Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
Oneric right around the corner, vpn woes
So according to the countdown timer, we have about a day left until Oneric (Ubuntu 11.10) goes gold and there is a mad rush to download it and complain about Unity. The problem for me is that I have a feeling I will never get to enjoy the new release. At work they recently moved to a new two-factor authentication system where first a certificate is traded then you auth with the usual u/p creds. Great..
First problem, vpnc has been working fine for me, but won’t work with the new scheme. I recompiled vpnc to support ssl certs, but after running it I found it only supports a hybrid client-only cert mode. Not compatible with the new vpn.
Second problem, I can’t get a 64-bit version of the official Cisco vpn client. The Cisco client does support certificate exchange, but I can’t find a 64-bit version that works. I was using this site, but it hasn’t been updated in a while. Then once I get the ipsec module compiled and installed, when I try to connect to it with the vpnclient, it dies a nasty death that takes the whole networking subsystem with it. Only a reboot can get my networking running again.
So what are my options? I am going to request a MacBook, but they take the better part of a year to get. So that means I will have to boot into Windows to use any company resources that require a vpn to access. I can still run Linux when I am at the office, but I end up needing a vpn much, it might become a major pita if I have to keep switching back and forth.
The Netflix debacle
Posted by: jeffro in Technology, Web on October 11th, 2011
I received an email list night that I found rather humorous. Below is an excerpt:
“It is clear that for many of our members two websites would make things more difficult, so we are going to keep Netflix as one place to go for streaming and DVDs.
This means no change: one website, one account, one password…in other words, no Qwikster.
While the July price change was necessary, we are now done with price changes.”
I have been a Netflix customer for the past 6 years and I have enjoyed it. I was pleasantly surprised when, 3 years ago, they unexpectedly lowered our monthly cost for a reason that escapes me now. I thought I was with a pretty cool company that would actually lower their customer costs as the company did better. When the price hikes came about I begrudgingly accepted them as the price of Netflix’s rising popularity. I knew the movie industry fat-cats would want a piece of the expanding Netflix pie, and licensing is a highly subjective pricing scheme so I knew there were going to be repercussions that would radiate down to us, the consumer.
When Netflix CEO Reed Hastings came out and said that DVD’s would be handled by a new company ‘Qwikster’, I had a major WTF moment. No really, there is nothing I want more than another website login, and an entirely separate queue for my movies. Really!? But then, they tantalized me the prospect of renting games with this new split. Hmm, I might be able to warm to this, maybe.
Now, the intrepid Netflix CEO made a blog post that says Quickster is dead before it ever started and game rentals are a possibility. Oh wow, so you are taking away something I didn’t like and something I did like. I guess the status quo is maintained, I love them but I don’t exactly hate them either.
At least there have been some positive rumblings for a native Linux Netflix client.
The Windows 95 paradox
Unknown to most (sarcasm), I am an avid Linux user. I know a great many other Linux users. As Linux users I feel we have a certain free spirit that comes with using our free OS. But I am finding a disturbing paradigm in regard to the response to the Gnome 3/Unity desktop environments that have surfaced recently. The number one rant I have read about online has been about how hard the new interfaces are to use. People want their program button with its flyout menus back.
Now I realize that many of the reviews were knee jerk reactions to the new interfaces. I had much the same reaction, when I upgraded to Natty. I couldn’t figure out how to use it, and I just wanted my familiar interface back. But wait, at some point inmy life, the familiar had to have been unfamiliar. When was that.. lets see, when was a little button in the bottom left corner of the screen for accessing programs and settings introduced… oh yes, Windows 95!! People want their Windows 95 like desktops back! For gods sake, that OS has been setting the desktop top standard for the past 16 years. This is almost the EXACT same reaction I get from people when I try to introduce LibreOffice to people that are used to MS Office.
Them: “This sucks, I can’t find anything.”
Me: “But what about the functionality, how does it compare to Office?”
Them: “Oh that, its fine, I just can’t find anything”
Me: “What options are you having trouble finding precisely?”
Them: “I have found everything I was looking for, it just sucks that I had to look for them.”
The problem isn’t the interface, you can teach old dogs new tricks. Its the fact that people don’t like new things. But wait, what about when MS changed the Office menu bar to the ribbon? Well, people were forced to use it, so they bitched, then got over it. And started to realize, maybe it isn’t so bad after all, they just needed to retrain their brains a little. You never know, you might find that your better with the new interface.
I for one love the Unity interface. There are quirks that annoy me, but what doesn’t have annoying quirks? Usage note with Unity; people love to complain about how hard it is to launch programs. If you have ever used Launchy, or Gnome Do, then this will be easy. Hit the super key, type in the first couple letters of the program you want, hit tab when it shows up, then hit enter, your done. I can launch a program in under a second, try that with a fly out menu and a mouse. Learn the keyboard short cuts, or stop complaining about using your mouse so much.
Nothing like those ole’ midnight deploys
Posted by: jeffro in Programming, Technology on September 16th, 2011
…*sigh, yeah, that what I am doing right now. Pining for midnight, fingers itching to hit the send button on the email to the admins to deploy the tag to the production servers. 57…58…59…MIDNIGHT, rock and fire!
Now I just wait while the admins do their things, and watch the ‘The web site is down’ alert messages from our hyperactive monitoring software. Yeah, thanks Chip..
Whee, the app is back online. QA … go get ‘em
UbuntuOne now with more of the GB
Posted by: jeffro in Linux, Technology on July 29th, 2011
UbuntuOne, the service that integrates seamlessly with your Ubuntu desktop to store your files online, now offers 5GB of storage with their free account. The question is, how long will it take the likes of Sugarsync and Dropbox to follow suit? I have been syncing with Dropbox at work and home for so long now, I probably won’t be in a huge hurry to move. But it will most likely happen, probably on my servers first.
One of the things that prevented me from using UbuntuOne was the fact that they didn’t offer the simplicity of Dropbox’s public download URL’s. I use this so much I can’t even count. No work if UbuntuOne has pushed this out, or is still working on it (most likely).
Google+ for me
Posted by: jeffro in Technology, Web on July 9th, 2011
So I received an invite from a friend to join Google+ this week and I spared no time getting logged in and setup.
The first thing we tried as a hangout, basically a netmeeting, only with the ugly MS requirement. After installing the plugin (they actually have a Linux plugin!!) and a little snafu with my mic (which was totally my own fault) we were video chatting with each other and sharing YouTube videos. You can chat with a bunch of people all at once so I see this being a contender to all the WebEx and DimDim clones out there. [ BTW, if you miss DimDim, try BuddyMeeting, it is a fork of the open source DimDim code ] Actually on second thought, I am not sure if it will compete with those sort of products, its contingent on everyone having a Google+ account, so that right there is a big strike against its viability as a WebEx contender. But still, all in all, very cool.
Next are circles, or groups, for friends. A novel idea on groups, but nothing terrible new here. The act of adding friends to circles is sort of fun with the animation, but other than that I haven’t seen a lot of difference there. There is one thing worth pointing out about about how Google+ uses these circles however. When you post to your stream, or your microblog of sorts, you can choose which circles get to see the post. This is huge for me. One of the things that really turned me off to Facebook was the fact that when ever I posted anything, ALL my friends would see it. So all those stupid YouTube videos or slight NSFW links that I wanted to share with my friends, yeah, my parents could see them too. The only alternative would be to unfriend my parents, not really an options when I want to share pics and videos of the kids with the extended family.
Other than that there aren’t a ton of differences from Facebook. You can share your videos and photos, nothing new there, and having an android phone makes it even easier. Its intriguing enough to bring be back from a self-imposed exile on social media, but if it will keep me remains to be seen.
Online man pages
Yes, online man pages is nothing new, but Dustin Kirkland has taken them a step simpler, by shortening the url and making it more like the actual command. So now you can enter ‘man grep‘ on the command line, or you can enter ‘manpg.es/grep‘ in your browser. I likee.. 
Ubunutu 11.04 initial impressions
Posted by: jeffro in Linux, Technology on May 2nd, 2011
So I intstalled Natty over the weekend, I am usually able to hold off for a total of 24 hours after a new release comes out before I really want to upgrade something.
Well I have been using Natty for 24 hours with the new Unity desktop and all. Well I can officially weigh in on Unity now. and the word is…meh.. Yeah, talk about anti-climactic. I switched back to Gnome classic after about 4 hours with Unity because it was just taking too long to do things in my mind. It was driving me crazy. Its not a bad design, not at all, but its such a divergence from what I am used to using that there was A LOT of overhead where I was just staring at the screen trying to figure out how to do something. Rather than provide an exhaustive list of things I wasn’t able to do let me just point out a couple.
Custom launchers. Yeah, in web development, the browser version matters. So I had to manually install FF3 in /opt and point to a special profile that I have all tuned for testing websites. Natty uses FF4, which not a lot of people are using yet. So I am flummoxed trying to figure out how to create a custom launcher for FF3 that is installed in a non-standard place.
Notification applets. They just don’t work in Unity. There are some that they custom build to work in Unity, but the standard Gnome applets and icons in the notification area don’t work, at all. You can’t click them and they are replicated when you have two screens. They just don’t seem very well thought out. There seems to be a lot of ‘not invented here’ syndrome going on.
I thought about trying Gnome 3 but I hear it totally breaks Unity. So I will probably hold off until a bit later, I will probably try Unity again at a later time. I needed to actually get some work done. 
Hollywood style code hacking
Posted by: jeffro in Programming, Web on April 28th, 2011
Hey kids! Have you ever wanted to pursue a career in programming? Checkout this site to see EXACTLY what its like! Just click the ‘Hack!’ button and start typing, you’ll be hacking Linux kernel code before you even realize what you are doing. Isn’t programming fun!
Happy Ubuntu 11.04 release day
Ubuntu 11.04 was released today and, as OMG! Ubuntu put it, “every man, wife, dog, child, elf, dwarf, sister, neighbour and cousin are downloading it right now”. OMG! Ubuntu has set up a cutomized landing page for people looking for Natty info. Head on over to http://omgubuntu.co.uk/hub/natty to see it
