The Blog of Lucien Stals

Once a computer is infected with the Labour Movement virus, it will only function normally for 8 hours a day. For another 8 hours, it will only perform functions that it wants to. For the remaining 8 hours, the system will shut down and will not be able to be restarted. The next day it starts all over again.

Some known variants of the Labour Movement virus are:
• The “40HourWeek” virus. This functions like the Labour Movement virus, but additionally prevents the infected system from working at all on weekends.
• The “36HourWeek” virus functions the same as the “40HoueWeek” virus with the addition that it will prevent the system from booting on one additional day every two weeks. Usually this day will be a Monday or Friday, in effect giving the system a “long weekend”, but it can be any randomly chosen day.
• The “AussieLabourer”. This is the worst kind of all. It has all the features of the 36HourWeek virus, but will also “chuck a sickie” and stop working for a whole day whenever it feels like it.

Removing this virus from your system can be extremely difficult. If you attempt to delete any infected file, the virus will immediately “go on strike” and shut down your system. This can have a follow on effect in that any other infected systems on the same network may also go on strike.

The ScabLabour.exe file can be run on infected computers to keep them running, but this is not a good long term solution. Attempts to run ScabLabour can cause other infected system to launch a Denial of Service attack on the system running ScabLabour.

The only way to fix this problem is to throw out an infected computer and replace it with a new clean system running the IndustrialReform program. This will prevent reinfection, but is a resource hog and tends to make the system run slower.

I broke down and bought an iPod nano.

First impressions?
* Apple gives good packaging
* OMG! It’s SOOO SMALLLLLLL
* It souds good too

Having simply plugged it into my iBook (can I buy a different vowel please?), iTunes fired up and updated the software automaticly.

Painlessly, my play lists are on the thing now.

It also offered to copy my photos. Before saying yes, I decided to download some more pics of the boys. So I went to our Flickr site and grabbed some of the latest pics. Using Safari (why isn’t it called iBrowser?), I right click on an image, and get the option to download directly to iPhoto. From there I can simply create a new album for the boys. Then tell iTunes to sync with that album whenever I plu the iPod in.

So the European courts are currently doing battle with with MS about bundling apps. But they aren’t the only ones doing it. And when things work this smoothly…

I’m sorry. Can sombody remind me what the problem was?

I just recieved an email from a student who had bought a new Mac and wanted some advice on a decent text editor for programming Java on the Mac. I though this might make some usefull advice for anyone in the same position…

With your new Mac, you should have received some disks. One of these should have the developer tools on it. This installs, amongst other things, the Xcode IDE. This is a fully featured, professional strength development environment. Unfortunately, it’s like using a nuclear bomb to swat a fly for the kind of apps we develop in SD2. Even if you don’t plan using Xcode, I would strongly recommend installing the developers tools.

NetBeans ( www.netbeans.org/ ) is another professional strength IDE that is nice to use.
Eclipse ( www.eclipse.org/ ) is a brilliant full strength editor, but lacks drag and drop visual style editing for gui’s.

Next on the hit list would be:
* JEdit www.jedit.org/
* JGrasp www.jgrasp.org/
* BlueJ www.bluej.org/

These three are all text editors (as opposed to complete development environments) and are free and cross platform (alas, Crimson Editor is Windows only).
They all work fine. BlueJ is designed to teach Java and Object Oriented programming and isn’t meant to be a professional editor, but does a good job anyway and has some very nice OO programming features.
BlueJ is nice for learning, but you will quickly outgrow it. Although there is a new version of NetBeans designed specifically with BlueJ users in mind. Supposed to make it very easy to transition from the small time (BlueJ) to the big time (NetBeans et al).

But my personal favourite at the moment is TextMate ( macromates.com/ ). This is my ideal editor for working on small projects. The only drawback is that it’s not free (39 Euros, money well spent in my opinion.)

My recommendation?

TextMate.

If you want something free, get either JGrasp or JEdit.
Save the full blown IDE’s for when you are ready to tackle a large project (10 or more reasonably complex classes).

One final note: don’t forget to go to the Apple developer site ( developer.apple.com/java/download/) and grab the latest version of Java5 for Mac. The default systems still ship with Java 1.4. You’ll need to sign up for an Apple developer account, but that is free.

Ages ago I fell in love with Ubuntu and posted the blog entry “Ubuntu Good“.

I just rediscovered the joy. After being put off the idea of installing Trac on the Mac, I thought I’d see if it was any easier under Ubuntu. And the answer is “Hell yes!”

Ubuntu is not a development environment out of the box, but they have taken the wonderful Debian package managment system so it’s so damn easy to add what you want.

Installing Trac?

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install apache2
sudo apt-get install libapache-mod-python
sudo apt-get install trac

That’s it. Too easy.

I haven’t tested it yet, but the installer reported no problems, so I have big hopes

It’s been on my mind for ages, but tonight I got around to cut and pasting together a ByteClub blogging guide. There’s plenty of good stuff out there, especialy from Sun and IBM.

A jamming device for mobile phones?

I could certainly use that in my lectures

It’s a long rambling story.

It started with Clinton suggesting we look at Trac as a possible project managment system for dev.byteclub.

I wanted to test it on the laptop so that I had an idea how it works before making any judgment.

The first obsticle is that it’s writen in Python and requires Apache to have the mod_python module installed. After reading the documentation for mod_python, it was clear that I was going to have to compile from source. This is something I have not done a lot of, and considering OS X’s deviations from the *nix norms, did not go according to plan.

So I consulted my handy UNIX for Mac OS X book to see if could enlighten me. It suggested using Fink.

Fink!

I installed that ages ago. “I wonder if it will work?”, I asked myself.

“I’d better just make sure it’s up to date.”

So I typed:

sudo fink update-all

That was 3 hours ago. It’s still updating. Currently building subversion. I assume it’s working alphabeticly through the installed packages. That means I’ve only got t,u,v,w,x,y and z to go

This is a note to myself in case I forget.

The Clagnut blog has some helpful hints on getting htaccess files to work on OS X (which disables them by default)

But it doesn’t make it clear that the second file you need to edit is

/private/etc/httpd/users/(username).conf

Damn config files hidden in the strangest places on the Mac

(Note: This was relevant to OS X 10.4. Not sure what the deal is under 10.5. I use MAMP for all my OS X web dev now. Save a lot of headaches.)

I recently discovered bit torrents. I know they aren’t new, but I goofed around with a couple of clients and found uTorrent to be easy to use. So easy that I’ve almost blown my download limit for the month.

But I wanted to try watching something on the TV, just to see what the quality was like. Also because I don’t have speakers on the computer and have to watch everything with the headphones on. Some shows, in DivX format, that come down over bit torrent are noticably blocky when run on the computer. But armed with my new DVD burner, and a copy of ConvertXtoDVD, I was able to burn some DivXs onto DVD (it took two hours to run the conversion, 5 minutes to burn to disc).

And the end result?

I could not tell the difference between what I was watching through the DVD player on our TV from normal free to air TV. Okay, we only get an analog signal. No digital set top boxes in this house. But the quality of the DVD was better than most VHS tapes I used to pay good money to hire. (Remember VHS?) There was one little bit in the show when the background looked a bit funny. But that’s it.

I’m not sure if this shows how good DivX is, or how poor analog TV’s are. I recently watched the newest Ghost In The Shell movie on DVD on my computer (not a DivX. An actual proper DVD) and it was a real delight to watch. The quality of the animation was astounding. Then I put it on the TV and was disapointed. It just didn’t look anywhere near as good. Perhaps I should just move the computer into the living room and be done with it. Only I’d never get a chance to do any work. (Yes, I have been known to do work on the computer. Not just watch movies

It seems to be a Melbourne geek thing, but everytime I ask anyone who opinion I respect with things technical, they all tell me that MSY Technology is the place to buy computer parts.

So I went there today to find out. I went there twice in fact, and still left empty handed.

First time, I was there at 10 am (it’s a Saturday). They weren’t open yet. I thought that was fair enough and decided to come back later.

Second time, at about 2 pm, the sign on the door said “open” so I went on in. As I came in, a disgruntled couple said “don’t bother, they aren’t very helpful.” as they huffed out the door.

But I went in anyway.

I looked around briefly and saw two people ahead of me being served (I guess) and three guys behind the counter. One of them just looked at me and said “Go away. Were closed. Come back Monday.”

“Not likely” I said, and left.

So what’s with MSY? Why does everyone I ask rave about them. This was the first time I’ve ever been there and I certainly am not planning on going back. I guess geeks like cheap stuff. And if MSY can save costs by not bothering with things like politeness or custmer service, then I guess they feel they are in a winning situation. But I, for one, will certainly not be going there again.

(Okay, I just looked their web site and it says they are open 10:30 till 2. But would it kill them to be polite?)