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The son of a friend of mine from the Middle East will be attending Norwegian classes in Oslo this school year, and to that occasion my work place decided to setup a laptop for him. It was a rolled-out Dell Latitude D620, and having replaced the hard disk drive I opted for Ubuntu 10.04 as main operating system. This is largely due to my pleasant discoveries I have made about Ubuntu's performance and stability on ~4 year old systems, who are fully capable of running this modern OS without dragging its feet. In addition, everything worked out of the box. As I expected, this did not go unnoticed by his father, and I wrote this explanatory e-mail to him, that I thought I would share with you:

Hi,
I was expecting some feedback on the choice of operating system, so no worries:) Please let me explain.

[Our company] only has windows XP which is 10+ years old and not officially supported by Microsoft any longer. We're slowly migrating to Windows 7 64-bit on a machine-by-machine basis for newer machines. We've never used Vista, which is a two steps backwards system..

On the other hand, the Ubuntu operating system is a GNU/Linux OS with the system stability and security that entails. It is backed by the Canonical foundation. Programs (called packages) are installed via Synaptics package manager from central repositories, meaning you do not have to know what program you want or where to get it from, a search in Synaptics will find all you need and provide automatic configuring and updates. Most tools and small programs needed in everyday use are pre-installed. The system and the adhering packages are Free in both senses: no cost and free from legal restrictions. The license of the operating system ensures that this will never change, regardless of Canonical's financial backing. Google is one of many large enterprises using Ubuntu on the desktop.

The office applications available are OpenOffice (of which Writer, the word-equivalent, is already installed), which offer the functionality of Word without the considerable price tag and poor inter-operability of Word. Arabic tools can be installed with a few clicks. This also goes for the system locale (menus and system language) which can be changed during login. Arabic language packages (locale) can be installed from Synaptics.

The rest of the OpenOffice packages (Impress for presentations, and Calc for spreadsheets etc) are available already or installable from Synaptics.

I use Ubuntu all the time at [Our company], and if it had been up to me we would not migrate to Windows 7 but use Ubuntu instead. Unfortunately it is uncertain what infrastructure we will have in 2 years.

Also, the reason why Windows 7 is a great improvement on XP and Vista, experts agree, is because it is moving towards a Linux-like operating system. It is not there yet however, and its license and closed platform provides a lot of future problems ([Our company] already has trouble accessing its own documents from older Windows and Word versions), that will not occur on open platforms.

The main reason to go for Ubuntu with this particular machine is because it is 4 years old already, and the Ubuntu system does not falter with time the way XP does. Windows 7 will not be preferable on the D620 given its hardware architecture. Linux is however, very well-versed on backwards compatibility and will provide the modern usability and offerings without compromising on system performance or stability.

So give it a try for a while and maybe you will reconsider. My girlfriend is not very computer savvy but after a couple of weeks with it she switched entirely and didn't look back. Ubuntu is also very popular among Norwegian students.

If you would still like to switch after using it a little while, it doesn't take long to do so. Your son can have my email and cellphone number:)

Sincerely,
Sigg3

As most of you who have used Ubuntu will know, you cannot watch DVDs on systems (even outside the US) without installing the ubuntu-restricted-extras (or their kubuntu or xubuntu siblings) that installs some restricted packages that are illegal in some countries. What is new as of recently, AFAIK, is that you have to download and install libdvdcss2 manually afterwards in addition to installing the above packages. Installing livdvdread4 in Synaptics won't actually enable you to watch DVDs, so here's how to get it done nice and easy:

1. Open Synaptic Package Manager and install the ubuntu-restricted-extras packages 
2. Close Synaptic and open up a terminal 
3. Run 'sudo apt-get install libdvdread4' 
4. Then ' sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh' 

And reboot! Now, while I understand you need to use caution with regards to these packages because you don't want it to appear as if Canonical is somehow encouraging breaking the law (in a few countries, including the US); I just don't understand that you have to hide them as well. The install info is available here: Installing libdvdcss, but you'd have to read the package description pretty carefully in Synaptics to even notice it.. If I remember correctly, on earlier versions you could just install the restricted packages and you were ready to go. This little difference almost ruined Lady C's vacation!

Live blogging from a meeting. Excited yet? BORED.
We've got four salesmen (one female) sitting around the round table selling us their SharePoint solution. We're one and a half hour into this meeting, which is one of four that I'm required to attend, and I've finally come to the realization that it's a complete waste of my time. I'd rather waste my time doing actual work than sit here and listen like a fool. A fool because I don't understand the language. We even had to hire a damn special (and especially well-paid) sales-man CONSULTANT, that can translate the snake oil to "our very specific situation".

That's right. Some f*** in management thinks that because we're not a sweatshop, or a factory, but a research foundation we're somehow special and has special needs. Eff that. Why not ask the guy who keeps the shop running? It's a mid-sized business with regular Windows XP users and the communication problems that are wholly regular when more than ten people get together. We sell research instead of baby milk or soccer pads, and who cares.

I give up!

When I arrived here as a conscientious objector in 2004 I suggested that perhaps I could redo the company website (and naturally substitute its non-existing back-end) as well as implement the ISO standard file architecture at no cost. At the time, the company had just flushed half a million or more into a no-name Linux guru customized solution (turned out to be a re-written xml database setup with a MS word like GUI, no documentation and crashes half the time). So they wouldn't hear about no-cost solutions because they would lose face.

The system that's limping on as we speak, was in fact a lot better than the .ASP + MSSQL solution the former head of foundation had created when he was not avoiding actual work, but it didn't really take much. This very blog does the same and is based on a php+mysql system created in 2001!

Come 2010 and someone has decided that we're gonna buy a SharePoint license and take the final step into eternal doom. Don't get me wrong, Microsoft's Active Directory and SharePoint content architecture and management are good, well-written software products and great tools as well if implemented correctly. But there's a difference between a razor blade and a lawnmower when all you want to do is shave. Especially when the lawnmower takes all your data as hostage, unless of course you implement the next iteration under a similar yet more expensive license a decade into the future.

My own solution? A combination of FOSS packages that can ideally replace SP as a whole using opensource architecture in the back end. It requires the same hardware, quite a few consultancy hours, but our data is safe from vendor lockin at the neat price of ZERO dollar. AND we can be a flagship example of being ahead of the curve and the rest of the research field as users of intelligent and creative computing. I want viable solutions, not packaged products dammit! .. Oh well. Back to pretending I'm listening. Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase 'die a little inside'.

Though the title makes USB viruses sound very exotic, I have found that they are in fact more common in Africa than elsewhere. Ask yourself: how often have you connected a USB pen drive to a friend's computer and come back home with a nasty virus inside? I'd gather internet café machines and other shared resources (conference room machines) are good hot spots for these pesky little things, but I have never, not once had this problem myself! You wouldn't think an entire continent would suffer any more than everywhere else.

This is however the case. Working closely with researchers all over the world, I have yet to see as many USB virus infections as I do on the machines that are working in or coming back from Africa. This applies to countries as varied as Congo and Sierra Leone to the "western" regions near South Africa. But then consider this fact: There is no wide-spanning internet access in Africa yet.

[autorun]

open=Feast\Ival\Feast.exe



;wenta mal ahlak yabnel mekaka lol ma2sodaksh enta ya

zaky yalla kol sana wenta tayebjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj.

action=Open folder to view files

shell\open=Open

shell\open\command=Feast\Ival\Feast.exe

shell\open\default=1

The viruses are as simple as an .exe (usually with preceding extension such as .pdf.exe) that an Autorun.inf file links to. See the example above gathered from the field. Then the .exe replicates itself and its backdoors throughout the system and any new USB devices connected thereafter. I'd be thankful for any interpretation of the comment though I'm not sure what language it is.

The infection relies on the improper handling of USB mass storage devices on Microsoft Windows, and as every other "feature" has a name; Auto-run or Autoplay. To properly disable auto-run in Windows XP you must run gpedit.msc and turn off Auto-play for removable drives (can be applied to CDs and other peripherals as well). This does not work on machines under an AD domain unless specified to do so, making it a real treat for virus writers. There are registry hacks (below from techrepublic) to turn off Auto-run, but they are less than solid:

1. Navigate through the Registry Editor to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer 
2. Create a DWORD named NoDriveTypeAutoRun 
3. Set the value to 000000FF 

My point of writing this, however, is more about the realization that Jurassic Park meme "Life finds a way" also pertains to computer viruses. This kind of virus is no more eloquent than the old 3.5" floppy viruses we had as kids but that was years ago, way before everyone had internet, and the preferred way of sharing information was the sneakernet. Now, if you could track these simple viruses, which could be a simple crowdsourcing task, you'd see the immense work of a long living human chain across the African continent sometimes stretching as far as Oslo, Norway; and you gotta wonder what could be done if they carried something more useful than viruses with them. The USB pendrives are to inter-state Africa what the internet is to our world.

And a warning to the worried: USB viruses will only advance with processes running unscrutinized as Human Interface Devices (irongeek.com) that is; as keyboards, mouse and peripherals as opposed to blockable mass storage devices.

I don't see why the USA, EU or any other international or domestic entity would embrace the patent philosophy which does NOT in its current form protect the artist, programmer or entrepreneur's interests; thus maintaining the ancient rule of de facto hierarchies and monopolies, as well as preventing innovation in a world where it is very much needed.

I also strive to fathom those who fight against the community driven efforts for sharing and collaborating without regard of the intellectual property lie, its laws and the man made borders of nations. And I can only see Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt as the explanation.



I got this petition from the Eurolinux mailing list:

Eurolinux advocates policies which lead to European Digital Independence: Full-scale Linux migration, market order & interoperability enforcement, mandatory open standards, abolition of software patenting, and sustainable public investments in Linux development for the preservation of our digital liberties. Software from the public sector ought to be licensed as free and open source software (FLOSS) to promote job creation, skills development and re-use in Europe. Eurolinux aims to overcome strategic dependencies of our critical information infrastructure which put Europeans at risk.

Google recently launched a new communication platform which aims to be a replacement for traditional e-mail, instant messaging, blog and bug posting as well as online collaboration tools. The scary thing is not that it's new and unfamiliar to us here and now, or that it still is really buggy and takes a lot of time getting used to, the scary thing is that with this new concept they might just have stricken gold. Maybe in ten years time this will be what everyone's using on any platform.. Best thing is, in order to make it so, Google intends to Open Source everything. That's the way e-mail spread across the globe in the first place. If you want to get in touch with me, or just "send me a wave" here's me identity:



If you still don't have an idea what it's all about you should check out this introduction video (very long): Google Wave developer preview. More information about the protocol can be found at Google Wave Federation Protocol, but the source code for the API itself is yet to be published. If you're interested in the technology, check out Google Wave: Under the hood also from the Google I/O 2009 conference.

At this moment you need a google account (got gmail?) to login, and I also think you need an invitation but of that I'm not sure. If you do, please contact me and I can send you one. I still have 5 left. You might consider using Chrome for this as its pretty CPU intensive at the moment. Have a nice weekend, and play nice!

EDIT: 18th of January 2010
From the Google Wave Federation Protocol website: "To encourage early experimentation with the federation protocol, we also built a basic open source client/server." This is command-line only at the moment, but allows local testing of Wave without making arbitrary connections to Google's services. Get the source code here, and check out the documentation.

As regular readers will have noticed I have been spammed the last couple of months through the blog comments. I had a hard time keeping the comments clear of spam messages in certain blog posts, but that was because my b2 blacklist module was wrongly configured (and I had reached a max limit). The situation has been remedied, much thanks to good old Mike and I am adding new IPs to the blacklists as they appear. Unfortunately, there are a lot of infected Windooze machines out there so you may experience a few spam messages once in a while, though not at the same rate as before.

An alternative solution could be to follow the example of one of my colleagues who was tired of getting spam into her mailbox. She put up a strong filtering rule and hasn't received any spam since. Or any other e-mails for that matter. She called me up in my office just to praise the wonders of good old-fashioned fax technology...! I doubt it will last.

In other news I have been reading more about Drupal, the all-in-one Content Management System that I think will prove to be the one ring to rule them all. Drupal has a lot of followers and haters, much thanks to its intricate terminology which differs from the rest of the world's. But I hope bringing a modern CMS to this site will make things easier for me, you and a lot harder for the spammers. And bring new possibilities for playing around with my Danish server. Now it's time for lunch.

The FS Esprimo Mobile is a consumer-targeted and cheap laptop for light home use, emphasis on cheap, which arrived the market sometime in 2008 as far as I know. It comes with a 1 year warranty, as is only too normal when it comes to cheap devices (e.g. cheap hardware), so consider extending it if it's not too expensive. A colleague of mine had managed to drop his machine on the floor resulting in a completely dead laptop. No sounds, LEDs lighting up, no beep/light codes, nothing. Naturally I figured it had something to do with the PSU and told him I would check it out. I couldn't find an official disassemble manual online, only the regular user manual, so I decided to document the process. First a word of warning: I am not responsible for your own actions, whether you are taking the risk of opening your laptop or farting in the elevator. It's all you. And if you have a warranty that still applies, please check whether actually using it is cheaper (probably is).



Before you do anything at all, disconnect the power adapter, remove the battery and press and hold the power button for 10 seconds. This is to make sure there is no remaining current in the system. A short-circuit can and will damage the motherboard and other EM sensitive parts and thereby cost you more money. That said, I hope you like to screw, because there is a lot of screwing to be done!



1. Remove the 12 screws as illustrated above (click for bigger version)



2. Pick out the rubber covering the 2 hidden screws on the front bottom. If you want to you can glue them back on when you're done.


      
3. Remove the HDD cover (1 screw) and the small screw underneath it ( pic 1). Proceed to the two screws just below the LCD hinge cover (2). Then, using a small flat screwdriver wiggle up the two hinge covers (3).



4. To remove the chassis top cover to get to the keyboard you will have to release the hinge cover, that is, the small piece of plastic running seamlessly across the machine between the keyboard and the LCD. This is attached by two hidden latches on either side (pictured above). When this is done you are ready to slide out the keyboard towards the monitor. Be careful not to pull it too long which will damage the keyboard control cable underneath! Place the keyboard while still connected on the palmrest face down.



5. Still using a small flat screwdriver, flip up the keyboard connector, and remove the keyboard. Probably to reduce typing rattle FS has put some kind of cloth underneath the keyboard. At least I hope that's what it's for. Move it aside for the time being and remove the 3 screws just below the LCD.



6. Remove the last 3 cover screws and then the 4 long screws keeping the LCD in place. When you remove a laptop LCD you should try to open it near the 180 degree angle so that it is easily removed and re-inserted. This varies among laptops however..



7. Use a flat screwdriver to carefully pry open the chassis. Make sure you don't harm any of the connectors, and since the VGA connector on this model is built into the plastic, you must make sure to bend the plastic around it. Be careful not to break either!

Congratulations! That's it! You can now access the entire motherboard and all of its components, and as I soon I got to this stage I discovered that the PSU connector had broken completely off.. Not from the process above of course, but the clumsiness of my colleague. The laptop had landed on the power adapter in the PSU connector thus breaking its inner counterpart in two pieces. Which means coughing up the cash for a new motherboard most likely. But in that case I'll at least know where to begin!

I urge you to click the links I've provided throughout this post because I couldn't put up all the pictures on my front page. You can also go and see all of the pictures together on this flickr page. When you're done replacing your part(s) you just retrace your steps from above. Please remember that if you're only swapping out RAM modules or changing the hard disk drive there is absolutely NO REASON to disassemble the entire laptop. It is only required for a few protected parts like the PSU. Good luck!

As your comatose relative(s) may have completely failed to notice, Sigg3.net's database was down and up and down the last couple of days. At first it was deemed a configuration issue but it turned out I had churned out more words than my megabytes of storage could allow for. This could happen again! So just check in a day later. I'm always around.


For more Jesus wisdom visit 150 Jesus Pictures!

My generous host Enavn has raised the upper limit to allow for the page to still be displayed while I decide what to do.

I was taken aback by this situation since I was under the clear impression that I had paid for database storage in addition to my "normal", flat-file webspace. Add to this a site administration tool that clearly says I have more than half a gig to go on and you can see the contour of my general bafflement. Alas, I will have to go through the digital paperwork and find out what is what and how much is it and why not or else. To cut down in the amount of words I may have to drp 'vry vwl 'n rder 2 sve spce.. But you can't twitter a god damn train of thought unless you're a master of text-speak. Which I am not. When I send an SMS there are often multiple references to messages of the past, which I have numbered sequentially according to sender and receiver, so that Ref#SI-B421 and Ref#HA-SI883 exclamation mark exclamation mark space smiley..

In the meantime it's business as usual. I mean, breakfast as usual. See ya!

I have bought around 20 of Dell's "new" Latitude E-series notebooks, ranging from the 12" E4200 to the 14" E6400 (ATG as well), as hardware upgrades to the machine park where I work. They are good looking machines, and potentially excellent companions as well, but we have experienced a range of errors from the horrifying Windows BSODs/STOP errors to software bugs decreasing performance that made me very uneasy about keeping my job. Luckily, there are solutions! If you have run into the same problems listed below, you may also have found that Dell's support technicians have been rather reluctant to admit there's something wrong with their products. The trouble I've experienced so far, running Windows XP Professional SP3;

• 0xFE USB_BUGCODE_DRIVER STOP ERROR (BSOD) 
• Machines refusing to boot when power adapter is plugged in 
• Network connections taking 5-20 minutes to resolve (Wifi & LAN) 
• Worthless SIM cards installed in WWAN connector 
• .. and more, less serious bugs! 

Truth of the matter is, regardless of what support tells you, there was an ENGINEER HALT of the production of the 13.1" E4300 model early January this year. This is according to an internal send-to-all e-mail disclosing hardware failure in the motherboards of this particular model. If you bought a Latitude E4300 prior to 15-20th of January 2009 you are probably entitled to a free motherboard exchange. According to support, this is the cause of the power-boot failure. They also recommended disabling Boot on AC in the BIOS, but it was disabled by default.

This whole process made me a bit shaky about the stability of the other models (E4200 and E6400) in terms of hardware, 'cause we were seeing several BSODs a week, and I didn't order anything else from Dell for a while. I found it a bit weird that they didn't write anything on their homepage about this, or sent out e-mails to their business partners. In the meantime I was troubleshooting it as a bug with Dell's advanced E-port port replicator, which was ultimately proven false.

This went on until one of our researchers had a serious HDD crash in the field, loosing two weeks' valuable data from her E6400. The BIOS reported 'No bootable device' and didn't detect the HDD at all. Usually such a sudden death of a disk is due to a power surge or simply a wipe of the partition table, the latter a very easy problem to fix. But this drive was completely inaccessible to my forensic tools, and since the E6400s were identical in hardware, I feared a wave of data loss; "as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced."

I was and still am positive that the hard disk drive was worn down by a series of BSOD's, until the hapless user one day put it in stand by, moved it from the breakfast table, never to see her data again.. Remember that I still thought the BSOD's were caused by a faulty motherboard Dell didn't know about. So when they sent technicians a few days later, they had brought new mobos and hard disk drives for all the E6400s. Being that we didn't find any errors with the motherboard, they replaced the faulty drive and two others, and left me tearing my hair out. 'Cause like I said, the failing of the disk was not the problem but a terrible symptom caused by the as of yet unknown problem.

Turns out the 0X000000FE Bugcode_usb_driver STOP error was caused by d553bus.sys which is a part of the driver for the DW5530 WWAN (mobile broadband) adapter. The fix, they say, is to head into Safemode on the machines affected and uninstall this driver in Device Manager, restart the machine and install the new driver found here: DELL Wireless 5530 HSPA MINI A06 (R220877)

In addition to this problem, that affected machines of all three models, I had some serious connectivity issues that I traced back to the Dell ControlPoint Connection Manager utility. This is a third-party management app that I would usually avoid at all cost (be it from Dell, Lenovo, HP etc), but that I felt obliged to install to allow our machines to connect to the WWAN using the mobile broadband. Even with the latest drivers of today, having installed them correctly (must be installed in the right order, and existing installations must be uninstalled manually first), it took 5 minutes to connect to our LAN with a cable. I haven't seen such performance since the nineties!

Dell actually admitted these problems and more, though in a "please don't tell anyone" kind of manner. Instead they told me to fetch Ericsson's utility that would allow me to remove the Dell ControlPoint applications completely! Why they don't include information like this anywhere else but in a private user's post at the Dell forums is a mystery to me. People often buy through recommendations, and those recommendations ultimately come from geeks like myself. Due to their handling of this case I have not recommended Dell's new machines these past six months at all.. A real shame if these machines are as good as advertised. So, remove the DCP bull, and install Ericsson's driver: DELL WIRELESS 5530 HSPA MINI A00 (R198215)

In addition to this, our machines were supplied with SIM cards that are outside European telco's jurisdiction.. I phoned our associate about this and he was surprised we'd got the SIM cards at all, because we evidently shouldn't. (Does not apply to the UK & USA as far as I know.) The trouble was that Dell's automatic "Activate your SIM card today" and Netcom's corresponding online activation form (Netcom is a Norwegian telco who made a deal with Dell) actually accepted the bogus SIM cards leaving the user puzzled and offline for two weeks after the so-called activation.

I have yet to implement all the quick and dirty fixes, not to mention the removal of about a gigabyte of Dell ControlPoint software, so you'll have to check by this post for updates to see if it has worked. In all, I've read just about only good reviews regarding these machines, so I guess that if the problems are sorted out or you don't experience them at all, you're already cruising. But if you do, it's hard to find a place where the answers are, justifying this blog post, when they should be effectively advertised on Dell's own webpages in my humble opinion.

Edit 6th of July 2009: HOWTO
I've begun implementing the suggested fix and so far it has proved to at least make the machines faster (and connect faster too). I just hope the BSODs are a thing of the past now.. Here's what you should do if you suffer the same:

1. From Add/Remove programs in control panel, remove the following:
   • Dell ControlPoint Connection Manager 
   • Dell ControlPoint Security Manager 
   • Dell ControlPoint System Manager 
   • Dell button service (optional) 
   But make sure that you keep (or install) the Dell Security Device Driver Pack. 
2. Reboot into safemode 
3. Right-Click My Computer and select Manage, then Device Manager. 
4. Under Network adapters right click Dell Wireless 5530 HSPA Mobile Broadband Minicard Network Adapter and select uninstall. 
5. Boot back to normal mode. You will see Windows recognizing new hardware, but just ignore the Found New Hardware Wizard. Instead, you extract and install R220877. 
6. Reebot, then install the WWAN application from Ericsson (R198215) 
7. Configure Windows Zero Config wireless manager (or install Intel's Pro/SET tool). 

You are now ready to enjoy a faster, more responsive desktop!

Whether you like it or not, Windows 7 is in the making, and you can fetch your free copy of the release candidate evaluation version RIGHT NOW. The license key you receive will be valid until the 1st of June next year. Micro$oft.com writes:

Watch the calendar. The RC will expire on June 1, 2010. Starting on March 1, 2010, your PC will begin shutting down every two hours. Windows will notify you two weeks before the bi-hourly shutdowns start. To avoid interruption, you’ll need to install a non-expired version of Windows before March 1, 2010. You’ll also need to install the programs and data that you want to use.

To get your copy of the evaluation version just go right here!
It's available in both 32 and 64-bit versions, and apparently works well on netbooks too.

THERE BE DRAGONS!
You may think this goes without saying, being Windooze and not a stable and open operating system, but there is extra need to use caution. For those of us in the *nix world, the word "release candidate" means there are bound to be pitfalls, bugs and glitches ahead, as opposite to what you'd expect in a quote unquote stable release. This is a testing version, and you contribute to the M$ empire by using it, because they need user input to make it better. An open source model adopted by the dark lords in these troubling financial times. And probably a smart move too. Please note that although this version is free (for a year) it isn't free software. It is proprietary software, though with a nice price tag. For truly free software see the Free Software Foundation!

Internet Explorer 8 is out.
And it still doesn't render my fully validated XHTML 1.0 STRICT / CSS 2 version of this site. (Not the one you're watching.) Oh well. Better luck next time!

Following what I said on Monday regarding the home.no.net sites, I've now moved all the home.no.net sites that I could remember. They can now be found at their permanent grave @ sigg3.net/users/homenonet/. I'll let you know when I've uploaded all the mp3 files. I am not sure if this is all of the sites I had stored there, but if I can't even remember them why should I care?

...'Cause I'm a Hamster! I'M A HAMSTER!

And really hung over from celebrating the Army Dude last night. See ya.

My former band CRESCENT currently at http://devoted.to/grunge will lose its nice URL as of April 30th, as Bravenet announced they are closing down free redirects/fast URLs in an e-mail sent to me before the weekend. In addition the band page's free server, Home.no.net, is closing down as of the 1st of May 2009 according to this announcement, also for financial reasons. This not only affects the Crescent site, but a number of other websites I made as a teenager as well:

• http://home.no.net/crescent/
• http://home.no.net/saamdal/
• http://home.no.net/qhreak/
• http://home.no.net/qhreak/kim/
• http://home.no.net/chrifos/

For the sake of history and many fond memories, I will download all of these sites to an accessible location on Sigg3.net to be released later. I will also upload the rest of the Crescent media files that I have, including the complete and never before released studio album from our heydays called Based On Sex.

I've also added bold font weight to the 50 latest Jesus pictures @ sigg3.net/blogger/gsus/pictures/, since so many of you were complaining that you had seen at least a hundred of them before. Bitches.

As I've talked about before (discussion from Nov 2007) I want to migrate to a website framework which is still in active development, as opposed to my existing b2 and flat file mashup, which is quite a mess to maintain. I was reminded by this when I were doing the invert-all-colors on my frontpage on April the 1st, and discovered that my CSS was only partially in control of my layout apart from the heavy table-based design which stems from my upbringing in the 90s. Oh yeah, I was the table master. I could do anything with a table or two. But those days are over, and I fully embrace CSS as a brilliant solution to all my problems.

BUTT!
(And you go: "WHERE?!")

I will need to have a functional, powerful and all-encompassing website framework working behind the scenes for the move to be complete. A new design just doesn't cut it today, and since I like discovering new things on the greener sides of the hills, I have decided to give Drupal a go. It reportedly has a steep learning curve, but ever since I grabbed a copy of Using Drupal from the online bookshelf I've been surprised by its simplistic buildup once you get the hang of its mystical terminology.

What's kept me from doing the swap already is the daunting fear of losing content or having to track down errors for days, while the rest of me life's put on hold. It was easier before when I didn't have one. But I'm sure I'll be able to manage, as both Michael and Jamie have given me helpful pointers in the past. Not to mention Koew who literally spams me with new Sigg3.net mockups. The transition essentially involves migrating from b2 to Wordpress to Drupal, instead of scripting the in-between myself. That means that Sigg3.net could potentially be down for 2-3 days! but I will be sure to let you know in advance. I know how some of you refuse to eat or have sex with your spouses unless you've read the latest on my blog, so I'll do my best to keep the amount of pain at a minimum. I'll let you know when the shit's about to hit the fan. Until then, have a nice day!

Today (Monday) I had the honor of listening to one of the founding fathers of Free Software as we know it. Mister Free Software Himself, namely Richard Stallman. If you haven't read the Zenwalk or Slackware manual, or are into the politics and philosophy of computing and software, you may not realise what an important figure he is in the history of Free software. Quoting from The origins of free software in the Zenwalk manual:

History begins at the start of the eighties, when Richard Stallman, a researcher of the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, U.S.A.), faced an ethical dilemma. His IT research section had been closed down; for years, he had shared his knowledge with his colleagues. Now, did he have to sell his knowledge to the highest bidder, or would he take the occasion to share his knowledge with the world? To appease his conscience, he created the principle of 'free software'.

Most of the linux users in the world refer to linux as linux, although the appropriate term is a collective of "GNU plus Linux", abbreviated to GNU/Linux. The GNU part is the work of Stallman and other pioneers to create a totally free operating system, but lacked some software until Linus created the Linux kernel. You may read more about that in the Zenwalk manual. The two of them together make the brilliant OS I use at work and at home every day. But they may still be licensed differently.

Most other users of Windows and Mac OS, may still have come in contact with Stallman's work or other people's work, because it is licensed under the General Public License (GPL). You may also have been in contact with other material, such as user contributed text, in the form of Wikipedia for instance. If you go to any article at Wikipedia.org you may see that "All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License." This license is the work of Richard Stallman, as the president of the Free Software Foundation, and many others. With a long beard and a growing belly, think of him as the Santa Claus of Software. As the giver of gifts, there comes great responsibility.

Hence, Stallman specified 'free software' with four fundamental freedoms:

0. The liberty to run the program, without restrictions upon its usage. 
1. The liberty to study the inner workings of a program, and to adapt it to your needs. For this, access to the source code is a prerequisite. 
2. The liberty to redistribute copies. 
3. The liberty to improve the program, and to publish those improvements, so the whole community can benefit from it. For this also, access to the source code is a prerequisite. 

The talk was about Free Software and Copyright (or Copyright vs. Community in the Age of Computer Networks - Free software and beyond) totally avoiding the cloudy term 'intellectual property' which somehow tries to combine several different sets of laws with little other result than confusion and powergrabbing. Stallman went on to give the historical grounds of copyright, as an industrial economy of scale in the days when the printing press was invented and became a part of society, as an example of how technology affects ethical issues. Various monarchies gave monopolies on certain books to certain publishers as gifts. While 17th century Britain granted a 14 year copyright to the author in order to encourage writers. This has since been the picture painted by the copyright holders, or more likely, those enforcing those rights. Because many authors, according to Stallman, suffer from their work being quote unquote protected by major corporations. While it is true that a few stars, like J.K. Rowling, certainly promotes copyright there are many authors whose work is kept from them because their representatives are using copyright against them! (Not irrelevant is Don't Buy Harry Potter Books by Stallman.)

Stallman went on to discuss several types of technologies which are really good example of how the end user is exploited by evil End User License Agreements, notably technology that is hidden within the proprietary source code and thereby does harm to its user. There are "gaping backdoors" in Windows and Mac OS which allows the developers to make any change they want to a user's system, and more infamous are the different forms of Digital Restrictions Management software, as Stallman called it: DVD encryption (which was broken by DVD Jon &tc. but whose work is illegal in the US due to the Digital Millenium Copying Act), AACS encryption used in HD DVDs and the PS3, not to mention the additional layer(s) suspected in the blue-ray format. Stallman also made a point of the original DRM rootkits that used GNU software and was therefore in direct violation to its license because they didn't distribute the code.

He went on to talk about the "Sony Shredder" (Reader) and "Amazon Swindle" (Kindle) which is the new way the major copyright holders and/or corporations are trying to keep us from freely using information. Think of how many times you've borrowed a book from a friend or from the library. They don't want us to do that anymore, and they can control this by adding DRM to the socalled e-books that are on the rise these days. Then Stallman asked this question: "What should a democratic government do about this?" The answer? Reduce the extent of copyright. To do this, the first thing it would have to do is to shorten the time a copyright is valid. His suggestion is 10 years, because it is more than 3 times the normal publishing cycle, but he noted that authors he had lectured strongly suggested no more than five years for reasons I've already mentioned. But the length is not all of it, copyright can't be as narrow as it is today and must take into account the social use of the work in question. Therefore, he suggested three major categories:

1. Functional works 
2. Works that state thoughts or opinion 
3. Works of art whose impact lies in itself 

I'll deal with these in a second, let me just remind you that my notes from the talk are not perfect, so I can't guarantee that everything is 100% accurate!

The first group deals with software, recipies, referential works such as encyclopedias, text fonts and all those how-tos I have written during my years. For this group, taking into consideration its social use, the user must have ALL FOUR FREEDOMS.

The second group deal with memoirs, essays of opinion, and scientific papers. To modify these kinds of works would not make sense and would harm the work, because modification would mean misrepresentation. Therefore the user should have the Freedom to non-commercially REDISTRIBUTE the work, but copyright should be allowed or even encouraged as a means of encouragement and industrial regulation.

The third group seems a lot harder to work out, because what is a modified version of a work of art? Some would claim that the artistic integrity would suffer. But consider then the case of Shakespeare. He borrowed a lot from other authors and his works would with today's copyright laws have been considered strictly illegal. Like Stallman said: "Shakespeare is trying to make a cheap ripoff of my book!"
So modifications and the freedom to do them are important, but how do we best protect the quote unquote artistic integrity of the artistic work? Stallman came to a sort of compromise by stating that, okay, if you have to wait for the work to go into public domain, then it doesn't really do any harm. So copyright is again encouraged, but naturally a reduced copyright to cover modification while granting everyone the freedom to non-commercially redistribute.

How do we acchieve this as a society?
Remember that the society uses peer-to-peer file sharing applications, and that they are wholly legal as such, including the infamous Pirate Bay. (When asked what he thinks about piracy, Stallman always answer: "Attacking a ship is a bad thing." This because sharing is not piracy, it's a social conduct, as apart from the anti-social conduct which piracy must be recognized as. Just as 'intellectual property' is a term coined to confuse, 'piracy' is a misnomer for natural human conduct.) Therefore the means to do this does not have to stand in the way of freedom. Stallman proposed two methods:

The first is the method of taxation. We pay taxes maybe to our ISP or everyone in general, and a certain amount would go to artists judging by how popular they are. But the division of wealth would not be linear proportions, instead the superstars would make a little less and the well-established ones would make enough to stay alive.

Not everyone enjoys taxation, however, and Stallman subscribes to this view himself. So another method could be voluntary payment. The examples here are pretty easy to remember from the top of our heads, namely Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails$ who distributed their music online and asked the listener to pay what they liked. They made a lot of money, but they had a starting fee. Stallman mentioned Monty Python whose sales have skyrocketed after they put everything they've ever made on youtube, and a Canadian singer who put everything she's ever made online and asked the user to pay what they like (starting price zero). She actually makes more money per song than your regular superstar on iTunes!
But, he added, the process should be made as simple as possible. Today we still have to whip out our credit cards or log into our banks to donate or something. A simple DONATE or VOLUNTARY PAYMENT button should be added to all software media players. Great idea, if you ask me! Just remove the DRM and ensure the user's rights to privacy and freedom.

It was an interesting and inspiring talk to listen to, both as a user of free software and as a writer of fiction. The issue of freedom as practice (or praxis, rather) is very central in many philosophies, but not so in the world of software nor its legislation. I shot a lot of video with my cellphone (almost 1 gigabyte) but I am not sure where I should upload it to. Reading the Youtube Terms of Use and with the file-size restriction of Flickr, I was apt to go for Wikimedia Commons but they won't allow my proprietary file format (mp4) which is too bad. Hence I went for Youtube. As I understand it, these recordings are my work qualified by "videos you have created of (...) people that are either public figures or are taken at public events" even though the speech itself is Stallman's of course:

• Stallman: The Four Fundamental Freedoms 
• Stallman: Saint IGNUsius of the Church of Emacs 

I recorded most of the QnA session as well, but it is over 600mb so I'm not going to share it. You may also check out the University's Dep of Informatics webpage Richard Stallman comes to Oslo, and NUUG who recorded the event and is supposed to release it sometime soon @ NUUG News. In addition to Stallman.org of course! I want to thank IFI at the University of Oslo for inviting Stallman, and of course the man himself for showing up. It was a great experience! Good night:)

Edit 26th of February 2009:
There has been a lot of interest in this article by many first-time visitors, mostly hardcore RMS fans eager to get their hands on the speech he held at Chateau Neuf. I have been in contact with NUUG and ping.uio.no and they have been so kind to let me know that they are waiting for Stallman's approval of license. One of the terms he had was that the audio was to be released as ogg only. I am not sure what he thought about the video. They will upload it as soon as possible, and everything is clarified.
Meanwhile, Friprog (Norwegian Open Source Competence Center) has written an entry called Eating soup with Stallman (in Norwegian), as they were invited to have soup with RMS at the Norwegian Opera. You can click that article for images, and Friprog has more pictures on their Flickr page that are licensed CC-BY-SA. Enjoy them while you wait for the tapes!

Edit 2nd of March 2009:
Some days ago I tried to upload my 30 minutes recording of the QnA session after Stallman's speech, but it has been removed from youtube because it is more than 10 minutes long. Doh.. But fret no more, RMS fans, 'cause ping.uio.no and NUUG have finally released the full recorded session in .ogg format, hi and low res:

• rms-oslo_2009-low.ogg (500MB) 
• rms-oslo_2009.ogg (2GB) 

That's it for this post I guess. If you like to check out more Stallman material see Stallman.org, or you can check out this torrent called Free Software Speeches in OGG - Stallman GNU FSF that apparently hosts more than 7 gig of Stallman audio and video courtesy of trygnulinux.com.

The Word Fuck has been the one keyword to attract the most visitors to Sigg3.net for many years, closely followed by t.A.T.u, Christina Ricci and Female of the Year related posts. So other keywords that occur much less frequently are usually more interesting. And why they were ultimately brought here is anyone's guess (though I've tracked some of them). Best ones are bold, in order of appearance.

1. 123456789@123456789.1234567890123 #1321 
2. norwegians are inbred 
3. cold war octopussies  
4. dog humping itself google maps error  
5. huey dewey louie naked #1298 
6. my chameleon is very shaky and lying on the bottom of cage #1286 
7. the art of rubbing up against strangers without them knowing 
8. traktor.bmp ?s=Traktor 
9. child swallowed flash drive #1293
10. "you make me smile when you make your body move" #1261 

Number 9 there makes me concerned that some desperate parent out there actually came to Sigg3.net for medical advice after his four year old swallowed the pendrive.. Whoops.

This information is cut and pasted from this post by SAM the administrator of TRIVUz Network, of which many are found in the Nokia N95 reference manual, for my own use and reference. If I find any more I may need, they will be added to the list.

*#06#
IMEI number (International Mobile Equipment Identity)

*#0000#
Firmware version and date, Phone Model and Operator Variant

*#92702689# (W A R 0 A N T Y)
Life timer - The amount of time your phone has spent sending and receiving calls.

*#62209526# (M A C _ W L A N)
Wireless MAC Address

*#2820# (B T A 0?)
Bluetooth MAC address

*#7370# (R E S 0 ?)
Format phone

*#7780# (R S T 0 ?)
Factory Reset

The factory reset comes in handy if you should ever find yourself a victim of the Curse-of-silence attack. See the advisory and technical details in this earlier post.

Also, I can really recommend the Nokia N95 page at Wikipedia, which includes full technical specifications, links and an overview of the different editions. I'm still at a loss as to why Nokia discarded the lens cover in later models.

Following my my brother's post a couple of hours ago showing off his stats for 2008, I realized it had been quite a while since I did a roundup of the latest website statistics and followed suit. Here's my website report for 2008 according to Google Analytics, dnScoop and Webalizer:

Site Usage 1st Jan 2008 - 31st Dec 2008:

40,844 Visits 

36,881 Absolute Unique Visitors 

53,810 Pageviews 

1.32 Pages/Visit 

79.98% Bounce Rate 

00:00:36 Avg. Time on Site 

89.90% New Visits 

12.86% of which is direct traffic to sigg3.net, 39.96% come from referring sites and 47.15% from search engines. The best improvement above, is to me the rise (or rather lack of decline) in pages shown per visit rate. I haven't done much coding on my webserver for the last one and a half year, so it isn't exactly search engine optimized (except for a few special pages not in use); meaning that people come for content not OMG WEB2.0 ajax applets. Not a time for sighs of relief, though, as PHP 4 is on its way out.

According to Webalizer's name resolution, Norwegian visitors account for a mere 2,46% of hits per month from an average of 111 countries. But Webalizer doesn't resolve some finer networks, and Network is my top "visitors" with an average of ca. 40% of hits per month. For some reason there's been a drop to around 90 countries represented the last three months. What gives?
Luckily Google has a different way of resolving traffic sources, and the data reveals that the top 10 most represented countries are:

1. United States 48.85% (19,953) 
2. Norway 8.70% (3,552) 
3. United Kingdom 6.18% (2,524) 
4. Canada 5.13% (2,095) 
5. Germany 4.81% (1,964) 
6. Australia 1,208 
7. India 641 
8. France 439 
9. Brazil 345 
10. Sweden 341 

From a total of 166 countries google could resolve. Top 5 cities are Oslo, London, New York, Brooklyn and Sydney, from a total of 8,559 known cities. But I wouldn't trust google or anyone else to rightly identify the exact locations of visitors. It's more like a general view of things. So if you're a hermit surfing through a mesh network in the outback of Australia, you're probably linked through a major city, thus marking you down as Sydney. Given Sydney is a 'major city'. I've never been there. Neither has google. Google is a search engine. It also displays this data in a pie chart, unbeknowest of the serious statistical flaws in those charts. There are no accurate pie charts, statistically speaking. Except for this one.

Age is my greatest advantage though. I wasn't born yesterday. dnScoop reports sigg3.net to be 6 years, 7 months and 1 day old today and I have a google pagerank of 4 and an estimated value of $16,510, both probably due to the domain age.

Visitor Browser Usage 1st Jan 2008 - 31st Dec 2008:

Firefox 41.75% (17,054) 

Internet Explorer 41.06% (16,772) 

Safari 7.44% (3,037) 

Opera 3.04% (1,242) 

Playstation Portable 2.39% (975) 

Mozilla 1.64% 

AvantGo 0.75% 

Playstation 3 0.67% 

Chrome 0.32% 

Netscape 0.27% 

Visitors' Operating System 1st Jan 2008 - 31st Dec 2008:

Windows 80.22% (32,765) 

Macintosh 6.12% (2,500) 

Linux 3.96% (1,619) 

iPod 2.75% 

Playstation Portable 2.39% 

I have 1288 posts (not counting non-blog pages), 1751 comments and 182 people are represented in the comments. 5 most commented articles are:

1. HOWTO open the Western Digital 500GB MyBook Premium Edition chassis (+26) 
2. Fight Night 2002: Freestyle battles (+24) 
3. Replacing the harddrive on a Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook P7010 (+23) 
4. Dysfemini? (+19) 
5. Michael Park the Pimp (+13) 

and top 10 commentators:

1. Sigg3 (+644) 
2. Michael (+221) 
3. koew (+197) 
4. kornelius (+109) 
5. IBloon (+80) 
6. MiB (+47) 
7. Bl00n (+46) 
8. Jaime (+35) 
9. ivar (+31) 
10. Mira Buva (+30) 

Top referring websites (minus sigg3.net, search engines and forums):

• salangen-nyheter.com 
• squirrelism.net 
• nanyate.com 
• scaryduck.blogspot.com 
• koew.net 
• jefflion.net 
• jim.casablog.com 
• mcgrupp.blogspot.com 
• michaelpark.net 
• mcgtruckin.blogspot.com 

Those who wasn't referred by site probably searched for: History of the word fuck, naked girls, playboy mansion, Katie Holmes, gentoo msi wind splash or mcafee uninstallation. Meaning you're probably a horny geek. But I already knew that.

Thanks for stopping by, all of you, even those of you I really don't like! And especially to those who don't like me. It took courage, blood, sweat and tears to click that link. And all of you who stole my bandwidth by hot linking pictures. I may replace them randomly with a picture of your mum. Or not. To be honest, I'm more likely to not really care. But it's nice that someone appreciates the time and effort I toss out the window by blogging instead of, say, getting some fresh air. That I do appreciate. Or else I would have to give it up. I love all your comments, even those I have to delete because they are filtered as tasteless. Thank you all, people of 2008. Go away now! Make room for the 2009 kind of guys. They're a year better:)

The Chaos Computer Club in Germany has released an advisory and a demonstration of a vulnerability for a whole range of Nokia cellphones using the Symbian 60 OS. The exploit is called Curse of Silence, because an SMS silently entering your cellphone makes it impossible to receive SMS or MMS's until the phone is restored to factory default (by entering "*#7370#"). The vulnerability works thus:

Emails can be sent via SMS by setting the messages Protocol Identifier to "Internet Electronic Mail" and formatting the message like this:

<email-address><space><message body>
Example: "123456789@123456789.1234567890123 " (including space)

If such messages contain an <email-address> with more than 32 characters, S60 2.6, 2.8, 3.0 and 3.1 devices are not able to receive other SMS or MMS messages anymore. 2.6 and 3.0 devices lock up after only one message, 2.8 and 3.1 devices after 11 messages.

See the advisory below for technical details. AFAIK there's no firmware available yet from Nokia's Device software update page that will fix the vulnerability, although the CCC did notify the manufacturers as the nice white hats they are.

See the full Curse of Silence advisory or the demonstration video (21M avi).
Tip: You can use Gnookii to tailor and send SMS from your laptop.

You've probably come across md5sums while downloading files from the web, such as this long list pertaining to Open Office 3 and wondered what they're good for.

md5sum is a quick and easy way to verify that the ISO files you download aren't corrupted somehow. For example, I have NAS at home and some people with the same box has complained that it corrupts files randomly. Whenever I copy one or more files I calculate the md5 sums on the source and destination to make sure there's no corruption. Hopefully it's just the other guys who have a bad network.

MD5 typically calculates a 32 digit hexadecimal number from whatever you input. It can be a string (text), a file or encryption. However, it is not considered a secure encryption method any longer. Think of it as a 32 piece fingerprint of your file. If any two files have the same md5 sum they're identical.

In most GNU/Linux, BSD and Mac OS operative systems you'll find that md5 is installed by default. There's two easy ways to run it in Windows: command line or graphical right-click context menu option. First things first.

CLI md5sum for windows

1. Download md5sum.exe to C:\Windows or C:\Winnt 
2. Hit Start->Run, enter CMD and hit ENTER 
3. Navigate to the file(s) you need to check and run 'md5sum <filename>' 

Graphic md5sum by digestIT

1. Go and grab a 32-bit or 64-bit copy of DigestIT 2004 depending on your OS 
2. Unpack the file and run the MSI file 
3. Right-click the file you want to check and select either a) Calculate md5 hash or b) Verify md5 hash - to compare with a previously copied md5 sum 

If you download ISO files this is an essential tool. Whenever something goes wrong the first step would be to check the md5sums of your files and compare them to the download site's. In fact, you're better off doing it before you even try to burn it. Happy hashing!