log of Logfish.net

Met afstuderen komt natuurlijk ook afbetalen, in mijn geval dan. Dus besloot ik op mijn-ib-groep eens te kijken hoe alles er voor staat.

Twee dingen die ik niet leuk vond om te zien: simpele content injection (wel gedeeltelijk ge-escaped, maar toch). Kijk bijvoorbeeld hier. En dat ze als verificatie het ip adres van hun interne proxy laten zien (zie screenshot). Denken ze dan dat ik daar wat mee kan? De paranoia nerd in mij denkt dat de overheid niet te vertrouwen is met computers.

The 5 real reasons to avoid OpenMoko phone:

* OpenMoko software will block calls for free. Some developers are paid, but nobody is the sole authority over what should and shouldn't be fixed.
* OpenMoko endorses and supports none of the used technologies. Essentially nothing works.
* OpenMoko won't expose your whereabouts or provide ways for others to track you. It has no social features what so ever.
* OpenMoko doesn't play patent- and DRM-free formats like Ogg Vorbis and Theora.
* OpenMoko is not the only option. There are better alternatives that respect your time, play free media formats, and let you use software -- like the IPhone 3G.

Further more, even if you can still buy the hardware, all company backed distributions have stalled in their development. Even though the list of distributions is growing, the list of problems (phone locking up, calls failing, messages disappearing) is not shrinking. The OpenMoko company has started yet another project that, what ever it will be, is probably going to fail because of the same problem: you can create, distribute and sell the hardware but it will do nothing without good software. With the FreeRunner they have shown that they don't have the expertise to pull that off. At the hart of this problem, is a proud community which aims to be open and free. This community will never be able to serve normal users because they think freedom and choice should always win over usability and stability.

Many thanks to the FSF for a template to rant about the OpenMoko FreeRunner.

PS In five years or so, I'll use my OpenMoko phone with as much joy as I now use my Linux Desktop and then I'll post a comment saying that all is well in OpenMoko land.

It seams that Ubuntu is starting to become a real company: grab money where you can!

Version of Firefox 3.0 (3.0.12+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu2 by Alexander Sack ) in Ubuntu introduces some new money grabbing features, all part of the "installed by default" Multisearch plugin:

• Searching with the top-right Google plugin is hijacked and sent to the Ubuntu start-page search
• Using search terms in the location bar is hijacked and sent to the Ubuntu start-page search
• Opening a new tab will show the Ubuntu start-page search box instead of whatever you set in the Preferences.

All of these features are installed to create a maximum number of hits on the custom search of Ubuntu, which through the Adsense setup and the partnering keys (partner-pub-2070091971271392:getzo5-xcfi) will push as much traffic (aka money) to Ubuntu.

The OpenMoko mainstream development branch has decided to go with Enlightenment as their main driver behind their GUI toolkit. More precisely, they are developing a new collection of libraries specially for mobile devices. Om2009 is going to be the first release which used Paroli with an FSO back-end.

Choosing FSO is a great thing to do and because almost all the distributions are now using it (or planning to) the bug reports and development effort has finally found a central point to converge.

Jumping into a new language can be allot of fun, but your pervious experiences may hurt you more then they help. A good example of that is jumping into Python with C++ experience and trying to use default arguments. Simply enough you say, after doing some of

You can sit back and think you have seen that all before. However, today I discovered there is actually a twist here. What do you think the following code will produce?

Will the hello ever appear on the standard out?

Here is a stupid, small but working recode script. It recodes flac, mpc, mp3 and m4a to Ogg Vorbis using gstreamer, after recoding the files are placed in the 'old' directory. Really simple, but if you have a large collection of mp3 files you want to recode into low quality Ogg Vorbis files, here is one way to do it.

Why logfish.net? Well, I ran through the freedict dictionary and brute-forced my way to a new dictionary word with not too many letters. Also it has "log" in it, so I thought that was cool.

For historical reasons, I decided to just copy the dict.org defenition and make sure it is kept here for all to see.

Running one of the usual autotools generated configure scripts, I came across this:

So I can actually support one million five hundred seventy two thousand eight hundred and sixty four command-line arguments on my 64 bit Linux. That rocks!

Hmm... I should definitely try to pass the Gutenberg project as a command-line argument to echo now.

The dutch public television hosts some of their programs online at www.uitzendinggemist.nl and they do it using the (yes, how stupid can they be) windows media format.

Because I don't use or own any Microsoft systems, I have to make due with reverse engineered FOSS solutions. No problem there, because gstreamer has a plugin and playing back the media will work most of the time.