FreddieFreeloader   Rantings of a paranoid computer hobbyist

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Things you get excited about when you’re old and gray

Over at http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS5673962628.html the author of the article opines that Debian is old and that

It seems to me that while Debian in the past has been the solid foundation of such excellent distributions as Ubuntu and MEPIS, this release shows that openSUSE and Fedora are the community Linuxes of the future.

It’s only natural for humans to confuse GUI eye-candy with advancement. It’s easy to look at a car and become amazed with the wings, the leather trim, the big speakers and the “bling-bling” mag wheels, but have you looked under the hood? I mean REALLY looked? Oh yeah, they love automatic transmission and GPS navigation too. Poor souls. They don’t know the pleasure of driving a real OS and get agitated if they don’t touch the mouse every second or so.

I’m a long time user of Gentoo, OpenBSD and Debian and I’m quite satisfied with it.

Make a nice transparent logo in png/gif format like:

ImageMagick’s ‘composite’ tool has a ‘-watermark’ option. Use it like:

composite -watermark 30% -gravity southeast water.png image.jpg image-watermarked.jpg

Let’s break that nifty one liner:

• “-watermark 30%” — make the logo 30% opaque (or 70% transparent depending on where you’re looking at it
• “-gravity southeast” — this defines on what part of the image should the watermark be located. It’s self-explanatory. If you’re still confused look here.
• water.png — filename of the logo we will be using as a watermark
• image.jpg — the original, untouched photo we will apply the watermark on
• image-watermarked.jpg — the end result of all this

This is the original photo:

And this is the watermarked photo:

The logo itself needs a bit of refinement. The important thing here is the code. Automating it to watermark a whole directory is just a simple for
loop one-liner:

for i in *.jpg; do composite -verbose -watermark 30% -gravity southeast water.png "$i" "${i%.jpg}-marked.jpg;done

http://strobist.blogspot.com/2006/02/welcome-to-strobist.html

I’m just a point-n-shoot guy. Although I would like to have a DSLR, it would probably stay at home most of the time. Compact cameras are easy to carry around — if a nice picture-perfect situation forms up you can easily snap a few shots to capture the view.

One thing I don’t like in compacts is that most of them are either in “auto” mode or they have pre-programmed modes for different situations. I like to go manual most of the time to adjust everything I can and play around with lighting and stuff. You can’t do that on a fully auto compact.

After almost 2 years — Debian 4.0 is out. For those people out there who have been wanting to try Linux for a long time but cannot find the suitable distro — this is it. Debian now sports Xorg (another “*sigh* finally”). More details here.

Now I can replace Gentoo in my “trane” box (1.8MHz, 256mb RAM) with Debian. I almost replaced it with Ubuntu but with the release of Debian 4.0, why bother? It’s not that I don’t like Gentoo — I’m still running it in my “davis” box (2.6GHz) and I don’t think I will ever replace it there. Gentoo is still my primary distro. I just don’t need the compile overhead in my slower box. I’ve been using Debian since 1999 with no complaints (just the long development phase). Debian is stable, period.

Of course I still have OpenBSD running on “duke”…

Yes, my boxes are named after Classic Jazz musicians. Go figure
Happy Easter everyone.

When public key encryption was first designed by it’s founders, it was touted as a solution to sending encrypted email with minimal risk of compromising the key because it separated the encryption from the decryption key. You only need to send out your encryption key, make it public by all means, but you have to keep you decryption key a secret.

Philip Zimmerman designed PrettyGoodPrivacy using this idea (and public key algorithms). It became famous. Phil got sued by the government for it. Time passed and PGP was eventually replaced by GnuPG.

Now people want to take advantage of this form of security, but with one failing — they fail to understand the concepts behind public key cryptography. Humans are basically lazy. This is both a good and bad trait. Laziness is the mother of most inventions. Soon people were designing software to take care of public key encryption (a front end to a command line program actually) so that more people can use the security of public key encryption. Problem with this is that all operations involving encrypting, signing a message are done behind some cute GUI — you don’t have any control on what happens to the actual data. You have to “trust” the GUI frontend to do housekeeping stuff (flushing caches, wiping temporary files, wiping the actual plaintext message).

This is where vulnerabilities come in…

Been listening to this for quite some time now thanks to my friend Paul. It’s different when you watch it. Damn nice music. Nobody makes music this good today. Nowadays, it’s quite rare to hear original music on the radio. What you have are 20-30 year old songs re-sung (trashed?) by so called “bands” that 14-year old moshers love to hear.

This is music:
[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9S4_kfs0i4″]

The magical sound of “So What” from “Kind of Blue”
[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=U4FAKRpUCYY]

I still have Gadd’s image in my head as a bass stomping drummer that clings pretty well to his grooves. Kinda surprised seeing him like this. Keep drumming Steve… [youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=FW97cf-C1lg]