Wolkje.net Weblog

The Dutch computer magazine Computer Idee! (intended for novice computer users) is critized for an article in which they investigated the behaviour of people on public wireless networks. The editors of the magazine installed a freely accessible public Wifi network at Shiphol Airport and monitored the usage of it. Obviously, there were people using this network and sending private data over it without any encryption. Now the editors of the magazine are critizied for not obeying the ethical laws common to the hacker community. Interestingly, this comment is made by Roel Schouwenberg, a researcher for Kaspersky.
I don’t think I agree with Schouwenberg. Computer Idee! exposed a real problem and in my opinion this is not a ethical problem. Users of public wireless networks should be aware that their data is exposed and can be used by anyone. Obviously, it is a bit questionabel that Computer Idee! stored the private data on their systems, but I think it is strange that researchers from Kaspersky are complaining about this. I think they should be complaining about the behaviour of users, who should use encryption technologies when sending private data over a public wireless network. Never trust systems and networks you don’t control.
But maybe Schouwenberg is complaining because the ignorance of users is essentially their business. If computer users were more security aware, the amount of virusses and other malware would be less, because the won’t be as succesfull as they currently are…. Making the public more aware and reducing the security risks by changing the habits of users is not in the interest of Kaspersky.

Last week, I installed Ubuntu 8.04 in a Parallels Virtual Machine on my MacBook. Today, I decided it would be nice if the Parallels tools were working, so I tried to install them. This didn’t work.
After some searching using Google, I discovered this is a known problem, and there doesn’t seem to be a solution for it yet. On a forum there is a topic on this issue in which some complaining about this, because VMWare Fusion seems to work perfectly well with the latest Ubuntu release. There is also no comments from the Parallels developers on this issue, which is a bad thing in my opinion, because it is a serious issue. Like most Parallels users, I mainly use it to test stuff on Linux and Windows, which requires a perfect working of both platforms to make this as effortless as possible. Hopefully, this issue will be resolved quickly, because this kind of stuff makes users switch from Parallels to VMWare.

The developers of the Gimp project released version 2.4 today. It seems to contain a lot of improvements, including a tool to extract foreground objects from their background (like Photoshop can already do for a very long time), full-screen editing of photo’s and improved selection tools. The looks of the application is also improved. All in all it seems like a very big improvement over the previous Gimp version and I think it is a little bit more capable in competing with Photoshop, especially since the program now also includes support for color management and color profiles, which was also a standard complaint when people suggested Gimp as a Photoshop alternative. While releasing the 2.4 version of the Gimp, the web developers of the project also updated the website giving it a new look. Also a big improvement over the previous look in my opinion!

‘Hello from Seattle’ is Microsoft’s alternative on the Zune to the ‘Designed by Apple in California’ that is printed on the packaging of Apple products. I think it is a bit of sad in a way an indicator that Microsoft is actually losing its leading position on the IT market. I don’t think it is a very good sign that you have to imitate (or react, depending on your view) this kind of gimmicks of the competitor.

Last weekend was quite busy. We went to the Efteling because the employer of my girlfriend was having a family day there. It was very nice, especially because the weather was exeptional good for this time of the year.

I also read today about a new mainbord from ASUS which incorporates a embedded Linux installation for configuring the system and also provides some functionality, such as Skype. I think it is a nice idea, but unfortunately, it is a little expensive with a price of 360 dollars. You can buy a complete system for that money.

Rikkert Koppes has created a library which enables some Web Forms 2.0 elements for existing browsers. Not all additions are implemented and some parts, like css pseudo classes, work a little different than in it will be in the ‘real’ WF2 implementtions, but it is a very nice start and I think it can definitely be useful in web applications (especially the various date controls).

It seems that Novell created a fork of OpenOffice.org. The cause of this action is the fact that the Sun Microsystems currently controls the entire development process of OpenOffice.org and requires contributers to transfer code ownership to Sun. Some of them, for example the creator of a linear solver for OO.o Calc refuses to do so. Novell now provides a version of OO.o which incorporate these patches. I’m not sure if this will benefit the development of OpenOffice.org in a significant and positive way. It is a shame that Sun is making all key decisions with regard to the future of OpenOffice.org and as such preventing the developer community introducing novel ideas.
I still think that OO.o is missing an opportunity by effectively building an MS Office clone instead of a Office suite which implement the same functionality in a better (or at least different) way.

Recently, I did some reading on new software releases. Last week, a new version of Gnome was released which was not unexpected, considering the fact that Gnome has the aim to release a new version every six months. Gnome 2.20 does not contain revolutionairy features, but has some nice improvements. One improvement I like is the notification that the e-mail client Evolutions give when it thinks the user forgets to add an attachement to an e-mail. When an e-mail contains words indicating that the mail should contain an attachment, the system gives an warning that the user possibly forgets to include the attachement.

Another useful improvement (not mentioned in the release notes) is the drag-and-drop functionality between File-roller and Nautilus. I think this kind of features are very important to get Gnome accepted by the general public.

A nice addition to the list of applications that are available for Gnome is Cheese, which is a clone of the Mac OS X application PhotoBooth.

MySQL 6

Earlier this month, MySQL AB, the company behind the open source database MySQL, has released the second alpha version of MySQL 6. This upcoming version of the database system contains a new storage engine, called Falcon. This engine’s aim is to replace InnoDB as default storage engine. The company which developed InnoDB was bought by Oracle in 2005 and I think MySQL don’t like the idea that its main product is based on a storage engine developed by one of its competitors. Falcon is developed by Jim Starkey which became an employee of MySQL when it bought Starkey’s company Netfrastructure.

Starkey has researched some important technologies for database engines. While he was working for DEC, he was the first to implement multi versioning concurrency control (MVCC) and triggers. These technologies were integrated in InterBase which later became the basis for the open source database engine Firebird.

Falcon has some nice features, such as an advanced caching system, support for ACID-transactions, and row-level replication. It would definately give MySQL a enterprise ready storage engine, but they first have to finish it. Currently, according to preliminary benchmarks, the performance of Falcon is worse compared to InnoDB when storing and retrieving BLOB-data. But the potention is definately there, considering the fact that Falcon is still under development. However, MySQL has the target to release the final version in 2008, which may be a little optimistic.

I wrote an article of Falcon for Tweakers.net (Dutch).

A new version 2.3 of OpenOffice.org has been released. I have not yet tried the new version, so I’m not sure if it is really a n improvement over the previous version. Recently, there was some good news for the OpenOffice.org development progress, since IBM has announced to support OpenOffice.org development. According to various developers in the OpenOffice.org community, the lack of developers is the main problem of OpenOffice.org. I wonder if this is also the cause of the fact that usability-wise, OpenOffice.org is in some area’s worse than what Microsoft provides with its office suite.

I’m not a very frequent user of OpenOffice.org, so I’m not really an expert in OpenOffice.org, but I think the development team missed an opportunity to beat Microsoft by just doing things the right way and make it more user friendly than Microsoft Office. For example, it is very hard to select another language than the default for a document. For some odd reason, this has to be done in the settings for a paragraph, but there are also language dropdowns in the spell checker and the ‘options’ menu. Such an essential task should be more easy to be done.
Apple has done a better job with its iWorks suite. It seems they really tought about the usability and did not start with the ’standard way’ office suites implement their interfaces. This resulted in a different userinterface compared to the competition, but definately an improvement over its competitors. Maybe, in the feature we will see this kind of improvements also in the open source office suites. It seems that office suite developers are starting to understand this problem, since the latest release of Microsoft Office shows an entirely different user interface which - on some points - is definitely an improvement over the previous version. However, it should be noted that I’m not an Microsoft Office user, so I’m not sure if it is also an improvement in daily use.

Because I now use a Macbook for development, I had to install some stuff I needed for development. Unfortunately, Mac OS X does not provide a convenient method to install all the stuff using a single tool (such as apt-get/Synaptic on Ubuntu), but installing some basic stuff is not very difficult. After some research, I choose to install the following packages:

• MySQL
• PostgreSQL
• PHP 5
• Eclipse

Read on for the location of the packages I used (more…)

For people who think the only solution to have decent photo editing software, is to use a pirated version of Adobe Photoshop or Painshop Pro, there is a site called ‘Open Source Photography’. The site is all about (digital) photography and processing photographs using open source software. It contains tutorials on The Gimp, Illustrator and other software and provides information on other tools. The site focus on users, and I think this kind of initiatives makes open source software more accessible to common people.

Last weeks I cleaned up a lot of stuff, both virtual and real life. Almost all build-in cupboards are reordered, including the creation of new shelves. Working in an ordered environment makes your head cleaner is my experience. I also cleaned up most harddisks in my computers and servers. In order to not lose anything, I decided it would be nice to have automatically backups. So I fetched my Learning Perl book and wrote a nice backupscript which create tar.gz files of the most important directories (/etc, ~, www) and my database. A lot of drives should crash simultaneously in order to actual lose data. I also fixed my self-signed certificates for my e-mail. A nice tutorial on how to create self-signed certificates can be found here