The Substantially Similar Weblog

Whenever I discover a solution to a computer-related problem that isn’t easily found on google, I post it on my useful linux page, in the hopes of saving other people time with the same problem. I’m always trying to figure out the best way to present the problem and solution so that people will find what they’re looking for. Right now, I’ve just got a laundry list of problems and solutions on that page, which seems to work pretty well based on my traffic analysis (particularly for people searching for the cups client-error-forbidden message, which has brought thousands of visitors to my site).

In any case, here’s my most recent batch of useful stuff:

• I’ve written a few times about my wireless woes. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why my Xircom CWE-1120 card couldn’t connect to my Access Point. As it turns out, the card was set to the French Channel Set, which is different from the North American Channel Set, except on Channels 10 and 11. So I set my Access Point to Channel 10, and now I can finally access my network. There is, allegedly, a DOS command line tool that allows you to reprogram the EEPROM on Cisco cards to switch the channel set to North American, but I was unable to locate it. In fact, Intel (who purchased Xircom, which produced the card) was very wary of the whole topic. I suspect it might be illegal to have/use this tool, since it might permit you to set your card to a mode that violates FCC regulations. Intel was actually pretty spooked that I even had the cards (which I purchased legitimately in the United States, thinking they were North American cards). Thanks to Dan Lanciani on the airo-linux-gen80211 list for finally pointing this out to me.
• I’ve been trying to set up GNU/Linux (remotely) on my brother’s Toshiba p25-s477 (one of a seemingly endless number of obscurely named Toshiba laptops). Almost everything worked fine, except the sound was almost inaudible, and substantially distorted with external amplified speakers. It turns out I needed to go into the alsamixer (ncurses GUI) program and set “External Amp Power Down” to “Mute.” This is far from intuitive: first, that “external amp power down” would be “on” by default, and second, that you need to “mute” this setting to have “power down” turned “off.” But that’s how it works. (solution posted by someone in the aesthetically weird tlinux-users mailing list.)
• I’ve been looking for functional Debian Java packages that work with latest Mozilla in sid. I tried downloading several Java binaries from sun and elsewhere and either it didn’t register in Mozilla or crashed immediately. I finally discovered José Fonseca’s excellent Java packages that actually work. Add the following to your /etc/apt/sources.list to get these packages:
  

  deb http://jrfonseca.dyndns.org/debian ./

  As a side note, does anyone have any idea why so many webmail interfaces are hooked on unnecessary Java? I provide SquirrelMail as the webmail interface for bostoncoop.net, and it seems to do quite well without Java, Flash, streaming video, or any other silliness. Do makers of webmail software just get a kick out of making their software not work with standard browser installations?

I feel some obligation to perpetuate the Bush in 41.2 Seconds meme. Maybe I’m a little late. (Thanks to UG for the link).

I’ve written about my tribulations with “Paris Hilton” related referrer spam before. Since my weblog tracks “inbound links” on the right side, spammers create spurious inbound links into my site so that their site will be linked from mine and thus have greater visibility and a higher Google PageRank. My solution has been to ban anything with the words “paris,” “hilton,” and a host of other porn-related terms from the list.

Starting today, I’m starting to get a new breed of referrer spam: Janet Jackson superbowl video referrers. Maybe it’s a bad idea to track inbound links at all. Or maybe the solution is to have my referrer tracker actually look at the supposed inbound link and make sure that it does, in fact, link to my site. In any case, I’ve now added a bunch of Janet Jackson related terms to my banned list.

How will this arms race end?

While I’m talking about scourges of the Internet, what’s the deal with autoreply virus/worm detectors? A huge number of corporate and educational mailservers scan incoming email for worms and viruses, and if they detect a worm or virus send a message to the sender telling them the message was subscribed and that they are infected. Usually, the autoreply also includes a plug for the email scanner software itself.

So how is it that the developers of this software are smart enough to include the distinctive signatures of all these email worms, but not smart enough to realize that those same worms always forge the “from:” part of the header. That means if the apparent sender actually is infected, it’s at best a total coincidence. There is no connection, with most worms, between the “sender” of an email and the person who is actually infected with the worm. (other than some third person who is infected might have the apparent sender in their address book). Presumably these software developers are smart people and spend some time trying to understand email worms and viruses, and send out frequent updates of the distinctive signatures of worms and viruses.

Does anyone have a rational explanation? Even better, can someone educate these software developers and the people who purchase their software to end this scourge of false “virus detected” emails?

I run my own little “rightwatch” organization by subscribing to the mailing lists of several right wing organizations. Although on occasion I find myself agreeing with the more economic/libertarian groups (e.g., the Cato Institute·), I always find the social right pretty funny. Here’s the latest press release from the Christian Coalition·:

Washington D.C. — Today’s decision by 4 out-of-control left-wing judges on the Massachusetts Supreme Court to force homosexual “marriage” on the citizens of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the rest of America should be thoroughly ignored by the Massachusetts State Legislature. The American people who overwhelmingly oppose homosexual marriages (only 24% support such an abomination) — through their elected officials —- must make these important decisions, not a tiny minority of judicial tyrants.

This excerpt is striking because they admit that 24% of the population supports gay marriage. It’s astonishing that that’s the lowest number the Christian Coalition can reasonably claim. What might that number have been ten years ago? Twenty? The Christian Coalition is on pretty thin ice if one-quarter of the population supports an “abomination.” I’m not sure that can really be counted as “overwhelming.” Assuming the trend towards acceptance continues at anywhere near the current rate, it’s going to be pretty hard for them to continue to claim that these judges are way out in left field.

They also (unsurprisingly) neglect to mention that constitutional rights are almost always countermajoritarian: if the only issue were the will of the masses, then the only purpose of the constitution would be to insure proper (representative) functioning of the legislative branch. But that’s clearly not the case, and one only need to look to the school desegregation cases to see why courts must act against the will of the majority when the constitution so commands.

I’m sure the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (holding same sex marriage rights required under the Massachusetts Constitution in Goodridge·) and the United States Supreme Court (in holding sodomy prohibitions unconstitutional in Lawrence v. Texas·) have seen the writing on the wall: people will some day look back at this time and wonder how people could ever have harbored such homophobic views. By setting out bold precedent breaking with past practice, authors of these opinions must be hoping to establish themselves as visionaries in the eyes of future legal historians, just as we now see the Holmes and Brandeis dissents in the free speech cases of the late 1910’s·, or Holmes’ dissent in Lochner v. New York· in 1905. We realize now that Holmes and Brandeis understood what is now obvious, at a time when the rest of the court was stuck in an untenable (or unjust) conceptual framework.

I’m looking forward to the time when we can look back on all of this and laugh at the small-mindedness of the Christian Coalition. In any case, I feel better about getting married this May knowing that I live in a state where the right to marry isn’t predicated on the gender of the person one loves.

Although I can’t identify the problem exactly, it appears that Hotmail is rejecting a ton of mail right now. Some of it bounces, so the sender sees that the message didn’t get through, but in many cases it just disappears into a black hole, and neither the sender nor the recipient ever finds out that the message wasn’t delivered. Some have suggested that this is connected to the Mydoom epidemic, but I have some evidence that it predates the latest worm by a few months. For example, a Hotmail subscriber to an email list I administer just told me she had never received any messages from that list over the past two months, although I’ve never received any notices that her address is bouncing.

If anyone has more insight into exactly what’s going on, please comment on this entry. In any case, I’m hoping to spread the word that Hotmail is very broken, and since I can’t email Hotmail subscribers directly, this is the best I can do.

By now, you’ve probably all heard about Mydoom, the latest trivial exploit of Microsoft vulnerabilities that is ravaging the Microsoft world and inflecting some collateral damage on the rest of us. SCO, an apparent target of the virus, is offering a $250000 reward for the arrest of the author. I also heard through the grapevine that Mydoom will not send any email to an account with a domain that contains “mozilla.”

I hope this doesn’t provoke a negative backlash against free software. I imagine SCO is going to accuse us of “not being able to police our own,” as part of their campaign to discredit the entire development model.

Slate· is running this entertaining and mildly insightful analysis· of the recent television advertisments by IBM promoting Linux· (I’d normally say GNU/Linux, but the ads just say “Linux”). If you haven’t seen the ads, check them out. Then read the commentary.

As it turns out, googling for “cannot rename self” returns no results. This would almost qualify as a Googlewhack, although apparently you can’t have a legitimate googlewhack that requires quotation marks. In any case, Steve recently asked me to rename myself and I replied “cannot rename self,” so you see how this all got started.

(don’t I deserve at least one truly geeky blog entry every few weeks? — what, all of them are truly geeky?)

Whenever I talk with intellectual property attorneys who aren’t familiar with the particulars of the SCO v. IBM case, I mention SCO’s claim that the GPL is unconstitutional:

SCO asserts that the GPL, under which Linux is distributed, violates the United States Constitution and the U.S. copyright and patent laws.

This is a marvelous tidbit to have, because it signals the absurdity of SCO’s case. If SCO seriously intends to make this claim in court, anyone who practices copyright law understands immediately how desperate their case must be.

Larry explains quite clearly why the GPL can’t be unconstitutional. It boils down to two points:

• No state action. The constitution restricts the federal government, and the states (primarily through the Fourteenth Amendment), but says nothing about what private parties can do. Although some people think the world might be a better place if people had constitutional rights against private entities (e.g., free speech rights in the private workplace), this certainly isn’t how the constitution has been interpretted.
• In rare cases, the Court has held judicial enforcement of private contracts to constitute state action for constitutional purposes; e.g., racially restrictive covenants on property were held to be unenforceable in Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1, a 1948 Supreme Court case. But this reasoning is quite rare outside of that particular context (another salient exception is the application of the First Amendment as a limitation on civil libel suits as in New York Times v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964)), and certainly has never been applied to the enforcement of copyright licensing agreements.

If you’re ever trying to explain why SCO has little chance of winning to someone with intellectual property expertise, mention that SCO has argued that the GPL is unconstitutional. It should clarify things immediately.

(maybe someday people will come to my weblog based on something other than non-existent Paris Hilton materials!)