DenisPetrov.com

I just obtained a piece of anecdotal evidence that the demonstrably low market share of Linux is at least partially due to the very low level of awareness of the platform among the great unwashed. Even among techies there are few who feel the need or desire to keep updated on the latest developments in the Linux-land.

I had a conversation with our intern about relative security of computing platforms while cleaning a zero-day Trojan infection from his Windows PC. He was looking to buy a computer for college, and had a choice between an “expensive” Mac and a  ”troublesome” PC laptop.

I gave him a few good reasons why he should get a Mac (no viruses, more stable, better usability, better quality of hardware) and also showed him some basic stuff on my Ubuntu desktop at work which I have been using for development. That left quite an impression and I thought that if more people became aware how easy and useful an Ubuntu PC can be, Linux market share would be way more than the paltry 1%.

So the mission now is to give Ubuntu CDs to all friends to try out.

After millions of dollars and years of development, rumors, delays and media leaks Microsoft finally delivered its latest “innovation” – drum roll please – a feature phone! Yaaaaaay!

In this light the latest Microsoft’s move of bullying HTC into licensing its patents because it would be getting a “free ride” on Microsoft’s “innovations” is silly and cynical. It’s another clear example, on one hand, how dysfunctional and contrary to its stated goals the patent system has become, and on another, how it has been hijacked by the likes of Microsoft to help protect large monopolies and put a brake on true innovation and progress. Sad, sad day.

Here I am, blogging from my HTC Eris using the WordPress Android app I just downloaded. Hopefully this will help me keep the site updated.

Wow, it’s been a while since last update! Anyway, here’s something curious for you – if you look at http://gs.statcounter.com/, you’ll see the market share of IE steadily declining, that of Firefox staying about the same, and Chrome steadily rising, suggesting IE users switching to Chrome, not Firefox.

I have a possible explanation – it’s the clever way Chrome installation works. To install and update Chrome, you don’t need admin rights on Windows systems – it installs all files into user profile, which means that all the corporate users logging on with limited permissions to corporate systems can install and use Chrome themselves, and all the security patches will be applied silently without anyone noticing, including the IT departments.

Firefox installation and updates require administrative account, and so far there has been no official way to distribute patches throughout corporate networks. While administrators would love to provide users an alternative to IE due to its atrocious security record, the pain of keeping Firefox updated is obviously greater than dealing with IE’s security issues.

The browser has matured to the point where it can be used daily for most browsing. The last hold-back was the lack of Flash, which is working now, and really the only thing missing is AdBlock.

CNet reports that researchers from Carnegie Mellon University found out that users ignore “Invalid certificate” warnings:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10297264-83.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5

The conclusion? Use essentially an external rating system that would ignore certificate validity and use a database to look up benign and dangerous web sites.

I think the real problem is that certificates are simply too expensive. Drop the prices, make a valid certificate mandatory for HTTPS by default, and provide a way to obtain valid certificates for free for intranet use, and the problem will go away on its own.

Which will probably be the dorkiest of all places. Expect a wave of jokes that begin with the words “Three geeks walk into a Microsoft store…”

Well, technically there is still one and a half months to go, but it is close enough.

What has changed from the original configuration?

• Upgraded memory to 4GB
• I bit the bullet and reformatted the hard drive to upgrade Ubuntu from the original 32-bit Feisty 7.04 to 64-bit Hardy 8.04
• Updated BIOS from 1.0.3 to 1.0.15 to utilize all of the available memory – without the update, it reported only 3.2GB

64-bit Hardy feels faster and it took care of the minor annoyances I had with the original setup. It takes about 40 seconds between grub showing up and being able to click on something on the desktop.

I initially tried to upgrade Ubuntu to 7.10 and then to 8.04. The first upgrade went flawlessly, but the second choked up on some package dependencies that wouldn’t resolve, which made GUI unusable and after poking around for an hour or so I decided that fixing it was not worth my time: I wanted to upgrade to 64-bit system anyway, and I felt that even if I eventually fixed the problem there might still remain small glitches that could make life difficult. So I made a backup of my files, took a deep breath and made a fresh install of 64-bit Ubuntu 8.04, which was uneventful except that I had to add irqpoll kernel boot option.

BTW, I also installed Hardy on my little Fujitsu P1120 laptop, and it automatically installed drivers for the touchscreen and Linksys PC-card wireless adapter! Although the touchscreen needs calibration, the mere fact that it’s supported is huge. The laptop is almost 5 years old now and Hardy is too heavy for its 800MHz Cruzoe and 240MB of RAM, and I need a replacement. The manufacturers finally woke up and smelled the coffee, and Fujitsu squandered a wonderful opportunity to jumpstart the market. As far as I know P1120 was the first in the form factor of current Netbooks (feels nice to be ahead of the curve by 4 years :) and it has always been a conversation starter. Now I am waiting for the perfect device to take its place.

I use two tools to gather usage statistics on my site. One is Analog, which is a simple web server log analysis tool provided by my web host, and I also subscribe to Google Analytics, which only registers a hit if a visitor’s browser executes a bit of JavaScript code embedded into my web pages. (more…)

In Windows, if you right-click on a folder and select Properties, one of the useful things that you get is the sum of sizes of all files contained in the folder and its sub-folders. It may take a while if there are a lot of files and folders. This number can be very useful in certain situations. For example, when copying a large hierarchy of files from one place to another during backup or relocation, it helps to check that all files were copied successfully, and one of these checks is to compare the total size of data in source and destination.

When copying between Windows and Linux, the problem is that while Gnome does provide a similar feature,  the size reported is not precise and it includes sizes of folders as well. To get the same size as reported by Windows, go to command line, change to the root of the directory hierarchy you need the total file size for, and type

find -type f -printf "%s\n"|awk '{sum+=$0}END{print sum}'

Thanks goes to ghostdog74 and others at LinuxQuestions.org