Blogger Captcha Cracked?

I just 50+ emails from Blogger saying new comments were posted on my blog:



Up until now, the spam situation with Blogger was decent. I'd only ever had the odd spam comment come through and I had been able delete them all. With this massive barrage though, I don't have the patience to go through and delete them all, especially knowing that it can happen again.

For now, I'll just hope that blogger deletes the spammer's account and all of the comments he posted.

Toy Story, Cave Story, .... Ubuntu Story ?

About once a month, I receive an email solicitation asking me to promote something on my blog. 9/10 times I just ignore it, because they're usually asking me to promote a spam blog. Not cool.



It looks like we did better with this month's email. Rather than a pointless spam blog, it was instead regarding UbuntuStory.com, which seems like a friendly advertisement for Ubuntu by a community member. I'm probably preaching to the choir here, but if you haven't tried Ubuntu yet, I'd check out the site.

Sorry, your first impression from that site will be wrong - Ubuntu won't take you on a wild African adventure, but it can make your computer much less of a pain in the ass to use. :)

Ubuntu 8.04 Beta Thoughts

Yesterday, I decided to upgrade to the Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) Beta. I've been having problems with internet connection and I thought an upgrade might fix it, but now I'm convinced it's a problem with my LAN segment, not my card. Anyways, among the shiny new goodness:

• Firefox 3 - Great new GTK look on all the buttons, they don't look like they're from 1993 anymore!
• Wait, more crazy Firefox 3 goodness - apparently now I can cut and paste images around by right-clicking on them in the Blogger "Compose" mode.
• Notebooks in Tomboy! If you're a Tomboy Notes user, you won't believe how useful this is. I currently have 78 notes in Tomboy, so being able to organize them is a huge win for me.
  

Tracker (left) and Tomboy (right)

• Tracker for indexing, now with a spiffy tray icon. More importantly, when you right-click on the tray icon, you can easily pause the data indexing (for example, if you have an older PC like me and want to fire up a game that pushes your system, like Quake Wars)
• The new screen resolution and display setup dialog. I've read lots of people evangelizing about this - it's supposed to make setting up a second display easier, such as when you're plugging in a projector. I haven't tested this personally though, and I'll believe it when I see it.
  
  

• Lots of little improvements to Evolution as well. It handles multiple operations nicer now, and seems quite a bit snappier. Big thanks to the Evolution team for their hard work.
• Other random things that I haven't personally tested: The new gio stuff in Nautilus is supposed to make doing multiple file copies simultaneously "better", and the old VFS mounts have been replaced with a new system. I use SSH mounts through Gnome frequently, so I'm looking forward to playing with the new system.

I'm sure there's lots of other little things I've yet to stumble across, and it'll take about a month for me to notice any little bugs that crop up. So far so good though - it looks like we've got another good Ubuntu release!

HOWTO: Figure out what's using your soundcard in Linux

It's 2008, and while Linux audio is getting better for desktop users, I still occasionally find myself running into a situation where one application is tying up my soundcard. Sometimes I'll try to run jackd through qjackctl and it'll fail because Firefox has a flash video loaded in it or something like that.

Anyways, to figure out what's using your soundcard on Linux, you can run:

sudo fuser -v /dev/dsp*
sudo fuser -v /dev/snd/*

The first command above will list all the OSS applications using your sound hardware, and the latter will tackle ALSA applications.

For example, if I run those commands with nothing running:

gamegod@home:~/$ sudo fuser -v /dev/dsp*
gamegod@home:~/$ sudo fuser -v /dev/snd/*
                USER        PID ACCESS COMMAND
/dev/snd/controlC0:  gamegod    6236 F.... mixer_applet2

The output above is showing me that GNOME's mixer applet is using the "control" interface on my soundcard. This won't interfere with any applications, so you can always safely keep this running.

As another example, if I run Mixxx (software for DJs) before running those commands, I'll see:

gamegod@home:~/$ sudo fuser -v /dev/dsp*
gamegod@home:~/$ sudo fuser -v /dev/snd/*
              USER          PID ACCESS COMMAND
/dev/snd/controlC0:  gamegod    6236 F.... mixer_applet2
/dev/snd/pcmC0D0p:   gamegod   12936 F...m mixxx
/dev/snd/seq:        gamegod   12936 F.... mixxx

This time the output above is showing me that Mixxx is using my soundcard's audio first ouput interface (pcmC0D0p corresponds to ALSA's hw:0,0), as well as ALSA's MIDI interface.

KDE 4.0 Released!

After having sworn off KDE many years ago, I might just have to give it a second shot - KDE 4.0 was just released, and brings a massive overhaul to the desktop environment. Congratulations to the entire KDE team on making this release happen. A lot of very talented people put a lot of hard work into this.




If you're looking for eye-candy, check out the KDE 4 screenshots on their site. Kickoff and KRunner look well thought-out, and I'm itching to give them a try. They also look like they're better integrated into the desktop environment than their GNOME equivalents (Deskbar and any of those XP/Vista-style system panel clones).

If you want to give it a spin, the source and binary packages for several distros are available on the KDE 4.0.0 info page. Packages for (K)Ubuntu 7.10 are available along with a LiveCD here.

Good stuff.

HOWTO: Get more visualizations in Totem/Rhythmbox

After 4 years, I finally got sick of GOOM and decided to figure out how to get more visualizers in Totem and Rhythmbox.

This looks really trippy when it's in motion

Turns out all you need to do is install the libvisual-0.4-plugins package through Synaptic. Piece of cake.

In Gutsy this buys you eight more visualizers, although I was hoping for more than that*. I feel the urge to write a cool visualizer one day, seems like a good weekend project.

* I was hoping that it'd be like installing xscreensaver-gl-extra and xscreensaver-data-extra, where you get a ton of really funky new screensavers.

So you remember all of those Mac vs. Vista ads...

... and you remember the whole "deny or allow" thing?

Well, I don't know why Apple was making fun of Vista, because they decided to join in on the fun in Leopard:

Yes, I know Skype is an application from the Internet. Where the hell do you think I get 99% of my applications from?

It seems like Linux is the only OS moving forwards these days...

Leopard (kinda) hates Ubuntu

I ended up picking up a MacBook a few weeks ago, and I've been dual booting Ubuntu and OS X (Tiger) on it. Ubuntu's been a bit of a let-down because there's been so many quirks, and so I spend most of my time in OS X on the thing. (I still use Ubuntu on my desktop machine.)

Anyways, I got my Leopard upgrade DVD, and found a nice little surprise when I tried to upgrade: The Leopard upgrader wants to format my whole drive because it can't find my OS X partition or something. The manual and website say that I'm supposed to be able to upgrade if I used a beta version of Bootcamp to dual-boot (which I did), but apparently it wants to format my drive because I've got Linux installed instead of Windows in the other partition.

Did I mention that it wants to format my whole drive? (my old OS X partition too)

It's not like Leopard doesn't have enough problems already....

Update: Arrrrrrg, bloody Apple lingo. The installer says it wants to format my "Macintosh HD", which I forgot isn't actually my whole hard-drive (despite the HD moniker). So it just wants to format my OS X partition.... which is the one I use and store all my data on.... *sigh*