uRandom

Fri 9th May 2008 @ 01:50: Run As Administrator

My laptop came with a license for Microsoft Windows Vista.

Thank you, Microsoft, and Lenovo, for such a considerate addition to my purchase. I didn't ask for it... oh yes, that's because I didn't want it. As I have mentioned previously, I have had some level of difficulty in obtaining a sufficiently crippled version of the software to match that for which I have a license. Still, I have finally managed it. And - for what it's worth - it seems to accept that it's running under VMPlayer courtesy of Debian GNU/Linux, and not on the native machine, with the genuine license key which tells it it should be on a Lenovo laptop.

Either the licensing confirmation is poor (it did query it at first), or it's going to complain again at some point in the future. Really, who knows? For now, let's assume that it's happy to be running on the hardware to which it was licensed, which it is.

I wanted to transfer a file to my lovely Windows Vista system, so I needed a way to communicate with the Debian box. I tend to use hostnames, rather than IP addresses (call me awkward if you will), so I thought I'd set up the /etc/hosts file under Windows Vista.

From previous experience, I know that they store it somewhere like c:\windows\drivers\system32\etc\hosts, so I found the file. Double-clicking on it gave me the file - with IPv4 and IPv6 entries for localhost.

But I can't save it, and nothing within Notepad (their idea, not mine - but apparently it doesn't matter what app you use to open the file, the permissions are the same) will allow me to tell it that I am allowed to edit the file.


This is where the "Run as Administrator" feature comes in... except it only seems to work for applications, not for files.

It is not enough to browse to the file, and click "Run as Administrator" - one must first select the application you want to use (why should I even know what it is, let alone where to find it?!), and run the entire application as rootAdministrator, and then use the application to locate the file again, and once more open the file, edit it, and save it.

With this method, there seems to be no accountability whatsoever; it may be logged somewhere (I've got no idea!) that "Steve" took Admin rights over "Notepad.exe", but it won't know what I did with those rights. If it was logged that "Steve" took rights over "/etc/hosts", then, it would be possible to see what kind of thing I was up to. If your logs (I kindly assume that some must exist) simply tell you what applications were used, but have no other control, then what is the point in their existence?

I will ignore the slow disk access (96 minutes for 608Mb? That's 6Mb per minute, or 10Kb/s)... As it is running under VMWare, and "could be" due to issues beyond Windows' control. Since the rest of the machine seems to be running fine, it is somewhat unlikely, but let's give the benefit of the doubt wherever possible, eh?

After all that, the game didn't install, so the whole event was a waste of time.

Nearly as bad as when I tried to use it to write a MS Word document based upon an MS Word template; OpenOffice.org struggled, and created a 30Mb document. With some messing, got that down to 3Mb - still a huge thing for a 7-page document. MS Office 2003 (borrowed use) refused to open the template. MS Office 2007 ("trial" use) opened it, messed up the ToC, and still created a 3Mb document.

MS Office 2007 still believed that the 7-page document's "Total Page" count was 10, and - although OO.o sorted the ToC properly, I had to hack the ToC by hand to make it work in MS Word.

I keep on saying: "Microsoft Windows will not catch on", and nobody believes me. I don't know what I'm missing out. The "killer apps" are either nonexistant, inwardly incompatible, or simple undocumented. The OS itself is inherently unstable, too open to 3rd-party closed code, and demonstrably insecure.

There is no compelling reason to use Windows, let alone Office.

OpenOffice.org (and StarOffice) are not perfect, but it's taken this experience to remind me how far ahead of MS Office they are.

As for Windows Vista; that's another story.

GNU/Linux will remain the dominant desktop Operating System until Microsoft can fix these major misfeatures. Microsoft simply don't stand a chance, given the currently available alternatives, be it on the OS level (GNU/Linux), the tools level (GNU and others), or applications (OpenOffice.org and all the countless others).

Wed 7th May 2008 @ 23:38: Nine Inch Nails

It seems that Nine Inch Nails have released their latest album as a free (in exchange for your email address) download via BitTorrent.



It's available in MP3, FLAC, M4A, and even better-than-CD-quality 24bit 96kHz.

What really surprises me though, is the speed it's downloading as a torrent... I'm used to Torrents taking days to complete - does that mean that I just like obscure stuff, and I've now gone mainstream with NiN?

No, it seems that it may be that the already-neglected Gnome client possibly does have flaws already showing; btdownloadheadless shows about 175Kbps, which is still better than I usually get from BitTorrent.

Still, when I looked at it again, a few minutes later, it had finished downloading.

Fri 2nd May 2008 @ 21:12: Comedy Car

One of the nice things about my job, is that I'm not stuck in an office 9-5, and I can pick up the kids from school from time to time.


The downside is the other parents, or more specifically, their cars... there seems to be one more 4-wheel-drive every day. Some of them seem quite practical, some are quite clearly just trying to show off.

However, there's one, which arrived on our local school run recently, which was clearly bought for the sole purpose of entertaining me while I wait for school to finish.

The Dodge Nitro makes me laugh out loud whenever I see it. Our school-mum has got it in silver, like this one. I say silver... it's more of a "we forgot to paint it" kind of a colour.

Bless it, it's trying so hard to look cool and rugged, but it just looks like the pictures I drew when I was five years old, knew nothing about car design, or even about perspective.

But it's trying so hard... Aw, bless!

I'm not a big fan of 4-wheel-drive cars for the school run in the first place, but this one looks as if somebody decided to build one without having ever seen the competition, but having only heard somebody describe them.

So, given its "tried to look like a military vehicle but failed epicly" looks, I think that the "roll over the bullets" caption must have been a deliberate inclusion by some intrepid soul with no fear for their job... especially given the rest of the text. Was that "like a badge of honour" in the sense of "almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a badge of honour", perhaps?

Fri 2nd May 2008 @ 01:34: Richard Stallman

I went to the University of Manchester tonight, to hear Richard Stallman speak about Free Software in Ethics and in Practice - or, in other words, to give his usual speech. It seems to have been organised by BCS, IET and Manchester Free Software. It doesn't seem to have been publicised, though - I came across it on the FSF website, and when I asked, got an email saying that I was the only person who had asked about it. I phoned the University, who passed me through a few departments, to get me the number of a Professor's voicemail, where I left a few messages.

Somebody must have publicised it somewhere, though; the room had a capacity of around 200-300 people, and it was packed. It was due to start at 1845; I was there around 1800, and went into the building around 1810. I asked someone if this was the venue for the Richard Stallman talk. He looked around at the largely young, white, scruffy, male, often-bearded, and generally geeky-looking people surrounding us, and said, "Well, it looks like it, doesn't it?!"

It was a good talk; it looked as if someone was "officially" videoing it, so it may come online at some point. I recorded the audio of when he was speaking about Free Software in schools. I've only got it in AMR format for now (RMS on Free Software in Schools - 7m30s) - not a widely used format outside of mobile phones. If I can convert it, I will do. In the meantime, here is my precis of this part of the talk.

His main point on this topic (which is the subject I hadn't heard him talk about before) was pretty much what one might expect:

• Cheap / Gratis copies of closed-source software for students won't won't become Cheap / Gratis copies of the software in the workplace, certainly not for the companies that the students go to work for.
• Schools should not accept cheap / gratis software, just as they should refuse to accept gratis samples of addictive drugs for their students to experience.
• Schools have a social mission to educate the next generation to be good citizens of a strong, independant, cooperative and free society.
• This means teaching them to use Free, not Proprietary, software.