MindlessCode.net

Went to CCT’s (Corvallis Community Theatre) production of Fiddler on the Roof last night. Wow. It was awesome, and required a lot of hard work (over 200 people were involved). Sorry, no pictures due to copyright restrictions. The local newspaper might have something, but their search function is broken.

Anyways, it was a great show! Good job all of you who were in it!

Well, what would you expect. Someone has released a worm called Dabber, which exploits a security hole on Sasser. It scans for machines infected with Sasser, then opens up port 9898 so that crackers/attackers can enter and check our your computer (or run something, make your computer crash…whatever crackers do. I don’t know. Really).

You can of course read about this in The Register.

http://www.fredsvagt.dk/intern/bomb_iraq.html
Yes, Paul sent me that one.

CNN has an article up about how the US may deploy tiny robots into the nations water ways to sample water in real time “…to protect our waterways from terrorist attacks”.

Maybe this could be used to monitor pollution from chemical and other plants? Or maybe not…
http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/05/14/water.robots.ap/index.htm

Hmm, what next.
The Justice Department has forced the ACLU to remove a paragraph from their website about what FBI agents could do under the PATRIOT act. The article is located on the Washington Post website. You can still get the text via Google cache (read /. for a link).

Ugg, the article will probably get censored.

Well, it looks like Google is going to start adding “targeted image ads” to websites (not its own, though). No animations, and they must be a standard size. However, they will be distributed, editing HOSTS won’t block them. However, downloading the AdBlock Extention for Firefox and adding some filters for ads should work.

In other news, just tell Google what you think. Send them a message like this:
Dear Google,
I have been a long time user of your search engine. However, with your recent announcement of graphical ads, I am looking for another search engine now. I click on text ads, only. I understand that you will only be placing these on parter sites. Will you contact the partner sites? What if they object to having banner ads on their site?
I urge you to reconsider this.
<Your Name>

The US Postal System (USPS) is getting driven out of business by private companies. I recently (well, three weeks ago) purchased a battery from CompUSA. They only ship via FedEx. Only. The FedEx truck couldn’t find us :(. It was “returned to sender” without any notification from CompUSA. I requested it be shipped by USPS. Nope. Why? They have a contract with FedEx that demands that ComUSA will only ship via FedEx. This is similar to what UPS does.

So, we finally got CompUSA to refund out $176 order, and I went out on eBay in search of a battery that would be shipped via USPS. Every, single, web site (that I found) shipped via UPS. Finally, I located a company that shipped via USPS…and it was $70 cheaper!

I encourage all of you to only order from companies that ship via USPS.
OK, so I’m mad. Sorry.

I downloaded and compiled Scribus 1.1.6. For those of you who don’t know what Scribus is, it’s “GPL Desktop Publishing and More”. I have an upcomming concert brochure that I need to do and thought that I’d try out Scribus.

The build was simple, just the regular ./configure, make, make install procedure. Of course, I’m a geek to I made a Slackware Package out of it. If you want the package, please download it.

Scribus is built with Qt, so it fit in well with my KDE desktop. It still has the ugly Qt dialogs, though. The new dialog offers you many different paper sizes, organized alphabetically rather than by common use. Letter is way down at the bottom.
There didn’t seem to be an option to create half-page (book fold, as MS Publisher calls it), so I had to skew the numbers a bit and find the right settings for the margins, orientation and paper size.

The editor itsself was very easy to use with many features. All text styles are applied through the Styles menu. Although this is a little confusing at first, you get used to it after a while.
The PDF support is very good, you can insert annotations and links, as well as export your document in a high resolution. You can also insert PDF fields, such as buttons, check boxes, and other controls.

In short, Scribus is pretty good, but still needs some work, especially in the “basics” area.
Good work Scribus team!

http://www.thesunmachine.net/image_archive/archive/oct03/al_sahhaf_microsoft_no_bugs.jpg
Thanks Paul!

Andrew Morton released version 2.6.6 (please use a mirror!) of the Linux Kernel yesterday. Soo, of course I downloaded the 2.4 MB of bzip2′d patches.

Shucks, well it broke support for my wireless card AND my PS/2 mouse stopped working. Now I’m back to 2.6.3. Now you know why I have 10 options in my LILO…