Software – Page 8 – Walt-O-Matic

Ubuntu, Linux for Mortals

Some quick web places for a new Ubuntu users to get started quickly!

So, you’ve ordered your free copy of Ubuntu online, and you’ve installed it. Now you want to do something more than browse the web and use office. Here are some spiffy resources:

What does Ubuntu give you on the desktop, a quick one page synopisis.
Some actual printed books:
– The Official Ubuntu Book
– Beginning Ubuntu Linux: From Novice to Professional
– Ubuntu Linux for Non-Geeks: A Pain-Free, Project-Based, Get-Things-Done Guidebook
The online Ubuntu Desktop Guide, my personal favorite. Start here!

Protecting Windows XP

While I no longer support Microsoft Windows, here is list of Walt’s recommended software to help keep your machine safe.

Just having this alone software won’t protect you, it must be used properly, and frequently, with liberal doses of common sense.

Spyware Blaster
This protects a running system from getting infected, grab updated and enable them frequently.

Spybot Search and Destroy
This finds all kinds of evil stuff in your system and removes it. Update frequently, imunize, and scan.

Ad-Aware SE
This looks for a lot of stuff as well, but different kind of things – works great with Spybot.

Anti-Virus Guard Free Edition
A very good virus protector — I use it over Norton and McAfee.

Registry Mechanic
Scrubs the registry for when things don’t uninstall correctly.

Peer Guardian 2
An active firewall for catching -outgoing- traffic!

FireFox
A richly featured, free replacement for the horrible and vunerable Internet Explorer. Be sure to snag the Update Notifier, AdBlock and Adblock Filterset.G Updater extensions.

Other tips —

Turn your Windows firewall on.

[ Start / Settings / Control Pannel / Windows Fire Wall / On ]
Update your computer often, using custom (not express), so you get all the updates.

[ Start / Windows Updates ]
Make regular system restore points

[Start / Help and Support / “Undo changes to your computer with System Restore” / Create a Restore Point ]
Defragment your drives often.

[Open My Computer, Right Click C:, Properties, Tools, Defragement Now… / Defragment ]

And, in all seriousness, consider moving away from Windows — look at OS X, Ubuntu, or Fedora Core. If you can get past “Oh no, it’s not Windows! I’m scared! It’s unfamiliar! I quit!” and just try it, you’ll see it’s not as complicated as you fear, and installation and use is actually easier than Windows.

I’ve literally seen a 4 year old use OS X without instruction and use various apps.

I’ve observed a 13 year old girl who wasn’t computer savvy install Linux and immediately start web browsing, drawing in Gimp, writing in OpenOffice, talk via Instant Messaging, and playing videos …all without being taught or trained.

iTunes install fails on XP… no worries

Installed iTunes on XP, but it blew up with an iDriver application error and didn’t finish the install. Turns out this is an easy one to fix.

Went to install the latest iTunes (with Quicktime) and got a nasty looking iDriver.exe -- Application Error message.

Opps, I’ve seen that before. It’s part of the install shield tool and not iTunes. Here’s what to do about it:

1) Disable your Anti-Virus system during the duration of the install.
2) Open Task Manager and kill all the processes starting with iDriver, iTunes, and iPod, including the helpers.
3) Re-run the iTunesSetup.exe program again.

If you get an error message at this point, go to this page on Trouble installing iPod, iTunes, or QuickTime software in Windows.

Review: Picasa Web Albums

If you’re a digital photographer, then you know the hardest part of the workflow is getting your images to a webpage because of all the work that has to go on dealing with adjusting, labeling, resizing, and moving the images. Google’s Picasa Web Albums comes to the rescue, and it can handle a lot of photos well.

Take a quick gander at my web gallery. To be honest, I don’t know what you’ll find up there at any given moment. The reason? I’m having too much fun playing with it!

The album is hosted by Picasa Web Albums, and I already know what you’re thinking: you use Flicker or PhotoBucket. Well this is different.

Much different.

Goggle’s free Picasa, software will scan your system for photos. You can browse them super fast, present slide shows, crop, strighten, fix red eye, correct color, correct contrast, correct brightness, and apply a ton of effects. You can email, print, order prints, make collages, export, and blog. But you can now automatically upload as a Picasa Web Album. And it’s fast.

all

OS X users aren’t left out at all, given that Apple’s iPhoto, does the above as well, Google gives you a plug-in that makes iPhoto export to a web album. They also give you an uploader, in the event you just have a folder with pictures.

The web album does all the rest, however — thumbnail browsing, photo selections, order organizing, downloading, publishing, printing, and notifications. Yes, you even get RSS feeds, so people subscribing to your photo album will know when you’ve updated without you having to send an email.

It’s interactive. It’s awesome.

This is a great tool for any digital photographer who wants to go from camera shoot to web pages in a very short period of time.

Walt gives Google Picasa Web Albums a thumbs up!

Do a Project Health Assessment

Try this simply one-page quiz to score your current software project. Is it rockin’ or is it in a death spiral so bad you’ll never pull out?

A while back Software Development magazine had a fun little article about a number of things that could go wrong with a project. At the time, I was in a project that was in a horrific death spiral, so for fun I made up a small quiz to rate a project. It took a smidge bit of tuning the scoring, but it works adaquately enough to get the point across.

It works surprisingly well. I suggest trying it three times. Once for your current project, then once for the best project you can remember working on, and once for the worst project you can ever remember. The last two will help validate to you that the your current project evaluation is actually quite accurate. Then pass it out to your co-workers, and see if you all have the same unspoken assessment.

1 page PDF of about 60k

I’d love feedback to see what your scores were and how accurate you felt it was, along with any suggestions to improve the quiz.

Embrace and Disgrace

Microsoft has done something new: Embrace and Disgrace

You’ve heard a lot about Microsoft’s embrace and extend technique to screw up a standard. Well this time they’re doing embrace and disgrace by providing a shoddy implementation of the open document format. What bugs me is that the implementation is already written, and free; they had to work to get it wrong. And my bet is that they’re doing this so people using Office think the problem is with the format, discrediting all the work the open source community did.

Go read this: http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS8691455074.html

And then this:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20060720063746488

Walt’s Desktop: Alertbear

From Walt’s Desktop, he shares that he uses Alertbear to stay on top of a swamp of RSS feeds, giving the application five stars.

Today’s nifty desktop utility spotlights on Alertbear, a RSS news reader for Microsoft Windows.

Most RSS news readers give you a pile of feeds, and then within that a pile of stories, and then when you select those you get content. The interface assumes you’re giving the application full attention, and that you have time to read everything.

Alertbear works differently; it knows that news is a firehose of content with a shelf life. More importantly, it realizes you’re going to be in the middle of something, and you may, or may not, want to stop what you’re doing.

When a pile of news articles are ready, they pop up in the bottom right corner of the screen. If you ignore them, they go away in a second or two. If you move the mouse over them, you can scroll through the list, clicking on stories that are interesting. If you’re using FireFox, these will appear as new tabs in your browser. When you right click, the list goes away and you can resume work, coming back to your browser when you’re ready, having all the choice material at your disposal.

I find Alertbear a great way to stay on top of breaking news and technology announcements without having to break my workflow or attention span.

WALT GIVES ALERTBEAR FIVE STARS.

Opal, I’ve Missed the Point

There’s a lot of buzz about Opal, a new outlining tool for the Mac, however, has everyone forgotten about OmniGroup’s OmniOutliner, which is free, and has a Pro version as well with tons more features. What am I missing here?

Today there seems to be a lot of discussion activity on the Internet about Opal, the more modern version of Acta, an outlining tool for the Mac.

Am I not getting something, because OmniOutliner, which is free, seems to do one amazing, feature-rich, job of handling outlines. Even better, there’s an inexpensive Pro version, with free trial, that does even more.

As much as I love software, is this not reinventing the wheel forno reason?

Linux Install Problems on a PowerSpec MCE510

FC5 and FC4 have serious problems booting on a MicroCenter PowerSpec MCE510. One gets an “not syncing” error with atiixp and ide-ios.

Purchased a MicroCenter PowerSpec MCE510 PC with an Intel Pentium D 805 2.66Ghz Processor w/ 1024KB x2 Full Speed L2 Cache.

The intent was to install the latest stable Fedora Core 5, however after probing the USB ports and heading to check out the IDE drives, the screen dumps a number of random characters and the kernel panics.

So, hard rebooting and backing off to Fedora Core 4, I get to the same point in the installation and discover this error message, which is unobscured:

Kernel panic – not syncing: drivers/ide/pci/atiixp.c:129: spin_lock(drivers/ide/ide.c:c03de668) already locked by drivers/ide/ide-iops.c/12. (Not tainted)

So, I back off and try Slackware 10, this seems to work.

Supposedly this problem existed in FC3, but was fixed. Dave Jones, however, points out this fix didn’t seem to make it up stream. It is curious to note that one comment says that this problem only happens when there is a DVD in the drive, not a CD. Sure enough, I have a DVD. (I have not tested this theory yet.)

I tried FC6-test, and that also had problems.

For now, I need to get work done, and will be using Slackware… however, I hope to revisit in the near future and see if I can find a work around.

UPDATE 08-Aug-2006: Found someone who claims they got a fix that worked — reburn the CD as slow as possible AND start the install with linux ide=nodma and someone else suggests adding noprobe as well. And, to date, only this comment of this thread seems to explain why this error happens. It seems to have been fixed in later kernels, but that poses a serious problem if you’re trying to install. In the voodoo category, someone says if you create an error in the boot prompt (like make it look for an image that doesn’t exist; e.g. type mediacheck), this somehow releases whatever lock it had, and then booting with linux mediacheck works; not many success reports on that solution. From what I can tell there are two threads: those who have FC installed and had a failure booting with an upgrades kernel (so they revert back and twiddle the source), and those who are trying to install Fedora in the first place.

Yum: Cannot find a valid baseurl (solved)

The yum software package, used for upgrading software on Linux, can sometimes report a mysterious “Cannot find a valid baseurl for repo: extras” error message. Common wisdom says to twiddle config files or reinstall yum. Don’t. Here’s the solution…

Ran into a problem using Fedora Core 4 that went like this:

I was signed on doing a yum upgrade, and during the download my connection dropped. When I got back on line and tried to do it again, I kept getting an error that the baseurl could not be found.

$ sudo yum upgrade Setting up Upgrade Process Setting up repositories Cannot find a valid baseurl for repo: extras Error: Cannot find a valid baseurl for repo: extras

No amount of searching seemed to resolve my problem or tell me what to do next, though a handful of people had experienced the same problem. The common recommendation was to go to the /etc directory and twiddle the yum configuration files (or even reinstall yum). Hint: don’t.

What you’re seeing is actually actually a DNS failure. Bind is having problem resolving host names. A little bit of poking around with dig, and sure enough, it was clear that something wasn’t right.

In fact, while trying to ssh to the system in the first place, I recall it took a while for the login prompt to appear, yet another sign that reverse name lookups weren’t happening right.

The solution was to make sure that the DNS servers listed in /etc/resolv.conf were indeed serving correctly, and bouncing the named process with the /sbin/service named restart command as root.

Yum still didn’t work right, but that was because it had a dirty cache. So, I cleaned up everthing.

$ sudo yum clean all Cleaning up Everything 25 headers removed 24 packages removed 12 metadata files removed 0 cache files removed 4 cache files removed

Then I tried the yum upgrade again, and with the cache cleared out, and the bind name service resolving DNS correctly, it worked like a champ. Yum was fixed, and I didn’t have to change a single configuration file for it.