SCO lawsuit – A brief history

Posted on March 30th, 2005 in Technology by Jim Prince

SCOLinuxInsider has an excellent article detailing the history of the SCO lawsuit.

The author concludes

"I promised I would not discuss the merits of the IBM lawsuit, but I would not be the only one to conclude — from the facts publicly available — that the case is flimsy to meritless, and that SCO’s recent victory will be short-lived. Once the IBM case is dismissed, the others will fall like dominoes — except those that are effectively gone already."

Let’s hope so eh?

You can read it here.


Securing phpBB

Posted on March 28th, 2005 in Technology, Work by Jim Prince

phpBBphphBB is a popular and powerful Open Source bulletin board. Here are five ways to improve the security of your phpBB installation.

  1. Disable Anonymous posting.

    2. You can do this via forum permissions or preferably add the following to posting.php after the session management section.

    if ($userdata['user_id'] == ANONYMOUS)
    {
    redirect(append_sid('login.'.$phpEx));
    }

    This will disable anonymous posts across all forums regardless of their settings.

  2. Secure admin folder

    3. Restrict access to the forums admin folder using Apache by adding the following to httpd.conf or using .htaccess files.

    <Directory "/var/www/html/docs/forums">
    Options None
    AllowOverride None
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from <IP ADDRESS>
    </Directory>

    <IP ADDRESS> should contain addresses that can access your admin pages.

  3. Remove memberlist.php.

    4. The file memberlist.php contains a complete list of all the registered users on your forum. Remove the hyperlink from overall_header.tpl in your templates directory then delete the memberlist.php file.

  4. Use the most secure Admin settings and change passwords regularly.

    5. You should use the following settings in your forums configuration.

    • Account activation – Admin
    • Enable Visual Confirmation – Yes
    • User email via board – Enabled
    • Enable HTML – Disabled
    • Enable gallery avatars – No

    You should ensure that users with Admin permissions change passwords regularly and that you change the database password from time to time.

    If you’re using MySQL you can do this as follows.

    set password for user = PASSWORD('p@55w0rd')

    Where ‘user’ is your forum database user and ‘p@55w0rd’ is the new password. Don’t forget to update config.php with any password changes.

  5. Finally subscribe to the phpBB mailing list and keep your installation up to date!

XML networking products

Posted on March 28th, 2005 in Technology by Jim Prince

Just stumbled across an article about Cisco’s intention to develop networking products specifically to handle XML documents.

Anything that’ll speed up the transmission of XML data has to be good thing. Read more here.


Red Eye Reduction

Posted on March 19th, 2005 in Technology by Jim Prince

GimpI’ve found a cracking article on how to remove ‘Red eye’ from digital photographs using the Gimp.

Check it out here.

There are a bunch of other useful tutorials at gimpguru.org.


Redirections

Posted on March 17th, 2005 in Technology by Jim Prince

In the last week or so I’ve come across several different ways to redirect a webpage to another location.

The most powerful of these can only be used if you’re running Apache. Basically you use the Apache mod_rewrite functionality to carry out the redirection.

For example;

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/docs$ /support/documentation/a_to_z.html [R]

will redirect any requests for /documentation to /support/documentation/a_to_z.html. The ability to use regular expressions makes this very powerful. However any changes will require you to restart the Web Server.

You can read more about mod_rewrite here.

The remaining two methods are far more simple, but requre you to create physical pages at the location you want the redirect to occur.

The first of these is by using meta tags. You simply create an html page containing the following code;

<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="5;url=http://www.jimprince.co.uk/"> </head>
</html>

This example redirects you to jimprince.co.uk after 5 seconds. if you want an instant redirection you would simply specify 0 instead of 5 before the URL.

The final example uses Javascript but achieves exactly the same functionality as the meta tag example.

<html>
<head>
<script>
function GotoUrl(url)
{
this.location = url;
}
</script>
</head>
<body onLoad="GotoUrl('http://www.jimprince.co.uk')">
</body>
</html>

I’ve never found the need resort to this method myself. I always try to avoid Javascript unless it is absolutely necessary.


Five Albums I don’t own but really should!

Posted on March 15th, 2005 in Music by Jim Prince

I recently came across a website listing some of the best Albums of the last 50 years or so.

Surprisingly I have a lot of the albums listed (especially those from Q Magazine) but the following are missing from my collection and they really shouldn’t be!

  1. Primal Scream – Screamadelica,
    Standout tracks: Loaded, Movin on Up.
  2. Nirvana – Nevermind,
    Standout tracks: All of them!
  3. Massive Attack – Blue Lines,
    Standout tracks: Unfinished Sympathy.
  4. The Prodigy – The Fat Of The Land,
    Standout tracks: Breathe, Firestarter, Mindfields.
  5. Public Enemy – It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back,
    Standout tracks: Don’t Believe the Hype.

Time to check out eBay I reckon!


SuSE Linux and Frank Zappa

Posted on March 7th, 2005 in Music, Technology by Jim Prince

I caught the Gadget Show on Friday and they were talking about Open Source Software. The usual suspects Linux, Open Office, GIMP etc were the main focus, but it was nice to see them in the spotlight.

They also referred to the developers of SuSE Linux for thanking Frank Zappa for contributing to the success of the distribution. Sure enough I found the following in the SuSE Admin guide

“The list of all people who contributed to the success of this distribution would exceed the scope of this book. We would like to express our gratitude to all who worked tirelessly to present this quality SuSE Linux release. With their voluntary commitment, the developers of Linux cooperate on a global scale to promote the development of Linux. We thank them for their efforts — this distribution would not exist without them. Furthermore, we want to thank Frank Zappa and Pawar. Last but not least, special thanks to Linus Torvalds.”

Bizarre but true.


Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy Movie!

Posted on March 4th, 2005 in Books and Films by Jim Prince

Hitchhikers
I would wholeheartedly recommend you check out the new trailer for the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Movie. It looks fantastic, Martin Freeman is a cracking actor and in my opinion a great choice for the role of Arthur Dent.

You can view the new trailer here.


Wireless USB

Posted on March 4th, 2005 in Technology by Jim Prince

usbNow this is an interesting new technology. The new wireless USB protocol is due to be completed at the end of March. With a range of about 10 metres and a peak data speed of 480mbps is hard to see how this technology can fail.

Hopefully it’ll put an end to the rat’s nest of cables sprouting from the front and rear of my PC.

Read more here.


The future of DVDs

Posted on March 2nd, 2005 in Books and Films, Music, Technology by Jim Prince

It’s hard to believe that DVDs have been around for almost a decade. Over this time it has replaced video as the medium of choice and has found it’s way into most households in the form of DVD Players or in peoples PCs.

So what’s next for the technology?

Apparently there are two rival formats.

The first is called BLU-RAY backed by the likes of Sony, Pioneer, Philips, Panasonic, HP and Dell. BLU-RAY has a 50gb storage capacity and a maximum bit rate of 36Mbps. Standard DVD has a 17gb capacity and 17Mbps bit rate.

The second is called HD-DVD and is backed by NEC, Toshiba, Sanyo and Microsoft. The maximum capacity of HD-DVD is less then BLU-RAY but the maximum bit rate is the same. Both formats support MPEG2 and MPEG4 with high definition video.

Which of the two formats will come out on top is anyones guess. After all Betamax was better than VHS, so quality or capacity is unlikey to be the deciding factor.

Either way I think standard DVD will be with us for a while yet. Remember DVD-A and SACD did very little to impact on CD Sales.


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