Liquid rescale feature now available as a GIMP plugin

One month back I had written about a content aware image rescaling technology. And I hoped that this technology will be incorporated in Gimp in the future. Well we didn't have to wait that long.

A liquid rescale GIMP plugin has already been released and you can download the source as well as binaries for a variety of Linux distributions and for Windows at the following location. The download link of the Windows version of the GIMP plugin does not seem to work so I found an alternate location here.

You can download and install this plugin and take it for a run.

Once you install the plugin, you can access it in GIMP by navigating to layer -> liquid rescale.

Fig: Liquid rescale plugin dialog box in GIMP

Possible uses of the liquid rescale plugin

• Rescaling a 1600 x 1200 px wallpaper image to a smaller diamension (Eg: 800 x 600) without losing its clarity.
• Reducing the size of an image without losing any important parts.
  

Social bookmarking explained in plain English

Social bookmarking has literally changed the way people aggregate and bookmark content. Gone are the days when you relied exclusively on bookmarking interesting sites you visit in your web browser's bookmarks menu. Now a days, the trend is to maintain all your bookmarks at a central location online and then share them with like minded people. Thus you have a process where by you never lose track of the interesting sites at the same time get to explore new sites which cater to your tastes but which has eluded your eyes.

One of the premier social bookmarking sites is del.icio.us which is a Yahoo venture. Here you can create an account and then start bookmarking your sites. What is more you can also tag your sites and enter short descriptions about it thus making it much more easier to manage.

Well if you didn't understand the concept behind del.icio.us by reading my short explanation, then I don't really blame you. A better bet would be to watch this Youtube video.

A word about the creators of this video

This video is shot by two enterprising individuals (couples actually) by name Sachi LeFever and Lee LeFever. They run a company called Common Craft and their job is to create educational (or promotional) videos such as the one shown above explaining various concepts related to technology and as you can see, they have done a pretty good job of it.

What I really find unique about the video is the way it is shot, where they explain things using pictures printed on paper with a little bit of animation thrown in and of course using neutral accent English thus bringing it down to the level of a child's understanding. You can also find many other videos on their site. And if you have some spare change, you might be interested in hiring them to do a similar video of your site too ;-).

Firefox reaches 400 million downloads

It is nice to see one of my favorite web browser logging 100s of millions of downloads. When I think about it, I do not even remember the last time I used Internet Explorer. Then again it has been quite a while since I have logged in to Windows too in my dual booting machine.

So a couple of weeks back, Firefox passed the corner stone of being downloaded a whooping 400 million times as tracked by the Spread Firefox website. While the number might be challenged by critics because they don't say if the data is for unique downloads or if it counts all repeat downloads too (Most probably the latter is true). For example, I myself have downloaded Firefox a total of 7 times in the past 6 months.

Fig:Firefox download trends since the past couple of years

I feel happy that this Open Source web browser is gaining more and more patrons as days go by. But it has a long way to go if it needs to challenge the might of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. This is because even now, IE is the dominant web browser for the simple reason that it is installed by default on all Windows machines and it is used by a majority of users. While Firefox's percentage is gradually increasing, it still lags behind IE.

As an example, the graph below highlights the browser usage trends of visitors to this blog. I was really surprised that only just over 25 percent of the visitors to this blog use Firefox as their web browser. And a dominant 66 percent of visitors still use IE.

Fig: Web browser used by visitors to this blog.

But I may add that the percentage of Firefox users is gradually increasing as days go by. And one can definitely dream of a day when Firefox will grab the majority user share of the Web browser. Kudos to the Firefox team for giving us this wonderful web browser.

High end Lenovo and Dell laptops for sale at 40% discount

Would you like to acquire a sufficiently high end brand new laptop sporting upto 1 GB memory (RAM), an Intel dual core processor, 120 GB hard disk et al manufactured by a company like Dell or Lenovo for just around 60 % of its street price ? Well you could, provided you are living in the Indian state of TamilNadu and more importantly you are a bona fide student enrolled in a school or college in TamilNadu.

The scheme is the brain child of Electronics Corporation of TamilNadu Limited (ELCOT). ELCOT is a wholly owned Government of TamilNadu Undertaking, registered under the Indian Companies Act(1956). It is the nodal agency for Information and Communication Technology projects for the Government of TamilNadu.

Now this news coming from TamilNadu, I am not the least surprised. TamilNadu government (doesn't matter which political party is ruling) are famous for rolling out people friendly schemes. To list a couple of them which come to my mind, there is

• The Free bicycle scheme for all students studying in 12th standard
• Distributing 20 KG rice per month for just Indian Rupees 2/KG which in US dollars is equivalent to 5 cents per KG of rice.
• Distributing Free Colour television sets [Link]
• And now high end branded laptops at a hefty discount. Wow ... make that double Wow.
  

So people in TamilNadu are getting a fair deal from their government as far as the number of free schemes are considered. Perhaps the the respective state governments in the rest of India should take a leaf from the government of TamilNadu and roll out such people friendly schemes. For example, we could have a scheme of providing $25 computer desktops free of cost for all school students on the lines of the $100 laptop project (er... is it still called the $100 laptop?). But I digress here.

Coming back to our story, ELCOT purchases these laptops at their market price of $1100 each (Indian Rupees 44000) and then is selling it at a massively subsidized discount rate of less than $800 (Indian Rupees 29000 to 32000). Additionally you also get $140 worth extras like a 3 year international customer carry in warranty, an adapter and a carry case. The discounted laptops are available only to the students living in TamilNadu and enrolled in a government recognized school or college there.

Guess what the laptops will be running ? Full marks to you if you guessed it right. It will be running what else but Linux of course. The laptops will be loaded with OpenSuSE Linux and will be fully Linux compliant with all the Linux device drivers made available at their website. Do check out the specifications of the laptops on offer. And here is a list of the software pre-installed on each laptop.I bet you will surely be tempted to accept domicile in TamilNadu and then enroll your children in a school or college there just to lay your hands on the laptops at such a bargain price.

GNOME 2.20 released - some new features

GNOME is a popular, multi-platform desktop environment which focuses on ease of use, stability, and first class internationalization and accessibility support. GNOME rolls out a new version of its ever popular Desktop every six months. And in keeping with its commitment, it has yet again made available the newest release which is GNOME ver 2.20.

This begs the question as to what is new in GNOME 2.20. There are a number of new features. But most of them are subtle in nature and are not conspicuous to the end user. Here is a concise list of the new features in GNOME 2.20.

Evolution enhancements

• Gives an attachment reminder to the user if he tries to send a mail without any attachments but certain words in his mail indicate that he has attached a file to the mail.
• Backup all the mails and profiles in the Evolution client with the click of a button.
• A new mail notification icon and many other tiny miscellaneous enhancements.
  

Epiphany Web browser enhancements - More intuitive inline completion in the address bar

Image viewer enhancements

• Eye of Gnome (EOG) has a menu which allows you to open an image using another software program such as Gimp, Fspot, a web browser or G-thumb while viewing the image using eog. And if the image is modified, the modifications are updated in the eog in real time.
• The new image properties dialog provides easy access to basic information and metadata for your images, and now includes XMP (Extensible Metadata Platform) data that your camera or software might store in your image files, along with the existing EXIF data. This might include location, copyright information, license, and tags.
  

Evince PDF viewer

Supports interactive PDF forms. That is forms which allow you to enter data and then which can be send to print. Evince's page rendering features are also noticeably faster.

Great media player enhancement

Totem is the default media player in GNOME. In the new release, totem will search for and install all the required media codecs - even the non-free ones if it finds that the media file requires additional codecs. This is a very cool feature and will do away with all the manual installations required to make Linux more multimedia friendly.

Fig: Totem now offers to install the proprietary codecs

Notes synchronization

Tomboy now supports saving and retrieving notes stored in a remote location via its WebDav framework or SSH. This means that it is now possible to synchronize all your notes say between your home and office machines.

Search integrated in the File chooser dialog

This redesigned dialog now allows you to search for files using Desktop search systems such as Beagle or tracker. This makes it much more easier to open your files.

Nautilus enhancements

• A pie graph incorporated into the Nautilus file properties window makes it much more intuitive.
• File manager can now read EXIF data from digital cameras and will automatically orient and display the thumbnails of images.
  

A new control panel

GNOME 2.20 sports a new appearance control panel which allows you to change various properties such as themes, background images, fonts and such from a single interface. Till now each of these options had their own individual dialogs but not anymore.

Other enhancements
Improved GNOME keyring system providing you with a few new conveniences. I have not used the GNOME keyring yet so can't comment on it.

GNOME help browser called Yelp now sports a much more pleasing style and layout.

Apart from all this there are a number of other minor enhancements all round.

In the system administration side, GNOME offers an improved Lock down and user profile editor as well as incorporating better auditing support and roll based access control in Gnome display manager (GDM).

Having said that, the number one feature which excites me as an end user is the totem's built-in feature of pulling in and installing all the required codecs to play any media file. I guess with this, one can finally say goodbye to poor out of the box support for video and audio files in Linux.

You can read the official news at the GNOME website and also try out a live-cd of Foresight Linux sporting GNOME 2.20.

Introducing a new installation wiki in the neighbourhood

If you ask me to start naming some content management system, I can start with Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal and so on and then will not know when to stop. Seriously, there are innumerable content management or blogging systems around. Someone told me that he started counting the blogging tools available in order to get an idea in numbers and he was still counting when he reached the number 200.

Now add to this backend programs such as databases and web servers which play a pivotal role in the working of CMSes and we have a whole lot of software on our hands. Keeping this huge mountain of software in mind, Packt Book publishers who are on the forefront in publishing books related to CMSes (they publish books related to other subjects too) has rolled out a new Wiki called InstallationWiki.org which caters to explaining how to install most of these software on your machine either locally or remotely. It has divided the tutorials into 8 broad categories namely "Open Source", "Content management systems", "Web development", Databases, Java, PHP, "Microsoft and .NET" and finally "Networking and telephony".

Already there are a growing number of tutorials and howtos mostly related to CMSes on this site. But considering that this is a Wiki, which anyone can edit, this project shows a lot of promise. Also one should keep in mind that the tutorials listed on the Wiki bear the seal of approval of Packt Books thus one can expect to find quality articles on this site. Do check out the article on PHPMyAdmin for instance to know what I mean... In the past, I have reviewed a couple of Packt books such as the one on Oscommerce ,IPCOP, Wordpress, Drupal and so on and I have found each of them to contain very useful information.

Gimp UI brainstorm - Ideas to help make Gimp better

Gimp is one of the finest graphics suites which is released under a GNU license. I dare say, feature wise, Gimp rivals even Adobe's Photoshop in creating and manipulating images targeted for the web. Before you jump the gun, I did say images for the web.

One of Gimp's weakness is its poor support for CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black) color profiles which is the dominant profiles used in the printing industry (read offset printing) . So if you are creating images to be published on a glossy magazine or a flier, then you will do better to stick to Photoshop for now. Again another off repeated complaint that most first time users of Gimp have is its seemingly kludgey interface.

Personally, I have no problem with it as I have grown comfortable with the current Gimp GUI but I guess it could be further polished and made more efficient. So there has been a move by the GIMP UI redesign team to highlight the possible ways in which the Gimp UI could be spruced up and made more user efficient. And the result is the Gimp GUI brainstorm blog.

This blog highlights mock ups of GIMP UI interface which is contributed by the general public. If you have an interesting idea, then you can create a mock up and submit it to the blog and it will be published for all to see.

The rules for submission are as follows :

• Explain your idea in an image or two. Only these images will be published, so make sure any needed explanation is inside them. Images must be in jpg, gif, bmp or png format, maximum 8MB each.
• Your images should show your idea in a clear way, but they don’t have to be glossy and polished. Plain vector drawings or even scanned pencil sketches should also work.
• Send your image to gimp [dot] brainstorm [at] gmail [dot] com , with the word ‘GIMP’ in the subject line of your email.
  

Apart from the blog, the GIMP developers have been busy and have published a set of User Scenarios which will be used in the GIMP redesign project.

Here are a sample of the mock ups which have been submitted by Gimp lovers.

Fig: Red Eye tool - Sorry! Gimp already has one. You can find it in the menu.

Fig: I like this idea...

Fig: Cool eyecandy :-)

Questions you have to answer to get hired at Google

I know, who wouldn't like to be hired by Google ? They have set a new standard in best employee retention practices by making it a fun place to work. When I think of Google, the first thing which come to my mind - apart from its obvious leadership in online search - are the free gourmet meals they provide to each of their employees. I have come across rumors of Yahoo employees sneaking into the Google cafeteria next door just so that they could sample the rich variety of food on the menu.

Now that you are visibly drooling, you must be wondering what does it takes to get hired by Google right ? Well the secret of getting hired at Google is to have a knack of thinking out of the box. Not many people can; I certainly can't - a reason I am still blogging ;-).

And Google weeds out the chaff from the wheat (so to speak) by putting the candidates through their special set of interview questions.

I came across Tihomir Nakov's list of 17 questions put to his friend when he was called for an interview at Google. Some of the gems from that set I like are as follows :

• How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?
• Every man in a village of 100 married couples has cheated on his wife. Every wife in the village instantly knows when a man other than her husband has cheated, but does not know when her own husband has. The village has a law that does not allow for adultery. Any wife who can prove that her husband is unfaithful must kill him that very day. The women of the village would never disobey this law. One day, the queen of the village visits and announces that at least one husband has been unfaithful. What happens?
• Imagine you have a closet full of shirts. It’s very hard to find a shirt. So what can you do to organize your shirts for easy retrieval?
• How many piano tuners are there in the entire world?
  

The thing is, many questions do not have just one correct answer; heck some may not even have a correct answer at all, rather I guess the response of the candidate to the questions gives Google an idea about the usefulness of the candidate for the job.

Read the full list of Google interview questions collected by Tihomir Nakov.

[Via. India Uncut]

Sexy Ubuntu wallpapers. Um... NSFW

These are beautiful eye catching Ubuntu wallpapers. Some of the best I have seen in quite a while. No doubt about it. And they are "not safe for work" only if viewing a bit of skin is frowned upon at your work place or if you happen to work at a convent ;-).Then again, no one should accuse me saying I didn't warn them before hand and so the NSFW label. All the wallpapers can be downloaded from gnome-look.org.

Links you may like

Do you know the relation between Sex and Linux?

Click on an image to download the wallpaper.

Cracking a 13 digit alphanumeric password in 160 seconds

The story might seem right out of science fiction. But it is true, with the rapid steep increase in computing power, it is now possible to crack a password from its encrypted state much more quickly with the aid of right kind of tools.

Jeff Attwood writes to indicate that he was able to crack a 13 digit alphanumeric password - the password in question is "Fgpyyih804423" - in just 160 seconds. For the cracking, he made use of an open source tool called Ophcrack - which is a Windows password cracker based on Rainbow tables.

A Rainbow table is a lookup table offering a time-memory tradeoff used in recovering the plain text password from a password hash generated by a hash function. For example in Linux you can store your password encrypted using MD5 or the more powerful SHA1 and SHA256. I may add that while installing Debian, Mandriva or Open SuSE, the installer asks whether you want to encrypt your password in MD5 or the more powerful SHA encryption. Choose SHA because MD5 can be easily broken....

To see your passwords in hash form in Linux, just log in as 'root' and view the /etc/shadow file.

So what this open source tool called Ophcrack does is it uses the rainbow tables to crack the passwords (thankfully only Windows passwords) in real time. They have released a LiveCD based on SlaX Linux distribution which can be used to automate the process to a large extent. The ophcrack developers claim the liveCD cracks passwords automatically, no installation necessary, no admin password necessary (as long as you can boot from CD)- so there.

While Jeff does make it sound scary, with the right precautions, Rainbow password cracking can be made useless. Thomas Ptacek a security expert explains some of the secure password schemes and the precautions you can take to secure your machine from a remote attack based on Rainbow tables.

Determine the virtual terminal you are using in GNU/Linux

Have you ever had to determine the virtual terminal that an X session is running on? Perhaps you may want this information for a program you have created. It is possible using the fgconsole command.

# fgconsole
7

Just running fgconsole will print the number of the active virtual terminal. For the uninitiated, by default, you have 7 virtual terminals on your Linux machine. You can switch between them using the Ctrl+Alt+<Fn> key sequence.

Usually, your Linux machine will be using any virtual terminal which is available for displaying X. But if the following two parameters are enabled in your /etc/gdm/gdm.conf file, then it will always use the same terminal.

#FILE /etc/gdm/gdm.conf
FirstVT=7
VTAllocation=true

You may also do the following to see which virtual terminal your X session is using :

$ grep VT /var/log/Xorg.0.log
(++) Using VT number 7

Richard.M.Stallman calls for vigilance to safeguard ones Freedom

Richard M Stallman the father of GNU in a whole hearted interview with Peter Moon of ComputerWorld publication exhorts all Freedom loving community members to be aware of and vigilant about the pitfalls of turning a blind eye towards the less obvious details such as the version of GPL license used in various open source software.

Here are some of the quotes from the very interesting interview...

On difference between Free software and Open source...

In terms of ideas, Free software and Open source are as different as could be. Free software is a political movement; open source is a development model.

On where and why he opposes Linus Torvalds ....

The fact that Torvalds says "open source" instead of "free software" shows where he is coming from. I wrote the GNU GPL to defend freedom for all users of all versions of a program. I developed version 3 to do that job better and protect against new threats.

Torvalds says he rejects this goal; that's probably why he doesn't appreciate GPL version 3. I respect his right to express his views, even though I think they are foolish. However, if you don't want to lose your freedom, you had better not follow him.

Will free software community win the war against Microsoft ?

Nobody knows who will win this fight, because the outcome depends on you and the readers. Will you fight for freedom? Will you reject Windows and MacOS and other non-free software, and switch to GNU/Linux? Or will you be too lazy to resist?

On the deal between Microsoft and Novell ...

Microsoft's aim, in the deal with Novell, was to make people scared to run GNU/Linux without paying Microsoft for permission. That is why we designed GPLv3 to make it backfire.

Read the full interview here.

OpenBSD now features better Flash support

Viewing Flash content has always been a bone of contention for the BSDs (OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD et al). Mainly because Adobe has yet to release a native version of Flash player for the BSDs. And at present people using BSD are using a Linux compatiblity module to run a Linux version of Flash player - that too version 7.0.

But things are changing for the better - albeit at a glacial pace. Now there are a number of ways of viewing Flash files in OpenBSD (Which should also be applicable to other BSD's too).

1. Opera Flash player plugin - You can install Opera web browser via the OpenBSD ports. And using Opera web browser is one of the easiest way to view Flash content in OpenBSD.
2. net/yt - This is a script written by Pedro Martelletto which allows downloading and saving of flash videos from a variety of websites such as Youtube and the likes. The script not only downloads the Flash movies but also converts them to a more open format to be viewed on video players like Mplayer and Xine. You can download this script from the OpenBSD ports.
3. Gnash - Gnash is a GNU implementation of a Flash Player which is being actively developed in answer to a demand for a purely Free (as in Freedom) GPLed Flash player. This player has been said to show positive results such as for instance, now being able to play Youtube videos. A native version of Gnash can be installed in OpenBSD (Oh the joys of Free software).
4. There are a number of online services which allow you to convert Flash based videos to other formats, which can then be downloaded to your computer.
   

[Courtesy: OpenBSD Journal]

So as you can see, there are different ways of viewing Flash content on the BSD's more specifically on OpenBSD. I believe one of the biggest handicaps of the BSD's has been the lack of native support for viewing popular file formats such as Flash on them. But that is fast changing for the better.

Pick and choose packages to create your own custom Linux distribution

A long time back, I had talked about precisely such a service where you can pick and choose packages to create your own custom Linux distribution. Well here is a similar but much more intuitive project.

The custom NimbleX LiveCD project is an online service made available by Bera Florin & Radulescu Bogdan, which creates a made-to-order Linux distribution with just the packages you need and facilitates the resulting ISO image for download.

Fig: Wizard to create the custom Linux ISO.

Fig: Choose the wallpaper from the collection.

Fig: The ISO being generated.

When you visit the website, you are prompted to start customizing Linux. There are three modes of customization which you can choose from them being :

1. Minimal - Usually minimal customization is not the reason you came here but if you want to get a standard no frills distribution choose this option.
2. Custom - Choose this option if you have been using Linux before and you are familiar with some of the software packages.
3. Recommended - This mode is very similar to the custom option but has the advantages that it automatically points you to some of the most useful packages for day to day activities.
   

While the website recommends you to select the "Recommended mode", it is a good idea to choose the "Custom mode" instead if you are sure which packages you need. Next it prompts you to select the categories that interest you. All the packages have been separated into a total of 9 categories such as Office, Games, Network, Graphics and so on. And the package selection is quite intuitive too. For example, if you want to install the GCC compilers, then you can select the Compiler pack from the list of packages and it will add all the packages related to the compilers to the resulting ISO image of the Linux distribution.

Once all the packages have been selected, the website allows you to fine tune the distribution in a variety of ways such as choosing a custom wallpaper (You can even upload your own personal wallpaper), Set the volume and KDE sounds, set the root password and create a user account and set your language. Finally just before it starts putting together your custom ISO, it lists your selection of packages and you can verify all your selection is included and then the site creates your custom Linux distribution on the fly and provides you a link to the ISO image for download.

Advantages of using this service

• Pick and choose only those programs which you actually need.
• The resulting Linux distribution ISO is lean and once installed will occupy less space on the hard disk.
• A good selection of packages including Sun Java 6.0 and Proprietary Nvidia drivers
  

Drawbacks of this service

• You cannot choose packages not listed in the wizard. For example, if you want to include GNUCash then you are at a loss.
• There is a slight security problem because there is no way to verify the genuineness of the packages selected.
• The resulting ISO image is made available only for 6 hours after which it is deleted. So it doesn't cater to those with a dial-up connection.
  

All things considered, this is a very good project which has a great potential. I have often wondered why the big Linux distribution makers such as Debian, Red Hat, SuSE and the likes do not provide such a service. For one, it considerably reduces the bandwidth usage even though it might drastically increase the usage of disk space on the server. Secondly the end users get to create a custom ISO with only those packages they need.

Do check out this very interesting project developed by Bera Florin and Radulescu Bogdan.

Portable Apps - Carry all your favorite Open Source applications where ever you go

Recently while visiting a friends house, I ran into a situation where I had to use his computer. His computer is a rather old one which he has seldom maintained properly. He still has Windows 98 loaded on it. The very same Windows OS which came pre-installed on his computer when he bought it a couple of years back. And most applications including the web browser (IE) have not been updated. In fact the web browser he has on it is IE 4.0. And as you will know, IE 4.0 does not have good CSS support and so render most websites poorly. And on top of all that, he is so tech phobic that he was not inclined to allow any other software on his machine.

That was when I felt the need for a solution where in I could use a standalone version of my favorite applications. And after some googling, I came across this unique website called portableapps.com which has a collection of many Open Source and GPLed software which I use on a daily basis.

The idea is that you can use these applications without installing on the hard disk. For instance, faced with a situation such as mine, you can easily carry all the applications on a USB stick and then just plug in the USB stick and click on the necessary application to start using it. It is as simple as that.

The website provides the portable applications bundled as a suite in two different formats which is :

• Standard format 89.5 MB and
• Lite format 30.4 MB size
  

At present, there are over 50 different open source applications including the latest version of Firefox (2.0). And all the applications are guaranteed to work in Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Vista and Wine. Some applications are also known to work in Windows 95 too.

Advantages of using portable apps
You can carry the following things with you on a USB stick ...

• Your web browser with all your favorite bookmarks
• Your calendar with all your appointments
• Email client with all your contacts and settings
• Instant messenger and your buddy list
• The whole office suite (OpenOffice.org) along with your documents and presentations
• An anti-virus program and other computer utilities
• All your important passwords and account information securely.
  

You can also put portable apps to use in diverse ways such as ...

• Have your favorite websites handy to recommend to a friend or colleague
• Have your presentation AND the required software ready to go for that big meeting
• Have your password with you if you want to bank online while traveling
• Have utilities handy when visiting family or friends that are having PC problems
  

If you are always on the move and are forced to use computers not your own, then this handy suite of open source applications will be a real convenience to you especially if you are wedded to using open source applications to get your job done.

KDE 4.0 beta 2 released

KDE 4.0 is going to be a heck of a Desktop when it is finally released some time in December this year. For the time being we can satisfy our curiosity by taking the beta version of KDE 4.0 for a test drive.

That is right, KDE 4.0 beta 2 has been released. And what is important about this release is that it marks the beginning of the feature freeze. While KDE 4.0 has entered the bug fixing mode now and major ideas and changes will be held off until 4.1, some KDE components, such as Plasma, are exempt from this freeze and will still see significant improvements.

Fig: KDE 4.0 beta 2 - nicely shaping up

So if current beta 2 release of KDE fail to excite your senses, there is a good chance that you will change your mind and fall head over heels in love with the brand new KDE 4.0. Of course, a large percentage of the so called major changes in KDE 4.0 is happening under the hood so to speak which means there is great potential to see a desktop which is slick, user friendly and pleasing to the eyes thus giving a boost to ones productivity.

You can read the full official press release to know the finer details of the features in KDE 4.0.

Is it possible to hack into a gmail address ? - Really scary

Who doesn't have a gmail id now a days ? In my honest opinion, I am yet to discover a more user friendly web mail host. Gmail is non-intrusive, provides all the advanced and usable features such as POP3, mail search and much more.

But recently at a Black Hat security convention, Robert Graham, the CEO of errata security, surprised attendees by hijacking a Gmail session on camera and reading the victim’s email. He went even further by demonstrating the attack by taking over another journalist’s Gmail account and then sending emails from that account. Really scary.

So how do you protect yourself from somebody sniffing your email while it is in transit and then hacking into your gmail account ? There is one way to make it much harder for sniffing your mails. That is by sending and receiving mails using Gmail's SSL feature. SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer and is used to provide secure data transfer across the web, for instance ecommerce sites use SSL to transmit your credit card details. Google provides the SSL feature for gmail and all it takes to enable SSL in Gmail is by typing the address https://mail.google.com instead of http://mail.google.com. Make note of the 's' in 'https'. What this does is instead of encrypting only the username and password, Gmail encrypts the whole mail session and this makes it possible to transfer your mails in a secure manner.

So the next time you decide to log on to your gmail account, use https instead of http and you will be fairly safe from getting your mail sniffed in transit.

A problem enabling the hardware acceleration of an NVIDIA card on a Sun Ultra 20 M2 led me to Solaris Express Developer Edition

I want to point out a problem which I experienced on a Sun workstation: it's not a blocking problem, but no evidence is given to the user, just an error and some warnings in Xorg log files.

As soon as my new Sun Ultra 20 M2 was delivered to me, I started playing with it and soon discovered that 3D hardware acceleration was not enabled. I bought from Sun an addition NVIDIA graphic adapter for this machine, and even if I expected that this feature was enabled by default, I picked up my favorite editor to apply some modification to xorg.conf. I had no luck. Even if the workstation is shipped with Solaris 10 (11/06) preinstalled and even if the latest Tools and driver CD had been applied (and re-applied), an unknown problem prevented 3D hardware acceleration to be enabled.

The next thing I did was looking for errors in Xorg log and a quick

$ cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep ^\(EE\)

pointed the finger at libGL. Some library links was indeed screwed up and after some quick experiment I came out updating the following soft links:

/usr/X11/lib/amd64/libGL.so -> ../NVIDIA/amd64/libGL.so
/usr/X11/lib/amd64/libGL.so.1 -> ../NVIDIA/amd64/libGL.so.1
/usr/X11/lib/libGL.so -> NVIDIA/libGL.so
/usr/X11/lib/libGL.so.1 -> NVIDIA/libGL.so.1
/usr/X11/lib/mesa/amd64/libGL.so -> libGL.so.1*
/usr/X11/lib/mesa/amd64/libGL.so.1*
/usr/X11/lib/mesa/libGL.so -> libGL.so.1*
/usr/X11/lib/mesa/libGL.so.1*
/usr/X11/lib/NVIDIA/amd64/libGL.so -> libGL.so.1
/usr/X11/lib/NVIDIA/amd64/libGL.so.1
/usr/X11/lib/NVIDIA/libGL.so -> libGL.so.1
/usr/X11/lib/NVIDIA/libGL.so.1
/usr/X11/lib/modules/extensions/libglx.so -> NVIDIA/libglx.so
/usr/X11/lib/modules/extensions/mesa/libglx.so*
/usr/X11/lib/modules/extensions/NVIDIA/libglx.so -> libglx.so.1
/usr/X11/lib/modules/extensions/NVIDIA/libglx.so.1

This problem was clearly not Xorg's: when the correct links were in place, it detected everything fine, even with no xorg.conf at all, which is what I expect at least in this workstation, where every piece of the hardware is supported by the operating system.

After a short time I had another problem: the pdf reader shipped with Solaris 10 had trouble with some fonts. Even Sun documentation was unreadable and, since another Solaris installation was affected by the same problem, I decided to give my first try to Solaris Express Developer Edition. At the first reboot after installation I gladly discovered that all the hardware was functioning properly. No Tools and drivers CD was even required! Furthermore, since I use this machine as a Java development platform, I could immediately enjoy Netbeans 5.5, Sun Java System Application Server 9 and Sun Studio 12.

Nmap explained from an Ethical Hacker's View

Nmap (Network MAPper) is a network scanner written by Gordon Lyon. It is a free and open source tool and is available at insecure.org with versions for Windows and Linux and is ubiquitous in its use.

Nmap can be (and is) used to for instance, scan for open ports on a remote server, to detect the OS run on the server, what all services are running on the remote server and so on.

Many of us might have run the TCP SYN scan which require root privileges and the TCP connect scan which can be run even as an ordinary user. But there is much more to the usage of nmap tool.

Kirby Tucker at ethical hacker has written a very informative article which provides inside knowledge about the usage of nmap as well as what each command accomplishes.

In part I of this tutorial, he explains no less than 13 different scans you can run using the nmap tool. And at the end he also demonstrates how you can glean information by running nmap in conjunction with wireshark (an open source network protocol analyzer). A really interesting read for all aspiring system administrators.

Update (September 06 2007): It seems the publishers of the article have run into some copyright problems and have temporarily taken the resource down till the problems could be ironed out.

In the meantime, a comprehensive resource on nmap which you will find really helpful is the book titled - "Secrets of Network Cartography: A Comprehensive Guide to nmap" authored by James Messer which you can freely read online. You can even download a PDF version of the book for a nominal price.

A collection of best rated videos on C++

Here is a collection of best rated videos on C++. These videos have been collected from a variety of sources such as Stanford university, reconnectworks and even a lecture by Dr. Bjarne Stroustrup the creator of C++.

The Stanford University lectures are very clear and start with the basics in an attempt to teach C++. Each lecture is about an hour and a half long.

It starts with the very basics and ends with sophisticated example of tracking code. The content of each lecture is roughly the following…

1. session 1: basic declarations, conditional structure, operators.
2. session 2: pointers and functions.
3. session 3: introduction to classes including operator overloading using 3-Vector from CLHEP (class library for high energy physics) as an example.
4. session 4; more on classes with arrays and lists and including templates.
5. session 5: introduction to inheritance and some thoughts on class design and dealing with legacy code.
6. session 6: polymorphic inheritance with a large example taken from a simulation code.
   

These series of lectures are not a "hands-on" style ones. Only few practical exercises are suggested in the lectures. The students are expected to take their own initiatives in getting started.

By the end of the course, one should be able to read most C++ code written by others and be on their way to using C++ in their own work.

Link to the video lectures

Deploying an USB based ZFS storage pool at home

I recently bought a Sun Ultra 20 M2 workstation which I mainly use as a Java development platform. Nevertheless, I wanted to take advantage of Solaris 10 in my home network too and, after much reading about ZFS, the first thing I wanted to implement was a personal file server.

I started digging into official documentation at OpenSolaris.org and at Sun to discover the full ZFS possibilities and determine which was the best setup for 3-users small network. Minimum system requirements were met, so the first decision I had to take was: which devices I'm populating my zpool with? The requirements I had were very simple:

• I needed enough storage to weekly backup 3 machines; a rough estimate was 30 GB for machine so a total of 100 GB would be sufficient for the moment (for the sake of simplicity, backup is going to be done with rsync);
  
• 100 GB would be required to host and share my CD collection between all the clients I have at home;
  
• all the extra storage would be welcome and used as "scratch" space;
• a replication scheme should be implemented. Priority is given to storage rather than to performance.
  

So, which kind of disks was I going to use?

This wonderful machine, unfortunately, natively supports only two internal SATA(/SAS) disks and the available I/O ports were:

• 6 USB 2.0 (2 in the front and 4 in the back)
  
• 2 FireWire 400 (IEEE 1394a)
  

There was not so much to play with. One option I considered was buying an additional SATA controller to drive some additional SATA disk. Solaris Express Developer Edition 05/07 includes the following drivers:

• marvell88sx (Marvell 88SX SATA controller)
• si3124 (SiliconImage 3124/3132 SATA controller)
• ahci (Intel ICH6 and VIA vt8251 SATA controllers)

This option was particularly interesting because of the superior performance of an SATA disk compared to an USB 2.0 high speed device. Many controller I've seen use both Marvell and SiliconImage chips and finally a server class SuperMicro controller caught my attention. My workstation, by the way, is not equipped with PCI-X slots and, even if that controller is PCI compatible, I didn't want to run an underpowered solution. This option was finally discarded. Had I known this before, I would have seriously considered buying a Sun Ultra 40, which supports up to 8 internal SATA drives.

At this point I was left to choose between FireWire and USB. FireWire ports on the Ultra 20 M2 are IEEE 1394a, whose data rate is limited to 400 MBit/s. IEEE 1394a data rate is slightly inferior to the data rate ofUSB 2.0, which is 480 MBit/s. Nevertheless, FireWire peer-to-peer network architecture and FireWire support for memory-mapped device allows a more effective and less resource consuming approach for storage resulting in less CPU consumption, so FireWire appeared as an attractive solution. Unfortunately two FireWire ports are not enough for me, because they do not leave room for any replication scheme but a two-way mirror, which is a replication scheme I would avoid trying to maximize storage availability.

ZFS, indeed (as of Solaris Express Developer Edition 05/07), provides data redundancy in two flavors: mirrored or RAID-Z. An n-way mirror is a set of n disks where n-1 copies of the data are made during writing. This solution can survive various disk failures and provides (roughly) parallel read access to the n copies of data. RAID-Z is available with single or double parity. Citing official documentation, a RAID-Z configuration with n disks of size x with p parity disks can hold approximately (n-p)*x bytes and can withstand one device failing before data integrity is compromised.

At the end, I bought 3 350 GB Lacie USB 2.0 desktop disks and created my first zpool with them. I also added as a cache device an old 200 GB Iomega disk which I couldn't use as pool device. As the size of the pool depends on the smallest disk, a (350-350-350-200) GB RAID Z1 configuration would be equivalent to a (200-200-200-200) GB which turns to be roughly 600 GB. A (350-350-350) RAID Z1 configuration grants roughly 700 GB, which is 100 GB bigger!

The zpool was easily created with just one command and a few seconds wait:

# zpool create tank raidz c2t0d0 c3t0d0 c4t0d0 cache c6t0d0
# zpool status
pool: tank
state: ONLINE
scrub: scrub completed with 0 errors on Sat Apr 19 00:58:31 2008
config:

NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
tank ONLINE 0 0 0
raidz1 ONLINE 0 0 0
c4t0d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c3t0d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c2t0d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
cache
c6t0d0 ONLINE 0 0 0

errors: No known data errors

Now the pool's ready for hosting filesystems. I created one filesystem for every users' home and set a custom quota for everyone of them. The home filesystems are auto mounted at user login with just a one liner (assuming home filesystems are created in the /tank/zones/ssh-zone/home subtree):

# cat /etc/auto_home
+auto_home
* -fstype=lofs :/tank/zones/ssh-zone/home/&

I also set gzip compression for every filesystem with

# zfs set compression=gzip [filesystem-name]

The whole process took me less than half an hour (most of which I spent reading zpool and zfs man pages) and now have a single-parity RAID-Z pool hosting a quota-based, gzip compressed filesystem for every user, created just in time thanks to ZFS.

A talk with Pavel Kanzelsberger, Creator of Pixel

You say you do not know what Pixel software does ? Well it is the end result of a one man company's remarkable achievement in developing a graphics software at par with Photoshop. The person in question is Pavel Kanzelsberger from Slovakia who has single handedly developed this software. I may add that it is not a GPLed product rather it is as closed source as Photoshop. Its USP is that it has a native Linux build and runs on numerous other OSes as well. And then again it doesn't cost you a hand and a foot to acquire it as it costs far less than Photoshop and is pegged at just $38 .

At present Pixel is still in the beta stage but is quite usable. A glance at the user interface of Pixel will give you a clue as to where it takes its inspiration from . It has the exact interface of Photoshop - an aspect that Adobe should be worried about especially since this product works flawlessly as well and is getting better as days go by. Check out the screenshots of Pixel.

James Gray at Linux Journal quizzes Pavel Kanzelsberger about what motivated him to start working on this project, the development process, a little about the person himself and the future of Pixel. Do read the interview.

How to create a custom DVD from multiple video formats

I have always found it a hassle to convert a video file from one format to another in Linux for lack of (or rather, not being aware of) a good Free video conversion suite. I have tried converting an Avi file to another format such as mp4 using some software but the results were far from satisfactory. I take it that it has more to do with the settings I selected than the fault of the software I used.

Axel has written a quite detailed article explaining how to create a custom DVD using a Free video conversion software called DeVeDe. What is really interesting about his article is that he shows the exact settings he used in the conversion - a big factor if you want your converted video file to have more or less the same quality. In fact my experience shows that you need to get the ratio of number of frames per second with respect to resolution of the video right else the quality of the video might suffer.

Fig: DeVeDe software interface

He has used the Windows version of DeVeDe but this is a software which is available for Linux as well. For example, in Ubuntu, you can install this software using the command :

$ sudo apt-get install devede

You need to have Mplayer, Mencoder, DVDAuthor, VCDImager, MKisofs and all the proprietary codecs installed though since DeVeDe is just a front-end. More over since DeVeDe is a Python script, it requires Python as well. For more details on the actual steps required to convert a video file from one format to another, do read the guide.

Benchmark : Which is the best Linux terminal ?

It has many times occurred to me which terminal among the plethora of terminals at our disposal are the most efficient in terms of speed, memory consumption and ease of use. And I was of the opinion that the ubiquitous xterm was a likely candidate for a terminal with less memory footprint. Well I couldn't have been further from the truth.

It seems xterm is a very poor choice when selecting a terminal. Martin Ankerl benchmarked a number of terminals available in Linux including xterm, gnome-terminal, KDE konsole, wterm, eterm and aterm. And his findings indicate gnome-terminal and konsole as the best choice of terminals for its speed. And by speed I mean the speed of execution of commands in it and not the program's startup time. But the down side is that these two terminals consume a significant amount of memory. For example, Gnome-terminal is found to consume around 45 MB.

Martin states that he found wterm as the best bet for a low memory footprint with just 6.5 MB consumption. And it is sufficiently fast in executing. xterm loses in this department too with each instance consuming around 16 MB.

Do read the full benchmark details and also a nifty graph of his results.

Gorgeous GPL wallpapers for your Linux desktop

Who wouldn't like to spruce up their desktop ... like changing the theme to one of your liking, changing the look of the icons, and at the most basic level, changing the desktop wallpaper. And Linux desktops are very flexible in allowing you to change every aspect of its look to your liking. So much that there are projects which allow you to make your Linux desktop (be it Gnome or KDE) look like Mac OSX.

There are good, Sexy Ubuntu Wallpapers on this blog.

Some of the sites which I frequently visit scrounging for pictures to spruce up my desktop include kde-look.org and gnome-look.org just to name a few. Today I came across a collection of gorgeous wallpapers for the Linux desktop at Shareapic.net. Shareapic is a free service that allows its users to upload and host images on their servers.

While the wallpapers are to put it lightly, stunning, I am not sure if they do not cause some distraction at work. If you use your Linux desktop primarily for recreation, casual browsing or chatting, then go ahead and use the wallpapers. But if you are doing serious work, it is always prudent and less distracting if you select a wallpaper which has plain colors or rather no wallpaper at all. But that is just me airing my opinion. You can download the nature collection of wallpapers released under GPL at http://www.shareapic.net/134601-GPL-wallpapers.html (Update 30-March-2009: Link Broken).