Tag" functionality I finally decided to get rid of all the "toread" tags from posts already tagged with "read". This didn't quite turn out as expected: