Mimor

Everyone knows them. The so-called ‘funny’ mails.
Most of the time they contain a hoax, a big-ass picture, a power-point presentation or a video clip.
On top of this, they usually also contain a huge list of mail-addresses from people you don’t even know.

By this post, I’d like to point out that not all people like these mails unlike what some people tend to think.
Consider that there are people that get a lot of serious mail. (yes, it can be used in such manner)
You might not be aware of it, but reading all those mails take an huge amount of time.
These people are constantly fighting against unwanted messages as it consumes way too much time.
This is not such a big deal, but it gets harder if their mail-address is being used in a inappropriate way.

By inappropriate I mean that their mail-address, along with a lot of other addresses, is put inside the ‘cc:’ field, making it visible to all people ever receiving that mail.
If you’re not aware of the implications, just imagine that your home address or your cell-number is published instead of your mail address.
Some people use this medium for work related communications or for serious business. The so funny mails become quite annoying in this context.
In the end, they are unwanted messages, also called spam.

I understand that you might want to share the funny stuff with people you know.
But take some actions to prevent spamming people.

Things you can do

• Use the BCC: field to place the mail-addresses in.
  This will prevent you from distributing people’s address to the world.
  You can do this in Outlook .
• Think twice when forwarding a mail to your contacts.
  Differentiate people that use the mail-system for social contacts and those that use it for serious business.
  You can do this by making distribution listsin Outlook or Windows Live (alias hotmail), categorizing these people.
  This makes it also faster and easier to send the mails.
• If someone answers your mail asking you to stop sending this kind of mails, don’t ignore it.
  That person will possibly just block all your mails, resulting in the ignorance of serious mails.

For an overview of the email etiquette you can check out this website for a nice and comprehensive list of things you should know before using any mail-system.

When you have multiple computers on your desk, it can be very annoying to switch keyboard an mouse each time you want to do something on one of the other computers.
So, you can solve this by just using one keyboard and one mouse for multiple computers without buying a hardware switch.
Synergy is a package, available from the repository that lets you share the mouse and keyboard over a range of different computers.
When synergy is active, your keystrokes will be send to the machine where your cursor is currently positioned.
The cursor will slide from screen to screen just as if you are working on one single system with multiple screens attached.
As far as I know, it’s not possible to drag windows from one machine to another. Which would be nice.
So if you’re a programmer and you’re still searching for a useful project, then this is just your bit.

Here is how you can easily start sharing your keyboard and mouse between different computers and screens using synergy on Ubuntu:

First off, install the synergy package and the QuickSynergy packages on each machine you want to use your pointer on with the command:

sudo apt-get install quicksynergy

Note that apt will install the synergy package as it’s required to run QuickSynergy. (QuickSynergy is in fact just a gui for Synergy)
When it’s installed, you’ll find QuickSynergy under the category ‘accessories’ in the application menu.

On the server:

The server is the computer where the used keyboard and mouse are attached to.
In the Share tab fill in the names of the computers where you want your keyboard and mouse to be operational.
Do not fill in the IP address, it won’t work.

To find out the name of your computer(s), open a terminal and type:

hostname

If all the hostnames are put in the right place, start the service by clicking ‘Execute’
Note that the window becomes gray.
You can now just minimize it and let it do it’s work.

On the client:

On the Client, fire up the QuickSynergy app and go to the Use tab.
Fill in the hostname of the server.
Note that you can also enter its IP, but know that when you’re using dynamic IP adresses, you’ll have to reconfigure this each time you fire up Synergy.

Then just hit execute and minimize the window.
Now you can remove your keyboard and mouse from this computer.

When moving the mouse outside the window to the side you’ve configured the other computers position on the server, you’ll see your pointer go ‘troug’ the space between the two computers and appear on the other screen.
Als handy to know is that the clipboard is shared.
So you can actually copy something on machine 1 and paste it on machine 2. (text that is, don’t try this with data)

Note:
Synergy uses an unencrypted TCP/IP stream on port 24800. So if you’re on a network you can’t entirely trust, don’t use it unless you encrypt it.
I would even recommend ALL users using a wifi-network to encrypt the connection.
To Encrypt the Synergy data, you can simply follow the guide on their website.

I installed Ubuntu Server 8.04 inside a VirtualBox (v 2.4.1_OSE) virtual machine.
The installation went smooth, but when I wanted to boot into my Ubuntu Server, it returned the following error right after GRUB:

This kernel requires the following features not present on the cpu: 0:6
Unable to boot – please use a kernel appropriate for your CPU

Screenshot or it didn’t happen?

How to solve:

This can be easily resolved by enabling the PAE/NX option in the virtual machine’s settings.
This will expose the PAE of your CPU to the virtual machine.

Just:

1. go to the homescreen of Virtualbox
2. select your virtual machine
3. click the ‘settings’ button on top of the screen
4. click the tab ‘Advanced’
5. check the box next to ‘PAE/NX’

Like in this screenshot:

Now, you can fire up your virtual machine again, and it will start up without this error.

GRUB is one of the most common used bootloader on linux.
So, when using linux, and you’re a bit interesting in ‘what’s under the hood’,  it’s the first thing you want to learn about.

When you turn on your computer, the bios will start the bootstrap procedure from the primary boot-device.
(If you’re planning to run a LiveCD, you might make that your CD/DVD-rom drive)
A bootstrap is in fact nothing else than having a small program, so that this can load a bigger one.
That’s the thing GRUB does, in short!
What you should remember, is that it’s important, and you would not like to break it.
If you do, you’ll render your hardisk unbootable.

So the first thing you want to do, is back up your MBR!
Why not just GRUB?
The MBR is a 512-byte segment, the first sector, on your harddisk.
GRUB takes 446 bytes, the partition table takes 66 bytes
and the 2 remaining bytes are for a signature.
You might want to keep these 3 intact.

Read the rest of this entry »

After I installed Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) I noted that my keypad didn’t work anymore.
I never searched to fix this bug as I’m not using it that often. (The top-row number are far more efficient to use)
My first laptop (dell latitude d820) made me learn how to work without the numeric part. Afterwards, this was not such a bad thing. Typing without using the keypad makes typing much quicker. You should give it a try some day!

But now my girlfriend wanted to use my computer to do some internet banking, which uses quite a lot of numeric digits to get authorized, and thus I have to fix it.
It seems like this is a problem in X.org.
This bug has already been registered on Launchpad with the number #197589.
The quick work around is disabling the “Pointer can be controlled using the keypad”-option in your keyboard settings.
Or just disable it by hitting “Ctrl + Alt + Num Lock”
There, that solved the problem… not that hard, but handy to know

I was looking at the stats for mimor.be and I was a bit surprised to see these easy attempts to compromise data from the website.
There were several 404 errors returned on files with names such as:

• /packet.mdb
• /wwwroot.zip
• /shop.rar
• /shop.zip
• /site.rar
• /web.rar
• /web.zip
• /www.zip
• /www.rar
• /tomdb.mdb
• /shop.mdb
• /shoes.rar
• /wwwroot.rar
• /HSH.mdb
• /site.zip
• /HYTop.mdb

Read the rest of this entry »

Try this:

Explain to the average home-user why he/she can’t use the microsoft guidelines while putting their contacts from gmail to a non-English version of Outlook.
Don’t bother trying to explain why it can’t be pulled in just like the emails.

Ever wanted to test something on another platform than the current one you’re on?
Needed to take screenshots of a windows environment  while having a *nix-only network?
Then you might consider running the extra OS as a guest in a virtual machine.

There are lots of different ways to do this on Ubuntu.
You might want to use VMware, Xen, KVM, Iguest, rhyp, UML, qemu, OpenVZ, … catch my drift? Read the rest of this entry »