Carthik Sharma

The NOC at UCF posted a warning, asking UCF computer users to not use Google Desktop V3. Good call!

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Microsoft will close the book on its FrontPage Web-design program with the release of Office 2007, formerly known as Office 12, late this year.

Words fail to express how much I hated Frontpage, for its ugly code, indecipherable menus and options and general incompetence. All those who “know” how to use Microsoft Frontpage will soon be left in the lurch, just like so many times before, when a big corporation decides to shelve a successful product. All the training, time and effort spent by non-techies into learning how to use the monster will now be a waste.

This is a big disadvantage to using proprietary programs and tools – the discontinuation of the program or tool, or even the absence of updates can force you spend more time, and possibly money, and cause much heartburn. Try using open source alternatives in the place of such products. You will never have to worry about the product becoming obsolete or discontinued, if it is in the top of it’s domain. Knowledge you earn by learning to use open source tools is open too, and the very nature of open source OSes makes you educated, informed and capable of fixing your own problems.

This microsoft tool will remove the stuffing from your documents.

Brief Description
With this add-in you can permanently remove hidden data and collaboration data, such as change tracking and comments, from Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint files.

The webpage details the apps that this works with. Often I have seen the size of word documents and such grow uncontrollably. I still work with MS Office, and this would have been very useful had I know about this earlier. I owe one more to Karl for this tip.

One of the main problems I had (about a year ago) with working, or using the computer, when at home, was that I did not have a proper seating arrangement, and so used to end up slouching in the couch, or torturing my spine in bed, or some such. So I got myself this desk from Target.

Now the problem with working from home was that when I work on the laptop, the laptop keyboard on top of the desk made for an uncomfortable typing position. The keyboard tray in the desk is already occupied by the desktop’s keyboard and mouse — so I can’t place an external usb keyboard and mouse on the tray for use with my laptop.

So as things were, I used to work, and use the computer at school.

Until tomorrow. Today I installed Synergy on my desktop as well as laptop. This was very easy to do – $sudo apt-get install synergy was all it took, thanks to Ubuntu’s magical software management. Then I edited a synergy.conf file onthe desktop following the instructions at the wiki.

The following is the entire content of the file /etc/synergy.conf :

section: screens
        # two hosts named:  umberto(desktop), milan(laptop)
        umberto:
        milan:
end

section: links
        # umberto's screen is to the right of milan's
        umberto:
                left = milan
        milan:
                right = umberto
end

Then the desktop was ready to act as a “server”, that is the machine that has the keyboard and mouse physically connected to it. $synergys --config /etc/synergy.conf got synergy running.

Now, on the laptop, I installed synergy, and I fire it up using $synergyc umberto (where umberto is the host-name of the desktop). That’s it, now I can use the same mouse and keyboard for both the desktop and the laptop. When I move the mouse to the extreme left on the desktop’s monitor, and then a little more to the left, the mouse pointer pops into the laptop’s screen, and now the mouse and keyboard can be used for the laptop. When I move the mouse to the extreme right of the laptop screen, it pops into the desktop, and now the kyboard and mouse can be used with the desktop. This is so magical, almost, when you try it – especially since setting it up was so effortless.

I wonder why I took so long to set this up, really. Now I can’t wait to do this at the lab too, where I have another desktop, keyboard and mouse waiting

Come tomorrow, I might just feel better about working from home, and save myself at least the late-evening trip back to the lab.

Oh, Synergy works for windows and macs too, and for any and all combination of OSes, and for multiple computers. So you can have 5 computers and monitors all controlled by the same keyboard and mouse. Isn’t that great!

The Gnu Privacy Handbook stresses the importance of creating a revocation certificate for your gpg keys soon after you create your key-pair(s).

Update: the official FAQ lists the following, too, more or less. Why is it that you always find what you were looking for after the event?

It does not, however say how to revoke your keys using the generated certificate at a later date.

So here’s an overview:

Create a revocation certificate by :
gpg --output ~/myrevoke.asc --gen-revoke your_user_id
The above command will generate a revocation certificate, and save it as myrevoke.asc in your home directory. Save the myrevoke.asc file – guard it, since if I get my hands on it, I can revoke your certificate.

Protect it by:

• Encrypt your revoke cert with gpg -c file. As you are using symmetric encryption with -c, the password is the only key you need. Then, burn the key on a cd (or two), store them away properly and erase the key plus any temp files the burning program might have created (also, dd if=/dev/zero of=/partition/of/swap might be a good idea, /dev/urandom for the tin foil hats)
• You can enable others to generate revokation keys for your own private key with via gpg –desig-revoke (or just hand them a cd with your encrypted revoke cert if you trust them not to brute-force it.

Thanks to Richih of irc://irc.freenode.net/linuxhelp for help with the above.

On a later day, when like me, you grow suspicious about the integrity of your key-pair, you want to revoke the key-pair using the revocation certificate that you already have, do the following:

Import the revocation certificate to revoke the key-pair on your system:
gpg --import ~/myrevoke.asc
The above command assumes that the revocation certificate is named myrevoke.asc and resides in your home directory.

Now send the updated keys to a keyserver near you:
gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --send-keys your_user_id

Now you are all set. Whenever someone refreshes their keys database, they will know that the old keys have been revoked.

Long time users of Photoshop, the image editing program (so to speak) may have a problem getting used to Gimp.
The first problem is the that it takes some time to get around the question, “Why the heck is software that is so much better than Photoshop in some respects, available totally free?”. I leave you to work your way around that problem.
What I can help you with is the other problem – relearning how to accomplish different actions in Gimp. The gimp project has called the GUI the Graphical User Irritation or something in the past, if I recall correctly. Back in the days when I was a novice Linux user (not that I am any better off now, really), I found it interesting that the whole Gimp menu appeared when I right-clicked on the image. I thought that was neat, but it had it’s problems and all that. Now Gimp has windows-style menus and all that jazz, but some of the features or tools in Gimp have names that are different from Photoshop, and the menu is differently organized.
Now, with Scott’s GimpShop, Gimp behaves like Photoshop(Go ahead, check out the screenshots if you don’t beleive me). There is a Linux port of GimpShop too, if you need one.
So save the $649 for something better. Use Gimp.

(If you were a smart ass like me, you’d be using Ubuntu as your OS already , and saving and feeling good about being smart. )
Note: The author of the above article acknowledges that rising at 4 A.M. to work, and then taking a break after just 3 hours is not too smart.

Now what sort of an error message is this?:

Error: Success! (like it was not supposed to succeed at what it was trying to do)

Notice the other error message, which is still sane. This used to happen occasionally, and I had saved a screenshot for later.

I upgraded to Ubuntu Hoary, which is the next release, coming out sometime in May 2005. It is bleeding edge software under development for the most, but from my experience using it on the work desktop, I know it to be pretty stable. No problems so far, with anything critical. I guess I can take any problems it throws at me.

The reason for the upgrade was so that I can use Tomboy and F-spot, or at least try them out.

Tomboy is a desktop-note taking app, which I already find mighty useful, after 2 days of using it. An icon (Tintin) sits on my taskbar, and pops up an easy to use list of notes, and a link to Recent Changes. I can link to other notes from a note, so it really is a small note-taking wiki, which is el neato.

F-spot is for managing photos, you can tag snaps and export them to Flickr, or your own gallery. The gallery export feature did not work for me, and since it is a product currently being developed, there isn’t too much documentation or details at the website. It’s not complete by any means, but it interesting nevertheless. I need a way to organize all the photos I have on my computer. A lot of the more recent snaps never made it to my gallery, really, and I have been postponing the upload until after I have organized the pics locally. Why, oh why, is organizing such a chore?

Here’s where I live and here’s my daily drive! Thanks to maps.google.com.
On a side note, I have been thinking of biking the 5 miles daily – should be a good exercise, and could save a little gas money, like about $0.75 a day

It’s easy to look up a map given the latitude and longitude as an ICBM coordinate pair.
Here’s 28.553101, -81.193150 for example, which I got by entering the text I used in link, in the search box.

It seems like it is limited to the US /North America now, though, ’cause I get nothing for 76.958333, 8.437500, which is somewhere in Kerala, India.

Phishing flaw a danger to alternative browsers is interesting, to say the least. Internationalized domain names were introduced so we could have URLs in all languages – not just English. The modern browsers, especially gecko-based ones, like Netscape and Firefox support IDN already. Users of these browsers could be fooled into beleiving that www.pàypal.com is www.paypal.com, for example. It’s called a “homograph attack”.

The articles says :

Microsoft has not implemented support for IDN yet, so its IE browser is not vulnerable to the flaw.

Microsoft hasn’t implemented support for many standards, so that’s no surprise, really.