For the uninitiated, Mono is one of those things that people feel… strongly about. People who are ambivalent or even completely apathetic about the whole thing do exist, they just aren’t very vocal about it. Perhaps I should blog about that. Sure, why not?

Diary of someone apathetic about Mono.

As I was making breakfast this morning, I noticed how the scrambled eggs in the pan before me failed to remind me of the great Mono debate. The kettle came to the boil, whistling in that shrill way that’s almost, but not quite, completely unlike the flame wars I hadn’t read the night before. I realised then that I hadn’t thought about Mono for minutes, perhaps even tens of minutes. My girlfriend looked at me in a way that was completely different from the way Miguel de Icaza and Roy Schestowitz would glare at each other if they were thrown to the bottom of a bottomless pit, destined to fight each other to the death for all of eternity.

Err, perhaps not.

Anonymous July 18, 2009 10:26 AM
[...]

So again, why would you ever want to use Linux, its old, its clunky, and if you use it you lose the advantage of having windows and all its apps, and massive app base, and you are restricted to only using apps available for linux. Which are few a well lacking in quality. (lets be honest here please).

One day you guys will realise that free is not everything, and if your product is free and crap it wont fly. Linux has been going over 17 years now and UNIX far longer. and Yet still your on the bottom of the pool and you see to be very still ?

the other main problem is the linux “community” its degenerated into a cult, and zealots, who think the universe revolves around Linux.

Pretty good effort, there, buddy. The word zealot is presumably the word of the now, seeing as it’s written endlessly these days. It’s always been a favourite word for trolls. It has religous connotations, which certainly helps people characterise Linux users as crazy bastards. And don’t even think about advocating actually using Linux, of all things. Don’t try that unless you want a “peoeple can decide for themselves stop pushingyourbeliefsdopwnpeople’sthroats” speech. Shut it, you morons. This is the internet. YOU CANNOT EMAIL SOMETHING INTO SOMEBODY’S THROAT. Except cum. Sure, esex is every troll’s favourite pastime. That’s probably why so many people come across this blog searching for “hair in boobs” and “reel life girlfriends”. They want a taste of something they can never have, which is silly because throats don’t have any tastebuds. I want hair in boobs, too. It’s only natural.

But seriously, it’s got to the point now where saying something like, “I like Linux,” you will be interrupted with “–FUCK YOU ZEALOT!!!!!” All right, so I’m over the top. Well fuck you. Nobody told you to read this blog. And on to our next quote,

Well fuck you. Nobody told you to read this blog.

What an arsehole, trolling his own audience like that.

And finally for our last troll, I can’t tell if this one is serious or not, but considering this guy was spamming up the tubes with his bile, I’m guessing he’s pretty genuine. If true, then he’s a cunt. From the Linux Today talkback section of an article on Penguin Pete’s blog, in this exerpt he is defending dodgy business practices:

Starting from Injuns versus Settlers, slavery and a certain protracted bar-fight over whether that ought to be legal, then skipping to the mercantile “robber barons”, strike-breaking, the way US car manufacturers hobbled competition by the nations’ railroads, the waterfront mafia, the way in which Standard Oil used its commercial clout, “Ma Bell”, the development of anti-trust legislation and its use on Microsoft by Judge Jackson (you can Google for it).

If you do, you may find a pattern. Which is that ethics has no place (and never had) in US business or politics. Nowadays it does have a place, which is to serve (nowadays) as a convenient cop-out in case of legal trouble in the form of a “Code of Conduct” (You know, that tome filled with Maoist gibberish that your company adopted along with its “mission statement”).

As long as something isn’t demonstrably illegal *and* so visible as to attract prosecution, it’s something that will be used. Over and over again. And that’s what Microsoft is doing, Ok?

And by the way, since when was using your commercial clout to disincentivize “the channel” or public officials from offering other people’s products “illegal” eh?

I don’t even need to make fun of this one. There is a word that describes the capability to live to a set of principles, and respecting and abiding moral values. Something this guy lacks. The word you’re looking for is integrity.

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

WAR IS PEACE.

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY.

OWNERSHIP IS DISCRETIONARY.

That is all.

I tried to ask questions about this on a forum and got banhammered for it. But never mind. I did a bit of research into it and discovered that a few people have already documented this possible vulnerability, and that it is somewhat legitimate. People love to say that the biggest security threat for computers is the users themselves, which is fair enough. Who needs to craft a drive-by download when you can just get the users to click on naked_chix.jpg.exe all by themselves? Linux makes it difficult, but not impossible, for malware to take hold, but it pays to be aware of the dangers, however slight they may be. I don’t personally believe that there is much of a threat at all, and the particular exploit I’m about to describe isn’t very special or clever, either, and can only affect a small number of people. The only thing that is somewhat interesting about it is that it can get root access without drawing attention to itself.

And that’s another thing about root access. Who really needs it? Sure, back when people made viruses to fry people’s hard-disks, having administrator privileges would have been a godsend. This is classically one of the reasons Windows has been so full of holes. New users were given Admin accounts by default, allowing them to tinker with every aspect of the system (within limits). Viruses run as the normal user could integrate themselves deep within the system utilities that made the operating system work, and from there carry on doing whatever it is they’re built to do. Of course nowadays, Windows doesn’t give its users root accounts by default. It has led to gripes because the UAC prompts you get on Vista tend to annoy some people, but the overall concept is sound. But the question remains: do you really need a root account to do the things that today’s malware does? Certainly not. Root helps, but it’s hardly necessary.

So any way, onwards we go. Gnome does a very nice thing. It can override launchers for individual users. All of those lovely launchers you see in the Gnome Menu, well, they are all in /usr/share/applications. Go and take a look. But, they can be overridden by putting your launcher in ~/.local/share/applications. Gnome checks there before it looks for the global launchers, exactly the same way many applications check your home directory for conf files before looking in etc for global confs.

All you need to do to gain root access is make a duplicate launcher for an application that already requires root access. You don’t even need that, but a user might get suspicious if he’s prompted for his sudo password when launching Firefox. Synaptic, on the other hand, is a good choice. Let’s have a look at its desktop launcher in /usr/share/applications:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Synaptic Package Manager
GenericName=Package Manager
Comment=Install, remove and upgrade software packages
Exec=gksu --description /usr/share/applications/synaptic.desktop /usr/sbin/synaptic
Icon=synaptic
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=PackageManager;GTK;System;Settings;
NotShowIn=KDE;
X-Ubuntu-Gettext-Domain=synaptic

So, if you were to put a launcher in ~/.local/share/applications that was exactly the same, except that it runs your malware first, then bingo, you’ve got root. Your malware can then happily go off and add itself to init.d and load up with root privileges every time you boot your machine. So I gave it a go:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Synaptic Package Manager
GenericName=Package Manager
Comment=Install, remove and upgrade software packages
Exec=gksu --description /usr/share/applications/synaptic.desktop /home/ryan/ohno.sh
Icon=synaptic
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=PackageManager;GTK;System;Settings;
NotShowIn=KDE;
X-Ubuntu-Gettext-Domain=synaptic

The password dialogue will use the Synaptic description for the prompt when you try to open Synaptic:

And then it’ll execute our virus (ohno.sh) with root privileges:

Major bummer.

Any way, I was asked a question about how this rogue synaptic.desktop file gets into your application launcher folder in the first place. And sure, it isn’t a case of drive-by downloading. It requires the user to actually run something himself in order to take hold. This is what’s known as a trojan horse, and conventional wisdom goes that there is no way the operating system can ever fully guard users against these. The best weapon we have to fight trojan horses is education. This is a crucial point and I can’t stress it enough.

Some of you may be thinking, “Sure it could work on idiots, but I’m not going to arbitrarily execute some random code sent to me by some random guy without checking it first.” Well, no, of course not. But the tricks malware use to get users to click the OK button can be very devious. One of the attack vectors for the Conficker virus, for instance, involved hijacking the autostart prompt for playable media on Windows. What looked like the button for “Browse contents” was actually the option to run the installer for the virus!

Conficker is, admittedly, a special case, because it uses pretty much every method of infection available to Windows malware writers. But can we employ similar tactics to get people to open malware files on Linux? Sure, why not. And it’s doable with those pesky desktop files, again. On Gnome, the launchers can have any name you desire. In fact, if we make a launcher with the following code,

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Terminal=false
Exec=python exploit.py
Icon=ooo-writer
Type=Application
Categories=Application;Office;WordProcessor;
StartupNotify=false
MimeType=application/msword;application/rtf;application/vnd.ms-works;application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text;application/vnd.oasis.opend$
InitialPreference=5
Name=lol.odt
Name[en_GB]=lol.odt
GenericName=Word Processor
GenericName[en_GB]=Word Processor
Comment=Create and edit text and graphics in letters, reports, documents and Web pages.
Comment[en_GB]=Create and edit text and graphics in letters, reports, documents and Web pages.

We shall have the following to gawp at in our Nautilus:

Well, that’s all well and good. But look at its real name, as it saved on the disk:

So now we have a desktop launcher, hidden to look like a document file, that actually launches the exploit.py code. And sure enough, when our poor user attempts to open the document:

In this example, it’s obvious that there is an exploit, because it’s unashamedly named right there in the same directory. But there are plenty of ways the desktop launcher could do something dodgy. For instance, you could set it to run a wget command to download and execute a remote exploit from the web. The exploit code itself can be filled with all of the virusy nastiness you would expect. Replacing all of the launchers that require gksu with a buggy version, for instance. Editing someone’s bashrc to hijack a sudo alias would be trivial, too. Gaining root is really not that difficult, so long as you can get the user to run the original exploit in the first place, by trying to open our dodgy document.

The question now is how does this launcher get on to the user’s computer in the first place? It could be emailed to you, it could be sitting on a USB stick someplace. There are many ways it can happen. In fact if your exploit scans Evolution or Thunderbird for your contacts, or perhaps loads up a background process to spam itself to message boards, then it could conceivably become somewhat self-replicating, as all true viruses are.

I’m not saying this is a sure-fire way to pwn Linux users. Far from it, I actually think it’s kinda lame. And long_boobs_hair.jpg.exe was lame too, but that still caught people out. All I have described here is one very primitive and highly-specific mode of attack. And so it seems, it’s been written about many times before. Never mind. I never even considered it before, so I was more than a little bit intrigued to test how much such an attack can achieve. The answer, as with all trojan horses, is everything. If you let it happen.

I’m probably kidding myself if I think I can get away with posting this without getting any flames, but what the hell, so long at least one person in the world is now just that little more informed about the realities of malware, then I have achieved at least something worthwhile.

Conservative estimates consider the universe to be 13.5 billion years old. Since we know that there are sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour, twenty-four hours in a day and 365.2545 days in a year, then we know that 426,032,848,800,000,000 seconds must have passed since the universe began. Well, that number isn’t big enough. So let’s think bigger. There are about 6.5 billion people alive today. For argument’s sake, let’s say the internet has 120 million sites on it to boot. Well, that’s a whole load of numbers.

Well then, let’s imagine that everyone in the world alive today has been registering an entire internet at a rate of one internet a second since the beginning of time. How much of the address space have we used up? Can you guess? A thousandth. A measly thousandth of the available space has been taken. A god-damned THOUSANDTH. Sometimes, things just boggle my mind. I hope you appreciate how big some numbers can be.

Oh, and here’s the raw data, for those who are interested:

So it isn’t a thousandth, it’s a thousand and twenty-four…th. Doh.

Who's reading this thing?

That enormous spike you see was generated by a recommendation from here. A few more clicked the next day and the day after. And what did they read?

Yikes. So Google and my girlfriend are the hottest hits. I shall have to make every blog post about either of those. Possibly both. I don’t know, perhaps something like “How Google has ruined my relationship” or maybe “How Google has stolen my girlfriend.” Yeah, that ought to do it. So how about the search terms of the now? These are usually good for a giggle.

Emphasis added. Yowzer. Porn freaks plenty much. Are these people sick of having to put up with all of those wigs in porn films or what? I am intrigued by the number of people searching for reasons why Google’s Chrome OS sucks, considered it doesn’t yet exist. I get the feeling there are flame wars all over the internet this week, and the Microsofties are looking for some ammunition. Well, good luck with that, chaps. I’m off to pen my next masterpiece, “Top ten reasons why my girlfriend’s hair sucked  real life Google Chrome OS.”

Any thoughts?

Even so, despite how cringe-inducing I find the term, cloud-computing is genuinely an interesting subject. The potential  benefits and pitfalls of the very idea are worth investigating in full. So I’m going to ruin this blog post by ignoring all of that and instead concentrate on the most boring aspect of it you can think of. I’m even going to alienate all the readers I might have gained from a kind mention over on this blog. Yes, folks, it’s licensing. See how the number of readers drops off after that last sentence:

Readership

That chart doesn’t even have any numbers on it, which aside from making it completely useless, also hides the sinister truth. You, yes you, were the only reader to begin with. You’ve now been cut down to a tenth of your original self. Just the act of thinking about licensing is enough to do that. You’re now a vague mess of incomplete body parts that somehow remain sentient. A triumph for human biology, but we must be press on. As with most things in life, if you want to get ahead, you have to understand what the hell you’re dealing with. So I’ll explain how licensing and cloud-computing work.

Here in the free software world, we have two main licences that we can use. There are others, but I’ll stick to explaining the fundamental principles if you don’t mind. The first licence we use is called the GPL (General Public Licence), and it’s a pretty sneaky licence indeed. Software written in this licence is free to use, distribute and tinker with to your heart’s content, with one simple caveat. If you distribute the software, or an edited version thereof, the software must have the same licence tacked along with it. It is this special clause of the GPL that makes a lot of free software possible, and the reason Microsoft once called it cancer. By its very nature, the GPL spreads very easily. We now have an enormous library of code that’s not only free, but will always remain free. This is a scary thought for many people, for reasons that should be obvious. The GPL is the ninja of all software licences. And despite the pejorative use of the word, “viral” is a very apt description of how it multiplies.

The other type of licence we have are BSD licences. These differ in one fundamental way. Distributed code does not have to have the same licence, nor does it have to be open. It’s essentially the “do whatever the hell you want” licence, which should appeal to the Libertarians among you. It makes it possible for a random guy to grab the source code to a project, change it a little, and re-license it with a restrictive EULA and sell it for big bucks. Although that doesn’t happen as often as you might expect, and when it does, the free original remains available.

The difference between these licences is mostly philosophical. For practical use, either licence allows you to write your code freely, or modify someone else’s with similar freedom. It’s still the subject of the occasional flame war, mind you.

So far so good, but how do these licences work when computing is taken to the mysterious magical cloud? In the new age of software, applications are supposedly going to be beamed to our computers from the internet. Google Docs is a great example of this. All you need to run such software is a web browser. Your computer isn’t running any other application; it’s all being done on Google’s own servers. The upshot of all this is that the applications are never properly distributed, only served. You can’t download and install Google Docs to use offline. Well actually, no, that’s a bad example because you can run Google Docs offline with their Gears package, but you get the point.

So if a company never actually distributes anything, they need not worry about the clauses of the GPL that insist the code must remain free and open. They can quite happily take GPL-licensed code and do all sorts of nasty things to it, and keep it closed and all to themselves, depriving everyone else of the benefits. Well, this is a shame. And according to research conducted by Black Duck, the GPL is apparently being used less these days as a direct consequence of things moving into the cloud. Black Duck is a proprietary software company whose best interests would be served by a complete abolition of the GPL, so it’s worth taking their research into the matter with a supermassive blackhole-sized grain of salt. Whilst they’re saying it because they want to encourage people to drop free licences, the possibility that people will is quite frightening.

But wait, all is not lost. There is another licence that closes the loophole. It is known as the AGPL (Affero GPL). This licence makes it so that the source code to web applications that use it remain as open as regular, offline GPL applications are. It is going to become increasingly relevant to web application developers as time goes on, and thankfully, many people are already using this licence, despite it being excluded from Black Duck’s dodgy report. I hope it becomes the de facto licence of choice for all future web applications made by the free software community. I hope you all do, too.

All in all, I’m a little bit suspicious of cloud-computing. The idea of entrusting my computer to applications hosted on some far away server isn’t very appealing to me. Even so, marketing buzz-word spewers are apparently hell-bent on ensuring that anything meaningful on desktop computers will one day take place in the cloud. Whether or not you like the idea of it, it’s good to know that free software will be as much a part of it as it is on your regular desktop machine. So roll on the future, with all of its crappy slogans and soul-destroying marketing bullshit. At least it’ll still be free.

Sorry, But Linux IS NOT Going to EVER…

be a dominant OS player on the desktop. Linux as a server OS is robust and works well. However, Linux will NEVER be able to overtake Windows because the average Joe is not going to fuss over kernel recompiles, terminal sessions, etc. to get whatever flavor of Linux working on the desktop. Ubuntu is close, but still, no cigar.

Believe me, I would LOVE to see Linux overtake Windows on the desktop, but no matter how hard one blows the horn, it is not going to happen…period.

What was that? I can’t hear you because I’m too busy recompiling my kernel! Let’s do the motherfucking timewarp cause this guy’s straight out of 1995! Fail troll is fail. The next troll on our list isn’t trolling about anything in particular, he’s just being a cunt.

I think linux fucking sucks. (3.00 / 2) (#6)
by Del Griffith on Fri Feb 08, 2008 at 04:46:01 AM EST

No wait, who am I kidding?  I know it fucking sucks.

If you really want to be a UNIX weanie, just get OSX & be done with it.

Otherwise, get Vista Ultimate OEM, and install the SUA.

Some of us have better thins to do then compile codecs.

You tell em, boy! I absolutely fucking hate having to recompile my audio codecs every time I want to listen to my music. Such a pain! This guy is actually a pretty legendary troll, and he’s well aware of it. So I can’t quite bring myself to hate him. You just know that somewhere in the world, somebody is reading that comment whilst stale Cheetos are crumbling out of his mouth, sticking with the saliva on his chin, and laughing to himself, “Yeah, Lunix users are such fags durrp.” Successful troll is successful. Well done.

the Korea Communications Commission (KCC) said it has been notified by South Korean computer vaccine company Ahn Lab that the DDoS virus responsible for initiating the attacks, was set to destroy at least 20,000 contaminated PCs across the nation.

Can I be the first to say,

LOL

Finally, a botnet master with some balls enters the fray. Botnets will continue to be a problem because they are almost invisible to normal users. If your computer is part of a botnet, you will not know about it. Botnets are used to harvest credit card numbers and such these days, and true “delete fucking everything” viruses are few and far between because of it. And now, apparently, 20,000 people are going to get their computers hosed. This one’s on you Microsoft. The more the sort of thing happens, the more pressure there will be on Microsoft to fix their god-forsaken, shitty, bloated and completely fucking busted operating system. Am I gloating? Too damned right I’m gloating. Shove that in your pipe and smoke it.

Who's reading this thing?

98 readers in a day isn’t bad for my first week, I guess. But that seems like beginners luck based on all the other days. Hrmm. Well, what the hell were all of these people looking at?

Well that makes sense. I got a pretty cool scoop about openbittorent. It took a while for the torrent news sites to catch up with that one. For a few hours, the post I made here was on the front page of Google for a number of openbittorrent-related searches. Alas, it’s now been pushed down to page 2. And nobody ever looks there. The interview I had with Dollface was rather odd. It appeared all over the intertubes. Strange stuff, these blogs. Still, let’s have a look at the search terms people used to come here:

Hrrrm. It seems I’m in the wrong business, methinks. I hope that chap who was looking for fucking linux retards found what he was looking for. Hair in boobs. What the hell is up with that?

It gave Asus a package it couldn’t refuse – a cheap version of Windows as long as it tossed the upstart Linux overboard. True or not, Asus has changed from being a successful proponent of Linux to an evangelist for Windows.

Nice to see it there in print. Thanks goes to @glynmoody for highlighting this one. His blog is pretty great, too, so check it out whenever you can.

What the heck is this thing?
It’s an operating system. You know, like Windows, or Ubuntu Linux.

Another operating system? What makes this such a big deal?
Well, for starters, it’s based on Linux. That means Google are not coding up a hundred million lines of stuff themselves. They’re relying on the solid groundwork of Linux code that’s already been written. So, the distribution they’re making is guaranteed to work.

Secondly, it’s fucking GOOGLE. They have the financial muscle to get this thing loaded on to netbooks and possibly even desktops if need be. And you can bet that they will. Just imagine walking into a computer shop and seeing something that doesn’t have fucking Windows on it for a change, which nobody has managed to do successfully yet. This is competition for Microsoft, and this is a good thing. For those of you using XP on netbooks, by the way, you have Linux to thank for that. Just remember: if it wasn’t for Linux, Microsoft wouldn’t have made Windows 7.

Thirdly, it will run on more than your average sort of processor. Specifically, it’ll run on ARM-based processors. These are very cheap and dirty processors that are easy to build and they use tiny amounts of power, which means longer battery lives. There’s probably one in the mobile phone you’re using. They can be made a bit more powerful than that, though. They can be made more than powerful enough to run on a netbook, for instance. Linux runs just fine on these devices. The only trouble is people are scared of making them in big numbers, because Windows doesn’t work on ARM processors at all. If Google can make these products lustful, then they will get built. That means many more cheap netbooks for everybody.

It’s cloud-based. But what does that even mean?
Well, it’s moron-language, but in English it means that applications are beamed from the intertubes direct to your computer. All of the heavy duty, megahertz-nomming work can be done on Google’s own servers, and they can send the results to you. What this means is that the machines will be able to run with terribly crap hardware and still be pretty use-able.

Eww. That doesn’t sound very good. What if my internet cuts off? Or I’m outside someplace?
Fret not, young padawan. Google Gears is Google’s tool for getting their webby applications to work on your computer without an internet connection. And luckily, the OS will have Gears built into it. The devices will work just fine when not connected to the web; they just won’t be using their full potential.

Hang on a minute. I thought Chrome was an internet browser, like Firefox.
That’s right, Google have a browser by that name. However, this new operating system will be designed around the browser itself. The desktop won’t really matter very much, as 99% of your time will be spent using the browser. Have you seen the things HTML5 can do, by the way? Watch the video at the end of this blog to see some of the things it can achieve.

I’m a Linux-user. Won’t this be bad for me?
Absolutely not. It’s based on Linux, and it’ll be open-source from the ground up. With Google’s financial might getting this operating system installed on as many new machines as possible, it means hardware and peripheral manufacturers will be falling over themselves to make sure their devices work with it. That means more drivers, more compatibility, more awesome. Those things will filter back to the Linux community, so everyone can join in the fun of having their mobile phones and mp3-players working out of the box, once and for all. Additionally, with so many people working on this, Google will become a pretty active contributor to Linux itself. Linux is all about sharing. There is nothing to be scared of, so quit worrying.

I use Vista and I think this sucks.
You might just as easily say you’re a rape victim who thinks feminism sucks.

Okay, I don’t use Vista. But I’ll be using Windows 7 by the time this thing comes out. What does this mean for me?
It means Microsoft will be working very hard to compete. They’ll be slashing their prices, adding new features, trying to bribe manufacturers into supplying only Windows machines by offering incentives. It’s never been a better time to be a Windows user. Windows is expensive, buggy and lame because it’s the only show in town. But now there’s a brand-new circus right across the street that’s free, fast and shit-hot. Microsoft will pull out all of the stops to keep up. You want to stick with Windows? Expect it to get a lot better while they still have money left.

All right then. But what about Android?
It isn’t the same thing. Google’s Android can be made to run on netbooks and other devices, but it was designed originally to run on mobile phones and such.

When, where, how much?
It’s coming out in 2010, so they say. And it won’t cost you a penny. It’s free and open source software, duh. Even if Google charge people to download it from their site, they can’t stop others from giving it away for free. It’s in the licence, kid. Those are the rules of free software.

Update: I just realised that these sort of posts get far more readers when you include a bullshit top-ten list of bullet point opinions for people to mechanically retweet at random passers-by on the street like a moron. So here’s your god-damned list of stuff about why Google Chrome OS sucks:

1. It’ll mean there will be ten zillion fanboys banging on about for ages. People like me, except worse. People who say things like, “I’ve got an app for that on my iPhone three gee ess,” as they retweet a Facebook spam message from one of their moronic, illiterate vague-acquaintances whom they shallowly moniker “friends”, which invariably ends “lol”.
2. We’ll have to see lots of boring analysts contemplating shit they don’t have a clue about on boring tech sites. Like me, but worse. The sort of people who use phrases like, “ideas platform” honestly and without wanting to suffocate themselves every morning.
3. We’ll have to put up with the army of shills who will come out in force to bang on about how much it sucks. And they will say retarded shit like, “Joe Sixpack can’t use it ready for prime time can’t play Crysis DURRRP.”
4. We’ll have to put up with Linux writers banging on about what this means for free and open-source software, and others pointlessly claiming that this is the year of Linux on the desktop.
5. We’ll get yet more marketing gobbledygook Web2.0 bullshit weasel words. Something completely retarded like “GOspell” for an application that checks all your spelling. People will blog about it with religious overtones. You know, “I lost my spelling ability but now I am found it with GOspell!” and “Hallelujah for the GOspell.”
6. It can’t cure world hunger.
7. Cure cancer? Not a chance.
8. Old world media will have to report on it. And it’ll be more cringe-inducing and crappy than making a GUI in VB. It’ll be like listening to your grandparents describe a bukkake orgy.
9. And when it finally arrives, people who buy it will say crap like, “It can’t play Microsoft Office wtf,” and “Where is the Start menu I can’t see the Start menu!?!?”
10. It’ll be in Beta till 8766. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Linux is a work in progress after twenty years, after all. But don’t pretend you’re ever going to bloody finish the damned thing.
11. THIS TOP TEN LIST GOES ALL THE WAY UP TO ELEVEN oh sod off.

So now you know what Google Chrome OS is all about. I’ll leave you with this video about how awesome Google Wave is.

To see why this subject is so scary, you first have to understand it. Specifically, how do these weapons work? I’ll start with atomic fission devices, the sort that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the Second World War. Nuclear fission is what happens when you split atoms. In the nucleus of an atom, there are tiny particles called neutrons. These, along with the other particles inside atoms, determine what element it is. Uranium and plutonium are two elements that are incredibly dense. They have hundreds of particles inside their nuclei. They are incredibly unstable; and, left to their own devices, these atoms lose particles because they cannot stay intact for long, which causes the stuff to break down into lighter elements. It is the lost particles that make these materials radioactive. The tiny particles fly away at high speed. When they pass through a human body, they mess up the molecules of the cells they pass through, causing them to mutate and become cancerous. It is this that makes the fallout from a nuclear weapon so deadly.

Uranium and plutonium are so very dense, that it is possible to split them completely into two different elements. To do this, you must fire a neutron into the nucleus of one of these atoms. It becomes overloaded, and splits in two. The atoms it splits into don’t need so many neutrons, so the remainder are left to fly away. The discarded neutrons slam into other uranium particles, causing them to split, and so on. It causes a chain reaction that ultimately results in a huge fucking explosion. This is the technology that destroyed those Japanese cities. Atomic bombs such as these typically completely destroy everything within a mile, and seriously fuck up everything within two.

Still, it didn’t take long before some bright spark worked out a way to make these weapons more powerful. They settled on the idea of fusing atoms together, rather than breaking them apart. This technique, obviously enough, is called fusion. It is what powers the sun, and all of the other stars in the sky, and it is the process by which all matter in the universe came to exist in the first place. Including the carbon that made our planet, the moon, and even me and you. It is a pretty powerful force. Fusing atoms together releases an enormous amount of energy. In an as accessible way as I can manage to explain it, it works like this. There is a force between atoms that keeps them separated. There is another force, a much stronger force, that keeps atoms stuck together. Consider two magnets that repel one another. Now imagine the surface of these magnets is made of velcro. It is very difficult to push them together, but if you can, they will stay together. Where does all that energy that was keeping them apart go? It goes out, out and away, and becomes another huge fucking explosion.

In fission, scientists can only realistically split the heaviest elements with enough ease to create useful weapons. In fusion, of course, they choose the lightest. Hydrogen is the lightest of them all. When two hydrogen atoms are fused, they become a single atom of helium, the next lightest element we have. Unfortunately, fusing two hydrogen atoms together is extremely difficult. It requires temperatures of over one million degrees centigrade to do properly. We have only one thing that can easily create those kinds of temperatures, which is an atomic bomb. And that is precisely what fusion bombs use.

So, the final configuration of a thermonuclear bomb looks like this. First, commonplace explosives are used to smash up some uranium atoms, which create an enormous, super-hot explosion, which compresses a tank of hydrogen so much that it all fuses into helium, releasing a much greater burst of energy. You begin to see now, I hope, why so few nations have managed to successfully build nuclear weapons. Building them isn’t any secret; the physics of how they work is well-documented. You could give Robert Mugabe a copy of “How to Build a Thermonuclear Weapon”, but it would be useless to him, because Zimbabwe doesn’t have the technology required to build such devices. If it did, then they wouldn’t need a handbook, because they’d have already built one.

So how powerful are these fusion-based, thermonuclear weapons? The standard yield weapon has the power to almost completely vaporise everything within a nine-mile radius. The temperature in this zone is so high, that human bodies will burn when subjected to it. That’s right, you will actually be on fire. Not just your clothes. You. Your skin, your bones, your internal organs. They be in flames. The closer you are to the centre of the explosion, the less pain you will feel.  On the outer edges of this zone, if caught out in the open, the heat will sear the flesh of your bones, in what must be the most unimaginably painful way to die. Within the range of nine to twelve miles, the heat produced is not enough to cause you to burst into flames, but it is enough to make pretty much everything else burn. That means your clothes, trees, houses, cars, etc. You might not get set on fire, but you’ll be in an environment where everything is burning. If you manage to survive this, somehow, then the blast wave might just get you. If you’re within twelve miles, and you’ve managed to take cover from the searing heat by hiding under your stairs, it won’t much matter, because the blast wave will blow apart the bricks and mortar of your house like paper. Beyond the radius of twelve miles, your chances of survival are greatly improved, especially if you duck behind a strong wall, or get inside somewhere. But after the event, you must escape the fallout cloud to avoid getting radiation poisoning. Don’t think that hiding behind a series of steel-reinforced walls only a few miles away from the explosion will help you. Nuclear missiles and bombs are designed to go off a couple of miles above their target so as to maximise the damage they can cause. Your fancy walls will not save you.

So how at risk we here in the UK of getting nuked? Well, historically, it has always been the United States and Russia who have been gunning for each other. At one stage, Russia had over 60,000 intercontinental ballistic missiles. These are missiles that can be launched from anywhere in the world, and can travel to anywhere in the world. They are the very pinnacle of good rocket science. Guided death by missile strike from anywhere in the world! America, for their part, mostly relied on a fleet of B52 bombers to drop their payloads. Although they did just so happen to litter Europe with missile stations to try and get an advantage over Russia. One of the places they put their missiles was the UK, where many remain to this day. That means in the event of these two powerful nations going to war, the UK will be targeted as well. Major bummer. The risk was so great that at one stage the Government created a series of helpful documents called Protect and Survive. These were not very comforting. When I was at school we had to read these pamphlets. They were localised for each town they given to. And I was not very comforted to see my hometown on a map with a series of blast radius circles stretching outwards, engulfing every neighbouring town all the way to Eastbourne.

So, how at risk are you of getting nuked? Well, in the event of a nuclear showdown between Russia and America, it is the missile silos here in the UK that are targeted first. If you live near one of those, you’re sod out of luck. Next on the list are other military targets, so if you happen to live near an army barracks or a naval base, major bummer to you. Then it comes the turn of major communication centres; or anywhere with sophisticated communication equipment. Think airports, port towns, towns with powerful radio equipment. Then, our infrastructure that targeted. Power stations and major substations, waterworks, major rail links, and so on. Next, our industry is targeted: industrial estates, factories and such. After that, the remaining weapons will be used to hit any major centres of population that haven’t yet been bombed as per the previous targets (think of large suburban towns like Milton Keynes). The last few targets on the list may not be bombed for several days, as central command has been eliminated, and messages to submarine crew and secret missile bases around the world take time to come into effect. So if you manage to survive all that, what, exactly, are you going to do now? The UK has been completely fucked, as will most of the other countries in Europe. An enormous, radioactive dust cloud hangs over the country, which, come winter, will cause temperatures to drop to below minus twenty degrees centigrade. You’ll most likely freeze to death, or run out of food. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the army will have snipers patrolling the countryside in radiation suits. Their mission is to shoot dead anyone seeing walking around without radiation protection. The reasoning being that these people are as good as dead anyway, and walking around like that they put the lives of others in danger. Your chances of survival are pretty much a million to one, right now. So let’s just hope war never comes.

It nearly did, though. A whole bunch of times, in fact. I will relate the story that I think is probably the most maddeningly scary. During the Cuban missile crisis, an American Army General unilaterally raised the Defcon level to its highest. This meant the nuclear-laden B52 bombers were sent into the air to circle Russia, waiting for the go ahead to continue. Missile silos were primed, and everything was ready to go. The Russians knew it was happening, and I imagine they were all shit-scared. President Kennedy, on the other hand, hadn’t even been informed. This General wasn’t acting on any sort of military intelligence or official orders; he was just doing it as a fuck-you to the Russians. All it would have taken to cause Armageddon was for a jumpy Russian general to hit the big red button. Who knows how close they came to doing just that, but I believe it was too close for comfort.

Many people seem to labour under the misapprehension that the Nuclear non-proliferation treaty is the thing that stops countries from gaining access to these weapons. Unfortunately for you boys and girls, that’s a crock of shit. It is the difficulty of building these devices that has hampered many a dictator who would love some. And it is this alone. And some countries have even just simply bought their nuclear weapons from others. Even backwards buttfuck North Korea seems to have worked out how to build these things. Iran, apparently, is on their way to achieving likewise. We now live with the terrifying knowledge that we’re fast entering an age where having these weapons will be pretty commonplace. All it takes for it all to go bang is for one idiot to push that button. Do you trust the leaders of the world to make the right decision when it really matters? No. That’s what I thought.

I don’t think about this shit all the time, and it isn’t the sort of thing I lay awake at night dreading. Living in fear of something such as this is idiotic. You might as well live in fear of a meteor strike fucking us up. Still, it is just one of those things that, due to a variety of reasons, has become a regular feature of my nightmares. All the same, perhaps you will be scared by this stuff happening. Maybe you will live in constant fear of impending nuclear death. One can only hope. Thanks for reading.

Cool kids. Munch Munch.

The support band were pretty cool. Very noisy. Very quirky. Munch Munch was their name. Jolly good. Anyhow, Why? got set up very quickly, and were ready to go in about ten minutes after the nomnomnom kids left the stage. Yoni was still at the bar getting booze and made his entrance by literally dropping in from the rafters, Fiddy Cent style. They started out with Sanddollars. These are some funky Jews.

Yoni makes his entrance. Rawr.

We were really impressed with how well received this band were. The audience were going bat-shit insane after every song. And it seemed like everyone in the room knew the chorus to These Few Presidents. Groovy stuff. Good Friday was up next, which is when the band really started to rock.

No fancy lighting effects for these chaps.

All of the songs they played were from Alopecia and Elephant Eyelash, which was a bit of surprise. As we were led to believe that they had written loads of new material. Hrmm. Well whenever you’re ready guys, drop a train on ‘em, yo. The Vowels and Sad Assasin came next, which sounded pretty awesome and very loud for such a small venue. And what’s up with the floor in that place, any how? We were standing in two inches of water. My shoes are completely fucked. Bastard bastard bastard.

He doesn't afraid of any heckler.

The Hollows and Brook & Waxing came next. Around about this time some stragglers arrived and demanded that Good Friday be played again. And they repeated their request after every bloody song. The band kept cool. Yoni made up a short rap about the heckler being a gimp. That shut him up. Nice work! The band had a pretty good rapport with the audience throughout. They commented on the number of clearly underage girls screaming and giggling at the front. “Got all my jailbait girls down the front here,” the singer mused. I half expected a member of the crowd to start hollering, “ARE YOO A PAEDO!? BROKEN BRITAIN!” Ah, but this crowd are far too ironic for that shit.

So it's a time-exposure. You want to fight about it?

The Hoofs toned things down a bit, before the band launched into a completely insane version of Waterfalls. It’s probably the most fucked-up song they have, and it was pretty awesome to see it live. It was turned into a bizarre, epic bastard of a song. Really powerful stuff. I must get my hands on a live version of it.

They were switching instruments around quite a bit. I like that.

They wrapped up the set with sing-alongs Gemini, The Fall of Mr Fifths and A Sky for Showing Horses Under. The audience were begging for more, but Audio is one of those places that turns into a night-club after ten o’clock, and they had to shift it. Such a shame. God-damned DJs and their bloody roof-raising. Oh well.

As their songs are mostly spoken-word, the vocals sounded much like they do on the records.

Still we left with plenty of time to catch a bus home. And then we watched a film, The Prestige. Apparently it’s one of those films you have to watch quite carefully to spot the twists and turns. But is it just me, or is it almost blatantly obvious what’s going to happen really early on? As soon as Tesla is mentioned, it kind of puts it beyond all reasonable doubt. Shame, really. Wait, what? This is a fucking gig review. Arrrgh. Err, here have another picture.

The audience were pretty apeshit. But only one bastard posed for a picture.

And another:

The set list. Cool.

Purple. Moody. Nice.

Maps were really rocking, but it was obvously M83 that people were dying to see. And when they came on, sure enough the audience hipsterishly edged their way forwards to get a better view. After an atmospheric, synthesised intro to suitably set the mood to LED-lights-at-night, they came crashing down on us with Graveyard Girl, and boy did this song fly.

They had some pretty cool light effects.

Most of the songs they played were from their last couple of albums, with the exception of Sitting, which was given a suitably thumping rendition. I’m guessing this is to cash in on the eighties sound they had on those albums which is so in vogue right now. They played Teen Angst and Don’t Save Us from the Flames to thunderous applause. It didn’t take long for everyone to start dancing.

Sometimes the light effects were pretty powahful.

It turned out that we didn’t have the best spot to stand. From our vantage point. Anthony Gonzalez was hiding behind a Macbook composed entirely of LED lights for most of the gig.

Stop hiding, you bastard!

We were impressed with the quality of Morgan Kibby’s vocal skills. She sounded better here than on the albums, we thought. Perhaps it was the mixing. The drummer was kept behind a cage all night long to avoid drowning out the sound of the other instruments. Not that there was much chance of that happening, though. Anthony Gonzalez’s guitar was set at about four billion decibels.

She doesn't afraid of anything.

Kim & Jessie, Skin of the Night, We Own the Sky and You, Appearing all made an appearance, much to everybody’s delight. We were standing next to a boring lady who didn’t much like dancing, but never mind. Maybe she had a bad leg, the miserable cow. I did finally manage to get a good picture of Gonzalez in the end, though.

Just enough light. Marv.

The encore was a souped-up version of Couleurs, which nobody really wanted to end, and thankfully it went on for ages. I was a bit miffed that they didn’t play any new songs, but I can let that slide as it was a pretty damn fine gig all the same. I hope they get round to releasing a new album soon, the lazy sods.

Very cool stuff.

Update | 8th July: Watch out, this will download the US version of Firefox only. If you’d rather have a version in your own locale, be sure to follow ol’ Psychocat’s version instead.

if [[ -e ~/.mozilla ]]; then cp -R ~/.mozilla ~/.mozilla.backup; fi; wget -c 'http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.5&os=linux&lang=en-US' && sudo tar -jxvf firefox-3*.tar.bz2 -C /opt && rm firefox-3*.tar.bz2 && sudo mv /opt/firefox/plugins /opt/firefox/plugins.backup && sudo ln -s /usr/lib/xulrunner-addons/plugins /opt/firefox/plugins && sudo dpkg-divert --divert /usr/bin/firefox.ubuntu --rename /usr/bin/firefox && sudo ln -s /opt/firefox/firefox /usr/bin/firefox

All in one!

function ram() { ps auxf | grep $1 | grep -v grep | awk '{sum=sum+$6}; END {print sum+1023/1024}' ; }

Append the time and date to the start of your files.

function datestamp()
	{
	for x in $@; do
		if [ -e $x ]; then
			mv $x $(date +'%F')-$x
		else
			echo "$x? File doesn't exist, fool."
		fi
	done
	}

Install, remove, autoremove and purge. Now renamed Loadry, unloadry, laundry and nuke, respectively.

function loadry () {
        if [ $(whoami) != "root" ] ; then
           sudo apt-get install $@
        else
           apt-get install $@
        fi
      }

function unloadry() {
	if [ $(whoami) != "root" ] ; then
	   sudo apt-get remove $@
	else
	   apt-get remove $@
	fi
      }

function laundry() {
	if [ $(whoami) != "root" ] ; then
	   sudo apt-get autoremove $@
	else
	   apt-get autoremove $@
	fi
      }

function nuke() {
	if [ $(whoami) != "root" ] ; then
	  sudo apt-get autoremove --purge $@
	else
	  apt-get autoremove --purge $@
	fi
      }

For anybody who followed the Futurama tutorial, here’s a little something extra, just for you.

function woots() { #!/bin/bash
  cows=(/usr/share/cowsay/cows/*.cow)
  num=${#cows[@]}
  ((num=RANDOM%num))
  randcow=`echo ${cows[$num]}`
  if [[ $randcow = "/usr/share/cowsay/cows/leela.cow" ]] || [[ $randcow = "/usr/share/cowsay/cows/fry.cow" ]] || [[ $randcow = "/usr/share/cowsay/cows/bender.cow" ]];
    then futurama;
  else
    phrase=`fortune -a`
    cowsay -f $randcow $phrase;
  fi;
}

Ah shucks, maybe someone will find this nonsense useful some day.

Google-hater says:

Google’s monopolistic practices are far worse than Microsofts. At least Microsoft only sell software.

Microsoft-hater says:

Sheesh. Don’t hold back. Tell us how you really feel.

There is NO profit in Open Source Software
Submitted by Anonymous on July 4, 2009 – 12:40 P.M.

Hey, business idiots, these guys sell boxes. They don’t sell service. They sell boxes that have hardware. They sell boxes that have an OS. They sell boxes that contain software.

If they sell hardware with Windows, they can charge whatever they want for the OS and make a pretty good profit.

If they sell a box with Linux, they are specifically forbidden by the GPL to make any profit on the sale. Read the license.

You specifically said, “I never pay for software or operating systems.” Why should they even bother sell to you? You specifically eliminate their highest sales margine products and ability to make money. They sell to the crowd that allows them to make money, and that isn’t you.

Challange here:

Go create a business based on Linux and see how long you last. Bet it never even gets off the ground.

Best part is that you’ll blame Microsoft for your failure.

The service is called OpenBittorrent and as a simple tracker, it is not bound to any particular torrent index site, which effectively adds an extra layer of abstraction and decentralisation for filesharing networks. Will they eventually get shut down, too? It seems unlikely, for now. As the project’s homepage explains:

Just to make it clear so people sending DMCA takedown notices understand:

• We do not have any content.
• We are not a bittorrent site, we are just a tracker, we can not see what content is behind an info_hash.
• We don’t have any torrent files.
• We can’t give you any IP addresses in any other way than normal tracker usage – the software don’t support it.
• We can’t verify any claims when we have no data other than the info_hash.
• We can’t block info_hash keys from being registered with the tracker.
• We don’t have any logs or ways to trace previous connections, there is just not enough disk and IO resources in the world for that (at least not at our operational budget).
• And most importantly, we have no time.

Seems like a good idea. So how about the Pirate Bay? What do they have to do with any of this?

ryan@lappy:~$ host openbittorrent.com 
openbittorrent.com has address 212.63.222.20
openbittorrent.com mail is handled by 10 ap.tfr.org.
ryan@lappy:~$ host 212.63.222.20
20.222.63.212.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer tfr.org.
ryan@lappy:~$ whois tfr.org
...
Registrant Name:Fredrik Neij
...

If this isn’t cause for a huge, shit-eating grin, I don’t know what is. This has made my day. Great stuff.

host openbittorrent.com 
openbittorrent.com has address 212.63.222.20
openbittorrent.com mail is handled by 10 ap.tfr.org.
host 212.63.222.20
20.222.63.212.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer tfr.org.
host tfr.org
...
Registrant Name:Fredrik Neij
...

function experts() { curl -s -H 'User-Agent: Googlebot/2.1 (foo)' $1 > $2.html && firefox $2.html; }

Change the ‘firefox’ bit to whatever browser you use (I’m on 3.5, yo!). Usage is simple:

experts http://link.to.experts.exchange.article.com filetosave

Don’t worry about including the .html bit, either. The file is saved to your current directory, just so you know.

Blonder Tongue Audio Baton

This was The Swirlies‘ first full-length album, released by Taang! records, and it’s really something special. They are often compared to My Bloody Valentine, and with good reason. As soon as the opener Bell starts you can see the similarities. Quiet moments juxtaposed with loud, brash crashes of noise. The entire album feels hazy, fuzzy, dreamy. When I listened to this album I was also reminded of some of Sonic Youth’s stuff, particularly Daydream Nation, and perhaps Murray Street. It’s the wall of noise you notice immediately. Somewhere in all that fuzz, there is a melody, and softly sung harmonies. Each song is riddled with fuzzy sounds and a sense of otherness you just can’t quite put your finger on.

Pancake and Jeremy Parker are disorientating slices of dream-pop; spooky, atmospheric, and hypnotic. Jeremy Parker especially has a sound that can only be described as huge. To me it encapsulates what this sort of music is all about. You will be shocked at just how similar this song is to Sonic Youth’s earlier stuff, too. Still, the heavy fuzz of the guitars never feels overdone or too aggressive. The entire album has an aura of comatosed rock music, as if you’re listening to music being played several rooms and several floors away. Songs like His Life of Academic Freedom and the gorgeous ender Wait Forever have a soft, lilting sound that washes over you.

Perhaps less importantly, this album is one of those records that’s perfect for fucking to. I don’t know how important this is to you, but it certainly makes it worthwhile for me. Check it out some time, you’ll like it.

Buy this album from Amazon.
Download from MediaFire. (128 kbps only.) Link withheld till I get permission!

Track listing:

1. Untitled
2. Bell
3. Vigilant Always
4. His Love Just Washed Away
5. His Life Of Academic Freedom
6. Pancake
7. Jeremy Parker
8. Park The Car By The Side Of The Road
9. Tree Chopped Down
10. Wrong Tube
11. Wait Forever

What is your name?
My name is Lady Catherine aka Dollface aka Toots aka Catbob

That’s quite a few aliases. How did that come about?
Well, Lady Catherine is me in our parallel 1890s universe. Dollface, you just started calling me a few years back when you had watched a few too many ’40s hard-boiled detective films. I’m not really sure where Toots came from, you just say it. And Catbob is a nickname of old from my PGL activity holiday in 2001 that I kept cos I liked it! I’m just multiple personality lady. rambolrambolrambolrambolrambolambolramb

Explain the “rambol” reference.
Rambol is my alternative spelling of ‘ramble’, of which I do a lot. It’s like ‘gambol’, as in cute spring lambs, but with an R. Rambol!

Very well then. Okay, a simple one. Tell me about the sort of music you enjoy listening to.
Oh I don’t know, various stuff. According to you, songs in which you can make out what the singer is saying.

This is a reference to a telephone conversation we had a couple nights before, in which I told Catbob I thought that her musical taste involves comprehensible singing.

You can go to my last.fm and have a look if you’re interested. My user name is damselface. LOOK AT MY COOL MUSIC. You do listen to weirdo music. And pompous pretentious 17-minute-long numbers with a full string orchestra and ear-splitting crashes of DOOM and then terribly quiet bits, with names like ”And The Wind Will Whistle Through The Weeds of my Mind part 3” (there is no part 1 or 2)

How true is this accusation? I was listening to a song entitled “SST, 0452000, f’ = f*(sst/18.7)^2″ when I asked this. The song is by a professor by the name of Bob L. Sturm. The technique known as sonification, or auditory display, is the process of turning non-acoustic signals into sonic objects that can be listened to. The sensitivity of the human auditory system is well-known, and so sonification attempts to take advantage of this highly developed system to present data in more effective ways. In some practices sonification has become essential, for instance a heart monitor in the operating room gives the staff an status report on a patient’s condition without interrupting their visual or mental focus. Sturm has explored using sonification as a tool for research, teaching, and music composition.<br><br>The Pacific Ocean is an immensely complex environment that has enourmous impact on the entire planet Earth. Tides are predictable for the next 10,000 years, but the interactions of the ocean and atmosphere make week-long predictions of ocean conditions difficult at best. Winds grip the ocean surface creating wave-trains hundreds of kilometers long, which often travel thousands of kilometers to finally break, releasing the embodied solar energy on some distant shore. Deep water ocean buoys record these wave energies and make predicting coastal conditions easier. This data is extremely important to coastal engineers, mariners, military, scientists, commercial fishing, and surfers.

Sturm’s music is a demonstration and exploration of turning this data into sound and music. Listening to the ocean creates a new way of understanding it. Energy coming from storms thousands of kilometers away, local wind swells occurring in the afternoons, and seasonal and regional differences along the West coast of the USA, can be heard in the sonifications of the data. Composing for the ocean is also explored by using the buoy as performer and ocean as conductor. The results can be delicate wisps to massive jolts depending on the location of the buoy and time of year.

You’re so hip, you need a hip replacement.
I need a boyfriend replacement too, d’you know where I could get one?

Indeed. Why do you hate me so much, anyway?
Because you’re super-lame and make me cry and tantrum and do such awful impressions of me and always apologise as if to pre-empt me complaining about something, and you’re smelly and mouldy. Understand OK, I h8 all of u.

Ah yes, Engrish. You browse the web quite a bit. You must have seen your fair share of bad English, even by native speakers of English. What goes through your mind when you encounter terrible examples of English?
Engrish is very entertaining, but poor English from people whose mother tongue that is should be ”altered” so they can never form babby of their own.

Very well then! Let’s go geek for a few. What sort of sites do you visit the most?
Hmm, not many, really. I check my email, I use Twitter, I look at some funny blogs, there’s an astrology site, lastfm, our wiki … I gots a blag now too

So you’re a Linux user. How’s that working out for you?

Linux is very cool and I agree with the ideology and all that but I would a splode if I didn’t have you to show me how to do some basic things and sort out problems for me. I enjoy it though and wouldn’t want to go back to windows.

My dollface has lots of nasty peripheral issues. A pun?

Very well. Around the internet there are endless debates, discussions and flame wars about whether or not Linux is “ready” for the desktop. Well, in your opinion, is it?
Well it is if you just need it for simple tasks, word processors and email/internet and such, but you would need a lot of explanations first about how things work, like the terminal, synaptec, and the general layout; and woe betide you if you have a less common mp3 player or want to link your phone up to your computer or some such.

Indeed. Anyhoo, I’m just saying, I’ve been all over the interwebs and Lunix girls are few and far between, so asking these questions serve as great link-bait for geeks all across the world to come and see a real life girl and then collectively ejaculate as one. Okay, moving away from geeky stuff, tell me about your favourite BIOS set-up! lol jk
[She frowns at me.]

So, what was it that attracted you to me?
I could see my reflection in your eyes and glasses. That was hot.

Sometimes the refraction of light on my lenses means I see two of you. That’s hot as well.
Srsly tho I liked the cut of your jib. I liked that you could use words and punctuation and stuff, to humorous effect. I liked our silly banter and I was intrigued. And you were cute too with the little emo picture with the heart, and the easter egg box on your head. And later when we got to know each other better you were just kind to me (! Those days are looong gone!) and addictive to speak to. And you like cool music (as well as the dodgy stuff). So I overlooked your lame side and fell in lurve. D’oh!

You are interested in period drama and classic literature and stuff. What’s the appeal?
Well, I like words in general so that explains the literature. I haven’t read enough classics really, I need to read more. I just finished a Gothic novel, which was ever so frightful. Sometimes I like to be transported to a historical version of the world and see the way things were. Period drama contains gorgeous dresses & corsets and sexy tailcoats/top hats, and a cool mannered way of speaking, dashing gents, villainous cads, and damsels in doom.

OK. Next question. I am awesome.
[She looks unimpressed.] That’s not a question, it’s just a bare-faced lie. You’re lying!

Let’s get serious for a bit. The Israel/Palenstine conflict. How can it be resolved?
Blow them all up so there are none left to carry it all on.

If I were a rotten journalist, I’d use that to ask you a leading question about why you’re such a right-wing maniac. But thankfully my intentions are pure.
Ha!

Going back to what you were saying before about the wordiness of oldschool drama, would you enjoy life if everybody still spoke a little like that?
Yes, I would. People would consider their use of words a little more, there’d be a mixture of comedy and awesomeness, less of the mindless slang. Or if they did use slang, it’d be new to us. Yes, that would make my life less bum-achingly awful!

What’s your opinion on swearing?
Fucking awful.  I think swearing has to be in the right context. I don’t like lots of coarse language just for the sake of it, and I think it loses its intended effect when it’s frequently used anyway. That said, there are times when nothing will express your feelings like a good old curse-word. It can be very funny too when used in a certain way. But in itself it’s not necessarily big or clever or amusing.

Moving on, then. Tell me about your greatest fears!
Oho so you can use them to your advantage? I know your game! Being stuck with you forever. Eek. Fire … double eek. Dehydrating, or suffocating – linked to my dislike of narrow enclosed spaces especially underground ones, like caves/potholes, where if anything happened to you it would be very hard to rescue you, and stuff

I’ve never been frightened of enclosed spaces. When I was 12, I went on a pot-holing trip in Wales. Several metres below ground, on my stomach crawling through a very tight tunnel, with water seeping over me. I found it thoroughly enjoyable. Tell me where your fear of fire comes from.
Oh ssssh, that sounds godawful! It makes my skin crawl. I suppose you’re skinny and don’t have boobs so you can manoeuvre through narrow areas better than I could. I shudder to imagine it. As far as fire goes, I don’t know where it comes from. Either there was some incident when I was very young that I don’t remember, or maybe a past life, I don’t know. But I do remember having a phase of nighmares about fire when I was about six and being scared that the bonfire on the field behind my garden would spread and burn my house down, the first year we lived here. And crying at the scene in Home Alone where he blowtorches the baddie’s head, and then later with heating up the doorknob. I should think burning to death would be the worst way to go. Ugh.

So anyway. What’s it like sleeping with me?
Sleeping is lovely to doze off curled up together or spooning, but then I get elbowed in the face or pushed out of bed evey time you move in your sleep and wake up three hours before you the next day. But it’s lovely to share those sleepy moments with you when we’re so relaxed and cosy.

No, I mean the sex part.
What? I’m not answering that!

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.

Fry, now with quotes!

I know you want this. And here’s how. The tutorial even noobs can follow.

There is an easter-egg in the application apt. Have a look for yourself:

apt-get moo

If you want to have a silly cow greet you when you open up a terminal window, by all means put this command at the top of your bashrc. But there is a better way of doing it. Install this application:

sudo apt-get install cowsay

Now try running it with something you want to say,

cowsay Hello! I am awesome!

 ______________________
< Hello! I am awesome! >
 ----------------------
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

Now by using the -f option, you can choose other characters to greet you. Try out some of these:

cowsay -f tux "Hello I am groovy!"
cowsay -f sheep "Baaaaaaaa"
cowsay -f dragon "Rarr!"

To see all of the available options, run

cowsay -l

Wouldn’t it be great if you could have these characters say something different each time? Well, why the hell not, huh?

First make sure you have these packages:

sudo apt-get install fortunes fortunes-off

Now try running

fortune

to see a quote. Fortune has options too.

fortune -s   # for short quotes
fortune -l   # for long quotes
fortune -o   # for offensive quotes

You can combine those options a little, too. So for short, offensive quotes, go ahead and run

fortune -so

So how about combining these two awesome things? Go ahead and run this:

cowsay -f tux "$(fortune)"

 ____________________________________
/ To thine own self be true. (If not \
\ that, at least make some money.)   /
 ------------------------------------
   \
    \
        .--.
       |o_o |
       |:_/ |
      //   \ \
     (|     | )
    /'\_   _/`\
    \___)=(___/

Now we’re really getting somewhere! Combine some of the techniques we already know and we can do quite a few cool things. Let’s try a few more commands!

cowsay -f dragon "Hello, the time is $(date "+%k:%M, on %A, %d of %B, %Y.")"
cowsay -f tux "$(fortune -so)"

Well, now we have lots of cool things for a fancy welcoming prompt. Let’s try and incorporate the old geek-stable, Slashdot html-headers! You’ll need an internet connection for this stuff, and faith in Slashdot’s servers not exploding for some reason. First of all let’s have a look at them:

curl -Is slashdot.org

If you look closely you’ll see a random Futurama quote in there. Brilliant! We should use those for our greeting. And it turns out we can, by running the following command:

curl -Is slashdot.org | egrep '^X-(F|B|L)' | sed 's/^..//'

which strips all the information except for the quote. Have a look at the “(F|B|L)” section. This part of the command dictates whether you receive a Fry, Bender, or Leela quote. At the moment it will get any of them, so for individual characters, you must run

curl -Is slashdot.org | egrep '^X-(F)' | sed 's/^..//'  # for Fry
curl -Is slashdot.org | egrep '^X-(B)' | sed 's/^..//'  # for Bender
curl -Is slashdot.org | egrep '^X-(L)' | sed 's/^..//'  # for Leela

Wouldn’t it be awesome if we could use the ascii art from the cowsay application for these quotes? We could, but it might look a little odd:

cowsay -f tux "$(curl -Is slashdot.org | egrep '^X-(F|B|L)' | sed 's/^..//')"
 ____________________________________
< Fry: I'll be whatever I wanna do.  >
 ------------------------------------
   \
    \
        .--.
       |o_o |
       |:_/ |
      //   \ \
     (|     | )
    /'\_   _/`\
    \___)=(___/

We’re going to need some ascii art for Fry, Bender and Leela. Luckily for you, I’m going to give you some [gotfuturama.com]. All you need to know is that cowsay uses cowfiles, which are stored in “/usr/share/cowsay/cows/”

For Fry,

gksudo gedit /usr/share/cowsay/cows/fry.cow

And paste the following into it:

the_cow = <<EOC;
   $thoughts
    $thoughts
             u
      .  x!X
    ."X M~~>
   d~~XX~~~k    .u.xZ `\ \ "%
  d~~~M!~~~?..+"~~~~~?:  "    h
 '~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~?      `
 4~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~>     '
 ':~~~~~~~~~~(X+"" X~~~~>    xHL
  %~~~~~(X="      'X"!~~% :RMMMRMRs
   ^"*f`          ' (~~~~~MMMMMMMMMMMx
     f     /`   %   !~~~~~MMMMMMMMMMMMMc
     F    ?      '  !~~~~~!MMMMMMMMMMMMMM.
    ' .  :": "   :  !X""(~~?MMMMMMMMMMMMMMh
    'x  .~  ^-+="   ? "f4!*  #MMMMMMMMMMMMMM.
     /"               .."     `MMMMMMMMMMMMMM
     h ..             '         #MMMMMMMMMMMM
     f                '          (MMMMMMMMMMM
   :         .:=""     >       dMMMMMMMMMMMMM
   "+mm+=~("           RR     HMMMMMMMMMMMMM"
           %          (MMNmHHMMMMMMMMMMMMMMF
          uR5         dMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMF
        dMRMM>       dMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMF
       RMHMMMF=x..=" RMRMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMF
      MMMMMMM       'MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMF
     dMMRMMMK       'MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM"
     RMMRMMME       3MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
    XMMMMMMM>       9MMMMMMMMMMMMMMM~
   'MMMMMMMM>       9MMMMMMMMMMMMMMF
   tMMMMMMMM        9MMMMMMMMMMMMMM
   MMMMMMMMM        9MMMMMMMMMMMMMM
  'MMMMRMMMM        9MMMMMMMMMMMMM9
EOC

For Bender,

gksudo gedit /usr/share/cowsay/cows/bender.cow

And paste the following:

$the_cow = <<EOC;
   $thoughts
    $thoughts
     ( )
      H
      H
     _H_
  .-'-.-'-.
 /         $thoughts
|           |
|   .-------'._
|  / /  '.' '. $thoughts
|  $thoughts $thoughts @   @ / /
|   '---------'
|    _______|
|  .'-+-+-+|
|  '.-+-+-+|
|    """""" |
'-.__   __.-'
     """
EOC

For Leela,

gksudo /usr/share/cowsay/cows/leela.cow

And paste the following:

$the_cow = <<EOC;
             $thoughts
              $thoughts

                    '#%n.
            ..++!%+:/X!!?:              .....
              "X!!!!!!!!!!?:       .+?!!!!!!!!!?h.
              X!!!!!!!!!!!!!k    n!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!?:
             !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!tMMMM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!?:
            X!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!5MMM``""%X!!!!!!!!!!!T4XL
            !!!!!!!!!X*")!!!!!!!?L       %X!!!!!!!!!k `
           '!!!!!!X!`   !!XX!!!!!!L       'X!!!!!!!!!>
           'X!!!!M`    '" X!!!!!!!X        !!!!!!!!!!X
            X!!!f^~('>   X!!!!!!!!!        '!!!!!!!!!X
            X!!X     `.  X!!!!!!!!f        '!!!!!!!!!!
            !Xf  O    '  '!!!!!!X"         '!!!!!!!!!X
           "`f-.     :~  MX*t!X"           X!!!!!!!!!>
             >.         W! ~!             '!!!!!!!!!X
            :`             ':             X!!!!!!!!!!
            ~ ^`          '              '!!!!!!!!!X
            `~~~~~~~~     !              X!!!!!!!!!X
                `~~~      !             '!!!!!!!!!!>
                  >       !             (!!!!!!!!!X
                          !             !!!!!!!!!!X
                  >       '             '!!!!!!!!!!
                .:         /:`^-.        X!!!!!!!!!>
           /`  ~/         /(     `:       X!!!X!!!!!:
         /   : f         f'        !       `XX!M!!!!!%
        ~   / ~        :  >         4            "*!!!*
       ~   ~ '        ~   >          :
EOC

So now go ahead and try out your skills, run them to see if they work:

cowsay -f fry "$(curl -Is slashdot.org | egrep '^X-(F)' | sed 's/^..//')"
cowsay -f bender "$(curl -Is slashdot.org | egrep '^X-(B)' | sed 's/^..//')"
cowsay -f leela "$(curl -Is slashdot.org | egrep '^X-(L)' | sed 's/^..//')"

Now you may have noticed that the quotes don’t always come through. That’s mainly because there is only ever one quote in the headers at any one time. Searching for a Leela quote when there is only a Bender quote available will fail! Luckily, there is a way around this. What we need to do is search the headers for the quote, and then depending on whose quote it is, bring up the cowsay application accordingly. Well lucky for you I’ve already done it for you. Paste this code at the top of your bashrc:

function futurama() { wee=$(curl -Is slashdot.org | egrep '^X-(F|B|L)' | sed 's/^..//'); if [[ $wee = "Fry"* ]]; then cowsay -f fry $(echo $wee | sed 's/^Fry: //'); fi; if [[ $wee = "Ben"* ]]; then cowsay -f bender $(echo $wee | sed 's/^Bender: //'); fi; if [[ $wee = "Lee"* ]]; then cowsay -f leela $(echo $wee | sed 's/^Leela: //'); fi; }

Now the quotes match. Save your bashrc or zshrc file and close. Now every time you’re in the mood for your Futurama fix, just fire up that command.

cowsay -f tux "$(fortune)"

 ____________________________________
/ To thine own self be true. (If not \
\ that, at least make some money.)   /
 ------------------------------------
   \
    \
        .--.
       |o_o |
       |:_/ |
      //   \ \
     (|     | )
    /'\_   _/`\
    \___)=(___/

cowsay -f dragon "Hello, the time is $(date "+%k:%M, on %A, %d of %B, %Y.")"
cowsay -f tux "$(fortune -so)"

The current situation is as follows:

Apple refuses to implement Ogg Theora in Quicktime by default (as used by Safari), citing lack of hardware support and an uncertain patent landscape.

Google has implemented H.264 and Ogg Theora in Chrome, but cannot provide the H.264 codec license to third-party distributors of Chromium, and have indicated a belief that Ogg Theora’s quality-per-bit is not yet suitable for the volume handled by YouTube.

Opera refuses to implement H.264, citing the obscene cost of the relevant patent licenses.

Mozilla refuses to implement H.264, as they would not be able to obtain a license that covers their downstream distributors.

Microsoft has not commented on their intent to support <video> at all.

HTML5, for those at the back, is intended to be the thing that makes the internet not suck. The intention was to create a <video/> tag, that people could put into their web sites, which would display a video regardless of the browser used, regardless of the device used, regardless of anything. As it stands at the moment, most video content online is served up with Flash. There are also attempts at making a <canvass/> tag, which would allow people to do all of those arty things people also use Flash for. And thanks to the belligerence of the big vendors, we’re now one step further away from achieving that.

So why are they doing this? It’s pretty simple, really: Apple and Microsoft won’t support a codec that makes the web bearable for non-Apple and non-Windows users. Microsoft invented Silverlight specifically for that purpose. They want their browsers to look better than anybody else’s. Meanwhile the free browser makers dare not support anything that means they might have to pay royalties to somebody down the line. What can we learn from all of this? Business is more important than people, durr.

She doesn't really exist.

You know why? Because this is what happens when women enter the nerdsphere:

* You have entered #geekchat
<Darkone> no I haven’t tried the 64-bit version.
<grampy> I haven’t noticed much difference tbh
<Darkone> i guess I could always chroot it if i had any problems
<grampy> pfft, chroot jails are for girls
* Darkone is a girl
<grampy> zomg rly?
<lolohnoes> show us ur boobs lol jkz not really jkz
<somedood> hey your whois says you’re from NY, wanna hook up some time? jkz
<DeadSeven777> hey there’s a girl in here
<grampy> lol somedood. but Darkone maybe i could help you out some more if you have problems
<lolohnoes> Darkone: check pm
* Darkone has left #geekchat
<somedood> godammit

Geek women exist, sure. But let’s be honest about it. The geeksphere is almost entirely a meat-swinging contest. When I talk about geeky things, my girlfriend zones out and falls into a coma so deep that The World’s Most Bottomless Pit starts feeling threatened. My experiences are pretty much par for the course for most of us geeky males. I really should start a webcomic where the female lead isn’t some sort of idealised perfect nerd-babe who has a tedious will-they-won’t-they relationship subplot with the male lead. But would anybody read it? I think I lack the humour crystals to pull it off. OH WELL.

Joe Sixpack must die, and so should your fucking grandma. These two people are always called in whenever anyone has anything brain-meltingly ignorant to say. Joe Sixpack is a strawman of epic proportions. He’s so stupid, he probably needs reminding that he needs to breathe in order to live. “I don’t have a problem switching my computer on, but until manufacturers make them easier to switch on, computers will never appeal to Joe Sixpack.” Who is this brain-achingly pathetic individual, any way? It’s the fallacy of assuming that every single person in the world is pig-ignorant and to all intents and purposes a mindless drone. It’s elitist bullshit. In real life, nobody is so fucking retarded, not even retards are that fucking dumb.

Any way, the things people come up with which would make Linux more appealing is usually along the lines of

• Make installing really-new software easier!
• Make drivers more commonplace!
• Make it so the average noob never has to use the terminal!
• Make Windows applications run in Wine easier!
• A prompt offering to install media codecs when you play an mp3 for the first time is too difficult for people. They need it out of the box, like Windows!!

Never mind how retarded most of those ideas are, or how true or false they are. The point is all of these people are completely missing the fucking point. Do you know how many Windows licences are due to sales of those pretty boxes you see in computer shops? It’s about five per cent, apparently. The rest of the licences are due to OEM installations and bulk licence sales for businesses. That means the vast majority of people only use Windows because that’s what came with their computer when they bought it. On the other hand, 95% of Linux users actually had to make an effort to use it. I have two computers with Linux installed on both of them, yet both of the things have Windows activation keys taped on the side. Is it any wonder then that there are so few of us Lunix users? Microsoft owes its dominance entirely to pre-installs, and anyone who doubts that is a fucking moron.

So what is the solution to getting more people using Linux? It’s simple. Have it installed on the god-damned machines in the first place. Don’t have them available only as an online option. Don’t install a shitty distro that doesn’t even work properly, either. Actually have Linux machines up and running in the god-damned shop, right next to the Windows machines. Have a sign up telling people, “No. Your god-damned Windows applications won’t work on this. Linux has its own applications you idiot,” to stave off the morons who think it’s a cheap version of Windows.

People will see these machines and then they will buy them. You will get a lot of people returning them because “ZOMG I can’t play Crysis with this!!!eleven” You won’t sell quite so many, because people like to go with what they know. But the fact is, Linux usage will increase enormously overnight. So many of the bullshit problems people complain about with Linux can be solved with pre-installs. I mean, hey, have you ever installed Windows lately? The actual retail edition, and not the optimised disk image that came with the computer you bought, I mean. It ain’t fucking pretty. Shit won’t work without the drivers. MP3s and DVDs don’t work out of the box, either. If the average Joe fucking retard Sixpack can’t figure that shit out on Linux, how the fuck is he going to manage with Windows? Any way, guess what will happen when enough people have bought these machines. Hardware and peripheral manufacturers will be falling over themselves to provide support. Why? Because they’d make a butt-tonne of money, that’s why. And then all of a sudden, Linux computers all of a sudden become a viable option all of a sudden all of a sudden.

A solution, then, for getting more Linux users. Is this happening? No. So is this the year of Linux on the desktop? Hell no.