An article in Nature discusses whither or not the Voynich Manuscript is a well designed fraud using a known form of encryption. For those of you who are not familiar with the Voynich Manuscript, its Elizabetian era “book” that is in a never before seen “language”. Most fraudulent manuscripts from that era have been demonstrated so by linguists and cryptographers. So far the Voynich Manuscript has stumped experts (mostly because it contains so many similarities to actual language structure. You can find out more about the Voynich Manuscript at Philip Neal’s Voynich Manuscript page.
Month: December 2003
Commercial Linux
Commercial Interests and the Future of Linux is a very interesting article from one of IBM Linux team developers on why Linux is so popular with big blue, HP, and SGI. Well worth a read.
Sorry for the slot news last week. My family and I spent the Christmas break on a cruise and it cost like 40 cents a minute to access the internet. It’s all good though, I probably needed to unplug for a while.
Return of the King
Just a quick note. Went and saw the Lord the the Rings “Return of the King” yesterday. It is without a doubt the single greatest movie ever created. The trilogy itself will almost assuredly go down in history as the greatest movie epic ever made. The battle sequences we amazing.; the story execution was enthralling; and the climaxes were overwhelming. “Return of the King” is as close to a perfect movie as I have ever seen.
KOpenOffice
Undoubtedly the most powerful Office suite for Linux is OpenOffice.org/StarOffice (aka: OO.org.) It has most of the features of Microsoft Office and many many features that are not available in MS Office. The biggest problem with OO.org is its overall lack of UI integration with any Linux desktop. Sure it looks and acts fine but it does not fit with the rest of the desktop when using something like KDE or Gnome.
Ximian has worked to fix this by “Gnomizing” OO.org through their OpenOffice.org Bonobo Integration project (which has evidently died since being bought by Novell.) But that still left the best Linux desktop environment out in the cold. Well that has changed. The OpenOffice.org KDE Integration Project has been made an “incubator” project by OO.org (meaning that if it continues well it will be come an officially “accepted” OO.org project.)
This is good news for the KDE desktop community. The interesting part is that lots of KDE/OO.org integration has already taken place. KOffice already had plans to switch its file type to OO.org’s document type; and there is already an KPart for OO.org files in Konqueror (the founder of that project is also the founder of the OO.org KDE Integration Project.) The X11 calls have already been replaced and work will hopefully start on a KDE NWS.
Make your own Run Command
Several articles
I have posted have covered the utility and functionality of the KDE Run
Command. I have begun using one more… this one is based (slightly
modified by myself) on information presented in a KDE tutorial by Antonio Larrosa Jiménez. Check this out.
Go
into your KDE Control Center and browse to the “Web Shortcuts” section
in “Web Browsing.” There will be a list of web shortcuts that can be
used from within Konqueror and the KDE Run Command. Click the “add”
button and put the following information in the text boxes:
Search Provider Name: Qt Documentation
Search URI: /usr/share/doc/qt-devel-3.1.1/html/\{@}.html (works for Redhat 9; qt-devel-x.x.x will need to be modified for your specific Qt distribution)
URI Shortcut: qt,QT,Qt
When you click the ok and then apply you will be able to access the qt documentation via run command simply by typing qt:qstring (qstring being name of object function or tool instant entire c its like developer heaven>
Another great example of the functionality and flexibility of KDE and QT.
eDirectory via LDAP
We are beginning the process of converting some of our workstations of to Linux. Our current infrastructure seems to be ok, but we were having a little bit of trouble authenticating to Novell’s eDirectory. For anyone who is having this same problem here is a straight forward tutorial Mike found on getting it working, written by Novell itself.
My Own TiVO
I have been looking at HTPC stuff as of late because Mike’s very sweat TiVO unit. Well unknown to some is the fact that TiVO is Linux powered and any Linux enthusiast can make their own (and include whatever options they want.) Things like xmame for video game playing, DVD ripping/burning, TV-to-DVD burning, web access controls, etc.. are just a Linux box away.
Found a couple good resources for this. HTPC How-to is a great resource; as is mythTV (check out the screen-shots.. if you don’t know what Linux is capable of it will blow your mind.)
Change is good
Just thought I would pass another KDE link along. this link talks about kconf_update. Its a KDE script designed to auto-magically update KDE configurations for all users on a given machine the next time that user logs in (the first time after kconf_update has been installed.) Need to do a system wide change to all your KDE users personal settings 6 months after an install? Here ya go.
Its my life
Mike passed my along this link on Software Reality concerning the instance of role fragmentation in the IT work-place. Its basically a 15 minute rant, but damn if its not funny (funny in a “oh crap, this is my life!” way.) If you are a programmer you will appreciate this. If you are a programmer that is managed by a network administrator you will really appreciate this.
How much is it gonna hurt
Have run into a couple problems the last few days. My home Linux box got hacked via weak user password (my wife now has some “minimums” for her password=) ) and backdoored. You can check out here to see a pretty good list of *nix backdoors and rootkits. You will forgive me if I don’t go into too much detail yet…