Charles Curley's Weblog

According to the Beeb, Sony will stop selling floppy disks in 2011.

Yawn.

I found it amusing that the photo captioned "The first floppy disk was introduced in 1971 by IBM" showed a 3.5" floppy, not the 8" floppy IBM introduced way back then. Maybe the Beeb didn't have any stock photos handy? Maybe the editor didn't know the difference?

Speaking of which, I think I still have some 8 inchers out in my garage somewhere. I might be able to find them if someone is really desperate.

Yet another list of software one should have on one's computer. In this case The Register's Ten free apps to install on every new PC. The unstated assumption is, of course, that you are installing these on a Windows machine.

Still, it was an interesting read, and so were some of the comments (El Reg readers are not noted for obsequious deference to the writers). Apple's Itunes? It's not on my list more because I'm wary of the Mac fanboi cult of St. Jobs than anything specific. Besides, how could I have any opinion at all on an app that doesn't run on Linux?

It was nice to see OpenOffice.org (not, as The Register has it, "OpenOffice") at the top of the list. And a good (non-ideological) argument for preferring it to the M$ Office copy that apparently comes with a lot of Windows computers these days.

OpenOffice.org and others on the list run on Windows and on Linux. So if you are contemplating making the Big Switch, these are good places to start. These are the ones I recognized as Linux apps:

• OpenOffice.org
• Pidgin
• Skype, although Skype for Linux is usually a revision or two behind Skype for Windows.
• VLC

The others either have Linux analogs (Evince for Foxit) or don't need one (Microsoft Security Essentials).

#! /bin/sh

# pre, a script to scan the rpm or deb database for package names.

# Time-stamp: <2009-11-06 09:11:03 ccurley pre>

# Copyright 2000 through the last date of modification Charles
# Curley. Released under the GPL.

# I keep my copy in /usr/local/bin, where both root and non-root users
# can use it.

# Typical usage: pre libpng zlib | sort

# You can also use the output field delimiters to select the field you
# want. For example, virulent vociferous vi villeins can get rid of
# emacs with the following:

# for i in $( pre emacs | cut -f1 ) ; do aptitude purge $i ; done

# Nattering nabobs of nano can use a regex similarly:

# for i in $( pre emacs ^vim | cut -f1 ) ; do aptitude purge $i ; done

GREPCMD=egrep

argc="${#@}";
# echo there are ${argc} arguments.

if [ $argc -gt 1 ] ; then
  # build multiple alternatives argument to egrep, e.g. (foo|bar|baz).
  args="(";
  for arg in "$@"; do
    # echo $arg
    args="${args}${arg}|";
  done
  args=$(echo $args | sed s/"|$"/")"/)
else
  args=$@;
fi

# Why tab as the delimiter? That's cut's default delimiter. OK, it's
# ugly. If you don't like it, change it:

# pre emacs | sed 's/\t/|/g'

# echo "${args}";
if [ -e /bin/rpm ] ; then
  rpm -qa  --queryformat "%{NAME}\t%{VERSION}\t%{RELEASE}\t%{ARCH}\n" | ${GREPCMD} -i "${args}"
else
  dpkg-query --showformat='${Package}\t${Version}\t${Revision}\t${Architecture}\n' --show  | ${GREPCMD} "$args"
fi

"pre" is short for "present", i.e. which packages are present?

Another use is finding out exactly which kernels you have installed. On Ubuntu:

root@dragon:~# pre ux-im | sort ; uname -r
linux-image-2.6.31-17-generic   2.6.31-17.54            i386
linux-image-2.6.31-19-generic   2.6.31-19.56            i386
linux-image-2.6.31-20-generic   2.6.31-20.58            i386
linux-image-generic     2.6.31.20.33            i386
2.6.31-20-generic
root@dragon:~#

Software Freedom Day 2010 will be held Saturday, September 18th, 2010. Be there.

Maybe my conjecture that Software Freedom Day is the third Saturday in September_Gregorian is correct.

Red Star Tux.

Here is a major contender for the coveted title of "World's Most Useless Software Product". It's the North Korean "Red Star" operating system. It is based on Linux (no surprise), and is designed for monitoring user activity (again, no surprise). I doubt you will confuse it with Estrella Roja, an Argentine disty.

Red Star's email client is something called "Pigeon". freshmeat.net doesn't list it. No. Absolutely not. Don't even think about RFC 1149.

Red Star is a candidate for the title "World's Most Useless Software Product" for several reasons.

• It's only available in North Korea. That limits its market somewhat. (But what do the North Korean government know about markets?)
• Very few people in North Korea have computers.
• Very few people in North Korea have access to what passes for an Internet in North Korea.
• That which passes for an Internet in North Korea is heavily censored and monitored.

So why bother?

But it may not be completely useless. Large American corporations can reverse engineer it to see how the North Koreans spy on their users.

Some well written tutorials and how-tos for the Ubuntu user. Note that the author is careful to update things after each semiannual Ubuntu release. That alone makes them worth the price of admission (more, actually). Users of other Linuxes will also find it useful, according to how close their distribution is to Ubuntu.

For people new to Linux: read the advice on migrating to Ubuntu. The only thought I would add to that essay is to consider trying a virtual Linux box, either in addition to or instead of dual booting.

I found a really nice feature of Claws Mail. It's even documented, but I found it by accident.

It is good form when replying to an email to quote the material to which you are replying — and no more. With some mail readers, you hit reply, find the part you want to reply to, then trim everything else out of your reply.

Claws Mail has a neat feature to aid this process. Use your rodent to select the part you want to reply to. Then hit "reply" or "all", as appropriate. Claws will give you a nicely formatted and quoted excerpt, ready to go. And Claws even places the cursor after the quoted text, where it should be. Wow, what a concept.

This is a good example of how open source programmers and designers do it right where proprietary folks bungle it. Yes, you, Microsoft LookOut!, I'm looking at you.