The Substantially Similar Weblog

Does anyone know whether common so-called “generic” PCI WiFi cards work under Linux? pricewatch, the Internet’s best competitive marketplace for technology (often beats eBay), lists 802.11b PCI cards as cheap as $16. I’ve tried contacting the vendors of these “generic” cards but haven’t been able to get anyone to tell me the chipset or whether or not the card will be useable under Linux. Can any of my readers give me a tip?

Via Sarah: check out the Worcester Computer Co-op. They make high speed Internet access available to anyone for free, and have special after-school programs and senior computer classes. Particulary noteworthy is that they use free software for everything in their lab:

Free software setups such as ours are very well-suited to a learning environment. The Co-op network administrators have created a situation in which users are free to play with the computers at will without fear of breaking something. This freedom is fundamental to a user’s computer education. Learning about computers is 90% experimentation and 10% instruction. Once a user is comfortable clicking any button and capable of actually playing with a machine, they will quickly be able to transform the computer from an intimidating piece of expensive electronics into a useful tool for career development, education, entertainment, and communications.

Or, as they like to call themselves, “OpenOffice.org”:

I don’t know… Will a silly logo help or hurt? It’s certainly possible to argue that the semi-silly Linux penguin has been helpful in advancing open source software. Maybe a silly seagull will be more effective than the serious shadowy seagull they used before (still visible in the background of the logo above).

Update: Oops! A commenter points out that this is just the education mascot. Apparently I didn’t read the website closely enough, I just noticed that the silly gull is the first thing you see at OpenOffice.org.

Spam gets more clever all the time. Yesterday, this· appeared on the debian-mentors list·:

 Date: Wed, 7 Apr 2004 22:36:41 -0700 (PDT) From: rasheed badmus  Subject: free game boy To: debian-mentors@lists.debian.org Hello: I'd like to request for someone to sponsor the following unofficial packages I have: snes9express (1.39-beta) - a GUI frontend for SNES9x (as far as I know this is still an orphaned package); and visualboy advance (a gameboy/gameboy color/gameboy advance emulator for Linux). The said packages can be obtained in this apt source location: anything that u want to send,send it by this below. P.O box 1103 agodi Ibadan, Oyo state, Nigeria. 

Although list members quickly figured out that this was actually spam·, someone made a good point: if spammers start using text from a typical posting to a list in the body of their message, it’s going to be very hard to use content-based filters reliably. I can’t see how, for example, a Bayesian filter would be able to drop the above message in the right bin.

Also, see this fairly technical but fascinating description of how an Internet cafe technician in Dublin caught a spammer red-handed·. The best part is where the spammer tries to eat his USB memory stick so the police won’t get it. (Sorry, this is one instance where my civil liberties instincts are overcome by my harsh justice instincts).

(this is another case where this post would ideally be filed under two categories—”Debian” and perhaps “spam”—which is not yet a category.)

I’ve written before about one of the various forms of Internet pestilence: messages bounced back from virus filters that claim you emailed them a virus, when in fact the mail header was forged and the virus originated elsewhere. It’s particularly frustrating to those of us who use GNU/Linux and thus are practically immune from viruses, at least those that propagate through email.

Here’s my latest attempt at an omnibus virus bounce procmail filter. Put this in ~/.procmailrc and most if not all of these messages should go away. Note that you need to increase from the default LINEBUF length to pack this all into one expreession:

Suggestions for additional filter strings are welcome. This is an obvious case where there should be some standard for this kind of message, but of course each proprietary virus scanner company wants to have its own distinct announcement so as to advertise its product in the bounce message. The best thing would be something in the mail header other than the subject line.

I’ve also found the following recipe useful for filtering out a very common viral email that appears to be going around:

You could probably substitute virus with /dev/null without any ill effects in both of these recipes.

Finally, a neat trick if you use SpamAssassin. This is covered in the documentation, but I only recently discovered it. Here’s a way to filter very certain spam into one folder, and pretty certain spam into another:

Set the number of stars in the first recipe to be the SpamAssassin score you’d like to count as “very certain.”

Steve· recently pointed out that the linux-disciples mail list archives· were two months out of date. Linux-disciples· is a small community maillist I administer for all-purpose newbie linux questions (technically it should be “GNU/Linux-disciples,” but that doesn’t roll off the tongue smoothly). Upon investigation, I discovered that Mailman· has not been archiving any of my mail lists since February.

Previously, I had the problem that ArchRunner (the mailman process that creates archives) was using up all my available CPU·. So I turned ArchRunner off and had it run (or so I thought) every night from midnight until 6am as a cron job under user ‘mailman’.

The problem, I just discovered, was that I had given the wrong path to ArchRunner in the mailman cron job. The error message was going to user ‘mailman’, which was, in fact, a list I had accidentally created.

So it turns out there were over 100,000 error messages that had been sent to the mailman list since February, and these messages were all waiting to be ‘archived’ by ArchRunner once it started running properly again.

The lesson to be learned? There can be an awful lot happening on your server without you realizing it, even running a few monitoring utilities such as logcheck· which are supposed to watch the log files. Also, make sure that error messages from a process that tries to run every minute don’t go to a nonexistent user, and particularly don’t go to a user who is actually a mailing list.

I’m also wondering why google isn’t indexing any of my mailing lists·. A major impetus behind linux-disciples· was to make these questions and answers appear in the search engines.

In other news, I’m using a tryout demo version of Codeweavers Crossover Office· to run Office XP under GNU/Linux. Normally, I do everything with OpenOffice, which I much prefer, but I’m doing some intensive document exchange with others at work, and as much as I’d like to believe it isn’t true, the conversion filter is not yet perfect. The documents we’re working on are legal documents that are ultimately filed as such with official entities. Unfortunately, I think I’ve got to compromise my free software values on this one… On the other hand, so far, CrossOver Office is holding up quite well, and I’ll probably buy a version if things continue to work well.

(no need to comment on why MS Office formats are very bad for legal/confidential documents—e.g., Word Macro Viruses·, accidental disclosure· of confidential information·, etc.·. I know.)

I’ve decided to support Mozilla FireFox’s promotional campaign, at least for a while, by adding this button to my sidebar:

I wonder if they’ve worked out any possible trademark issues with The Matrix Reloaded. After all the trademark issues this project has had in the past, I would hope they would steer clear of future conflict. (Interestingly, Mozilla has filed with the USPTO for FIREFOX—smart move).

This is a dream I just had: I was showing a movie on a large screen connected to my laptop running GNU/Linux. For some reason, the movie stopped playing. The file was gone. I noticed the drive was running continuously. I checked for free space:

 joehill:~>df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/hda2 55G 52G 133M 100% / 

and then again:

 joehill:~>df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/hda2 55G 51G 1.2G 98% / 

Somehow, files were disappearing. I checked for some process that might be deleting files:

 joehill:~>ps aux | grep rm joehill:~> 

or maybe an rsync job with the —delete switch?

 joehill:~>ps aux | grep rsync joehill:~> 

Nothing! I yanked out the network cable in an effort to stop the destruction. Still the free space continued to increase. Suddenly, the system reboots, but now the bootloader is gone, and I have a “no disk found” error.

Someone from my office comes over to help me, but can’t figure it out. He says, “I’ll call the trainer to help you get up to speed on Windows.”

Then I woke up in a cold sweat.

I just discovered that spoon, aka Ian Truskett, has passed away.

I never met spoon, and had only exchanged a handful of emails with him. I maintain the Debian package of a perl module he wrote, libwww-shorten-perl (or WWW::Shorten). It’s an odd connection to have with someone, and now to realize that they died. I don’t know quite what to do about it.

It also reminds me that there are many small free software projects out there maintained by lone developers (I have several myself), and as the movement ages we need to figure out how to pass on the torch without too much disruption. Maybe we should all have something like a living will, expressing some sense of who should take up our projects when we’re gone.

I’m uploading spoon’s last release of WWW::Shorten into sid now, released just a few weeks before he died. It’s not much of a tribute, I know, but it’s the only thing I can think to do.

I just received this note from Topica:

In an effort to continue to provide our discussion list service at no charge to list owners and subscribers, Topica will shortly be introducing short text advertisements to be featured with some of the the discussion list messages.
[…]

(featured???)

Fortunately, I’ve moved all of the mailing lists I administer over to mailman running on my own server over the last few years. But that still leaves all the Topica lists I’m subscribed to, over which I have no control.

People’s eyes often glaze over when I try to explain why Hotmail and Topica aren’t really “free.” The typical response: “Well, I’m not paying for it. It’s free. Like television.”

How much junk can they force down people’s throats before they finally see that “free” is not “free”? Even setting aside the whole “free beer” vs. “free speech” distinction, isn’t our time and attention itself worth something in monetary terms (i.e., “beer”)?

And what about the fact that we have no say over what changes these services will implement in the future? You get stuck with your “free” email address and your “free” email lists, and there are substantial costs involved in moving to a new service, particularly when your free service tries to make it difficult to switch out (i.e., neither Hotmail nor Yahoo! mail allow you to automatically forward your email to a new address, although GNU/Linux utilities exist that can grab the messages for you—gotmail, YahooPOPs!, FetchYahoo!).

As more and more “free” sites put time consuming and annoying obstacles between us and the services we’re trying to access, I’m hoping people will start to think about “very cheap” as a good alternative to “fake free.” I can provide mailing list services to people at nearly no cost, and I’m involved with a group that’s scaling up for a colocated server that promises to provide storage and bandwidth to friends (and friends of friends) for pennies a month (no profit for us). I’d rather pay 25 cents any day than face the barrage of garbage hotmail and similar sites provide as a condition of getting their free services.