Rantings of a Lunatic

http://obamacto.org/.
I haven’t researched it, I just found it in one of my many RSS feeds. I love the principal of it at least. I need to check into it to see who wrote it, who is following it, and if it is actually affiliated with Obama in any way. Aside from that though, I think if it is real, it is the first step in truly democratizing our government. I understand that our government was written in a fashion that was right for its time, regarding representation. My question is, has that changed? Is two people from a state really enough to control the senate and put forth the wishes of the public? We are living in in an age where a large population of our society has access to the internet. Can we not tap into that availability and make the government utilize it to help shape and make these decisions? I understand there are parts of the nation that don’t have the internet penetration that we take for granted here, but does that mean that we shouldn’t have a government that is willing to step into the future and make its own processes open and transparent and accessible?

When I got up this morning, I went through all the upgrade guides, and change logs, and did my backups. Then I upgraded from R5f27 to 5.5, and I am much happier already. I don’t have it working 100% yet, and there were some glitches, but in all its up and seems to be far superior to the previous version. [Read more]

So, I have some plans for some different pieces of computer equipment, and this has caused me to realize that I need to backup my external HD to DVD and reformat it to better use it. It is currently storing about 400Gb of data from OS X, and is formatted HFS+. I went over a couple of different options, and then on a whim figured I would just plug it into my linux box, and see if it would read it. The good news is that it popped right up and is fully readable, I didn’t check if its writable, but I don’t care, as long as I can read it to burn the DVDs from I will be fine. I am a little worried about the files still being readable on a mac after burning them, because I doubt the meta-data will transfer correctly, but thats really only a concern for Apps, which are all inside DMGs as far as I have checked. [Read more]

Apparently I have been running one of the most insecure versions of Wordpress for a long time. I had done a manual install before I had been exposed to fantastico, and the version of WP I was running predated the auto-update features that are present today, and it was still working, so I had neglected to update it. If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it right? Well, anyway, I got a call the other day from Matt, who proceeded to let me in on a little secret. I was apparently being link farmed out to Carnegie Mellon’s CS department’s DB Wiki, which must have been trashed because they have thousands of casino pages up. I won’t provide a link, mostly because I deleted it with extreme prejudice. What had caught me with this was that I had seen those links about a month ago, and had cleaned them out then, expecting that they were embedded in the theme I was using, and I had just never noticed them.
So, after he told me that, (he had been hit on two of his sites as well), I also found a nifty little javascript in the header that was a function that just did character substitution to do a meta redirect to a windowze-antivirus-2008 like dot com site if the referrer was from a search engine, and had an enumerated list in it. Needless to say I eradicated that as well.
[Read more]

So, I go through and blog about my computing opinions yesterday, and today I find this, kde goes cross-platform with windows mac os x support. Maybe I will have to give it a shot at work as long as I can still access all of the web apps I deal with on a daily basis. I will also have to make sure that Jeff, our company’s IT guy, won’t care or notice. I did actually write “Its been a while since I used KDE, but version 4 came out recently, and I am considering giving it a shot.” yesterday, so I probably will jump right on it. Plus if that means that Kate will run on Windows, that could be helpful. Its not Bluefish, but I have heard a lot of good things about Kate even though I haven’t run it myself. Being a K app is the only thing that has been holding me back from trying it out. Though that shouldn’t have been holding me back, I have the K libs installed so that I can use K3B, because nothing on Gnome comes close to burning discs anywhere near as well.
Although, I have to wonder about a 600Mb install size. I find it difficult to understand why it requires that much space to host a desktop environment, though I am sure that includes other packages that aren’t really necessary. And, I don’t have a Windows Explorer frame of reference. I am sure that IE shouldn’t too terrible, but it can’t be that great either. I had somewhere around 13 tabs open at one point yesterday, and IE was using well over 150Mb of “Virtual Memory” and was swapping to disk. I will keep my progression noted on here.