Friday 5 December 2008

Come fly with me

I bought a laptop a year ago and it was my first real contact with Windows Vista. I must say I am not overly enthusiastic about Vista (understatement) and I have never been quite satisfied with the laptop. It is painfully slow to use and I dread the hard drive light to be turned on because that is a bad signal.

For that reason I have for a long time been curious about Ubuntu GNU/Linux but the overhead of backing up, repartitioning has stopped me from installing Ubuntu. I have been running Ubuntu under vmware but that was also a painful experience. Then I found Wubi.

Wubi is Windows installer that installs Ubuntu without doing any changes to partitions and it is a dual boot thing. Yeah, right I thought when I read about it but I felt I had to give it a try.

The Wubi installer is a small installation program, it is about 1 MB, but of course it needs a bit more than this. When you start it you just specify some parameters and start the installation. It will download a lot of stuff, like 500 MB or something, and after rebooting the machine it will install ubuntu in a folder named ubuntu on the windows disk you specified. The actual disk for ubuntu will be a file so you will not have top performance but it is really a good way to try out Ubuntu and it really lowers the threshold for trying it out.

I know that all things does not work very well with Linux so I thought the WLan and the Bluetooth would give me a hard time. Well, I was wrong. When booted up I was informed that there were some proprietary drivers for my wlan and my graphics chips which I installed. The wlan was up and running after configuring without any problems. Bluetooth worked like a charm.

My only worry now was the mobile networking dongle I have, although I have read that there is good support for the Huawei E220. Well, this morning I got it working so now there is nothing really stopping me from migrating to Ubuntu all together, and I will.

For me it has been a revolution. My laptop is flying with Ubuntu.

It has never been as fast as it is today and it feels like the usability factor has increased even though I go from Windows Vista to Linux. That feels strange but I think that Linux has come a long way when it comes to being usable for ordinary people.

So if you are curious about Ubuntu and you are stuck on a Windows machine, try Wubi. If you decide that Ubuntu is nothing for you, just boot up Windows and uninstall Wubi like any other Windows program. No worries.

Monday 15 September 2008

Simple scheduling in Windows

I have tried to become friends with the scheduling service in Windows but I guess it just does not like me. It was as simple as running a little command file that would make a backup of a wiki I have set up locally. I struggled over a period of several months to get it working but it was always something with the accounts and privileges that made it fail. When I finally got it to work I had to changed my password on the system and the backup stopped working, silently of course. I finally gave in and started to look for some other solution.

What I found was cron which a really simple freeware program that just does the job. It is a clone of the Unix cron so it uses a similar configuration file and it also has a log file which logs every attempt to start a job and the result. I just dropped a shortcut in the Windows Startup folder for it to start at boot time and it worked from day one. I could forget that it even had it running, which I actually did until the day I got a new computer and had to migrate my environment.

I made a mistake and put the backup command file in another location on the new machine and forgot to update the crontab file. When I did my usual check if the backup was working, which the Windows scheduler had taught me was a good idea, I realised my mistake and corrected it. I also had a look at the log file which showed that the backup has been running flawlessly since the day I set it up with cron, well until the system was migrated over which I also could see in the log. Now it works flawlessly again.

This is a good example of less is more. Simplicity rules.

Friday 22 August 2008

Tuesday 19 August 2008

Bye, bye, RealPlayer

I have been using RealPlayer for some years now just for listening to Internet radio. I know a lot of people dislike RealPlayer but I found a way to fiddle with the settings and get something that gave a look and functionality that worked for me.

I recently installed it on a new computer, the latest version of the free player. Well, I have to join the crowd that dislikes RealPlayer because the version I installed is not possible to customise to make it usable for me. So...

Bye, bye, RealPlayer and hello WinAmp.

Monday 11 August 2008

Phone amnesia

It has probably happened to you too. The mobile phone is turned off and you suddenly need to know your PIN code to get it going again. It happened to me the other day.

The first time you enter the incorrect code you think, I must have pressed the wrong button somewhere. You enter the code again and really try to be aware of what you are doing. Normally this is where the phone open its arms and welcomes you. But not for me.

That is when the confusion really hits you and you start to go through your mind troubleshooting what you just have experienced. You can only come to one conclusion.

My phone has forgotten my PIN code.

That is what happened to me. I never tried a third time but I left the phone running so my pocket had a go at it with no success. When I eventually found that PUK code I managed to convince the phone what PIN code it has. Let us hope it sticks this time.

Thursday 7 August 2008

The hammer for RIA

I listened to the lively debate regarding Rich Internet Applications (RIA) on The Java Posse podcast, episode 198, and I really have to agree that it is a really bad name for it. A RIA is no more than a more beefy web application.

Having had my primary focus outside of the web application sphere for a long time I have noticed the hammer and the nail mentality inside the sphere. You know, if the only thing you have is a hammer (web application) everything looks like a nail (application ideas).

I have seen this myself some years back where a company wanted a web application which should show graphs where you would be able to interact with the graph like zooming and dragging and such. Of course, one of the requirements was also that the application should not need any additional software to be installed and this was before the AJAX acronym was publicly known. I saw no way of making a good solution within a browser since what they really wanted was a rich internet application so my recommendation had to be that a desktop application should be deployed.

No deal that time.

It is some sort of perverted idea that every application user interface could be realised in a web browser. I don't really think that is the case and even if it was true, the browser is not the ideal environment for all productivity tools. Imagine having your development IDE in a browser window.

I think you should use the tools that fits the requirements instead of trying to fit the square pieces in the round holes. I am working with rich internet applications today but I Swing my hammer.

Wednesday 11 June 2008

Security without trust

Can we really have security without trusting someone or something?

I came to think about that the other day when trying to improve a server backed desktop application authenticating itself through a third party by popping upp a web browser showing the third party login form. As there are no really good web browser components for Java that you can use without too much hassle I was thinking about doing a Swing form which would post the information to a web page over SSL.

The suggestion was considered insecure and was rejected. When I thought about it I came to the conclusion that this was a matter of trust or should I say distrust. Why was such a solution less secure than popping up a web browser transmitting the same sensitive information? For some reason the third party felt more secure if the information was handled by a random web component from any developer than from a Swing solution by me.

It is all a matter of trust and to have security you must trust someone. When you go to a secure web page you must trust Thawte or Verisign, or whatever certificate authority has issued their security certificate, has done a good job validating the certificate owners identity. Whenever you register on a web page you trust that the site will keep your information secure.

Security is a matter of trust. Who do you trust?

I am not an early adopter

This is the first time I write a blog entry so you can definitely say that I am no early adopter when it comes to this weblog thing.

The same goes with Java. I did some pathetic attempts back in the 90ies but not until beginning of this century I really got into it and got really hooked.

But I guess it's a good thing that I am a late adopter. It is better to learn from other peoples misstakes. Life is too short to make them yourself.

This it for you, mom.