Computer Tips -Tech Info

This is a fairly significant “state of this site” type post and well… if you’re a usual visitor you might want to read/skim this one. It’s been about 15 months or so since the last big redesign of this site and as some long time lurkers may know, the updates were FEW and far between before moving to WordPress and this new layout. I mean, a year or so between updates was not uncommon. In the last year+ I’ve had a few spans where a month or so has gone by without posting, but in many cases I’ve been posting multiple (in other cases MANY MANY) posts in a single day.

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There are a couple new software packages in wordpress’ family: MuPress which is a multiuser (and multi-site) wordpress archicture… is available. IF that had been available a year ago, I might have based my sites on it, because it sounds as though you could have one backend for several sites. I may yet play around with it, but…. let’s see.. the other entry is bbpress which is a bulletin board backend that integrates with the wordpress user management system (shared user name/passwords/single login kind of stuff..) Good to see these releases and continuing development.

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I remember the question from long ago, we had just shared a printer across a windows network and…. wait for it…. “oh, well could I share my scanner too?” On windows the typical answer was NO, at least not unless there was a driver from the scanner manufacturer that supported it, but on linux the answer is an unqualified YES as long as the scanner is supported under linux (so many are..) Using SANE (which is the linux scanner driver backend) you can share out scanners across a network and tips.linux.com has an article on just that topic. I’ve set it up before on my network and it was relatively easy to do and VERY convenient. At that time, I don’t recall a good functional windows client for the SANE driver, but it may have matured a bit by now (last I looked into it was 3-4 years ago.)

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and the script kiddies rejoiced… It reads as though Metasploit 3 will make it easier than ever for script kiddies everywhere to take full advantage of the local wireless hotspots. Of course, metasploit has it’s good uses by people legitimately testing systems that they are responsible for, for vulnerabilities. But, it does make it very easy for the less skilled to pull off some exploits.

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Lacie has released a tool to write the back of cds using HP’s lightscribe technology under linux. I seem to recall there being a possibility of future support in k3b, but I don’t think that has been done yet. From what I remember about lightscribe is that it would require that you buy specially made cds that support being written using lightscribe. They were a bit more expensive than a standard cdr, but it is an impressive effect.

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Another issue was reported with the new IE 7 and confirmed by Microsoft. It seems that it’s possible for a malicious link to spoof the information in the address bar (make it look like you’re at a site that you’re NOT at.) Incidents.org gives the following possible workaround…

As a quick workaround you may want to configure MSIE 7.0 to open new windows in a new tab. In order to do this, Tools -> Internet Options -> Tabs Settings -> When a pop-up is encountered: Always open pop-ups in a new tab.

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The newest Ubuntu (K/X/Edu as well) is out, Edgy Eft 6.10 is finalized and will be supported for 18 months. (Longer support/users seeking stable proven base should stick with Dapper Drake…) One of the biggest changes I can see from reports is the init process replacement. It sounds like they’ve yielded some good bootup improvements and I’m looking forward to downloading and trying it out. I found it interesting to see that the plan for the 7.04 release of Ubuntu is to include native support for Autopackage which is another approach to making “just any” old program trivial to install on any linux variant.

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I’m tempted to say “long live the cd…”, but… EMI’s CEO has declared that the CD is dead. He does point out that you’re not likely to give your Aunt an iTunes download, so “dead” just means “in decline” in this parlance. However, I can’t help but laugh to myself of the notion that I release a cd through lulu of hymns and within the week the CD is declared dead. No, seriously… I haven’t bought a cd in quite a while myself. Mainly because I don’t want to put up with all the DRM restrictions these days. I want to be able to have a simple cd that I can extract to another player IF I WANT. But I want the original CD as a “high quality archived original” in comparison to the mp3 that might be lost when a flash drive or hard drive dies and isn’t quite as high quality.

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Several blog posts have heralded the arrival of Google’s newest toy, a custom search engine setup… sort of Through Google Coop you can design a search engine that only covers the sites you want it to cover (or favor, it can search the web and just be biased towards the sites you prefer.) Of course, this relies on googles existing index, so if a site has not been crawled and indexed by the googlebot, you seem to be out of luck. I’ve tried a test at http://www.southcarolinagenealogy.org/search for my North and South Carolina genealogy sites…. a merged search between the two would be handy…

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from the command line in linux… or generating them from Wavs…. So, I’ve got this CD that I’ve made and is up for sale at lulu.com traditional hymns done as “chimes”. I’ve spent quite a bit of time recording to hard drive, editing and getting the wav files as good as possible and I’ve uploaded them, but I also want to make the individual songs available as mp3 downloads too. AND I want to give a preview, either a low quality mp3 of the whole, or a high quality 30 second clip…. Hmmm… how to do it.

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