Geek Stuff category archive

Learn about the wonderful world of free and open source.

What: Monthly TWUUG Meeting.

Who: Everyone in TideWater/Hampton Roads with interest in any/all flavors of Unix/Linux. There are no dues or signup requirements. All are welcome.

Where: Lake Taylor Transitional Care Hospital in Norfolk-Employee Cafeteria. See directions below. (Wireless and wired internet connection available.)

When: 7:30 PM till whenever (usually 9:30ish) on Thursday, November 4.

Directions: Lake Taylor Hospital-1309, Kempsville Road, Norfolk, 23502 (Kempsville Rd. at Lowry Rd.) 461-5001

Pre-Meeting Dinner at 6:00 PM (separate checks) at Uno Chicago Grill, Virginia Beach Blvd. & Military Highway (Janaf Shopping Center). Accessible through the Janaf parking lot or directly from the ramp from Virginia Beach Blvd. to Military Highway north.

Daniel Klein and Patrick Bonavitacola, in the Boston Globe, consider the twitterfication of the language. A nugget:

Personal Responsibility

Old: “And so my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.’’ — JFK, 1961

New: “Buck up or stay in the truck.’’ — Sarah Palin, 2010

James Madison University:

James Madison coach Mickey Matthews closed practices to reporters last week and made no bones about the reason: social media.

(snip)

Matthews said reporters were “announcing to the world” what was happening at practices and he wouldn’t tolerate it because he has “an obligation to the university and the program.”

A Firefox extension called “Firesheep” automates hacking your wi-fi connection if you are using public wi-fi.

Firesheep, though, has an easy-to-use interface and, perhaps most importantly, a cute name. Surely this can’t be a “cracking tool”? It wasn’t released by someone going by a name like ‘dEvILSp0RN42’. It doesn’t feature white text on a black background. It has well-thought-out and literate documentation. To use it, you simply install it into Firefox and click a few buttons. One minor additional step, installing WinPcap, is required for Windows users.

Here’s a demo:

UK Electoral Edition.

At Psychology Today, Christine Louise Hohlbaum asks

Are we losing our ability to actually interact with other people on a personal level? I’m wondering if we are.

(snip)

In response to a private conversation my PR colleagues and I were having about this topic (yes, via email!) , Herdon, VA-based PR professional Diane Johnson said, “We’re cultivating a culture of mushroom people who want to sit in front of their computer or on their PDAs and believe using their fingers (while keeping them off each other) counts as human interaction.”

To share your reaction, use your mobile phone to connect with the Pine View Farm mobile site (the URL is the same) and text in your comments.

Phantom Facebook user brings police to school:

Clearview Superintendent John Horchak III said the students reported the posts around Tuesday to school officials, who alerted police.

The person posting the comments called himself David Prezet, according to students, and students were concerned Thursday because the poster indicated he was coming to the school that day.

Horchak said the poster claimed he was going to enroll that day. That did not happen, nor is there a student at the Mullica Hill school by that name, the superintendent said.

It started with friend requests. Once the poster had a number of “Facebook friends” amongst the students, the posts turned creepy–from the story, apparently more nasty than threatening.

Having been a teenager and (probably contrary to the theories of my children, being able to remember what it was like) I suspect the posts were pretty creepy to motivate the kids to complain to the administration.

Why can’t they be like we were, stealing the occasional stop sign and tping the occasional teacher’s yard and driving fast on back roads on dark nights perfect in every way?

And this surprises us how?

Facebook users are inadvertently providing access to their names and in some cases even their friend’s names to advertising and Internet tracking companies, through some popular applications, the Wall Street Journal said.

According to the Journal’s investigation, the issue affects tens of millions of Facebook app users, including people who set their profiles to Facebook’s strictest privacy settings, the paper said.

Ethan Gilsdorf considers role-playing, Dungeons and Dragons, All Hallows Eve, and Facebook in the Boston Globe. A nugget:

Role-playing? Like that conflict-resolution exercise your sales team endured last year? Or role-playing, as in Dungeons & Dragons — that strange and wondrous game I (and perhaps you) played back in the Reagan administration, rolling dice in a basement and slaying goblins and dragons and snarfing bowls of Doritos?

I’d argue all these experiences — including posting a witty Facebook update — are cut from the same role-playing cloth. We all share that desire to be someone else. To be better, stronger, faster; to appear more handsome, more clever, more attractive than our fleshy selves might ever be. “My, aren’t we having fun?’’ say our photos, snapped while we’re half drunk and posted in a day-after haze. On my Match.com profile, I offer clues that might seduce. I suggest, in a whisper of pixels, “I am your ideal man.’’

Jen McCreight, grad student and aspiring biologist, thinks she has found part of the reason that scientific information is poorly received. Scientists can’t write, and the conventions of scientific literature accentuate their inability to write:

Most scientists are terrible writers.

And when I say terrible writers, I’m not just talking about English skills – though that certainly is a problem. When I had to read some of my classmates’ papers in undergrad, I was often thankful to find a sentence that wasn’t a fragment or a run-on. I don’t have perfect grammar, especially when informally blogging, but I can usually get general concepts across. And don’t even get me started on the organization of some papers. Your methods are where?

But most science writing is simply impenetrable. Everything seems to be lingo and jargon, to the point where they might as well be speaking another language. This problem gets worse with time, since fields are becoming more specialized, not less.

I think she has a point. Much academic writing is execrable.

I once had a boss who had recently earned a doctorate in an education-related field (not teaching or guidance–he was in business, not in the school system; it was in ed. psych., instructional design, or something like that).

He told me that, when his advisor read the draft of his dissertation, his advisor told him to rewrite it.

He said, “Why? I think it’s very well-written.”

The advisor said, “It’s too well-written. It’s too clear. The sentences are too short. The language is too straightforward. Go back and replace the sort words with long ones.”

Thirty additional pages later, his advisor told him the dissertation was ready to be submitted to the examining committee.

Yesterday I used the Trinity Rescue Kit Linux Live CD to clean up a balky Windows computer. The computer has been washed, dried, and pressed, and is ready to be returned to its owner.

Today I wrote a blog post about it at Geekazine.

From the Chicago Tribune:

With the election weeks away, Fremd High School teacher Jason Spoor asked students in his government class, some of them first-time voters, to research local candidates vying for office.

They would have 15 minutes and one learning tool: their cell phone.

(snip)

The lesson would have been impossible in the past. But with cell phones tucked in the book bags and pockets of three-fourths of today’s teens, many high schools are ceding defeat in the battle to keep hand-held technology out of class and instead are inviting students to use their phones for learning.

We are giving it away:

. . . a study commissioned by security company AVG found that 92 percent of U.S. children have some type of online presence by the time they are 2 years old. A third of U.S. mothers posted pictures of newborns, and 34 percent of U.S. moms said they had posted sonograms of their as-yet unborn child.

The study, conducted by Research Now, surveyed 2,200 mothers with young children in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan during the week of September 27. American parents, according to the study, are more likely to share baby pictures and information online than parents from other countries in the survey. Seventy-three percent of parents in the United Kingdom, Spain, France, Germany, and Italy said they were willing to share images of their infants.

Full Disclosure:

I use and recommend AVG products.

Via GNC.

I am trying to shape up my friend’s daughter’s Windows computer, which is feeling poorly and has lost several steps in its jump off the bag.

A day of struggling with anti-virus and spyware software, ill behaved programs that insist on starting at boot-updespite what I tell them to do, and other stuff like that there reminds me why I don’t miss Windows.

Addendum:

Next time I do this, I’m going to charge for it.

Also, Trinity Rescue Kit rocks. Nothing fixes a Windows box like a Linux CD.

Persons forget that the internet is a public place.

Bloomberg:

Porsche AG is blocking employees’ access to social-networking platforms such as Facebook Inc. and Xing to shield the sports-car maker from industrial espionage.

Porsche, based in Stuttgart, Germany, is concerned that foreign intelligence services may be spying on workers posting “confidential” information on Facebook and other Web-based services, exposing the carmaker to unwanted observation, Dirk Erat, a Porsche spokesman, said today by phone.

The story does not indicate whether Porsche is following to lead of certain American sports leagues in forbidding employees to use personal devices to twit, only that it is blocking access through the company network.

I suspect that Porsche is over-reacting. But, after all, one’s employer’s computers belong to one’s employer. Persons tend to forget that.

Click for a larger image.

Lately, I’ve been spending most of my on line “social” time in forums trying to learn and teach stuff.

Via Blue Ridge Data.

Facebook is playing privacy games again, this time with phone numbers.

I wrote it up at Geekazine. If you have a Facebook account and don’t know about the stealth entries in your Facebook Phonebook yet, you really must read this. Then turn it off (if you can; I haven’t been able to yet–the “turn it off” link crashes I finally got through, but turning it off did not seem to affect entries from other persons’ accounts. Dammit, I don’t even want a Facebook Phonebook).

Zuckerberg keeps supplying evidence that he is not a very nice nor respectful person.

Joanna Weiss considers sincerity and social networking in the Boston Globe. A nugget:

With its elegant user interface, its privacy holes, and its vast popularity, Facebook has changed our relationship with the world — allowed us to project ourselves so broadly, so completely, that it feels like a revolution.

(snip)

Facebook is easy to love because it’s all about self-love, the ultimate online ego boost.

Aside:

I would hardly consider the Facebook interface “elegant”; contrasted to Myspace, though, it’s not actively annoying.

Malcolm Gladwell thinks that social media will not change the world.

Computer hackers managed to steal $600,000 from a New Jersey shore town’s bank account.

Officials say $200,000 still hasn’t been recovered.

TD Bank notified Brigantine on Tuesday that multiple wire transfers had taken place from its account.

There’s a reason I don’t pay bills on line (I will order merchandise on line).

Electrons are easier to forge than paper.