Geeky Baldisms

One of the simple, sad facts about switching from Windows to Ubuntu is that you must give up certain Windows apps, unless you want to jump through some hoops.

One hoop is running a virtual machine under VMWare, or any of the Linux virtual environments. Downside: lots of work for a non-geek. Performance on an older machine will also likely take a hit, running multiple operating systems at the same time.

An alternate hoop is Wine. Downside: funky interface, you may need files to run Win apps that you are unaware of (meaning that they won't run).

However, for less than 75 bucks, you can buy yourself a copy of Crossover Linux Professional. And if you do, you will find yourself installing Windows apps in a heartbeat, even if you aren't very computer-literate. And you will see very fast load times of the Windows apps, and they will be well-protected within your safe, secure Linux operating system.

I downloaded the free-for-a-day install, which was a shell script. You can also download a deb file or an RPM. I ran the sh script as super user, and it installed with no hassles.

Once you access the program itself, you will see that there are a slew of supported Windows apps. That means that if you run into issues, Crossover's tech support will help you. But even if your favorite Windows app (Paint Shop Pro 7, in my case) isn't supported, you still have an excellent chance of installing and running it.

While reading the latest spam crisis report, a thought occurred to me.

This world is incredibly litigation-happy. If some yutz injures himself doing something foolish and dangerous, he's liable to hire a lawyer and go after someone, and sure enough, some bubble-headed judge will likely judge liability on some innocent bystander who didn't stop the fool from hurting himself.

Indeed, lawyer-spread liability is feared like the rat-spread plague was in Europe a few hundred years ago.

So why hasn't anyone sued Microsoft for the spam crisis?

The vast majority of spam is generated by bot nets. These networks of outside-controlled computers all have one thing in common: they take advantage of security holes in various Microsoft operating systems to profligate.

And these aren't operating systems that have been donated by the behemoth corporation out of the goodness of its heart. No, these are bundles of software which have, in many cases, been painstakingly proven to be genuine by WGA. And as many as is humanly possible have been paid for, with proceeds going to Redmond, Washington. The amount of money that Microsoft has received for its various incarnations of Windows is too staggering to comprehend.

And what does the consumer receive for his money?

A “lease” of an operating system that promises security, reliability, and availability.

This operating system is far from secure, of course. Its architectural layout guarantees that if a hacker can get in with user rights, he can make fundamental changes to the operating system and bring it under his control. Another member of the bot net is thus produced.

Microsoft offers patches to keep things secure. However, many millions of computers remain unpatched, fair game to worms that will infiltrate them and add them to the botnet.

Spam costs untold millions, or possibly billions of dollars. Who pays? Big business, governments, and individuals.

So why hasn't anyone sued Microsoft?

I just got off the phone with my best friend, for whom I installed Ubuntu 8.10 on his laptop.

I installed it two weeks ago. His main concern with Vista was that it wouldn't play ball with his office network. It couldn't see the shared backup folder that i had set up for him years earlier, and also couldn't see his shared office printer.

I told him I didn't work on Vista, and he said that he wanted to hire me to get RID of it and install Ubuntu.

I did so, and his wireless worked out of the box (it was a new Gateway laptop, i don't recall the model). He also had good high-resolution video that played nicely with an additional plugged-in monitor. And his son had a DVD handy, so I got the codecs installed to read it.

And, of course, he can also see his shared folder and print to his shared printer ;-)

However, he called me up this morning feeling frustrated. His computer wouldn't connect to his home wireless network, and it also bombed on any DVD's he tried to play.

I consider the problems to be my fault, and I am making a mental note to make sure and do a more thorough job on my next Linux-converted laptop. Here are five steps you need to follow to make certain that you have a happy customer yourself:

I recently switched from AT&T DSL to Cox Internet. My download speed went from about 900k to speeds which vary from 3 meg (when usage is high) to nearly 20 meg (early in the morning). However, surfing didn't speed up much, if any at all.

The issue was that I would spend much time looking at "Looking up google.com" in the bottom bar of Firefox. In a word, Cox's DNS servers here in NW Arkansas are horrible.

The fix to that was to set up other DNS servers in my Belkin router. However, for some reason, the router wouldn't propagate the changes to my /etc/resolv.conf file. It continued to list the three slow Cox DNS servers and nothing else.

My fix could have been as simple as editing the file. However, I decided to dial things up a notch by installing dnsmasq. It's a local DNS cache that will greatly speed up name lookups.

Here's how to do it the GUI way:

Install dnsmasq with Synaptic Package Manager.

Now sudo gedit /etc/resolv.conf.

Here's what mine looks like:

domain Belkin
search Belkin
nameserver 127.0.0.1
nameserver 4.2.2.1
nameserver 4.2.2.2
nameserver 208.267.222.222
nameserver 208.267.220.220
nameserver 192.168.2.1
nameserver 68.105.28.11
nameserver 68.105.29.11
nameserver 68.105.28.12

Webmasters like myself have to pay the bills. With that in mind, if you would like to allow Adsense ads through Adblock Plus, here's a graphic showing the exceptions that need to be allowed. These exceptions allow ONLY Adsense ads, nothing else, as far as I can tell.

You can do a search for google and adsense in the Adblock Preferences dialog to get most of them, a manual search for /ads*.php$subdocument and http://pagead2.$~other,~object-subrequest will get the last two.

So why would you want to do such a thing? Well, I began using Adsense on my sites three years ago because it was polite. And it hasn't gotten any less polite with the years. I decided long ago that annoying surfers with intrusive advertising was bad business, so I have always refrained from doing so.

Adsense ads load quickly and inobtrusively, IMHO. I have NEVER had an annoying experience with them. So I personally see no need to block them, a la Adblock Plus.

I let them through as a courtesy to other webmasters who use them.

If you would like to do the same thing, here's your tutorial on how to do so.