Skype Video

I have been using Skype 1 for quite some time for my Voice over IP requirements. Skype 1 is supposed to work on multiple platforms (Windows & Linux). However, I mainly used it on Windows. I tried to install it on Debian Sarge (Linux)and gave up. (Skype on Linux is an OSS application, and is not ALSA-compliant yet.)

I have a Skype story to tell. I was on a business trip to Manila, Phillipines earlier this year. I stayed in a nice hotel. I paid for the Internet surcharge, and was able to get on the Internet. I wanted to call home, and I did not want to incur the ridiculous hotel rate of making long distance overseas phone calls.

I tried to use skype, but my family members were not near the computer at the time. So, I tried to use skype out

Skype Out is a feature that lets you dial out to regular telephone numbers. So, if my wife was home (and she was), she would pick up. It is a PAID feature: you must buy on-line a fixed amount of pre-paid credit. So, I started the surprisingly ardouus on-line process of setup (or more accurately, pay-up). I was eager enough to talk to my wife that I even divulged my credit card number. But, near the end of the process, it asked me to fax in a cancelled cheque. That was the last straw. I did not have a cancelled cheque with me (who would bring a personal cheque with them on a business trip?).

My points are 2: Skype Out is a much cheaper alternative to hotel calling if you were wise enough to set it up while at home; and, why do they have to make it so difficult to set it up?

Now, a beta version of Skype 2 was released recently. It is Skype 1 with Video. It is Windows only. So, I tried to install it on my Win 2003 machine. I guess I did not pay enough attention: Skype 2 is supported on Windows XP only. So, I am out of luck here: not supported on my 2 current machines (Debian Sarge and W2K3).

If you have tried out Skype 2, please let me know what you think.

Firefox 1.5

If you haven't heard already, Firefox 1.5 is out.

So, I upgraded from 1.0 to 1.5. Overall, the upgrade was very smooth. But, you do have to be aware of the extensions. More specifically, not all 1.0 extensions will run on 1.5. In my own experience, I had 10 extensions on Firefox 1.0. Eight of them runs on 1.5 when I did the upgrade(the 2 that did not upgrade marked in Red).

• DOM Inspector
  
• Paste & Go
  
• Ad Block
  
• Linkification
  
• In form Enter
  
• IE View
  
• Tab Browser Preferences
  
• Tab Mix Plus
  
• Nuke Anything Enhanced 0.51
  
• LeechGet Mozilla Menu Extension 0.6.1
  
  

The upgrade program will actually warn you about the extensions that won't upgrade. It would just mark them but not delete them from the list. That is good because a couple of weeks later, I revisited the list, and noticed that an upgrade is available for LeechGet Mozillan Menu Extension (0.7.1), and lo and behold, it does support Firefox release 1.5.

9 out of 10 is pretty good. But if you absolutely cannot live without certain extension, just make sure that it supports 1.5 before you do the upgrade.

Red Hat Off

I have always used the Red Hat Linux distribution; the last Redhat version I used being RedHat Enterprise Linux release 2.

Recently, as my blog attests, I tried the ubuntu Linux LiveCD version. That was my first foray into non-RedHat Linux. The LiveCD system runs a little too slow for me to be useful in day-to-day operations. To be fair, it did warn me about performance, and my machine only had 256M memory at the time. But, I liked it enough that when it came time to build a Linux system, I chose Debian Sarge (ubuntu is based on Debian).

I installed Debian Sarge on a brand new system. I chose the floppy disk install medium due to necessity. No access to CD-burner at the time. The floppy disk method worked. If you had previously installed any Linux distribution, you probably would have no problem installing Debian Sarge.

I have an observation about Debian Sarge. The base install actually installed the very minimum packages. The Debian installer does not let you choose the packages that you want install. You will want to subsequently install any additional packages that you need after the base install. Contrast that with the RedHat I used(Release 6-9), where you can choose what modules to install during the install process. However, with RedHat, I normally would just install all any way.

To install additional packages on Sarge, you use the apt-get (command-line) or Synaptic (GUI). The Synaptic program is just EXCELLENT. It handles all dependencies for you. You can search for packages easily. It is so good that I may just have to write about it in future blog entries.

In fact, I would say that the Debian package manager system is one feature that would keep me from going back to use RedHat.

Clean Download Managers

Earlier, I discussed the download manager I use on Windows, namely LeechGet. Since then, I have been looking for a good Linux download manager.

In my research, I came across this web page that reviews the different software out there. Not all are freeware though; some shareware. The review was done with a strong emphasis on being clean: free of adware/spyware. After all, the review was done by the same people who gave you Spybot Search & Destroy, a very popular privacy software package.

If you are looking for a download manager you should definitely read this. If you already have one, you may still want to check it out to see if what you are using is clean.

What the article recommends is LeechGet, followed by Download Express. Unfortunately, both are Windows Only. I want one that runs on Linux.

Perhaps, I will use WGET which is a great command line tool that runs on both Linux/Windows.

Click here to see review.

Still some More Google Hacks

In a previous blog entry, I introduced 2 Google advanced operators, (aka hacks) site:, and inurl:
I use those 2 hacks quite a bit to quickly find what I want via Google.

There are 2 more hacks that may come in handy. intitle: and filetype:

intitle: specifies keywords that you want included in the title of a web page.

filetype: defines the specific file extension, e.g., filetype:php will only return documents that have the file extension of php.

You can mix the hacks in a query, e.g.,

inurl:softwarejourney filetype:html

You can use boolean operators to narrow your search, e.g., use the not operator ("-"). E.g., -filetype:php

May you find what you are looking for.

Wireless Network Security Tips

I don't operate a wireless network. But, recently, I've taken some interest in wireless network security. After doing some research, I've compiled a list of TO-DOs for better securing a wi-fi network.

• If you have not done it already, change the default SSID for the wireless base stations (Access Points).
  
• Turn off auto SSID broadcast from your base stations.
  
• Make sure that WEP encryption is turned on (many base stations leave it off to improve throughput)
  
• Change the WEP key periodically, if feasible (not too many wireless devices)
  
• Restrict access to wireless network using the network cards' MAC address. This means you need to manually enter the MAC address of each network card into your base station.
  
• Change the default IP subnet that your base station is preset to (192.168.1.0).
  
• Disable the DHCP IP address generation feature of your wireless base station.
  
• Build a firewall between the wireless network and your trusted intranet.
  
• Turn off administrative access over wireless if possible.
  
• Upgrade your wireless network encryption to WPA/TKIP. This may require some geek help.
  

A portion of the above list comes from this article.

Flash Plugin Trouble at Ubuntu LiveCD

I've been booting my PC using the ubuntu LiveCD for the last couple of days. I'll spare you the pain of why, suffice to say I am experiencing a fallout from a Windows problem.

My experience with ubuntu during this trying time is that it did what I wanted to do. I used it check my webmail, and access the Web using Firefox. I was able to access my NTFS files (albeit read-only, but this is a more Linux issue rather than ubuntu-specific).

One problem was that I could not install the Flash plugin for the Firefox browser (1.02). The most obvious (easiest) way did not work: Clicking on the download plugin link on the web site which has flash movies on it.

Then, I started a rather long journey of finding out how. Along the way, I found 2 useful references for general information about ubuntu:

• Unofficial Ubuntu Guide
  
• Support for Proprietary Formats

It looked to me that I needed to install some flashplugin-nonfree directly from some ubuntu universe repositary. To do that, I need to first add that repositary to the package manager. This I could not do after some effort of following instructions given in the above links.

At this time, I gave up, and decided to fix my original problem that led me to use the livecd.

Tabbed Browsing with Firefox

A highly touted feature of the Firefox browsing is tabbed browsing. Basically, tabs allow you to open multiple web pages, each in a different tab. All these web pages are live. You can achieve all this of course with multiple browser windows. But the effort to manage these windows can be painful.

If you are a novice Firefox user, you may wonder where you can find these tabs. When you have only one web page open (such as when you open the browser), no tab bar (or tab) is visible because there is only one tab open.

At this point, if you want to open another web page in a separate tab, you can do a File/New Tab. And then, open the web page, and drag and drop it onto the tab bar.

What I suggest you do is change the value of a Firefox parameter, which will make the tab bar visible all the time (even when only 1 tab is open).

Simply go to Preferences/Advanced/Tabbed Browsing and uncheck the Hide the tab bar when only one web site is open box. With the tab bar open at all times, you can drag & drop a web page onto the bar.

Another bonus of tabbed browsing is that it is now possible to have multiple home pages. To do that, go to the Preferences window (Tools/Options on Windows, Edit/Preferences on Linux), select the General panel, and type the URLs, each separated by a pipe character (|), in the Home Page box. For example, http://softwarejourney.blogspot.com|http://www.google.com/

If you are an IE 6 user, you will find this tab feature useful. but then of course, you can wait until Microsoft releases IE 7 for your platform (Win XP or Win 2003) which will also have the tab feature.

Latest Buzzword: Podcasting

You probably won't find the word podcasting in your printed dictionary. It is a word made up of 2 words iPod and broadcasting (not that you can find IPod in your printed dictionary either).

It is simply the syndicated broadcasting of MP3 files over the web. Think of RSS feeds except substitute text with audio files. Instead of reading about say your commentator on Open Source Software, you will just hear an audio recording, assuming of course that the commentator provides the podcast.

By the way, you don't need to own an IPod to try podcasting. I don't for sure. Most podcasting clients can download directly to iPods. You can also play back those audio files on your computer.

What does it do for you and I? For me, not much. I generally prefer reading over listening for various reasons: it is faster, I can better scan and screen it, etc. I guess I am just a reading type of guy. I also find that again in general to write something requires more mental/cognitive organization than speaking, and so in theory, the result should be of higher quality. Of course, there are exceptions, but then I could screen them out much faster with newsfeeds, can't I?

I did try podcasting out, though. I was curious if and how well Bottomfeeder, my news aggregator supports podcast feeds. It should, because podcast is just another RSS feed with a MP3 file attached.

In fact, it does support it. You add the podcast to bottomfeeder just like you would add any news feed. To listen to the audio, just double click on the MP3 file link under Enclosures.

If you really want a more podcast-specific tool, I heard jPodder is good. It is cross-platform (Linux & Windows). It is a Java tool, so you need Java installed on your PC.

More Google Hacks

A few days ago, I mentioned an advanced Google search operator site: as in site:softwarejourney.blogspot.com. You use the site: operator to match against the domain and the host name. The site: operator does not support port numbers, e.g., www.somesite.com:8080. Also, it will not match the directory or the file name. For those kinds of searches, you need another operator/hack, inurl:.

The inurl: operator will try to match the thing you specify against the characters anywhere along the url, including the port #, the directory, and the filename. For example, if you enter inurl:blog, you may get these results back:

www.somedomain.org/blog/ 
www.blogger.com/
www.peterleung.com/somedir/blog.html

The inurl: operator comes in handy when you know a keyword is in the url (perhaps, even the filename), but the keyword may not be in the title or the body of the HTML document.

Google has become an indispensable tool in my live (and perhaps yours too), and getting more proficient at Google shouldn't hurt.

Blogging about Blog

Folks, it has been over 1 month since I started this blog. It is time to take a step back and evaluate the experience: my blog and my blog host (blogspot).

According to industry studies, the majority of surveyed blogs are temporarily or permanently abandoned: 66.0% of surveyed blogs had not been updated in two months. Of the active ones, fewer than 50,000 were updated daily.

This blog is one of the 50,000. However, I must tell you that it is no stroll in the park. What keeps me going is the readership: the people who actually read the stuff. So far, it is between 20 - 30 per day (an estimate). I suspect that most readers are people I know, but as a fact there are some who wandered into this blog. And God bless these good souls.

That brought me to one major gripe. It has been over a month, but my blog is still not indexed by Google. I have tried several things to get this blog indexed, and hopefully increase readership. Time will tell.

Creating a blog on blogspot is easy. Customizing the look and feel may take some technical skills.

Despite being the top blog host (second being liveJournal), feature-wise, I find it to be wanting. One missing feature is the ability to auto publish blog entries on a future date (although that is on their feature list). Second, the blogs can be more interactive. For example, I'd love to have polls.

It is probably time for me to investigate livejournal and see how it compares in terms of features.(livejournal is built using open source software)

Another annoyance with blogspot is that the google search at the top of the blog does not work. Specifically, it does not search entries in this blog. I submitted a problem report to blogspot, but all I received is a template reply to tell me to check its FAQ.

Which Windows ports are open?

Do you know what ports on your computer are open and listening? An open port means an outside process can potentially connect to your computer through that port.

Many operating systems, by default, try to be as user ready as they possibly can when first installed. Inadvertently, they make it hacker friendly as well. Having more ports open than you need is one example. Windows, especially the older versions, are guilty of this.

So, as a security precaution, you need to identify what ports are currently open, and then decide on whether they should be.

You can run a native Windows tool called netstat (a more powerful version of netstat exists on Linux). netstat is a command line tool. So, open a Windows prompt, and enter
netstat -an

Below is some sample output:

C:\tmp>netstat -an
Active Connections
Proto Local Address      Foreign Address    State
TCP   0.0.0.0:22         0.0.0.0:0          LISTENING
TCP   0.0.0.0:135        0.0.0.0:0          LISTENING
TCP   0.0.0.0:445        0.0.0.0:0          LISTENING
TCP   0.0.0.0:1028       0.0.0.0:0          LISTENING
TCP   0.0.0.0:1032       0.0.0.0:0          LISTENING
TCP   0.0.0.0:1038       0.0.0.0:0          LISTENING
TCP   0.0.0.0:3389       0.0.0.0:0          LISTENING
TCP   127.0.0.1:80       0.0.0.0:0          LISTENING
TCP   127.0.0.1:1031     0.0.0.0:0          LISTENING
TCP   127.0.0.1:1031     127.0.0.1:1032     ESTABLISHED
TCP   127.0.0.1:1032     127.0.0.1:1031     ESTABLISHED
TCP   127.0.0.1:3306     0.0.0.0:0          LISTENING
TCP   192.168.0.41:139   0.0.0.0:0          LISTENING
TCP   192.168.0.41:1038  195.140.142.166:80 CLOSE_WAIT
TCP   192.168.0.41:1974  204.209.205.53:110 TIME_WAIT
UDP    0.0.0.0:445         *:*
UDP    0.0.0.0:1025        *:*
UDP    0.0.0.0:1026        *:*
UDP    0.0.0.0:2967        *:*
UDP    0.0.0.0:38037       *:*
UDP    0.0.0.0:38293       *:*
UDP    127.0.0.1:1332      *:*
UDP    192.168.0.41:137    *:*
UDP    192.168.0.41:138    *:*
UDP    192.168.0.41:500    *:*

The details of how to use the report are beyond the scope of the blog. Suffices to say that you can identify the active ports under the Local Address column.
The port is the number after the colon, e.g, 22, 135, 445 are port numbers.

Unfortunately, netstat (Win 2000) does not tell you the process ID, the service name or the path of the executable. To obtain that kind of information, you need to download another tool: fport

Sample fport output is as follows:

C:\tmp>fport
FPort v2.0 - TCP/IP Process to Port Mapper
Copyright 2000 by Foundstone, Inc.
http://www.foundstone.com
Pid  Process            Port  Proto Path
876  ssh2master-> 22    TCP C:\Program Files\SSH Communications 
Security\SSH Secure Shell Server\ssh2master.exe
1720 apache    -> 80    TCP C:\PROGRA~1\EASYPH~2\Apache\apache.exe
488  svchost   -> 135   TCP C:\WINNT\system32\svchost.exe
8    System    -> 139   TCP
8    System    -> 445   TCP
688  lserver   -> 1028  TCP C:\WINNT\System32\lserver.exe
1532 firefox   -> 1031  TCP C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe
1532 firefox   -> 1032  TCP C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe
1708 EasyPHP   -> 1038  TCP C:\Program Files\EasyPHP1-8\EasyPHP.exe
1608 mysqld    -> 3306  TCP C:\PROGRA~1\EASYPH~2\MySql\bin\mysqld.exe
364  termsrv   -> 3389  TCP C:\WINNT\System32\termsrv.exe
8    System    -> 137   UDP
8    System    -> 138   UDP
8    System    -> 445   UDP
264  lsass     -> 500   UDP C:\WINNT\system32\lsass.exe
708  NSCTOP    -> 1025  UDP C:\Program Files\SSC\NSCTOP.EXE
708  NSCTOP    -> 1026  UDP C:\Program Files\SSC\NSCTOP.EXE
1328 Winamp    -> 1332  UDP C:\Program Files\Winamp\Winamp.exe
624  rtvscan   -> 2967  UDP C:\Program Files\NAV\rtvscan.exe
1116 MsgSys    -> 38037 UDP C:\WINNT\system32\MsgSys.EXE
584  pds       -> 38293 UDP C:\WINNT\system32\cba\pds.exe

It was reported that the version of netstat on Win XP SP2 does provide similar info as fport. I don't have Win XP so I can't try it out. But if you, try this:

netstat -abno

The fport or netstat report is just the first step. From the reports, you need to identify any suspicious active ports, and proceed to shut the corresponding program or Windows Service/daemon down.

What does Google know about me?

Now that I had had this blog (http://softwarejourney.blogspot.com/) for a few weeks, I wondered if Google, the all-knowing web genie, had any knowledge of my humble existence. For your information, blogger.com, the host of my blog, is owned by Google (So, you would think that it was a given).

There are several ways to find out. The obvious is to go to Google, and type in some hopefully unique keywords. Well, the search came back negative. I was in denial mode.

How could I be sure? Google had some interesting, advanced features (otherwise known as hacks).

For instance, enter site:softwarejourney.blogspot.com into Google search. This particular search returns all pages that Google knew about that web site. In addition, you can use the site: parameter together with any keywords that you may have.

The search came back empty, confirming that Google had not detected my blog site yet. Sigh!

If you have any Web presence (a blog, a home page, a forum, etc)at all, you should run the hack against it, site:www.yourdomain.com. This lets you know what Google (and anybody for that matter who cares to find out) knows about you. You may be surprised about certain web pages or files that you did not know are available on the Web.

It is a privacy defense tool (used by you), but also a privacy enemy (used maliciously by someone else).

Selectively Revealing the HTML Source

GEEK Alert:

All browsers I've ever used let you examine the source HTML code of a web page. With Firefox, there is a neat, little feature.

You can view the source code for a specific region on a web page. Just choose your mouse to select a region that can include graphics. Then, right click and select View Selection Source from the menu. The HTML code that corresponds to the selected region will be displayed in the browser.

It is that convenient.

Google Maps

For longest time, I have been happily using mapquest to find driving instructions and map information. Lately, there has been a lot of buzz about Google Maps because of the reputed innovation in web interaction design. So, I figure that I should take a peek.

GEEK Alert:

Google Maps is an application that uses a set of technologies known as AJAX. AJAX, or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, provides a more responsive (faster), and richer user interace for web applications that approaches what we experience and expect of desktop applications.

I was immediately sold on Google Maps. What can I say, it is the cool factor again.

Google Maps is still officially beta right now. But it is certainly good enough for me. I think I will be using it for the next little while, not so much that it offers any mapping-specific features that mapquest doesn't but more for the user interface experience.

Sorry, mapquest.

Can I feed on this page?

In an earlier article, we discussed one way to tell if a web page has a corresponding newsfeed. Namely, look for a RSS/atom/XML icon to appear on the web page.

If Firefox is your browser, then there is an additional way. A lightning icon will appear in the status bar at the lower right corner if the web page has a RSS or atom feed. Clicking the icon will automatically add this web page to the news aggregator that comes with Firefox. Incidentally, I do not use the Firefox news aggregator(but from what I gather from others' comments, it is a good, basic tool). So, I don't click the lightning icon. What I do is copy the URL of the web page, and paste it into the aggregator that I do use: bottomfeeder. Bottomfeeder is smart enough to automagically discover the URL of any news feeds associated with the page.

If you want to try out the default Firefox news aggregator, see this article for some tips and instructions.

Keeping up ...

As I am using more and more open source software, I found it harder and harder to keep up-to-date with each project. How do I efficiently find out if a package has a newer release? I have been trying to visit the project web sites once in a while. This method is neither systematic nor labour saving.

The job of keeping up has been made easier for many software packages by the use of feeds. Most of the open-source packages I use are hosted on sourceforge. For instance, windirstat, the software we looked at yesterday. Sourceforge projects have project update feeds. I found that these feeds are generally of low-volume. Why not give it a try? Use RSS to get the updates.

To find out the feed URL, you must go to the project's Project Summary Page. For windirstat, it is http://sourceforge.net/projects/windirstat/.
You should find a link labeled View list of RSS feeds available for this project. Click on the RSS feeds link. Then, click the XML icon for Project news releases (including full text if you wish). Copy and paste the URL into a news aggregator (such as bottomfeeder).

The tasks of identifying and feeding the URLs into bottomfeeder are not that painful, and the payoff is very good. You will no longer need to visit each web site to find out if there is a newer release. And you will never miss the next super-duper release of your favourite software. Welcome to the quick(er) pace of open source software development, and many happy returns.

Do you know what is on your hard drive?

Up till now, Windows Explorer was my main (and only) tool for finding information about the contents of a hard drive. It served me reasonably well except in a few situations.

One situation is tallying the total size of a folder. The Windows Explorer on Win 2000 can quite handily tell you the size of a partition, and of an individual file. However, when it comes to folders, the size that it reports only includes the files that are immediately in that folder. If the folder has subfolders, you need to bring up the Properties of the parent folder, and then it will slowly tally up the total size. I don't use Win XP. So, I can't say if the Explorer on Win XP was any improvement.

Another situation is when your disk is filling up, and you need to search and destroy the big files that are eating up disk space. If Explorer is all you have, you have a lot of work to do.

A great complement to Windows Explorer is windirstat. windirstat is a disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool for Windows.

When you fire up windirstat, it prompts you for the drive or folder that you want analyzed. The results are displayed in 3 views: the Explorer-like view, the extension view which summarizes the data by the file extensions, and the treemap view where each file is graphically depicted as a block in a color-coded map.

Using the color-coded treemap, you can quickly and visually pick out the biggest files. Because the views are linked, you can click on a block in the treemap, and the corresponding file will be highlighted in the Explorer view. This is a quick way to identify the biggest files on your hard drive. Now, you can choose to delete the file from the Explorer view.

Another example of how the views are linked is that you can click on an extension in the extension view, and all blocks in the treemap with that file extension will be highlighted.

I was happy to know that windirstat supports not only ASCII but also Unicode filenames. That is a big plus for those who use non-English languages.

For tools that can potentially traverse your entire hard drive, one naturally is concerned about its stability and scalability.

Regarding stability, the project is classified as Production/Stable in the SourceForge system. From the web comments, and our own experience (albeit short), there is nothing that suggests to me otherwise.

Regarding scalability, I ran windirstat against all my partitiions (37G of actual data). It took about 3 minutes on a slow Duron (800MHz, 256M) machine to analyze all 120,000 files. The TreeMap was amazingly usable, even with that many files, to give a visual representation of the disk space allocation.

I like the tool, not only because it does what it is supposed to do, but also it was fun while I was doing it.

A Listing of Open Source (Linux) Software

Recently, I came across a web page that lists the Linux equivalents of various Windows software. It caught my eye because the web master had taken the time to categorize the software, such as Networking, Desktop. Better, the list seemed to be maintained over time.

For those Linux users among us, you will find a source of open software. For Windows users, you may find that some of the Linux software have Windows ports as well.

For those who are into security, thanks to Clara Y, you may want to see this page for a list/commentary on free security software.

First Attempt at Organizing Digital Picture Files

I managed to upload all my digital photographs from my digital camera to my PC. So, all 200+ photos (jpg files) are now sitting in some folder somewhere. So, what next?

The first thing I wanted to do was to look at each picture, and then decide what to do with it.

As a Windows user, I just double clicked the first image file. Depending on what program the jpg file extension was associated with, either a browser window or a graphics program would fire up with the selected picture open. In my case, it was Firefox browser.

That was all fine. Next, I wanted to take a look at the next picture. So, I fiddled my way through all the open windows to find the next file, and repeated the above procedure. The result was another new window open for that file. Pretty soon, I was spending more time finding the right window (and killing the old ones) than looking at and admiring the pictures themselves!

Luckily, Derek P., a friend of this blog, pointed me to this software: irfanview.

irfanview (version 3.97, Windows-only) is described as a image viewer on its website. That is a little too modest because it can also do some simple editing tasks, e.g, converting from 1 format to another, convert from color to greyscale, cropping/rotating the image, etc. For a fancier feature set, you need to move up to something like a Gimp2 which we featured earlier in this blog.

To move through a directory, open any image file in that directory in irfanview. After you have it open, you may want to click View/Display Options, and choose Fit Images to Desktop. Depending on your picture and your screen's resolution, the default Fit Window to Image may require you to scroll to see the whole picture. Then click the left or right arrow to go back or forward 1 image file at a time.

Although you can do the navigating in Windows Explorer, you need to manage all the open windows, and keep track of what files you have visited and yet to visit. The advantage of irfanview is that it will do that for you and you don't need to do any prior preparation.

Besides just viewing the pictures, irfanview can also automatically create a slide show for you. You don't need to import the files into Powerpoint or OpenOffice Presentation. It is really handy.

irfanview amounts to my first attempt to organize my digital photos. It worked quite well for the simple objective of just going over the pictures one by one. Soon after, I wanted to further organize my pictures into a more structured photo album or gallery. I will go over the software I now use for that purpose in a later blog entry.

Feed or NO Feed?

How do I know if a web site has a feed or not that my news aggregator (BottomFeeder) can use?

Usually, the web page that has a feed available will have an small icon labeled with one of RSS/RSS 1/RSS 2/Atom/XML. RSS and Atom are 2 different XML-based newsfeed formats. Alternatively, you may just see a link labeled something like Feed/Newsfeed/Sitefeed (this blog has a sitefeed link).

If you click on the icon or link, you will see some XML code in your browser. That is NOT what you are interested in. What you want is the URL. So, copy the URL from the browser and paste it into BottomFeeder.

google newsfeeds finally

I get my daily dose of news from Google News Canada. I go to the google news website every time (sometimes multiple times a day, depending on how much time I have).

On Aug 10, 2005, google announced the availability of newsfeeds. The feeds are available in either rss or atom format. Promptly, I added the Canadian newsfeed to My Subscription List in my BottomFeeder. Worked like a charm.

Can this Fox find stuff?

Often, I use my Firefox browser to search for some word or phrase on a web page. The keyboard shortcut is Control-F (same as IE).

Firefox opens a flat, narrow Find bar at the bottom of the browser window. This is a great improvement over IE which opens a Find window which obstructs the contents of the browser.

Clara Y in her comment on an earlier Firefox blog entry raised a good issue with Firefox: it can't search within textareas on a HTML form.

One thing I still haven't figured out from FireFox is that if I am editing a page with an editable textarea inside (eg. editing wiki page, commenting textarea on blogger), it does not allow me to perform a find (Ctrl-F) within the context inside the textarea even with focus on in the editable textarea while performing the find; on the other hand, IE has no problem with that - able to perform find on parent’s content and its context inside editable textarea.

You may try it by

1. Clicking onto "comments" hyperlink of this blog


2. Type a word that doesn't exit outside the textarea


3. Ctrl-F, and find the word you have just typed into the textarea

Clara Y also rightly pointed out that IE has no problem searching within textarea.

It is true that Firefox has some problems with HTML form fields in general, and the Find within form fields is one example. The firefox developer community is aware of the problem, and I hope a future release will resolve this problem.

In the meantime, though, you can do this: after you do a Find, click Highlight in the Find bar. This will highlight all occurences of the keywords within the textarea in yellow.

If the textarea is long, you may have to scroll up and down, and you cannot use the Find Next or Find Previous buttons.

So, this is kind of kludgy, and may not be exactly what you want, but hopefully, it will be sufficient until they fix it.

For the paranoid

Most security-conscious web sites provide a md5 checksum file for each downloadable file. Occasionally, you may also see a SHA1 checksum file (for the really paranoid).

SHA 1 stands for Secure Hash Algorithm 1. It is a newer, and safer hashing algorithm than md5. (For the geeks among us, md5 is 128-bit; sha1, 160-bit.)

Again, for Linux users, to compute a sha1 checksum for a file, enter

sha1sum /path/to/file

For Windows users, you need to install extra software. Luckily, digestit (the software mentioned yesterday) supports both sha1 and md5.

While md5 is secure enough, if a file you are about to download has both md5 and sha1 checksums, you may want to use the sha1.

Download with Peace of Mind

So you finally decide to download some open-source software, say gimp2, from some web site. You now notice that the file you are about to download has a corresponding MD5 file (or MD5sum). The md5sum file contains some weird looking string of characters like 86e676934455864c42b42b342406c26b. So, what is this MD5 business?

MD5 is a Message Digest algorithm which calculates an unique checksum (the weird characters) based on the contents of a file. You use it to verify the integrity of the file you downloaded. After you download a file, you run a MD5 checker/decoder on the downloaded file to calculate its checksum. Then, you compare the 2 checksums, and if they are not equal, then the file you downloaded was somehow corrupted (not the same as the intended file).

If you are a Linux user, it is a breeze to compute the checksum of the downloaded file. Just enter:

md5sum /path/to/file.

If you are a Windows user, you need to download and install the md5sum utility. There are several Windows implementation of md5sum. I use the command line interface version as part of the
Win32 ports of GNU tools. The md5sum executable is within the Core Utilities package. Download the package here.

Alternatively, download digestit which provides a GUI frontend to md5sum. This may be a better choice for many because it is more straightforward to install, and has a graphical front-end. The Microsoft Installer for digestit is found here. Running the installer is quick and painless.

To use digestit to verify a checksum, right click the file you just downloaded, and choose digestIT 2004/Verify MD5 Hash. Then, paste in the target MD5 checksum that you obtain from the web site.

md5sum is a basic security tool that you need if you ever download anything from the net. You may find yourself with that much more peace of mind.

Interesting READ

While I hope to avoid spilling on the philosophical or business aspects of open source in this blog (there are plenty elsewhere already), I may occasionally just point you to an excellent read.

The Cathedral and the Bazaaris a most interesting read on the open source way of doing things (culture). In this collection of essays, Eric Raymond, a reputed open source guru, contrasted what he called the cathedral model of building software (used by the proprietary commercial companies) against the bazaar model (used by the open source community).

You don't need a computer science degree to appreciate the contents, but you will go away much happier if you are at least a "power user", and possess a keen interest in technology.

You can buy the book from a bookstore, or download it straight from the author's web site.

Faster, Safer Downloads with firefox

firefox has a built-in, default download manager. It is good for
small downloads. If you download something big (like the
586MB ubuntu iso CD image), then you really need a third-party
download manager/accelerator. I don't wish anyone to
repeat the same experience I had the other day when after an overnight download, it crashed at 90% complete.

Below, I review 2 download managers. These 2 Windows-only software
are quite similar in features. Both speed up your large downloads,
and will auto-resume if something unexpected interrupts your
download. Also, both support Firefox as well as IE.

• leechget


• DAP

leechget is available in 2 versions: Personal Edition (free for private use but only one download at a time), and the Premium Edition (for commercial use and you can have multiple simultaneous downloads).

Download Accelerator Plus (DAP) also comes in 2 versions: a free but
ads-supported version, and a non-free, no-ads premium version.

I tried out both the leechget Personal, and the DAP personal versions.
My privacy program (Spybot-S&D) picked up the DAP ads as spyware, but it could not delete the corresponding Windows registry entries. I tried to uninstall DAP, but DAP did not seem to want to be uninstalled cleanly. Even after I finally uninstalled it, spybot still reported the same spyware entries. I finally resorted to manually
delete the DAP Window entries!

I prefer leechget personal over DAP.

If you use leechget with firefox , you need to download the
Mozilla/Netscape/Opera Plug-in, in addition to the leechget
installer itself. This plug-in automatically intercepts any file download, and hands over the job to leechget instead of the
default firefox download manager. You should install the plugin to C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\plugins.

A feature I like about leechget is that I can specify how many pieces that leechget should split the file into for simultaneous transfer. For example, in an idle system, I can specify that it uses 6 tasks (max 20) to download a file.

The bottom line is that I don't want to pay for a download manager, and I like leechget enough that I decide I can live with downloading one file at a time.

There are many download managers out there. If you want a tool that works on both Linux and Windows, and you prefer the command-line interface rather than GUI, then you want to check out
wget. Alert: wget is for geeks only.

Fox on Fire

Firefox is a cool web browser. It has been my main browser since release 1.0 (latest 1.0.6).

Different people switch to firefox for different reasons, be it better security, cross-platform support (including ubuntu Linux), custom skins, the "cool" factor, etc. A more recent motivation is viability. If you are a Windows user, you need to ask this question: will IE 7, the upcoming version of IE, still run on your current Windows platform? If you are running Windows 2000, then you should be sweating.

Tomorrow, I will go over a helper package that I definitely think you should download if you are using firefox: a download manager.

Linux galore

If you want to keep up-to-date on Linux but you only have time to regularly monitor one web site, then I highly recommend this one:
Linux Admin Portal

While Linux is clearly its main focus, it also features articles on general computing, system administration, and software development. It has reviews, how-tos as well as news articles. I found something useful almost every time I visit that site.

Unfortunately, it does not provide a RSS newsfeed. But, the contents still keep me going there every day.

Digital camera. Now what?

Now that I had finally purchased my first digital camera, and took
some pictures, I looked for some cool things I could do with the image
files.

How about editing them with gimp2?

If you run a recent Linux distribution (e.g., ubuntu), most
likely, it already pre-installs GIMP for you. For the rest of us,
installing GIMP 2.2.8 on Windows was fairly straight-forward. The
stuff you need to download can all be found
here. You will need to first download, unzip, and run the install of the GTK+ Runtime Environment (the graphical library that GIMP uses). Then, you need to do the same for the GIMP for Windows Installer. While there, you may as well download the GIMP Help package file (the on-line GIMP help file).

For someone like me who was not much of a graphic artist,
and did not have much experience with drawing software, it took some getting used to before I became somewhat proficient. The best way to learn was probably go through the excellent tutorials on
the web site. Of special interest to me was the Photo Editing section
of tutorials. A quick search on google listed many other tutorials on
gimp.

I found the time invested in learning GIMP was well worth it. Happy photo-editing!

ubuntu Linux LiveCD

Recently, I've heard so much about ubuntu ("linux for human beings"), and Linux LiveCD. So, I decided to give it a try. Why Not? Especially, the word around was that they give out ubuntu CDs for free, and even pay for the postage.

By the way, a Linux Live CD is where you can run Linux completely off a CD like a RAM DISK, without having to install anything on a hard drive.

Order those free CD sets here

After about a month, the CDs arrived - to my great delight (who says there is no free lunch in this world). The shipped version was ubuntu 5.04 (codenamed Hoary Hedgehog) for Intel x86. Each set comprises of 2 CDs - a LiveCD and an Install CD. Use the LiveCD unless you want to install ubuntu the traditional way - on your hard drive.

The boot up using the Live CD took about 5 minutes on my computer (AMD Duron 850MHZ, 256M RAM). This was a little bit too long for me to use regularly.

One interesting note was that you should connect the computer to the Internet (plug in your LAN cable) while you boot up the LiveCD. For one, I noticed that it connected to some ubuntu server to synchronize the time.

After booting up, I was in Gnome desktop. I could immediately use some familiar and some useful applications like Firefox, OpenOffice, GIMP. Good!

The screen resolution was set by default to 640 x 480, and I could not change it using the gnome tool. I guess the install somehow had trouble with my graphics card.

The time was set to the correct GMT but not adjusted to my particular time zone (the install never asked about what time zone I was in). I used the clock display to specify the time zone. However, the correct time was not reflected in the clock display.

I wanted to sign on as root (default is ubuntu account which was empowered to sudo). This simple task was apparently made difficult by design. You cannot login as root directly to the desktop. You can open a root window while logged in as ubuntu. You can also do sudo.

All in all, the ubuntu LiveCD is definitely a no risk and pretty good way to feel out Linux as a Windows replacement. As a power Linux user, you may want to look elsewhere. Also, ubuntu is really geared towards the Linux desktop. If you are looking for a Linux distribution to run as a server, look elsewhere again.

Counting the Dead (Pixels) on your LCD

So, you just shelled out the big bucks ($) for a brand new LCD screen. You brought it home, and set it up. You recalled coming across this thing called the Dead Pixel Policy from the manufacturer (or your friend might have mentioned it to you). Most manufacturers have a warranty policy for a display that has more than a certain number (typically 0 to 8) of dead pixels.

What is a dead pixel, and how do I know if a pixel is dead?

An LCD screen is composed of hundreds of thousands of pixels or dots on the screen. Each dot relies on 3 valves (red, green, blue) to display color. A dead pixel is simply a defective one that does not display the intended color properly.

To determine if (or how many) dead pixels there are on your LCD,
download this Windows-only tool:
Dead Pixel Buddy

Extract the only file dpb.exe from the zip file. And simply double click it to run it.

Click the 5 colours in turn on the left hand side. Say, you click the colour black. Then, visually examine the screen, and count # of dots that are not of colour black. To pick the next colour, hit Esc, and then click next colour.

I found the tool very user friendly.

BottomFeeding my Own Blog

It just dawns on me that Bottomfeeder should feed on my own blog. First, I needed to get the newsfeed URL for my blog. I clicked on the Site Feed link, and then just copied the URL from the browser url field.

Then, I fired up Bottomfeeder, and added the feed to My Subscriptions.

Simple, and it works.

RSS Reader - Bottom Feeder

I wanted to finally install an RSS viewer on my Windows desktop. After using Google to see what other people are using, I decided to give bottomfeeder a try. My requirements were pretty simple: it must work, and it must be simple. I don't subscribe to that many newsfeeds (only 4). I was attracted to it because it runs on both Linux and Windows. The fact that it was implemented using Smalltalk raised a flag initially. Does it run fast enough? Will it install easily on Windows?
It turns out that the answer to both questions are YES.

I just have one small beef against it regarding the installation/configuration. The default configuration subscribed me automatically to TOO MANY newsfeeds than I cared for. I had to manually delete all but one newsfeed.

This software is loaded with features. I must admit that I did not spend much time in learning all the features. I did not need to because I learned what I had to in 5 minutes. I subscribed to 3 additional newsfeeds by right-clicking My Subscriptions and chose Add Feed.

At the beginning of each work day, I start bottomfeeder up. Those newfeeds that have unread articles in them are automagically highlighted in RED. I click on the newsfeed to display the article titles. Again, individual unread articles are highlighted in RED. I can view a summary of an article by clicking once on the title. I can render the entire page in my default browser by double clicking the title.

After I am done with a newsfeed, then I click on the newsfeed link with My Subscriptions, and choose Mark Feed, then Mark all feed items as Old. Then, I am ready for my next dose of RSS news.

I have been using it daily for 1 week, and I am happy with it. Overall, the software installs easily, and is fairly user friendly. It is good enough for me.