Technology Tales

Sometimes, things do get missed...

Being a user of Textpattern, I should have a vested interested in any developments in that venerable web platform. However, the latest release came out at the end of August unbeknownst to me and that's with an entry on the Dev Blog. Since those blog entries come irregularly, that might have been how I missed it, especially when there were other things going on in my life like the installation of new windows in my house and weekends spent in Scotland and Ireland.

Still, the whole release was more low-key than, say, a new version of WordPress where many would be shouting how important the upgrade would be and with messages turning up on blog administration screens too. There may be good reason for this, given the recent problems experienced by those who fail to keep up with progress. Of course, WordPress is a major target for unwanted attention, so it's best to keep your wits about you. Though the quieter nature of the Textpattern project might be an asset when it comes to warding off miscreants, its greater compatibility with more technically minded folk may help security too. While saying all of that may be pure speculation, you only have to look at the world of operating systems to see how the idea came into my mind.

A later posting on the Textpattern blog tells you about the new goodies available in release 4.2.0, yet here's a short selection to whet your appetite: themes for the administration area, multiple sites and new tags. Upgrading proved painless, though I did try it out on an offline version of the microsite where I use Textpattern before making a move on its online counterpart. Even if all went smoothly, it's always best to look before you leap, or a site rebuild might be in order and no one needs that.

Booting from external drives

Sticking with older hardware may mean that you miss out on the possibilities offered by later kit, and being able to boot from external optical and hard disk drives was something of which I learned only recently. Like many things, a compatible motherboard and my enforced summer upgrade means that I have one with the requisite capabilities.

There is usually an external DVD drive attached to my main PC, so that allowed the prospect of a test. A bit of poking around in the BIOS settings for the Foxconn motherboard was sufficient to get it looking at the external drive at boot time. Popping in a CrunchBang Linux live DVD was all that was needed to prove that booting from a USB drive was a goer. That CrunchBang is a minimalist variant of Ubuntu helped for acceptable speed at system startup and afterwards.

Having lived off them while in home PC limbo, the temptation to test out the idea of installing an operating system on an external HD and booting from that is definitely there, though I think that I'll be keeping mine as backup drives for now. Still, there's nothing to stop me installing an operating system onto of them and giving that a whirl sometime. Of course, speed constraints mean that any use of such an arrangement would be occasional but, in the event of an emergency, such a setup could have its uses and tide you over for longer than a Live CD or DVD. Having the chance to poke around with an alternative operating system as it might exist on a real PC has its appeal too, and avoids the need for any partitioning and other chores that dual booting would require. After all, there's only so much testing that can be done in a virtual machine.

Temptations, temptations...

The last time that I went out and bought a new camera was over two years ago, and I am minded not to make another purchase for a while. Apart from damage to the battery cover arising from a fall, my Pentax K10D has survived so far without a problem and I admit to being satisfied with the photos that it makes. Following a professional sensor clean, my Canon EOS 10D has been pressed into service over the past few months, too. Meanwhile, 6 and 10 megapixel sensors generate nowhere near the attention that might have been the case a few years back, but that's by the by. In fact, the megapixel race seems to have stalled, with features like video being added to photographic cameras over the last year and live screens coming to prominence as well. Neither would make me rush out to buy a new DSLR anyway, perhaps because having things the old way suits me just fine and megapixel counts never ever moved me in the first place either.

That's never to say that the likes of Pentax's K-7 or Canon's EOS 50D and 5D Mark II don't capture my attention with their promises of better quality. However, with things the way that they are in the world, I am more likely to retain my cash or maybe invest in new photo processing software for making the most of what I already have. Ideas for photography projects creep into my head when I get to looking over my online photo gallery and realise that not have my tastes changed, while my photographic eye has developed too. That seeing of things in a new light may mean that old subjects get revisited, and I don't need a new camera to do that.

High-end compact cameras such as Canon's G11 and Ricoh's GR Digital III do detain attention for a while but a brief look at their prices proves that you really got to need the portability and I never can justify the outlay when a DSLR will do all that I want from it, and perhaps even for less money. While I admit to pondering the purchase of a GR Digital to cover for the EOS 10D while it was away for cleaning, the Pentax came to be acquired when I realised that the versatility of a DSLR was too much to lose, even for a while. Olympus' E-P1 may have bridged the gap, but the old question of going miniature for the price of a full sized article recurs.

All in all, I am going to stick with what I have right now. We are coming to a time of year when things appear more golden and that combination of lighting and colour are what really matters, not how many megapixels are in your camera sensor unless you are making large prints or supplying stock libraries. As long as my cameras continue to deliver pleasing results, I'll stick with elevating my skills and taking my time over that task, even with all the announcements of new cameras at various exhibitions and shows.

A new phone

For someone with a more than passing interest in technology, it may come as a surprise to you to learn that mobile telephony isn't one of my strong points at all. That's all the more marked when you cast your eye back over the developments in mobile telephone technology recently. Admittedly, until I subscribed to RSS feeds from the likes of TechRadar, the computing side of the area didn't pass my way very much at all. That act has alerted me to the now unmissable fact that mobile phones have become portable small computers, regardless of whether it is an offering from Apple or not. After the last few years, no one can say that things haven't got fascinating.

In contrast to all the excitement, I only got my first phone in 2000 and stuck with it since, and that was despite its scuffs and scratches along with its battery life troubles. Part of the reason for this is a certain blindness induced by having the thing on a monthly contract. As that is not sufficient to hide away the option of buying a phone on its own, then there's the whole pay-as-you-go arena too. The level of choice is such that packages such as those mentioned gain more prominence and potentially stop things in their tracks, but I surmounted the perceived obstacles to buy a Nokia 1661 online from the Carphone Warehouse and collect it from the nearest store. The new replacement for my old Motorola is nothing flashy. While other phones may have nice stuff like an on-board camera or web access, I went down the route of sticking with basic functionality, albeit in a modern package with a colour screen. Still, for around £35, I got something that adds niceties like an alarm clock and a radio to the more bread and butter operations like making and taking phone calls and text messaging. Though pay-as-you-go may have got me the phone for less, I didn't need a new phone number since I planned to slot in my old SIM card anyway; incidentally, the latter operation was a doddle once I got my brain into gear.

Now that I have replaced my mobile handset like I would for my land-line phone, I am left wondering why I dallied over the task for as long as I have. It may be that the combination of massive choice and a myriad of packages that didn't appeal to me stalled things. With an increased awareness of the technology and options like buying a SIM card on its own, I can buy with a little more confidence now. Though those fancier phones may tempt, I'll be treating them as a nice to have rather than essential purchases. Saying all of this, the old handset isn't going into the bin just yet, though. While it may be worn and worthless, its tri-band capabilities (I cannot vouch for the Nokia on this front) may make it a useful back-up for international travel. The upgrade has given me added confidence for trying again when needs must, but there is no rush and that probability of my developing an enthusiasm for fancy handsets is no higher.

Early impressions of Ubuntu 9.10

Even if the twice a year release means that changes to Ubuntu are evolutionary rather than revolutionary, that isn't to imply that curiosity doesn't get the better of me from time to time. The result is that an early alpha version (3 at the time of writing) of the Linux distro has found a home in a VirtualBox VM on my main system. The most noticeable change so far is the inclusion of GNOME 2.27.5 with its Fedora-esque log-in screen and the movement of the shutdown and log-off paraphernalia to the System menu, which is where you find it in Debian or Fedora. On the account settings menu, there lives a link to an equivalent of the Windows Control Panel called Control Centre; the menu item is named System Preferences. For the record, I have seen it in Fedora 11 too, so it does look as if Ubuntu's GNOME implementation is looking more like a brown equivalent of Fedora. Whether this stays like this is anyone's guess, but a new messaging arrangement is coming into being, too.

Otherwise, there appears to be no real drama on the surface, with Firefox staying at 3.0.x for now and OpenOffice moving to 3.1. Personally speaking, I'd be very surprised to see Firefox 3.5.x being left out, though I did run into a spot of bother with the Preferences dialogue crashing it on Windows XP. Under the bonnet, the kernel is at release 2.6.31 and things seem reasonably stable at this stage. Saying that, there is a crash report icon that appears every session, but that has no effect apart from the visual side of things. VirtualBox Guest Additions work as they should, better than they in Windows guests if my experience provides any sort of benchmark (the display does odd things unless you keep jogging the graphics memory up and down). All in all, things appear usable if undramatic at this stage, and there are a few months to go before the final release anyway.

Adding msttcorefonts to Fedora

Once you have enabled the appropriate software repository, you can install the msttcorefonts (Microsoft TrueType core fonts like Arial, Times Roman, Verdana, Georgia, etc.) package on Debian and Ubuntu. With Fedora, it surprisingly isn't so straightforward. There is a recipe using the command line that worked for me, and I'm not going to repeat it here, so I'll leave you to go where I found it. In fact, it forms part of a wider unofficial Fedora FAQ that may be of more interest to you than solving this.

Update for Fedora 12 (2009-11-24):

You also need chkfontpath so the following needs doing before the final part of the command sequence, changing the filename as appropriate for your situation:

yum install xfs
rpm -ivh http://dl.atrpms.net/all/chkfontpath-1.10.1-2.fc12.i686.rpm

Making Nautilus work like it does in Ubuntu for any other GNOME-using distro

While It's a personal preference, I like the way that Nautilus (GNOME's default file manager if you need to know) is set to work on Ubuntu by default. For some tastes, it might look too similar to Windows Explorer, but having all the action happening in the same window is a convenience that users of other GNOME using distributions may not realise is there at all. By default, Debian and Fedora use what is called spatial mode, with each double-clicking action on a folder icon firing up a new window. Personally, I think that clutters the desktop without good cause, yet it's easy to change. All that's needed is to go to Edit>Preferences in a Nautilus window, proceed to the Behaviour tab and toggle the Always open in browser windows tick box as shown below. Quite why this is not the default in all GNOME using distributions is beyond me, but others may prefer what I dislike and Linux is all about choice, after all. Well, you can decide to use Gnome Commander instead and there are times when I do the same along with being a command line user too.

Using the Windows Command Line for Security Administration

While there are point and click tools for the job, being able to set up new user groups, attach them to folders and assign users to them using the command line has major advantages when there are a number to be set up and logs of execution can be retained too. In light of this, it seems a shame that terse documentation along with the challenge of tracking down answers to any questions using Google, or whatever happens to be your search engine of choice, makes it less easy to discern what commands need to be run. This is where a book would help, but the whole experience is in direct contrast to the community of information providers that is the Linux user community, with Ubuntu being a particular shining example. Saying that, the Windows help system is not so bad once you can track down what you need. For instance, knowing that you need commands like CACLS and NET LOCALGROUP, the ones that have been doing the back work for me, it offers useful information quickly enough. To illustrate the usefulness of the aforementioned commands, here are a few scenarios.

Creating a new group:

net localgroup [name of new group] /comment:"[more verbose description of new group]" /add

Add a group to a folder:

cacls [folder address] /t /e /p [name of group]

The /t switch gets cacls to apply changes to the ACL for the specified folder and all its subfolders, a recursive action in other words, while the /e specifies ACL editing rather than its replacement and /p induces replacement of permissions for a given user or group. Using :n, :f, :c or :r directly after the name of a specified user or group assigns no, full, change (write) or read access, respectively. Replacing /p with /r revokes access, and leaving off the :n/:f/:c/:r will remove the group or user from the folder.

Add a user to a group:

net localgroup [name of group] [user name (with domain name if on a network)] /add

In addition to NET LOCALGROUP, there is also NET GROUP for wider network operations, something that I don't have cause to do. Casting the thinking net even wider, I suspect that VB scripting and its ability to tweak the Windows Management Interface might offer more functionality than what is above (PowerShell also comes to mind while we are on the subject) but I am sharing what has been helping me, and it can be difficult to find if you don't know where to look.

Enabling DVD playback in Ubuntu 9.04

This information is scattered about the web, so I decided to collect something together in one place in case it helps anyone else. Here are two commands that appeared to do the deed for me:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras totem-xine libxine1-ffmpeg libdvdread4

sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh

The libdvdread piece is what sorts out encrypted disks and needs a two stage installation, hence the second command. For non-encrypted disks, ubuntu-restricted-extras might be all that's needed if my experience is typical. Taking things further, Wim Wenders' Buena Vista Social Club (Region 2 disk) worked when I tried it, too. In the interests of completeness, I tried the command combination on a virgin 9.04 installation with restricted and multiverse repositories enabled. Along the way, I spied a whole raft of helper components being set in place, and things worked like I would have expected with the aforementioned DVD afterwards. As with anything related to computing, your mileage may vary and, for more information, you can have a look here.

A spot of roughness with VirtualBox 3.02 on Ubuntu

Among the various things that I needed to do on Saturday, I got to look at why VirtualBox Windows guests could not shut down and the processes killed. Though it wasn't clear at the outset, my suspicions began to centre on the sound hardware emulation and how it interacted with the host's sound capabilities. A look at the VirtualBox log sent me that way after a spot of experimentation with reinstalling Windows 7 and adding the Guest Additions along with removal and reinstatement of the same for a Windows XP guest that makes my like easier. It also seems that the same problem blighted the start-up of Linux guests too. Either removing virtual sound hardware or using the null sound driver seems to allow things to run smoothly. That may not sound ideal, yet it doesn't bother me, with the host providing all that I need. Also, it's a moot point whether I have come across a bug in VirtualBox or whether using Ubuntu on a hardware configuration on which it wasn't originally installed is the cause, but I have found a way forward that suits me. Saying that, if I find that the issue disappears in a future, that would be even better.