What I hated though is how some techies and all techy-wannabes had a spontaneous collective orgasm at the first sight of the news. I mean come on! I think some of the guys at TechCrunch had to go change their pants after they read the announcement. Heck, this guy at the “IT Portal” has already written 5 Reasons To Love Google Chrome OS and the product doesn’t even have a web page yet! I like how he explained “reason #3″:

Google has a blank canvas to work with and doesn’t need to rely on code that is 15 years old, nor does it have to deal with software compatibility issue

Oh really ? Somebody should tell that guy that Linux (what Chrome really is) was first written in 1991 and is thus 18 years old!

Finally, some common sense articles are popping up. I like this one (specially how he catches TechCrunch for calling an OS like Linux a mere “bag of drivers” .. anyone who knows anything about operating systems knows that is not true). This article is also nice.

There are reasonable predictions of what we can expect from Google Chrome OS, and I’ll try to talk more about this later.

P.S: I hate over-hyping. I REALLY REALLY HATE over-hyping. That is why I dislike Apple, they overhype everything, even basic features! In all fairness, Google didn’t overhype Chrome, but many of those “techies” did.

In these days (and specially if the whole “cloud-as-a-service” model is to become successful, oh and it will) we should have a concept of a single global account, or a managable federation of accounts that form a global account, that would allow people to “turn on” services on the web to try them out (or use them), and then “turn them off”.

I know about openID, but having a single account (be it from Google or Microsoft or Yahoo) to log in to many places is too “big-brothery” for my taste. Plus, not all online services allow users to use openID, even though they really should.

It is bollocks! Bollocks I tells ya! *shaking his fist*

The weird thing is that the display driver is configured correctly, and i can see the full screen area and can move the mouse and windows around .. it is just the full-screen on flash and maximizing windows that does not work as needed. Another thing that added to the weirdness is that things are working perfectly fine on KDE3.

Anyway, i found the easy fix to this problem. The following file
/etc/sysconfig/displaymanager contains some configuration for your display manager. The following two lines demonstrate the problem:

DISPLAYMANAGER_RANDR_MODE_VGA="auto"
DISPLAYMANAGER_RANDR_MODE_auto="1024x768_60 64.11 1024 1080 1184 1344 768 769 772 795 -HSync +Vsync"


It says in the comments that this is supposed to help laptop devices somehow .. i didn’t totally understand that part. However, some online searches revealed some advice to comment out one of the lines. What i personally did to fix this problem is modify the first line above so that it won’t refer to the configuration on the second line. So i have something like this:

DISPLAYMANAGER_RANDR_MODE_VGA=""

I am posting this here so that it could help somebody some day … when i was facing this problem i did a ton of search and found nothing. So, if your screen is displaying a small area (1024×768) in the top left corner of your monitor, this might be the fix.

~~ Anti-Spam in Blog Engines ~~

While i no longer plan to test Qwaider’s spam system, I think the idea and discussion is still valid. Before i begin, i must state that i am not an expert in spam fighting, so i simply can’t go into the messy details of this field. However, for systems such as blog comments, one can imagine a set of techniques that are used to detect whether something is spam or not:

• Content: This is simple; if the comment contains certain flag words, or if the comment body contains multiple outbound links, then this is spam with high probability. While most systems such WP or Blogger, allow one link to be part of the comment body, some immediately send any comment with a link for moderation.
• Embedded Tags: WP and Blogger allow you a restricted set of HTML formatting tags in your comment body. But this could also be malicious if you add script tags. Again, some engines also takes the defensive strategy of stripping out all HTML tags.
• IP Address: Many systems build and/or rely on databases of IP addresses that are known to produce spam, so if your comment comes from one of these addresses, then it is marked as spam.
• DNS Checks: Many systems check whether the domain from which the comment is originating is known to be a “safe” domain and whether it matches the other IP info.
• Speed: It is unlikely that a human being will comment on 10s or 100s of blog posts within a few seconds, so if the system sees multiple comments from the same machine being issued in close periods, then that signals spam.
• Reputation: After your system ages a bit, it can assign reputation to the different addresses (clients) that communicate with it. People who frequently comment on a certain blog would gain reputation in the system for being trusted clients. Through their many submissions, the system can assign them a pool of addresses from where they are likely to send their comments. That along with their unique system identifiers (usernames, email addresses, and their internal system GUIDs) would allow the anti-spam engine to trust comments that match their IDs. This can allow the system to relax the strict rules for reputable users, and enforce them for the known bad guys.
• Manual vs. Automatic Submissions: One can quickly make a program to directly invoke the HTTP commands to submit a comment to a blog. However, legitimate users are unlikely to do that. So one can overload the comments HTML form (via the button or JS commands triggered by a keydown in the comment box) so that it flags that this comment has been typed by a human rather than sent automatically by a malicious script.
• Page Rendering Triggers: Humans will need to view the post before they can comment on it. So the server can generate a timed unique ID for a page when it is requested by a client, and require the comment forms to use that ID in sending their comments.

~~ Limitations ~~

These are probably the major techniques that many blog engines (such as Qwaider’s) use for their anti-spam engines in their blogs. Of course, isolated blog engines can not use other techniques that are used by anti-spam email engines, and even anti-spam hardware. Unfortunately in a blogging environment, you do not have a contact list to assist you in flagging emails, you can not (correctly) anticipate who will post a comment on a particular post, you can not use in-hardware checks on the actual IP messages, and you can not compute checksums on the data and such.

~~ Attack Strategy ~~

At this point, the strategy for a successful “attack” applet is simple. It has to mimic the actions of an actual community of human readers. This forces us to re-examine the goals of the applet; do we intend to overload the server and bring down the site ? do we intend to add a bunch of links to undesired sites ? or do we intend to litter the site with a  bunch of meaningless “comments” to annoy the owner and readers ? This turns out to be an important point that i’ll get back to later. However, for now, let us assume that our goal is to just litter the site with a bunch of garbage comments.

Given the goal and strategy above, the implementation is almost straight forward. One could write a small applet and link to it from a site within the community of the target blogger. For example, i could link to that applet from here since most of my readers read Qwaider’s blog as well. Once the applet is loaded on a bunch of machines, it can go in a “round-robin” fashion and each time pick an instance to deliver the spam comment. For example, if the applet was running on my machine, Hani’s, KJ’s, and Tooteh’s, at each epoch, only one of us will deliver that spam (assuming that the epochs are well spaced). Let’s say that it is my turn to deliver the spam; my applet would request a random recent post from Qwaider’s blog, and load it in an internal browser (the same kind that is used to automate web UI testing), it then grabs a random sentence from the post, simulates a user input event in the comment form, and submits a comment with that random quote from the article. These automated browsers exist for testing web UI and AJAX, and by faking the browser identification, the server can not know that it served a request to a fake browser or a real browser.

From the server’s perspective, the distributed nature of these applets insures that each spam comment is legitimately originating from a different address. The content of each message is not suspicious because it uses the same credentials of the users it is mimicking. It also simulates browser behavior so that is indistinguishable from normal activity.

~~ What is Spam ? ~~

This begs the question of whether this really is spam or not. After all, the spammers did not gain anything from their actions except the annoyance of the blog owner and readers. However, what is spam really ? If you as a blog owner are getting a flood of meaningless “comments” that are obstructing the dialog between you and your readers, then that is logically classified as spam. Notice that this does not rely on computational or statistical properties of the “spam” messages, but rather on their purpose and effect. So this means that all those automated anti-spam checks will never be able to catch all spam messages. Do “human-tests” and Captchas work ? No! because by this definition, humans could as easily manually type spam messages into comment boxes.

In the Computer Science literature, there is something known as the “Turing Test” in which a human chats on his machine with another entity. The test is passed if the human chatter can not distinguish if he is talking with a computer or another human. Currently no program can pass the Turing test. Does this mean that we will only be able to solve the spam problem completely when we finally pass the Turing test ? Actually, No! For those of us who live in areas with mail services, how many times do we get a letter in the mail and throw it out because we think it is just junk, only to discover later on that it was actually something “real” and important ? This actually happens quite often. So if even humans can not always distinguish spam correctly and accurately, then it is really impossible to solve the spam problem completely, correctly, and accurately. Then again, is there a single source that can say whether something is spam or not ? What you might consider as a spam message, i might consider as a legitimate and important messages. Take the weekly local sales flyers that you get in the mail for example. To me, that is always unsolicited junk mail. To others, that is valuable info. So truly, spam is in the eye of the beholder.

~~ So is Working on Spam Problems Hopeless ? ~~

Although we can never identify all spam correctly and accurately, there is still alot of work to be done in identifying messages that are obviously spam. That is where the crux of the anti-spam work and research is focused, and we still have a long way to go.

Anyway, these are my thoughts on this subject. I picked Qwaider as an example only because he is relatively well-known in our community, he built a good anti-spam engine, and i think he can take being picked upon

I LOVE desktop wallpapers. Specially colorful, vibrant ones. KDE (wikipedia) and GNOME (wikipedia) usually never fail at providing a good selection of default wallpapers. Recently, the Oxygen Team unveiled the wallpaper collection for KDE 4.0 (more on KDE 4 here). The wallpapers were breathtakingly beautiful. You can see or even download the entire collection here.

An electronic version will not only save trees and be cheaper in the long run, but it will come with many added benefits. Easy archiving and quick searching is among the more obvious benefits. However, using PCs exclusively for this task is not an appropriate solution. While many of us spends alot of time infront of their laptop/desktop screens, most people are used to reading books and newspapers in a different manner. Reading habits that were formed and inherited through centuries of reliance on handwritten and printed press are not easily replaceable with the ~30 year-old invention that is the personal computer.

Lots of research has been done on producing electronic papers. Some companies have tried that before, but i really did not see anything usable to hit the mass market through big retailers. Until now. Amazon introduced an eBook reading device that is more of an ePaper to me. Hopefully this new product (named Amazon Kindle) will be better than its predecessors. The cool thing about Kindle in my opinion is its integration with the Amazon store. It is integrated with their Amazon store such that if you buy a book, you can have it as an eBook through Kindle. Amazon already scans every single book they sell in order to gather these statistics (regarding topics and most prominent words/places), so i assume they will be able to deliver all books in an electronic version (even those ones that are not currently available as eBooks). At least hopefully.

Although i am not affiliated with Amazon, and i have not tried Amazon Kindle for my self, i am deeply interested in this topic, and wish there would be a good solution soon.

Running Ubuntu 7.10, i found myself re-installing ruby and rails on my system. Although prepackaged solutions containing both ruby and ruby on rails, i usually prefer to install ruby, and RubyGem, through my system’s package manager, and have gem freshly grab and install rails and all its dependencies.

So, here it goes:

1. sudo -s … (this sends you to an admin mode so that you do not have to type sudo over and over again … do not abuse it and exit as soon as you are done)
2. apt-get install ruby rubygem … should take care of installing ruby and rubygem on your system. (Debian system assumed, On SuSE Yast does that as well).
3. gem install rails --include-dependencies … oh oh … Gem::GemNotFoundException … no rails !!!
4. gem env … should show you your “GEM PATH” (in my case /var/lib/gems/1.8). In that directory, there is a source_cache file.
5. rm /var/lib/gems/1.8/source_cache …. Delete that file!
6. gem update … update your gem cache file
7. gem install rails --include-dependencies … yaay it works
8. exit … you must do this … do not abuse your root priviliges

This is it! The problem is that the stupid source_cache file is out of date and it needs to be resynchronized.

For some reason, after the successful installation i could not run the commands rails and rake directly from the console (without specifying the full path). This was because they were not added to /usr/bin. I didn’t bother googling for this because the solution is simple. If that happens with you, simply do the following:

1. cd /usr/bin … this directory contains links to all your executable … do not mess with it … baby pandas will die if you do.
2. sudo ln -s /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/rails … this creates a symbolic link to rails … notice that the bin directory is in gem path specified by gem env.
3. sudo ln -s /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/rake … do the same for rake … it is useful.

This is it … i hope somebody finds it useful.

However, as i refreshed the main page one last time … i discovered that they have updated their site in celebration of the new release. They managed to sneak in that update while i was writing this post!

Touché Ubuntu …. Touché!
Oh well … i am going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they have scheduled the release for 12:00 GMT. I guess i will be downloading 7.10 now and installing it.

OK, it’s Eid holiday, so this is not politics-related, but it is a cool way to find out if you are a right-brain or left-brain dominant. Look at the dancer and decide which way she’s spinning.

Focus!

If you think she’s going clockwise, you’re apparently right-brain dominant (imaginative, philosophical, touchy-feely, impetuous); if you see her going counter-clockwise, you’re left-brain dominant (logical, practical, detail-oriented, safe).

The publisher claimed that “most of us would see the dancer turning anti-clockwise though you can try to focus and change the direction; see if you can do it,” but I see it only clockwise!

After 3 days of downloading the dvd via the slow peer-to-peer network (since the direct link was not working yet), burning the iso onto a couple of DVDs (since the first copy was erroneous), performing three formats and repartitioning operations, and moving 30 Gigs of data back and forth, openSuSE 10.3 has finally installed successfully on my machine …. “successfully” here means “with some quirks”.

SuSE ships with a bunch of desktop environments, of which i mainly use KDE and GNOME. Unfortunately it does not ship with what i really would be using …. fluxbox … but i guess i can download that later.

Well …. the thing to know about openSuSE is that it is an awesome .. awesome distribution …… but it comes with a few quirks (or at least that has been my experience with it). This time around, GNOME had two problems. First, the panel and the dialog boxes would assume that my screen resolution is only 1024×768 and would sit in the upper left hand corner of my screen. To add to the oddity, YaST (the system configuration über-tool) correctly detects my normal resolution, and so does KDE and the rest of my system (except KDE4 preview). Not only that, even in this faulty GNOME, the background extends to cover the rest of my screen, and i can actually use the rest of the screen correctly. It is just that it thinks that its resolution is 1024×768 (and it displays that in its control center), but it also acknowledges that the screen is actually bigger !!! So, dialog boxes are centered in the upper left corner of my screen …etc.

In addition to that, the right click menu does not work on the desktop, and i can not see any desktop icons (not that i actually want to). Even worse …. i could not browse the filesystem without using the command line shell !!!

What could that problem be … what could that problem be ?!! …. Oh wait …. apparently i have accidentally installed GNOME without (guess what) … nautilus !!! For god’s sake, how could the system allow me to install GNOME without nautilus !! .. I installed nautilus and i can now use my desktop and browse my filesystem ….. (i wonder why ).

Unfortunately the 1024×768 dilemma was still a problem. I later on found out that it is somehow kdm‘s fault … it seems as if it was not passing the correct parameters or something .. i don’t know. But switching to gdm seems to have fixed the problem. Now all is left is to see why is NetworkManager giving me a hard time recently .. but other than that everything seems great (specially that 1-click install spiel).

Eh …. anyway, i hate formatting and setting up systems (last time i did that was 15 months ago). I have to get back to my Rails project. Unfortunately i have deleted the development database and all the dummy data, but luckily i have the entire db schema in migration files (which is one of the very nifty things about Ruby on Rails).

Another tremendously helpful application that came as the result of Hack Week was a nice new application called Giver. This little application docks into your system tray, and when you open it up you can see a list of all the users on your network who have Giver open:

To transfer images, files or even folders, all you have to do is drag it onto the person you want to send it to. They will get a small dialog asking them to accept or decline receiving the file:

..and then if they accept, it’ll pop up right onto their desktop. Simple!

Giver requires absolutely no extra configuration to get it up-and-running. All you have to do is start the application on the computers that you want to be able to send stuff to, and it will do all the rest. Another nice touch is that you also have the option of adding pictures to your user entry, as is displayed above.

Here is a great video demonstration as well:

It is finally here !! The latest distro of openSuSE was released today. openSuSE 10.3 is jam-packed with features (and the GUI is artsy as well )
More on that here…

And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced.
But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird.
The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire
and thunder upon them. For the beast had been
reborn with its strength renewed, and the
followers of Mammon cowered in horror.

from The Book of Mozilla, 7:15

Beyond sounding as if this text came from some holy scripture, this text does indeed reference events from the end of the browser wars. Here are some of the references it makes:

1. The Beast: is actually the Netscape browser. The core engine of Netscape was called Mozilla, and its mascot was a dinosaur, and thus it was a beast.
2. The Fall of the Beast: that is when Netscape loss the browser wars for MS Internet Explorer.
3. The Unbelievers: are the Internet Explorer crowd.
4. The Great Bird: the original name for Firefox was Phoenix.
5. Fire & Thunder: references to Firefox and Thunderbird