The Linux Launderette
Contents:
Gentoo
quote- Teenage sex and the
Linux desktop
- Pirates
- MS's Virtual
Wifi
- Yahoo putting public
domain books on the 'net
- Haiku
- Amusing but
true
- Open Source doesn't
mean "steal me!" (SONY)
- News
today
- Australian ISPs tapped
to kill zombies
- 'Unix beats Windows' -
says Microsoft!
- 'Inspirational' Linux
posters
- Penguins
- Years of
hard-work.
- More
William
- Universal
binaries
- LADY READ ME
PLEASE
The Overflow:
Gentoo quote
Mon, 31 Oct 2005
From Sluggo
'In the spirit of "having a package before upstream releases it", Donnie Berkholz wrote: "The first release candidate [modular X 7.0 RC 1] was announced roughly 12 hours ago. And fitting the Gentoo you know as up to the minute, so far beyond the bleeding edge that it's wearing a Band-Aid before it starts to bleed, comes the complete package in Portage -- all 296 packages worth."' http://www.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/20051031-newsletter.xml
(Now, if only it hadn't taken them a year to make Python 2.4 stable, months after 2.3 was disrecommended upstream.)
Teenage sex and the Linux
desktop
Thu, 03 Nov 2005
From Jimmy O'Regan
No, I didn't know the two were related either, but RedHat's CEO recently said: "The desktop has become a lot like teenage sex: a lot of people are talking about it but not many people are doing it" ( http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2005/10/27/redhat_customer_control)
Novell's Nat Friedman responded with graphs of teenage sex statistics (http://www.nat.org/2005/november/#Teen-Sex-and-the-Linux-Desktop) and says: "These graphs report that by age 19, 69% of American males and 77% of American females have had sexual intercourse. In fact, by age 17, about half of all teenagers have taken a ride on the wild elmo.
So, I don't know if Matthew has teenaged children or not, but if he does, I hope he's paying more attention to his Linux teams!"
Pirates
Sun, 06 Nov 2005
From Mike Orr
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002606783_pirates06.html Luxury ship attacked by pirates
MS's Virtual Wifi
Tue, 18 Oct 2005
From Jimmy O'Regan
Slashdot has a story about a Microsoft Research project ( http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/05/10/18/0353217.shtml?tid=193&tid=185) Virtual Wifi (switches wifi addresses on the fly so you can join multiple access points simultaneously): http://research.microsoft.com/netres/projects/virtualwifi
- The comments mention a Linux equivalent:
- http://www.wilibox.com/index.php?id=wili
(IIRC, Linux has been able to do something similar with Ethernet cards for years).
Yahoo putting public domain books
on the 'net
Tue, 04 Oct 2005
From Jimmy O'Regan
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/services/2005-10-03-yahoo-book-project_x.htm "Internet search giant Yahoo responded Monday to rival Google's plans to make books available for reading online by introducing its own version.
The key difference: Yahoo is not scanning copyrighted works, as Google did before publishers called foul and it temporarily stopped. Instead, Yahoo is paying for the scanning of older, out of print titles and making them searchable through the Yahoo index and a new website at opencontentalliance.org."
Userfriendly has the best take (http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20051004): 'Funny. I've never heard "Project Gutenberg" called "Yahoo" before'.
[Sluggo] Funny, I never heard IRC called "Yahoo Messenger" until a few years ago.
Haiku
Mon, 07 Nov 2005
From Jimmy O'Regan
Over at http://www.oblovmoka.com/code/haiku/haiku there's a Python script that 'discovers "Found Haiku"' in text files.
(See also http://www.oblovmoka.com/code/haiku.php3)
Amusing but true
Sun, 30 Oct 2005
From Benjamin A. Okopnik
So, I've shipped the HP laptop off to be repaired; however, just before doing so, I wanted to try something that I saw on the Net while looking up anything I could find related to this problem. Someone had mentioned that having APM set in the Wind0ws registry could create all sorts of mysterious crapology, and that getting rid of those settings was a Good Thing. I booted Wind0ws - probably about the fifth time I did so on this machine since I started playing with it, searched the registry for the "APM" string (nope, no such thing), and got ready to shut it down before shipping it out when I spotted THIS:
http://okopnik.freeshell.org/img/WinXP_POS.jpg
(Note message in lower left corner)
I was rather amused, but also somewhat curious: was this a virus, or what? Searching the Net for that exact string produced zero results (!), so my best guess is that some disgruntled employee at HP is doing his bit for entropy - and given HP's response, I suspect that I'm the first one to report this.
Yes, I was nice enough to notify HP. However, the support-droid that I spoke to did not appear to take me seriously... their loss. Pay the people who are your main interface to the public $5/hour, and you'll get those who are worth about half of that - if that much. On their own heads be it.
STRINGTABLE
LANGUAGE LANG_ENGLISH, SUBLANG_ENGLISH_US
{
1, "arial"
2, "tahoma"
3, "tahoma"
6, "Type your password"
7, "welcome"
8, "Please type your password again. \nBe sure to use the correct
uppercase and lowercase letters."
9, "You can click the \"?\" button to see your password hint.\n\nPlease
type your password again. \nBe sure to use the correct uppercase and
lowercase letters."
10, "Did you forget your password?"
11, "Turn off XP piece of shit"
12, "Turn off %s"
13, "Password Hint:"
14, "Undock computer"
15, "Logged on"
}
Interesting. Is that within the executable
itself, or is there a related conffile somewhere?
These items are put into a .rc file (the thing I quoted), which is then compiled into a binary .res file, which is put into the resource section by the linker. (I used a program called "Resource Hacker" to get a decompiled version).
Say, Ben, what did you name it?
As I recall, I took the defaults whenever I
could; I'm pretty certain that I didn't name it anything like
that.
[1] There's a program out there that'll read a Win32 .exe and output some C files that implement a similar interface in Gtk+, for example.
Open Source doesn't mean "steal
me!" (SONY)
Fri, 18 Nov 2005
From Kat Tanaka
Naughty, naughty SONY. Compounding their rootkit gaffe, this news:
http://software.silicon.com/security/0,39024655,39154379,00.htm
"Controversial copy-protection code used by music publisher Sony BMG on CDs appears to have tapped an open-source project, raising questions about copyright, software experts said on Friday."
"The XCP program will installs itself on Windows-operated personal computers when consumers want to play 49 title CDs from Sony BMG. The program forces consumers to use a music player that comes with the program.
"This music player contains components from an open-source project, an MP3 player called Lame, it has emerged."
Oh, SONY. Big corporation stealing from (the) Lame. Tsk!
News today
Sun, 04 Dec 2005
From Sluggo
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,387470,00.html Hooters comes to Germany St Pauli Girl, watch out
Australian ISPs tapped to kill
zombies
Sun, 13 Nov 2005
From Benjamin A. Okopnik
Forwarded from a ping by a friend:
http://news.com.com/Australian+ISPs+tapped+to+kill+zombies/2100-7348_3-5938170.html?tag=html.alert also available at http://tinyurl.com/b2qsm .
'Unix beats Windows' - says
Microsoft!
Fri, 11 Nov 2005
From Jimmy O'Regan
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Murphy/index.php?p=459
"What's noteworthy about it is that Microsoft compared Singularity [MS Research's new kernel] to FreeBSD and Linux as well as Windows/XP - and almost every result shows Windows losing to the two Unix variants."
Well... their "Services for Unix" (I think)
package provides a Cygwin-like environment. It's a free download,
but doesn't come with the OS because quite a few of the packages
are under the GPL.
Micr0s0ft can't, short of committing suicide, do anything broadly Unix-compatible with their OS, because the automatic next question from the users would be "then what the hell are we paying you money for?" If their entire user base was familiar with Unix commands and practices, they'd be out of business in a week.
'Inspirational' Linux posters
Tue, 22 Nov 2005
From Jimmy O'Regan
http://www.arouse.net/despair-linux
The Debian one? Yeah, it
sucks.
Ashworth's Law? /me
googles
http://baylink.pitas.com/20000226.html: "If the page someone pointed to is interesting, there's almost certainly something even more interesting somewhere else on the site"
Hmm... Oh. Porn, and Jesus. Interesting combination: makes me wonder if there are Catholic sites that give penances with the porn... "Lesbian schoolgirls and cheerleaders in the locker room! Order now for just $29.95 and 3 decades of the Rosary".
Penguins
Tue, 15 Nov 2005
From Mike Orr
http://www.guardian.co.uk/conservation/story/0,13369,1642792,00.html
My life as a penguin
"As far as they're concerned, this is beach weather, and the penguins are out doing what they do best: standing around in a big huddle looking in the same direction, in this particular case at me."
Read the rest of the article. It's interesting. Really.
Years of hard-work.
Thu, 1 Dec 2005
From Thomas Adam
Well, it seems I have been doing a lot of hard work:
http://www.linuxgazette.com/user/129
The latest from SSC's front page:
-------------------------------------------------------- Linux Gazette Experiences Site Breaking Traffic December 08, 2004 -- SSC Publishing, publisher of Linux Gazette, announces site record-breaking traffic. This November, Linux Gazette received 1,340,000 page views. The Gazette has been published since 1995 and has experienced steady growth ever since. webmaster - Wed, 2004-12-08 13:06. --------------------------------------------------------
Per Kat: "It's not just spooge; it's Spooge-a-saurus Rex!"
UCE : spam commentspam : spooge
More in line with the "traditional" meaning, I'd say spooge is "the endproduct of wanking".
More William
Sat, 26 Nov 2005
From Jimmy O'Regan
Rick mentioned the "Just William" books before (talking about "Good Omens"): Project Gutenberg posted "More William" this week, complete with illustrations.
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/7/1/2/17125/17125-h/17125-h.htm
Universal binaries
Mon, 21 Nov 2005
From Jimmy O'Regan
Funny citation from Universal Binary Programming Guidelines, 2nd edition (taken out of context):
Here are the most typical behavior problems you'll observe when your application runs natively on an Intel-based Macintosh computer:
1. The application crashes.
- Pavel's diary: Education day - universal binaries
- http://blog.janik.cz/archives/2005-11-16T22_47_07.html
LADY READ ME PLEASE
Tue, 29 Nov 2005 19.27.50
From MAURIZIO PAOLI
Hi
This is a legitimate appeal for ladies only. If you are interested or if you want to unsuscribe email me at pal555@mail.win.it
I'm an Italian guy,I live in Italy and my name is Maurizio.I live in Roma. I'm sending this message to the people because I'm bored to live in Italy,I'm looking for a lady what could invite me in usa.I seek a millionaires american lady who desires a young guy for marriage.
I would love to find a wealthy lady who lives in one of the following places in usa or nearby: 1) "The treasure coast",I mean north east Broward County or east Palm Beach county(FLORIDA) 2)Honolulu (Hawaii) 3)Reno(Nevada) 4)Las Vegas(nevada) 5)Atlanta(georgia) 6)Jupiter,Stuart,Coral Springs,Jensen Beach,Boynton Beach,Deepwater,Hutchinson Island or Miami(Florida)
Considering that I like the mature women, I'd love to find a lady of 45-60yo age range. I'd love to find a gentle long haired lady who lives in a swimming pool house near the sea (as I like to swim) . I seek a lady without young or old children,a no smoker lady who could be widowed,separated,single ,divorced. I would need a sugarmamma figure at the beginning .
I seek a bisexual woman that figures out of the years,looks young and feels young : it's not a problem if she's not beautiful because she should be beautiful inside and most of all ,she should desire a younger soulmate.(She could be overweight too) The thing I desire is to fix a serious stable relationship with a lady who gives me the opportunity to have a better life.
ABOUT ME:
I have long black hair,my weight is 65 kilos(145 lbs) and my height is about 1.80 metres(5.11)... I'm no smoker /drinker and I'm good looking.
If you could be the kind of woman I'm looking for, write me soon please!!!!!!
Thank you very much for reading my letter . I think there must be a woman for me out there.
Cheers
MAURIZIO PAOLI -Italy
