Free software free society

A short, simple yet rich in ideas article about free software and the democratization of hacking.

Screw Twitter, Free/Libre/Open Source Identi.ca is the way to go!

Getting into the microblogging world a week or so ago, has been interesting. For one thing I must say i don’t find twitter as useless and boring as facebook. I’ve been following a few people who provide interesting links to articles or posts that I have missed in the areas of technoogy, science and politics. So to that end, I can say it serves the purpose I intended it to serve (at least for now).

Having said that I discovered Identi.ca, an free/open source microblogging platform with a smaller community than twitter, mainly with users that are highly technologically oriented, being either software developers, web designers etc. Of course there are a lot of users on identi.ca that do not necessarily fall under any of those tech categories and that’s really good if the platform is to take off. To be honest, being free software, I believe that everybody on the twitter network should move to identi.ca and support the openness that it provides, and promote the ideas of free/open source software. So see you on identi.ca @serk01. Come on people,
“join us now and free the software”!!!

Tweeting it is then!

As a person who likes to know what the hell is going on around him especially in the technology world, I finally decided to create a twitter account and try this amazingly popular new service myself. On a similar note I once created an account on facebook just to see what it was like since everyone was talking about it, but just a week later, I deleted my account bored to death by what I saw. The one thing that I like (at a first glance) with twitter is that there is not much personal information to share and it looks easier to control how much personal information you expose to the outside world. One might say that the same is true for facebook, but that would be non-true. Not giving your personal information on facebook beats it’s sole purpose of existence. If you really want to keep in touch with friends, classmates etc, you cannot avoid but give real personal information, which one way or another is accessible by a huge number of people. With twitter at the moment i feel i can control my exposion (is this the right word??). My main aim with my twitter account is not to share everyday minute to minute activity information. I’m not gonna be tweeting about how the food I had was so great or how I got drunk at that party etc. My main aim is to follow a handful of interesting tweeters that might share interesting website or articles, maybe pointing out some new technologies or applications which I might otherwise miss.I will more or less be tweeting about similar things that I discover on my digital life, but not on my analogue (away from the computer) life. There will also be some political tweets here and there and that’s it. Anyway, I’m curious to see how it will go. I might find it as boring as facebook and shut it down in a week, or I might find that I actualy have access to a wider space of the internet through other’s tweets, which is my primary and only goal anyway, and keep it forever and ever…

If after all that you’re still interested, you can waste your time reading my tweets at http://twitter.com/serk01

Greek subs in Kaffeine

Credits for this post go to http://zeps-corner.blogspot.com/2008/11/kaffeine-greek-subtitles.html

1. Download arial fonts,
2. Extract arialBySapioiCorp.tar.gz to /usr/share/xine/libxine1/fonts/
3. Settings –> xine Engine Parameters –> subtitles
4. Beginer Options: normal 0 iso-8859-7
5. Expert Options: arial

How To install BackTrack3

I decided to install BackTrack on my hard disk instead of running it from the Live CD and since it didn’t end up being a straight-forward procedure I am writing this post to document how I did it. I have to give credit to this guy whose own documentation I actually followed and helped me greatly to avoid all the trouble he went into. However I felt the need to write my own HowTo since some of the things he described did not work for me (because my case was somehow different from his, more explanations later) so I had to come up with other solutions. Therefore my aim is to describe the whole process as it worked for me in order to keep it as future reference for myself. If it so happens to help anyone else then that’s great however I cannot guarantee it, even if someone has an identical setup on his PC to mine. I hope I don’t need to mention that you if you follow these instructions you are doing so at your OWN RISK and you take FULL RESPONSIBILITY of what happens to your system. Installing a Linux distribution by hand is never an easy task and a whole lot of things can go wrong in the process.

I got to mention here that I have created in the past a partition for testing purposes of any linux distribution that I find interesting so this time I did not have to create the partitions from scratch, instead I used the ones I already had to replace another Linux distribution with Backtrack. In order to create the partitions you need you can either check the original document or look somewhere else on how to do it. I will suppose you have the necessary partitions ready from here on. Let me note also that apart from the ‘dummy’ linux partition used for testing purposes, I also have an Ubuntu Linux partition running which I use as my main system as well as a FAT32 partition with Windows XP. As a result, I have already installed GRUB on the Master Boot Record and I get something like the following screen when I boot my machine:

1.Ubuntu 7.10

2.Dummy Linux Distro

3.WindowsXP

Therefore when I finish this document I will not describe how to set your boot loader from windows but I will describe what to add on the GRUB menu list to allow you to boot BackTrack. For a WindowsXP based solution look here.

########################################################

Ok so, enough talking, time for action!

1. I logged in with the Live CD as root and I went to /mnt/sda6 (which is the partition where my old linux distro was sitting idle, it can be anything for you) and I deleted the whole system by typing:

$ rm -fr *

2. then I created the necessary folders by typing

$ cp –preserve -R /{bin,dev,etc,home,lib,root,sbin,usr,var,opt,pentest} .

(notice the dot (.) at the end to indicate the current directory (/mnt/sda6)). This process takes quite some time, so go have a coffee or read a book or wait patiently ( and I mean really! patiently).

3. When this finished I typed:

$ mkdir /mnt/sda6/{boot,mnt,proc,sys,tmp}

4. Then I typed:

$cp /boot/vmlinuz boot/ (note I was already in /mnt/sda6 so I didn’t have to give the full path to /boot)

Here I am copying ‘vmlinuz’ from the Live CD’s /boot folder to the harddisk’s /mnt/sda6/boot folder where my Backtrack system resides. Until here I the instructions are almost identical to the original author’s HowTo which I myself followed. However after this step I stumbled upon some things that I had to do differently. I will only described my actions and will not talk about what I did instead of what the other HowTo said because it is unnecessary.

5. Then I also copied the “initrd.gz” to the /boot folder by typing

$ cp /boot/initrd.gz /boot

6. The next step is to either install grub or as in my case to edit the current grub list to reflect the new system. Currently my grub installation resides in my Ubuntu partition so I moved there to edit the “menu.lst”

$ cd /mnt/sda3/boot/grub

7. Then I typed

$ vi menu.lst

which is the file where grub loads the initial screen that you see when power on your PC.

8. Then I added the following lines to the menu.lst file:

title Slax
root (hd0,5)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz max_loop=255 root=/dev/sda6 vga=791 ro
initrd /boot/initrd.gz

I saved the file and exited.

At this point I restarted the machine but it failed booting with the message

“BT3 Data not found. This should not happen, press ctrl+alt+del to reboot”

It also gave me a hint about copying the BT3 folder to my windows drive in order to hopefully solve the problem.

So I went back into the LiveCD and started looking for this BT3 folder. If you boot from the Live CD the folder seems hidden under /mnt/live/dos/, but if you read the CD as a normal cd from wither windows or another linux distribution you will find it at the root directory. Then you need to copy it under the windows c:/ directory or /mnt/sda2 in my case (since i was doing it from the live cd environment) and then reboot. After this it all worked fine for me and I am actually writting this post from my newly installed Backtrack system!

As I said this document is mainly for my own future reference so I don’t intend to write down all the possible ways of doing this installation, but only document my own way of doing it. Check with the original document for further help and especially if you are a windows only user or don’t already have two Linux partitions on your system as I did.

G1 Android rocks!

Last week I decided to renew my contract with T-Mobile uk, and what I got was a free Google Android phone, the G1! First few days I got playing around with it to see how it feels, and get used to the interface. I must say the team behind the UI design have done an amazing job. It’s really easy and intuitive to work with and you feel just like home very soon after you get your hands on it.

However I wanted the Android phone so I can play around with it,and when I say “play around” I don’t mean simply browsing the Internet and listening to music! I want to program the damn thing. One interesting thing I found out pretty soon while reading the forums was that there is a so called ‘root bug’ which allows anyone to get root access to the phone and do whatever he wants with it. “This is good news” I thought but a little while later I found out that Google had patched this bug with its latest updates!

No worries though! Apparently some people have done an amazing job of providing all the tools and programs to overcome the Google updates, get root access to the phone and still keep the phone updated with whatever new features Google ships in the future with its Over The Air (OTA) updates. The process of rooting your phone is not very long and difficult but it should certainly be avoided by people who don’t know exactly what thery are doing.

Anyway I rooted my phone yesterday and I am now able to do anything I want with it.
I hear some people murmuring..”well not anything, you still don’t have multitouch like the iPhone right?”

WRONG! Actually the latest rooted update out there by JesusFreke and with the help of lukehutch, zinx and ryebrye has added multitouch support for the browser and some other applications!.It turns out that the Android kernel DOES support multitouch and generates such events, but thos are being dropped by the Android Java Stack higher in the hierarchy.

I can testify that multitouch on the Browser works just fine and the future of Android looks bright and shiny! Oh, by the way the Android Market has a wealth of applications that do literaly anything you can imagine!It’s worth having a look even if you don’t own an Android, just to see what you are missing ! (I do sound excited don’t I?).

Anyway, that’s all for now, but I am sure I will be back with more Android fun.

Next station: developer.android.com !!

P.S: Did you know you can actually install a complete Debian distribution side by side with the Android OS???? I love Freedom Software!

A Frakked up finish…

So Battlestar Galactica is over. It has been my favorite series over the last years, but to be honest, the last 10 episodes that ended the series were a huge disappointment to me.And although I was hoping for the series finale to compensate for some of the previous epsiodes, unfortunately that didn’t happen either. I mean it wasn’t THAT bad, but I had so much higher expectations that it felt really poor after all. Scanning over some comments on Slashdot I see that most people focus on the stupidity of Lee’s idea of abandoning all their technology for -essentially- a caveman lifestyle. I didn’t really mind that to be honest, thinking that after living some extreme situations in the super high-tech society of theirs for over 5 years, it might make some (I am stressing SOME here) sense to want to abandon it altogether and make a completely new start.

What dissapointed me the most was that it all seemed to be put together 10 minutes before starting the shooting of the scenes. So many questions and interesting notions went unanswered.  What the hell was Starbuck anyway? I mean she did find here own body on Earth1, so that needed some wrapping up if you ask me. We were kept being told by the hybrids that she would be the “harbinger of death” for humanity and instead we see her leading them to Earth2!

And what was all the fuss with the Opera house scene? This had been building up for so long that you would expect to mean something important, instead all that happens is that Baltar and Six take Herra and walk down a couple of steps before putting her down before! And then “God’s plan for Gaius Baltar” is revealed to us as a lecture by Baltar himself to Cavil regarding some vague religious notions and the angels that he sees!

One other thing that was completely lame was the way the Cylon Colony was destroyed. This dead Raptor pilot is being hit by a rock and her hand hits the launch missile button which shoots directly to the colony and destroys it!

Not to mention that all the scenes on Earth2 were like some kind of an ecological documentary about the beauties of our planet and how we should be taking care of it and how all our technology and our small robots are going to destroy it and blah blah! This is a series guys, for once, stop being politically correct and taking the predefined/safe path of endings and be creative for FRAK’S SAKE!

There is so much else to talk about but I’ll wrap things up for now.  I am looking forward to any comments and impressions by any visitors/BSG fans.

Battlestar Galactica, you will be missed, that’s for sure! It’s been a nice trip with its ups and downs.

So long, and thanks for all the fish!

A Christmas gift for me … from me :)

It happened yesterday. I was taking a walk in downtown Lancaster (for those familiar, this is a REALLY small town to walk around in), and I saw it outside the display window of HMV. It was beautiful and I had to get it. I went in and I got a hold of it at first. Price at £22 it didn’t look awfuly expensive either. I knew that I would probably find it at a better deal if I was patient enough to look around the internet and order it online. But my consumerism kicked in (which is rarely the case for me) and I couldn’t wait that long. I went to the cashier and I am now a happy owner of the Blade Runner: Final Cut: 5 DVD Ultimate Collectors Edition!

I did find it at a cheaper price in HMV website after all but what the hell, the ‘consumer’ inside me was worth the £7 difference for this chrismas gift to myself! It is  trully an amazing collection! Now all I have to do is find the time to rot myself to endless hours of Blade Runner scenery!!!!

Here’s what it contains (copied from HMV’s website):

Limited Edition 5DVD Box Set – Contains:

• Metal Tin Packaging
• Five-Disc Ultimate Collector’s Edition Version Of Blade Runner: Final Cut
• Lenticular Image
• Art Cards
• A Letter From Ridley Scott

Disc One Contains:

• Ridley Scott’s All-New ‘Final Cut’ Version Of The Film
• Audio Commentary By Director Ridley Scott
• Audio Commentary By Executive Producer/ Co-Screenwriter Hampton Fancher and Co-Screenwriter David Peoples; Producer Michael Deely and production executive Katherine Haber
• Audio Commentary By Commentaries by visual futurist Syd Mead; production designer Lawrence G. Paull, art director David L. Snyder and special photographic effects supervisors Douglas Trumbull, Richard Yuricich and David Dryer

Disc Two Contains:

• Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner – A feature-length authoritative documentary revealing all the elements that shaped this hugely influential cinema landmark

Disc Three Contains:

• 1982 Theatrical Version – This is the version that introduced U.S. movie-going audiences to a revolutionary film with a new and excitingly provocative vision of the near-future. It contains Deckard/Harrison Ford’s character narration and the happy ending
• 1982 International Version – Also used on U.S. home video, laserdisc and cable releases up to 1992. This version is not rated, and contains some extended action scenes in contrast to the Theatrical Version.
• 1992 Director’s Cut – The Director’s Cut omits Deckard’s voiceover narration and removes the “happy ending” finale. It adds the famously-controversial “unicorn” sequence, a vision that Deckard has which suggests that he, too, may be a replicant.

Disc Four Contains:

Bonus Disc – “Enhancement Archive”

• The Electric Dreamer: Remembering Philip K. Dick
• Sacrificial Sheep: The Novel vs. The Film
• Signs of the Times: Graphic Design
• Fashion Forward: Wardrobe & Styling
• The Light That Burns: Remembering Jordan Cronenweth
• Promoting Dystopia: Rendering the Poster Art
• Deck-A-Rep: The True Nature of Rick Deckard
• Nexus Generation: Fans & Filmmakers
• Philip K. Dick: The Blade Runner Interviews (Audio)
• Screen Tests: Rachel & Pris
• Deleted & Alternate Scenes
• 1982 Promotional Featurettes
• Trailers & TV Spots

Disc Five Contains:

• Workprint Version Of Blade Runner – This rare version of the film is considered by some to be the most radically different of all the Blade Runner cuts. It includes an altered opening scene, no Deckard narration until the final scenes and much more…
• Introduction by Ridley Scott
• Audio Commentary by Paul M. Sammon, author of Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner
• All Our Variant Futures: From Workprint to Final Cut – Featurette

A 16 year old boy is murdered in Athens by a police officer…

It’s not the first time either. I just hope it’s the last…

T-Mobile G1 Google Android review

A great in depth review of the first Google Android phone can be found on this blog entry by Matthew Miller on Zdnet. A lot of videos and photos as well as a detailed description of all the features and limitations of the device. A must read for any mobile phone enthusiast!