Another one from tuxmachines.com today, paypal had always been a supporter of free software by not requiring proprietary software to use the site. However the fsf recently noticed paypal "had added a proprietary software license to its User Agreement".
LINK
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
13 semi-abstract linux howto's
A great blog post has been posted by tuxmachines.org which contain 13 abstract howto's, including setting up a firewall in Ubuntu, strong wifi authentication in Linux and handy terminal tips (the ones you never remember!).
LINK
LINK
Day 1: Everyman 2 sleep schedule
Info
Well I really started last week, but due to events that I hoped wouldn't affect the schedule, I decided to go back to the normal schedule for a few days and start on the everyman today.My schedule is roughly as follows:
Core Sleep: 12.30am to 5am
1st nap: 8am (cheating really, but it's the only free time!)
2nd nap: 6.30pm
A bit of a gap between the naps, but it's realistically the only times I can make, and it also ensures I'm well rested before going to school/work.
How I feel
Well it's 6.00 am in the morning and I got up an hour ago, but I don't feel too bad. When you psych yourself up enough before going to sleep so that you know you will be getting up early the next morning, you generally feel more in control. The main thing to do is get up instantly, as there's quite a risk of going back to sleep.Thoughts
It just feels like I had a bad sleep the night before. Not too eventful, I'll keep you posted.Everyman 2 sleep schedule, polyphasic sleep
What is polyphasic sleep?
You may not know it yet but you're probably familiar with polyphasic sleep already, with the most famous schedule probably being the siesta. Polyphasic sleep is sleeping to a schedule in such a way that the amount of time you spend asleep is reduced, but the quality of sleep is increased, leading to a better overall sleep. When you sleep, the body passes through 5 stages on it's way to get the most important sleep, REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. The idea is that with polyphasic sleep, you can train your brain to go straight to the REM stage of sleep in 20 minute naps throughout the day. As it takes your body an hour and a half to reach REM stage normally, each 20 minute nap will drastically take away the amount of core sleep needed, and will allow you to feel like you've had a full nights sleep, in 20 minutes.
That's a brief intro, there's much more info on the web, and explanation I quite like is how to hack your brain, which is a really nicely presented page detailing the basics.
How does it work
As you can see from the page there are different schedules to suit your routine, and how many times you can take a nap in a day, from a siesta with 1 nap, to the uberman which comprises of 6 naps throughout the day (that's just 2 hours sleep!). The ubermanl is the best documented, however it is said to only suit the schedule of ~2% of people, and is very difficult to adjust to.
So what are you doing?
I'll be doing (I am doing) the everyman 2 sleep schedule. This is sleeping for 4.5 hours at night, and then 2 naps throughout the day. It may not be too extreme, but it's still 3 hours less sleep a night, and is the only one that I can fit into my schedule. The everyman 2 is perfect for me and I imagine most people as I can only guarantee myself 2 naps a day (if even) and the caveat about polyphasic sleep schedules is that you can't miss your naps or you will feel wrecked, and it will throw your entire schedule off. Also, the less intense a schedule you follow the more flexible it is regarding times, which is very useful as more than likely you'll get caught up doing something and miss a nap by a few hours. For example, my core sleep should start at 12.30 am, but if I go out that night, it mightn't start until 3/4 am. For more info on the uberman, check out here, an account from someone who's done the uberman for 6 months, talking about the everyman.]
My schedule is roughly as follows:
Core Sleep: 12.30am to 5am
1st nap: 8am (cheating really, but it's the only free time!)
2nd nap: 6.30pm
A bit of a gap between the naps, but it's realistically the only times I can make, and it also ensures I'm well rested before going to school/work.
Here's a list of the days, I should stick to it fairly well, except for 1 day this week when I can't avoid an event that will completely throw off the schedule. Also note, the posts during these times may contain spelling or grammatical errors, as I'm probably wrecked.
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
Days 7-9
Days 10-12
Days 13-19
Finally, please feel free to comment any of my posts, you don't need to sign up and it's a great way for me to answer any questions or receive feedback. Thanks!
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Windows won't boot with Error 0x0000225; A working solution
Well recently I partitioned my HDD to allow space for my Ubuntu 9.10 install. So to do this I did as I always did, I booted parted magic and used gParted to partition the drive. Everything went normal and it took about 2 hours to reduce my 400 gig debian install to 110 gigs. I then decided as I had it open, I'd increase the size of my windwos vista partition by 30 gigs, as it was running out of space. So I did the same as I'd always done and not too long later the partiton was increased.
And of course, when I reboot the machine, all my OSs work perfectly, except for windows, which gives the following error (well, along these lines anyway) ;
Windows has failed to boot, insert recovery disk etc...
File: \windows\system32\winload.exe
Status: 0x0000225
Info: Application missing or corrupt
So I poked around, I mounted windows on my linux box (very relieved to find the filesystem was intact) and found the file was indeed there. After a bit of google I found a few solutions that didn't work such as copying the winload.exe file from another directory. In the end, I decided that I'd simply do what the error message said, boot a recovery CD and hit repair. now I didn't like the sound of this, mainly because everytime I'd use a windows cd to recover windows OS, it either overwrote the system or destroyed my bootloader (or most annoyingly, installed the windows bootloader on other HDDs making it impossible to use GRUB as my bootloader). So I found a link to the torrent on neosmarts blog and burned the iso to a dvdrw. Learning from my mistakes, I backup everything up on a seperate HDD and unplugged all the other HDDs from my PC. I booted up the cd, 10 minutes later it fully boots. Nervously I press repair, it nicely tells my my problem, and if I'd like to repair.
I went for it, and amazingly, it took about 5 seconds and rebooted as normal. I was met by my lovely grub menu, and windows worked as though nothing ever happened. This came as a big shock to me, as I figured it would ATLEAST overwrite my bootloader.
Anyway, this post is simply meant as a reassurance to anyone who get this error, that microsoft won't completely mess your pc, and not to be afraid to use their recovery disk. The problem should never have occured in the 1st place, but fair play to microsoft for changing nothing, and making what seems to be a useful tool.
And of course, when I reboot the machine, all my OSs work perfectly, except for windows, which gives the following error (well, along these lines anyway) ;
Windows has failed to boot, insert recovery disk etc...
File: \windows\system32\winload.exe
Status: 0x0000225
Info: Application missing or corrupt
So I poked around, I mounted windows on my linux box (very relieved to find the filesystem was intact) and found the file was indeed there. After a bit of google I found a few solutions that didn't work such as copying the winload.exe file from another directory. In the end, I decided that I'd simply do what the error message said, boot a recovery CD and hit repair. now I didn't like the sound of this, mainly because everytime I'd use a windows cd to recover windows OS, it either overwrote the system or destroyed my bootloader (or most annoyingly, installed the windows bootloader on other HDDs making it impossible to use GRUB as my bootloader). So I found a link to the torrent on neosmarts blog and burned the iso to a dvdrw. Learning from my mistakes, I backup everything up on a seperate HDD and unplugged all the other HDDs from my PC. I booted up the cd, 10 minutes later it fully boots. Nervously I press repair, it nicely tells my my problem, and if I'd like to repair.
I went for it, and amazingly, it took about 5 seconds and rebooted as normal. I was met by my lovely grub menu, and windows worked as though nothing ever happened. This came as a big shock to me, as I figured it would ATLEAST overwrite my bootloader.
Anyway, this post is simply meant as a reassurance to anyone who get this error, that microsoft won't completely mess your pc, and not to be afraid to use their recovery disk. The problem should never have occured in the 1st place, but fair play to microsoft for changing nothing, and making what seems to be a useful tool.
To sum it up:
- Download and burn iso image which can be torrented here
- Boot from cd and click repair
Everything should now work perfectly.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Why we don't listen to Microsoft: New fud campaigns
You may remember Microsoft's "get the facts" largely biased campaign against Linux (now changed to the lower profile compare site). Well, Microsoft are back with new campaigns to lengthen the time before IE eventually dies. The site, found here, does a fantastic job of putting IE8 in a good light, with some very factual and non-biased (just checking I got the sarcasm across) arguments about how IE8 is superior to Firefox and Chrome (they don't seem to acknowledge Opera).
To briefly go through it's "facts". IE8 is the most secure browser because of its malware protection, it may have superior malware detection, but this is a comparison of web browsers, not antivirus, when it comes to exploits for browsers, most of them are for IE and the ones for the open source equivalents get fixed significantly quicker. IE8 also gets a solo tick for privacy with "in-private browsing", aka porn mode, this is something I don't understand as google chrome offers incognito mode which is effectively the same thing. The get a tick for ease of use, this is relative to the user, so I'll leave it alone. For web standards, they give all 3 browsers the tick. This is a load of crap, and they claim they deserve this tick because of their css 2.1 support, while even acknowledging that IE8 doesn't have support for new web standards such as css 3 and html 5. And seeing as html 5 uses an open source alternative to flash and silverlight, I don't think they ever will fully support it. I'll quickly go through the rest. IE8 gets a solo tick for reliability, which doesn't need arguing, sometimes IE8 won't even work on my box without the --no-addons parameter, admittedly it's probably my box, but still. They give themselves a tick for customisability, saying
Once again, this does not need to be argued, they're not mac, or opera, things don't work out of the box. The one to top the lot imo is the performance comparison, where all 3 get a tick. Now, I might understand the argument against Firefox, but against Chrome, there's no competition. The excuse for fast performance is
Anyone who has used IE8 knows this is a load of crap, and fairly contrasts googles claim that IE7, and IE8 similar, was 23 times slower than chrome in the sunspider JavaScript benchmark.
You may have noticed in the title I say "campaigns" plural. Well heres #2. Microsoft may not have the best products, but with the amount of money at their disposal the easy to get people to use their products is to bribe them. Microsoft is offering 10 grand (of Australian dollars) to Australians to locate the 10 grand, hidden in some site. To find the site, you have to follow the clues given on twitter, and of course be using IE8. I'm not sure what I think of this, from a marketing perspective it's quite a good idea, and even though firefox users can fake the IE8 user agent, I doubt many will. If you can't view the site using firefox (many firefox users are reporting this problem, I use arch so my user agent currently reads "grand paradiso", not firefox), you can download user agent switcher and put "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)" as the user agent.
Thankfully google have responded to this with their own parody site, found here. It's great to see someone fighting back against Microsofts campaigns, and google have made things a little more classy than the FSFs not all that impressive bad vista campaign.
That's all from "microwatch" (thank linux outlaws for the soundbite), I'll get around to my Arch linux review soon, feel free to leave any comments on the topic, and I mean any comments, I'd even take spam now to get some interaction :P , gl.
To briefly go through it's "facts". IE8 is the most secure browser because of its malware protection, it may have superior malware detection, but this is a comparison of web browsers, not antivirus, when it comes to exploits for browsers, most of them are for IE and the ones for the open source equivalents get fixed significantly quicker. IE8 also gets a solo tick for privacy with "in-private browsing", aka porn mode, this is something I don't understand as google chrome offers incognito mode which is effectively the same thing. The get a tick for ease of use, this is relative to the user, so I'll leave it alone. For web standards, they give all 3 browsers the tick. This is a load of crap, and they claim they deserve this tick because of their css 2.1 support, while even acknowledging that IE8 doesn't have support for new web standards such as css 3 and html 5. And seeing as html 5 uses an open source alternative to flash and silverlight, I don't think they ever will fully support it. I'll quickly go through the rest. IE8 gets a solo tick for reliability, which doesn't need arguing, sometimes IE8 won't even work on my box without the --no-addons parameter, admittedly it's probably my box, but still. They give themselves a tick for customisability, saying
Sure, Firefox may win in sheer number of add-ons, but many of the customizations you'd want to download for Firefox are already a part of Internet Explorer 8 – right out of the box.
Once again, this does not need to be argued, they're not mac, or opera, things don't work out of the box. The one to top the lot imo is the performance comparison, where all 3 get a tick. Now, I might understand the argument against Firefox, but against Chrome, there's no competition. The excuse for fast performance is
Knowing the top speed of a car doesn't tell you how fast you can drive in rush hour. To actually see the difference in page loads between all three browsers, you need slow-motion video. This one’s also a tie.
Anyone who has used IE8 knows this is a load of crap, and fairly contrasts googles claim that IE7, and IE8 similar, was 23 times slower than chrome in the sunspider JavaScript benchmark.
You may have noticed in the title I say "campaigns" plural. Well heres #2. Microsoft may not have the best products, but with the amount of money at their disposal the easy to get people to use their products is to bribe them. Microsoft is offering 10 grand (of Australian dollars) to Australians to locate the 10 grand, hidden in some site. To find the site, you have to follow the clues given on twitter, and of course be using IE8. I'm not sure what I think of this, from a marketing perspective it's quite a good idea, and even though firefox users can fake the IE8 user agent, I doubt many will. If you can't view the site using firefox (many firefox users are reporting this problem, I use arch so my user agent currently reads "grand paradiso", not firefox), you can download user agent switcher and put "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)" as the user agent.
Thankfully google have responded to this with their own parody site, found here. It's great to see someone fighting back against Microsofts campaigns, and google have made things a little more classy than the FSFs not all that impressive bad vista campaign.
That's all from "microwatch" (thank linux outlaws for the soundbite), I'll get around to my Arch linux review soon, feel free to leave any comments on the topic, and I mean any comments, I'd even take spam now to get some interaction :P , gl.
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