Friend of the Show - Frostbitesystems.com

I'd like to promote a friend who I have come to know via IRC and identi.ca named Jonathan Nadeau (a.k.a. frostbite).  I first heard of Jonathan on HPR radio being interviewed by Klaatu.  Jonathan is visually impaired.  Jonathan does however run a computer store.  He has with renewed conviction started to sell computer systems preloaded with Linux (multiple distros) pre-configured and installed for visually impaired computer users.

I have tremendous respect for Jonathan, who has not only overcome his handicap in a area of expertise where vision is a seemingly obligatory sense, but he has also gone out of his way to try alternatives to the expensive proprietary systems which are marketed to people with the same special needs.  Jonathan seems to have done away with thousands of dollars of software from companies who's only customers are handicapped and discovered free software which is comparable.

Jonathan has recently turned up his new site for selling computer systems which is Frostbite Systems and has been quite active on it's companion blog which he calls the Frostblog.  He is quite the vocal open source advocate and should be an inspiration within our community.  I would strongly encourage in the same way as a company like System76 to support Jonathan and the open source community by buying your next linux original install system from him if possible.  I would say that even if he weren't blind but to advertize for any company that has the nuts to install linux and support it.

Your doing great work Jonathan keep it up.  You are, at the very least an inspiration to me and I am not handicapped.  You are the picture in the dictionary next to "handicapable".

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CafeNinja

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Twitter is dead to me

This is my official blog post to explain my reason for migrating from Twitter to Identi.ca.  I have to say up front that both of these services do about the same job and I have very nearly the same list of folks I follow on both.

Let me just get these points out there and you may all comment as you wish.  I hope that maybe you will consider that my dive into social networking has been quite telling to me in that I still hang with the same geeks in the same IRC channels and some of them have basically become my social network.  I realize that maybe being on every service, and feeling an obligation to make different posts isn't the right way.  I feel that this step will not reduce the number of people who will see my stuff or make suffer anyone who follows me on either network.  This is also just one more step for me to try and reduce the number of social networking interfaces I have to deal with.

1. Open source.  I should put my money where my mouth is and promote the service that is open source.
2. The commercialism of services that scrub Twitter and have profits from the words of the masses bothers me.  You may feel different, and this is not a condemnation of you.  My "boycott" will not make/break Twitter.
3. Function: I enjoy that I get an email to direct reply to my posts on identi.ca
4. Function: I enjoy that conversations are now visible in context.
5. The community on identi.ca seems to be populated with folks who are more like me.  Twitter has just gotten too big for my tastes.  It is too mainstream and I probably won't hang out there.

With all that being said, I think it important in this internet age that I keep my presence and moniker present in the Twitter system therefore, I will be keeping the Twitter account, but all of my posts will be made to identi.ca where there is a "connect" feature that will forward posts to Twitter.   The poor part is that I will never know about folks who @cafeninja me on Twitter.  I would ask that if you don't have an identi.ca account, please DM me in twitter so that I receive an email.  Again, I won't be logging into twitter directly anymore.

If my choice has managed to sever some sort of communication channel for any of you, please post a comment.  I'm human and fallible, maybe there is something/someone I haven't considered.

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CafeNinja

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Steganography - Some new fun

After reading an article in Linux Magazine, I've been playing with the steghide program available on most linux distros and popular repos.  I am quite impressed with this programs ability to insert quite a bit of information into an image or wav file.

The word steganography is of Greek origin and means "concealed writing" (citation wikipedia).  Really, as a word it is just describing covert messaging.  It offers no context in which it must occur or any kind of standard.  This technique is designed to put the message in a quite public place, kind of like the symbology clues you might have heard about in "The DaVinci Code".  The concept of security through obscurity is primary here.

The program recodes color codes in a jpg file to replace a shade of color with another and then uses the digit difference to insert the message.  The steghide program actually takes the image and the message and shuffles them together on the level of the data.  The receiver would NEED to know to look for the message since there is no visible indicator of a hidden message.

The application steghide is a command line tool.  There is a gui tool called steg-gui, but I didn't feel like compiling it, and since not in my repos I didn't use it yet.  So I won't offer any opinion of it here, maybe in the future if it can manage to be included in the repos.

As another example.  The image of Bettsy above, is also a steganograph.  Feel free to have a go and treat the image like a captcha.  After steghide is installed the following will produce the message that is this blog post, give it a try.

wget https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8lzJH8uunbgYj61D3nW8Exqt_2XR5lVu4SGFbx53bOXXHasWOPduf5cqEgyGSrERsvep3eWKHFX2k1Evq06Uu9otnaVpBe32LznDwxhV3lTFBcLdOy7cFfmhiK1PwfhhTfO0rgGVq6v91/s320/steg-post.jpg && steghide --extract -sf steg-post.jpg

Enjoy,
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CafeNinja

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Inx 1.1 review

After listening to TiT Radio Episode #15, I found the link that was suggested by Azimuth.  This is really, really cool if you want to get some serious command line goodness.

The distro is called inx 1.1  and it is based on ubuntu 8.04 LTS.  It is also only a live distro, currently there are no simple install methods.  There is a Virtualbox image that you can download and just run without any burning/rebooting/hacking involved.  I am going to request that any and all geeks who would like to see this project continue to send feedback to the project.  I think it's fantastic and think it would be a great idea for a meta-package to make sure all the cli/ncurses apps that are used in his menu scripts are there, and then have this as an option from gdm to boot into (saving even more resources).

I am VERY taken with this.  There are just enough tools to do 98% of what people do with their computers and brings it down to the lowest common denominator.  I'm going to be trying to send as much feedback as possible to try and help those guys prepare for a new release using 10.4 when it comes out since there have been some dramatic improvements in the package selection since 8.04 (like screen-profiles a.k.a byobu).  Here is an example of some of the cli goodness you get with this tiny and non-resouce intensive distro:

I will be following this distro closely as it will help me also to have multiple VM machines which actually have some applications in them and do more than reply to ping when testing network apps on my host and home network.  If you look close at that screenshot the RAM footprint was almost 50mb!  Again, that is loaded with apps that are useful if you only take some time to make yourself familiar with them.

Enjoy CLI Geeks, and even if you don't use the whole distro, dig in there and check you the apps that come with the distro to see what you can add your command line arsenal.

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CafeNinja

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Bit of Humor

I heard the audio from this video on one of my podcasts.  Found it on Youtube and just felt I needed to share.



Enjoy!
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CafeNinja

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Podcast Review: H4cked.com

H4cked Podcast is a great tech show.  It's the batter of two brothers Seawn and Steve who discuss the way that real people talk about tech.  This podcast runs 45 min to just over an hour long, comes once a week.

Unique to this podcast is the fact that these two bring the perspective of supporting windows to feed the family while using linux and mac at home.  This brings a "better here, better there" exposure to the conversation that not many podcasts have.   Unfortunately most tech podcasts get carried away bashing the operating system of others.  I'm impressed that while they are each a little biased one way or the other, they have conversations that are engaging about it with some good humored nature.

I have to confess that there is some adult language in this podcast.  By no means is it enough to turn me off, and I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys hearing REAL dialog on the leading tech issues of the day while remaining light-hearted.

I'd suggest that you add this to your podcaster by getting the feedburner RSS feed directly to iTunes or gpodder.  Due to recent issues with the fruit named computer company, their podcast has been currently delisted.  But the feed is up and working great.http://www.h4cked.com

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CafeNinja

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Mac Vs. Linux, My opinion : Part II

I felt that it was time for me to follow up on my previous article  "Mac Vs. Linux, My opinion".  I do still, day-to-day use a mac next to two linux systems.  I feel in this regard, I have justification for my opinion.

Again to preface, I have used linux for much longer than mac (everyday).  As a result I learned over the years to use my linux in a windows heavy environment without much disruption or laments from my co-workers in regards to interoperablity.

For work purposes, both efficiency of activity and for productivity within the applicaitons I still find that linux is my prefered environment.  I should say that the gap that is software, which once was very wide, is no where near that wide anymore.  Much of that may have to do with my office's adoption of open source software.

I have to say that I prefer linux more now still for the double ease of use of the clipboard and having two available.  One accessible via highlight and mouse-wheel click and the other using the classic ctrl+c and ctrl+v. 

The second point that keeps me on a linux desktop is the ease of use and speed of virtual desktops in linux.  Mac does now have spaces (same function) but there is no customization available and it is sluggish in comparison to my linux system.

The third aspect of linux that I still prefer to mac is that it is much easier to migrate information to the lowest common denominator: TEXT.  Mac works fine with text and is useful in the terminal app, but on linux the transition from terminal to a gui application requires very little effort on the part of the user.

Lastly, of no consequence to efficiency, would be theme customization.  With the new Ubuntu (9.10) and following the additional themes I installed using the instructions at this long post on "The Silent Number" (new fav is 'Night Impressions') I have found the view of my linux system is something that I can change to easily based on tasks or system and with something like NBR (netbook remix) I can completely alter the function of my desktop any time I care too.  This is not an impossible task on the mac, but for sure isn't as easy.

The ace in the hole that mac still has is that the performance of VMware Fusion is great on the mac.  Like that I can still have access to any other operating system that I need/prefer since I am very much about using the correct tool for the correct work.  I won't use this as a "freedom" platform, this is just a direct 1-to-1 comparison while I have both systems side-by-side in my life.

Both will continue to be in my workspace and work-flow.  I hope in the future to have relevant follow-ups to this series of articles.

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CafeNinja

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.