Practical Technology

for practical people.

August 25, 2009
by sjvn01
1 Comment

The affordable Mac

The conventional wisdom is that Macs are expensive. Microsoft ads make a big deal about how much more computer you can get for the money. Nonsense. Actually, you can get a perfectly good Mac for cheap: the Mac mini, which can do everything its bigger, more expensive brothers do for a lot less.

The bottom of the line Mac mini comes with a 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, a gigabyte of RAM, a 120GB hard drive, and NVIDIA GeForce 940DM graphics. The price? $599.

That may not sound like much of a machine, but that’s only because most of you have been using Windows. On Windows, this would make for a pathetic Vista or Windows 7 PC, or an okay Windows XP system. With Mac OS X Leopard, and the soon-to-arrive Snow Leopard, that’s more than enough hardware for a great computing experience.

That’s not just theory. I’ve been running a Mac mini with these stats for the last few months, and I like it a lot. While I prefer desktop Linux for most purposes, I’m a software pragmatist. I like programs that do their job and do them well. For what I want from a Mac, the mini is great.

To be precise, I use my mini for video transcoding work and to manage my video library. For video transcoding — converting videos from a variety of formats to MP4 for my Apple TV media extenders — I use the open-source program Handbrake 0.9.3. To decrypt DVDs so that Handbrake can move their video into my library, I use the open-source VLC Media Player.

Both these programs are also available on Linux and Windows, but I find that they work best and fastest on my Mac. There are dozens of other programs that claim they can move videos from DVDs and other files to a format that works for you. Most of them cost money and fail at the job. Others programs, like FFmpeg can do the job, but they require a lot of manual tweaking to do the job right. Handbrake and VLC on the Mac is really the best way to go. Trust me: I learned that the hard way.

Video transcoding is not easy work for a computer. Nonetheless, my little mini does a better job of it than does my desktop Linux and Windows 7 systems using the exact same programs and with faster processors and 2-6 gigabytes of RAM. I don’t know about you, but I impressed.

I also use that same mini to manage my approximately one terabyte video and half-terabyte music libraries. These, of course, aren’t on my mini. Instead they’re on my gigabit Ethernet network. With NAS (network attached storage) and USB external drives, I don’t find that it matters much anymore how much storage comes with a PC; you can always and easily add more.

For video and audio management, I’m using iTunes 8.2. Yes, it’s proprietary. Yes, it can be a pain at time. But, again, like the mini in general, it’s fast and it does this job better than any of its competitors does. And, yes, in particular, it does this job better too than iTunes does on a ‘faster’ Windows PC.

On top of that, there are the oft-hidden costs of Windows. For example, when you buy a Windows PC, you must buy security software with it. If you don’t, your Windows PC will be toast sooner rather than later.

Of course, if you shop smart, a Linux desktop is always your cheapest desktop choice. But if you have particular needs for video and audio as I do, then a Mac isn’t just your best choice: it’s your most affordable choice. Or, if you just a good, general purpose PC and you want Apple’s great belt-and-suspenders support, then the Mac mini is also for you.

A Windows PC only looks like the cheap choice. Your best choice, even for people on a tight budget, may very well be the Mac mini. Check it out. I think you’ll be glad you did.


A version of this story first appeared in ComputerWorld.

August 25, 2009
by sjvn01
1 Comment

Botnets must die

Today’s Internet report is Green in the European Union, Yellow in North America but still Red in the Pan-Pacific countries and Israel.

In the U.S., Facebook and Twitter are still under siege from the Windows-based Katrina Storm botnet. Google, however, reports that search delays are now down to an average of three seconds. Things have gone from bad to worse in Japan and Reunified Korea, though, as attacks from former North Korean cyberwarfare units using the Windows-based MyDoom VII botnet have locked down all financial and government Web sites. That’s still better than Israel, where, according to landline phone reports, attacks from the so-called Sons of Eichmann cyberterrorist group using the Windows botnet New Cyxymu have totally frozen the country’s Internet access.

Sound like science fiction? I wish it were. I think it’s a fair prediction of where we’re going if we don’t stop Windows-based botnet distributed denial-of-service attacks.


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August 24, 2009
by sjvn01
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The SCO zombie wins one

Oh the irony. Today, August 24th, a Federal Appeals Court ruled that while the walking dead SCO still owes Novell big bucks for selling Unix to Sun and Microsoft, the District Court overstepped its grounds in ruling that SCO had never bought Unix’s IP (intellectual property) rights in the first place. What’s funny about this is that it’s only after SCO is dead for all practical purposes, that it finally manage to win one.

This does not mean, as the few brain-dead SCO supporters would have it, that SCO owns Unix’s IP. It means that SCO might own them and they can take the matter to a jury trial. As the ruling itself states (PDF Link) “We recognize that Novell has powerful arguments to support its version of the transaction, and that, as the district court suggested, there may be reasons to discount the credibility, relevance, or persuasiveness of the extrinsic evidence that SCO presents.” But, since “the evidence presented on a dispositive issue is subject to conflicting, reasonable interpretations, summary judgment is improper. So, “We think SCO has presented sufficient evidence to create a triable fact as to whether at least some UNIX copyrights were required for it to exercise its rights under the agreement.”

So does, this mean that as CEO Darl McBride said in The Salt Lake Tribune that this is a “‘huge validation for SCO’ that will enable it to continue its lawsuit against IBM and a related suit against Novell.”?

Uh. No, not really.

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August 24, 2009
by sjvn01
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Pidgin 2.6.1: The best Linux IM client gets better

M (Instant Messaging) clients have become invisible. We use them all the time to ‘talk’ with co-workers, chat with friends, and ‘text’ with family members on their phone. That is, I do, anyway because my IM client Pidgin, works with every almost every IM client in creation and it makes chatting with anyone, anywhere mindlessly simple. And, with this newest version, limited voice and video support is built in as well.

Today, the VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) and video framework is rudimentary, but the promise is there. Today, you can only use voice and video over XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol), an open IM XML standard on Linux. However, what’s important is that the framework is there. Adding voice and video to other IM protocols won’t be easy, but the big first step had been taken now.

Pidgin already has the IM clients down pat-AIM, Google Talk, IRC. MSN, Sametime, etc. etc. That said, I found that this version has faster overall performance and fewer hiccups.

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August 21, 2009
by sjvn01
1 Comment

Why openSUSE went for KDE

Usually, the major Linux desktop distributors offer both the major Linux desktop interfaces-KDE and GNOME. Some, like Canonical divide it into two separate distributions, Ubuntu for GNOME and Kubuntu for KDE, but they seldom offer a default choice. OpenSUSE. however, is taking that plunge and it’s decided on KDE.

It wasn’t an easy choice. As openSUSE Product Manager, Michael Löffler, explained in an e-mail to the openSUSE community, “The default desktop is an issue that many openSUSE users and contributors are passionate about.”

He’s got that right. I think that Linux attracts people who want the most control possible of their operating system and the idea of there being any default choice, no matter how good, rubs them the wrong way. The mere fact that there are dozens of Linux desktop distributions and several programs like SUSE Studio, which lets you easily roll your own distribution.

Knowing all that the openSUSE leadership bravely decided to “default [to] the radio button to KDE in the DVD installer. Therefore, with openSUSE 11.2 release, the KDE desktop will be installed if the user accepts the default setting. Users can also choose the GNOME desktop at this stage.”

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August 20, 2009
by sjvn01
2 Comments

Fixing Linux

Everything has security problems, even Linux. An old and obscure problem with the gcc compiler was recently discovered to have left a security hole in essentially every version of Linux that anyone is likely to be running. Here’s what you need to know about fixing it.

The problem itself was discovered by Brad Spengler, the hacker behind the open-source network and server security program, grsecurity. What he found was that in some network code, there was a procedure that included a variable that could be set to NULL (no value at all). Now, this didn’t appear to be a problem because the programmer also included a test which would return an error-message if the variable turned out to have a NULL value.

So far, so good. Unfortunately, the gcc code optimizer on finding that a variable has been assigned a NULL value removed the test! This left a hole, that didn’t exist in the original program. Using this hole, and code provided by Spengler, any cracker with sufficient access to a Linux computer could get into the computer’s memory and, from there, get into all kinds of mischief. For more on the down and dirty technical details, turn to Jonathan Corbet’s story, “Fun with NULL Pointers.”

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