Twitter as a News Source

There is a new trend on the internet. Every web site creates a twitter account and posts tweets about web site updates. Since there is an RSS present for years now, I find the whole idea ridiculous. There are three reasons why I find twitter updates useless:

1. They duplicate information, distributed by RSS.

2. Tweets are not complete updates as delivered via RSS, but only few words and link to the post. In other hand, some web sites do not deliver whole content through RSS, but it is a rare practice.

3. Link, delivered by Tweet, has to be clicked. It means, that one extra click stays between me and desired update. Also, the link is shortened by a we service and meaningless. Clicking the link, I do not know, where will it redirect me. Occasions, when I was transferred to spam or harmful sites, happen.

If I subscribe to news source, I want to receive updates in a fastest and fullest way. Twitter restricts this freedom. Be happy. Use RSS.

Learning C++ as a New Language

Yesterday I digested learning C++ as a new language paper by Bjarne Stroustrup. I am looking for a “correct” approach to learn programming. Programming science is giant mastodon. Programming is so huge system that it can’t be observed completely even after years of research. There are no professionals, who know all kinds of programming. Even old specialists with several areas of expertise observe only piece of puzzle. My target is to find universal guide into all, or at least most kinds of programming. A guide, that observes the whole mastodon and popularly describes every part of it.

However, the paper was not about my search. The paper is a good introduction into C++. It does not describe syntax of language, but provides a manual, guiding where and how to start learning the language. I noted, that those advises do not apply to C++ only, but applicable for any programming language. The paper is highly recommended to students, who are completely new to programming, as well as to teachers, creating their teaching programs.

I want to note, that if my teachers trained me according Stroustrup’s advises, educational effect would be higher. At least, i wouldn’t have had to discover a difference between standard library and language syntax myself. So if you are not satisfied by your teachers. but not sure where to start this paper is for you.

Speed up Firefox 3.5 on Fedora 11.

Since I moved to Fedora 10, I noticed Firefox became noticeably slower than before. Start-up was taking about 30 seconds. Even right click menu appearance had noticeable delay. I suspected plug-ins. I minimized amount of my plug-ins twice. It didn’t help.

After I suspected history and private data database. I tried to clean up history manually, but it did not decrease its size. Deleted entries were just marked as deleted, but kept remain in database. There was the last hope – trying to delete places.sqlite file manually. I had a hope that Firefox checks existence of database and recreates it in case of absence. And yes – it does it! It increased starting speed for about 5 seconds.

To eliminate large-history-problem in the future, I set a limit on it. You just need to go to about:config page and set a search filter to browser.history. Th following values need to be changed:

browser.history_expire_days;

browser.history_expire_days_min;

browser.history_expire_sites;

Personally, I set them to 30, 15 and 5000 accordingly. You may choose another values.

My last concern was language packs. There are all possible language packs installed and enabled by default in fedora’s Firefox. I disabled them all (a lot of clicking), except Russian and English ones. Miracle! Firefox starts up several times faster! Now it takes about 7 seconds only!

Windows and Linux System Time Shift Fix

Recently, I had to install Vista on my laptop. After installation I found that system time in Linux and in Windows had 3 hours difference. So every time I was rebooting into another OS, my system time was set on another value. To track time, I am always using clock in the tray. So changing clock value after each restart was really annoying.

Windows does not change sytem clock value, it changes output on system tray’s clock value according timezone difference only. Vista did not change any value on system clock. It was showing whatever value was left after Linux. Linux was not changing any clock value also. So problem was in time representation in both operating systems.

Occasionally, Linux can represent clock value in UTC, as well as in local time format. In my case, Linux was interpreting value as UTC, and converting it to local time. But windows was reading UTC value of clock, remaining after Linux, thinking that it is a local time, adding timezone difference, and viola! I was getting my three hours difference. Apparently, Vista can not understand that clock is UTC. So I just changed clock representation in Linux.

# clock --localtime

Cracking a WEP on HP Pavillion dv6k, Powered by Fedora 10

Introduction.

I was interested in wireless security since I have read some articles in “Xakep” magazine several years ago. They were saying “Most wireless networks are vulnerable and can be cracked within a day”. It was quite embarrassing that such a security threat can exist and really wanted to check whether it was true or not. Those years I did not not have any piece of needed experience. The task to crash test WEP stayed in my mind for years. Recently I have tried it.

Disclaimer.

All material is presented for educational purposes only. Do not apply this material’s guidelines in real life on real networks. Especially the ones, which do not belong to you.

This in not a how-to. This is a description of my experience. I do not guarantee, that process and steps, described here, will be applicable in your case and that it will work for you as well as it worked for me. I am not in charge of your failures.

System used.

I have used HP laptop with Intel 3945 wifi card installed, powered by fedora 10.

Fedora 10 Proprietary Soft Installation Script

When I Migrated to Fedora 10, I wrote small script, which was installing most common proprietary software I needed and updates system. I didn’t publish it, because I thought that it is useless and “do not publish all crap you think matters”. But this script was used more than twice by me, so Here it is. Just run it as Root.


su -c '
#Installing proprietary repositories
#rpm fusion
rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm;
#adobe
rpm -ivh http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm;
#installing software
yum -y install  kmod-nvidia stardict fusion-icon flash-plugin gnome-mplayer audacity xine-lib-extras-nonfree vlc libdvdread gstreamer-plugins* libmad libid3tag id3v2 xine-lib-extras-nonfree kdemultimedia-extras-nonfree wine unrar ida stardict azureus;
#updating sustem
yum -y update;
#healing fedora-after-update-bug
rm -rf /var/lib/rpm/__db.*;
'


UPDATE: I was pointed to a more robust script for additional soft installation for fedora.FedoMATIX

Installing Windows XP After Fedora 9

Disclaimer.
This text describes, how I installed Windows XP after Fedora 9. This is not a how-to. That is more a description of my experience in solving this problem. If you are going to try the same using this text, I am not responsible for any of your actions. Be extremely careful, when you are working with partitions. You may easily loose all your data.

Tools Needed.
You will need a Windows Installation CD and your Linux disto-cd ( dvd ). Also you may need some Linux liveCD – in my case I had to use Mandriva 2008 Spring One LiveCD.

Actions.
Cleaning up my PC last time, I removed slow Mandriva and decided to switch back to Fedora. Also, I had in mind that soon I will have to start my final year project, which is going to be Windows-based. So, I left unpartitioned space on my HD to install Windows there later on. A week ago I found a piece of free time which I used to complete my PC maintenance. When I was asked to choose a partition for Windows, it appeared, that Windows installer could not create partition in unpartitioned space of my HD. It said, that it “Setup unable to create a partition – partition table is full”. I was surprised a lot, and I had to explore from another direction. Obviously, partition had to be created in Linux, to give a chance to dummy Windows installer to copy its proprietary files somewhere. I booted up my Linux back and started the show.
At first, I needed to know, which exact layout does my hard drive have.