Humor: Why Geeks and Nerds Are Worth It...

I can't for the life of me understand what it is with this image associated with a geek. I mean, when somebody mentions a so and so is a geek, immediately, it conjures up in your mind a person who is married to his computer, wearing horn rimmed glasses with thick lens and squinting at a monitor for the major part he is awake. Oh yeah, a geek can never and I mean NEVER be a woman let alone find it easy to date a woman. It is really hilarious to see entire cartoon strip series being created which revolves around this stereotype of a geek.

Craiglist has a interesting write up where a female lists 15 reasons why it is a good decision to date a geek and even marry him. While it doesn't do anything to diminish the negative image of a geek, it is quite entertaining and humorous as well.

10 seldom or never used GNU/Linux commands

Guess how many commands are there in GNU/Linux ? My estimate is somewhere between 1000 and 2000. And how did I arrive at this conclusion ? In my bare bones Linux installation alone, there are 1151 commands. I got this figure by running the following command :

$ ls /usr/bin /bin /sbin /usr/sbin |wc -l
1151

And each of these commands or a majority of them can be combined together to perform complex tasks, in which case, these combinations can be considered to be whole commands in their own right. Naturally, it is a humongous task to master all the 1000s of commands available in GNU/Linux. More importantly, it is easier to ignore many commands which make very good replacements of some of the commonly used commands at least for certain functions.

Brock Noland has compiled a collection of 10 commands on his site *cough* "bash cures cancer", which are seldom used by a majority of GNU/Linux users but which in his opinion are a boon for all Linux users if only they knew about them. The commands are pgrep, pstree, bc, split, nl, mkfifo, ldd, col, xmlwf and lsof . He claims that his favorite of the 10 commands is surely mkfifo. But to know why, you should read his article. He has also provided a number of examples of usage of the commands which makes it an informative read.

Tip to properly render and read Indian language websites in GNU/Linux

Yahoo India has been on a drive to localize its web content. The result being a series of portals in a multitude of Indian languages which includes Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Hindi, Gujarati and so on. And it has made it easier for the visitors to view the website in the Indian language of their choice by using the web address format as follows - which is :

http://in.yourlanguage.yahoo.com/

Suppose your mother tongue is Tamil, you can view the Yahoo India web page content in Tamil by typing the address 'http://in.tamil.yahoo.com/'. Cool isn't it ?

Fig: This is how the website rendered before Indic fonts were installed

But while viewing the website rendered in the Indian languages, I was not able to read the content as the relevant Indian fonts were missing on my machine. After some search, I found that there is a package containing a variety of Indian language fonts available for Linux. They are popularly known as Indic fonts.

Fig: Website after indic fonts were installed

If you are using a Debian based Linux distribution, you can easily install the fonts via the command :

# apt-get install ttf-indic-fonts

which will install all the Indian language fonts on your machine. And once they are installed, it will be possible to view and read the Yahoo India websites in your regional language.

Fig: Yahoo webpage rendered in Malayalam

Fig: The same web page rendered in Hindi

You can even copy and paste pieces of text from the website to a text editor provided the text editor has been compiled with Unicode support.

News: Richard Stallman convinces Cuba to embrace GNU/Linux

When you hear the name Cuba, it concocts in your mind a picture of bankruptcy, food shortages, drug shortages, rampant unemployment et al, at least some of them a direct side effect of the US trade sanctions [source BBC]. But one thing the Cubans can be proud of is their excellent health care system which rivals even that in the US. Believe it or not, Cubans boasts of a better life expectancy than the North Americans and Cuba has better infant and adult mortality rates than the US.

Being a communist state, it was only natural for Cuba to embrace GNU/Linux as the official OS of choice for all governmental departments. But what surprises me is why it took so long. AP news reports that in a recent visit to Cuba, Richard M Stallman was able to convince the Cuban government the advantages of using a Free OS in all government offices - definitely a big feather in the cap for RMS. He was visiting Cuba to speak at an International Conference on Communication and Technologies in Havana.

It might seem that RMS is only successful with governments which are predominantly socialist in their beliefs. But the fact is, many reasons he lists in favor of supporting Free software are valid and make perfect sense for all the governments the world over irrespective of their ideologies - including (I may add) the US government. The prominent reason being :

The inherent security threat in using proprietary software for mission critical situations or in matters of state security, for the simple reason that without being able to examine the code, users can't know what it's doing or what "back door" holes developers might have left open for future entry.

I feel happy that one more country has decided to embrace GNU/Linux in a big way. Kudos to the Cubans for their foresight.

How to explain Digital Rights Management (DRM) to your dad

DRM stands for Digital Rights Management - a technical procedure which aims to make sure that the copyright holders retain control over their work by preventing unauthorized duplication of their work to ensure continued revenue streams. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) calls it Digital Restrictions Management. In recent times, DRM has caused extreme polarization even within the camps of Open Source and Free Software. With Linus Torvalds stating his displeasure over the move to formulate anti-DRM specific clauses in the upcoming GPLv3 spear headed by the FSF.

The big question is, when a lay person (such as your dad) approaches you and asks to explain what the cacophony related to DRM is all about, how do you explain in a way that he understands the basic idea of DRM without leaving him overwhelmed? If you are not sure how to address this question put forward to you, then you should read the example answers compiled by John highlighting the DRM-related problems, to help people understand what the big deal is with DRM.

Humor: Is your son a computer hacker ? Check for these symptoms ...

Today I stumbled upon this very interesting article where a concerned parent lists the signs to watch out for in your kids to guard against them turning into *gasp* hackers...

Here are a couple of gems from the article...

If your son has requested a new "processor" from a company called "AMD", this is genuine cause for alarm. AMD is a third-world based company who make inferior, "knock-off" copies of American processor chips. They use child labor extensively in their third world sweatshops, and they deliberately disable the security features that American processor makers, such as Intel, use to prevent hacking.

and still further ...

There are, unfortunately, many hacking manuals available in bookshops today. A few titles to be on the lookout for are: ... "Programming with Perl" by Timothy O'Reilly; "Geeks" by Jon Katz; "The Hacker Crackdown" by Bruce Sterling; ... and "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by Eric S. Raymond. If you find any of these hacking manuals in your child's possession, confiscate them immediately.

Even the good old Linux has not been spared.

The way the article has been written, makes it is clear that it is meant to humor the person reading it. Then again, some of those who do not know the A,B,Cs... of computers might really fall for what has been written there. Read the full article to get a good laugh.

Free online magazines dedicated to GNU/Linux and Open Source

These are a collection of my links pointing to free online magazines dedicated to Linux and Open Source. If you look around, a lot of effort is being expended, many of those on a voluntary basis to keep alive the spirit of Linux, Open source and Freedom. The links below highlight a slice of those efforts.

• Linux Journal - One of the foremost Linux magazines around, this magazine carry articles which are suited to a more technically oriented crowd. This magazine is made available in both print and online format. Many of the articles on its website are freely accessible but to read the most recent articles, you need to enroll in a paid subscription.


• PClinuxOS Magazine - This is a magazine launched by PCLinuxOS enthusiasts, which is freely made available in both PDF and HTML format. PCLinuxOS is a very interesting Linux distribution which caters to those who crave for a much more complete Linux experience on the desktop. Even though the magazine has the PCLinuxOS name, it carries articles relevant to all Linux distributions.


• Free Software Magazine - This is yet another freely available online magazine which contains articles related to GNU/Linux, open source and Free software.


• Gnome Journal - is an online magazine devoted to everything surrounding the GNOME Desktop. The rate of new articles are a bit far and in between but then that is expected from a magazine dedicated to a narrow subject.


• Linux Productivity Magazine - This was a magazine which used to provide a number of interesting articles on Linux. It has been discontinued since. You can find all the archives of previous issues here.


• Linux-Mag - This is a magazine in print but their website has a number of news items related to Linux.


• Linux Gazette - A purely voluntary effort, this is an online magazine which provides a number of interesting articles related to Linux and Free software on a regular basis.


• Linux Focus - This is another freely available online magazine maintained exclusively through volunteer effort. The USP of this magazine is that you can read the articles featured here in multiple languages. At present, apart from English, it provides the magazine in 10 other languages including the Chinese language.


• Insecure Magazine - This is a freely available digital security magazine discussing some of the hottest information security topics not necessarily all based on Linux. The magazine is available only in a PDF format.


• Linuxformat.co.uk - This is a UK based print magazine but their website also contain relevant news and tips related to GNU/Linux.


• RedHat Magazine - One might wonder why a major Linux distribution vendor like RedHat will bother to bringing out a magazine. But the fact is RedHat does publish an online magazine where you get a monthly dose of tips, howtos and news related to Linux, err... Red Hat Linux that is.


• Tux Magazine - I especially like this online monthly magazine. It is geared towards the new Linux crowd rather than the experienced Linux users and it sends a copy of the magazine in PDF format to ones mailbox. Or rather, it used to send the PDF magazine. As of now its future is in limbo as the magazine owners have found it difficult to sustain their efforts in bringing out the magazine. Hopefully they will find some way to keep this very good magazine alive.


• Full Circle Magazine - This is an independent magazine for the Ubuntu community available in PDF format for free download every month.


• OpenBSD Journal - This is not a magazine per se, its more like a Slashdot style blog. But this is the closest you can get to a magazine dedicated to OpenBSD - arguably the most secure operating system on this planet.


• O3 Magazine - This is a FREE electronic publication distributed in PDF format. The focus of o3 is on the use of Free and Open Source (FOSS) software in Enterprise Data Networking environments.

Note to readers: When ever I come across interesting websites related to Linux, I usually bookmark them for future reference. Over a period of time, I have built up an eclectic collection of links related to GNU/Linux or Unix which provide good information. Earlier, I had featured a slice of those links on the right hand column of this blog. I couldn't feature all the links there due to lack of space. Now, with a revamp of this site design, I decided to move them to their own individual pages. This post is the continuation of a series of such posts.

This article will be updated as and when I come across free online magazines related to GNU/Linux, open source and free software.