Software

Firefox simplifies Tinyurl

Dave Farquhar Software

This is cool. Steve DeLassus finds stuff and I blog it. If you like Tinyurl, there’s a Firefox extension that’s going to make you like it a lot more. If you don’t know what Tinyurl is, read on and you’ll be using it almost every day.First, why Tinyurl is useful: Ever try to give someone a web address, and you end up with something that’s three lines long? Items on Ebay are probably the worst. You try to e-mail it to someone, or post it on a discussion board, and the long length messes up the formatting, or the address gets chopped up and people have to copy and paste the thing back together again–if they think to try it.

Tinyurl is a web page you can visit, punch in any obnoxious address of any length, and it spits out an address that’s a few characters long, which can be easily passed along and won’t mess anything up.

Nice, eh? But what if you don’t want to visit tinyurl.com over and over again?

Install the TinyURL extension for Firefox, that’s what. Then you can just push a button to turn whatever page you’re viewing into a tinyurl and it goes straight to the clipboard. Push a button, then paste, and you’ve got it. What could be easier?

Firefox popups got you down?

Dave Farquhar Software

In case you haven’t read it elsewhere, Flash and other plugins allow popups in Firefox, even if you have popups disabled. Here’s how to disable popups from plugins.

I made the change (it takes 30 seconds) and the sites that had been getting popups through to me aren’t anymore.

Microsoft getting into the backup business?

Dave Farquhar Software , , , , ,

I take issue with this Register story, which says Veritas has a better name in the storage arena than Microsoft.

Enron has a better name in the storage arena than Veritas. Ditto BALCO and FEMA and Michael Jackson and Martha Stewart.

So Microsoft wants to get into the backup business? Good.I gave three of the best years of my life to the shrink-wrapped stool sample that is Backup Exec. I believed, wrongly, that the Constitution protects sysadmins like me from that piece of software in the clause that mentions cruel and unusual punishment.

After that last job put me out with Thursday night’s garbage, one question I always asked on job interviews was what they used for tape backups. Had anyone said Backup Exec, I would have walked out of the room immediately.

Nobody did. That was good. There are still some smart people in the world. My confidence in humanity was somewhat restored.

Microsoft’s offering will no doubt have problems, but when batch files and Zip drives are more reliable than your competition, who cares? Backup software is one area that desperately needs some competition. Microsoft entering with its usual less-than-mediocre offering will force everyone else with their less-than-mediocre offerings to either improve or die, because Microsoft’s offering will be cheaper, and there will be people who will assume that Microsoft’s offering will work better with Windows because nobody knows Windows better than Microsoft. (In this case, that assumption might actually be true.)

What’s wrong with Backup Exec? Ask your friendly neighborhood Veritas sales rep what they’ve done about these issues:

If a Backup Exec job backing up to disk contains both disk and system state data and it’s the second job to run on a given night, it will fail just as certainly as the sun coming up the next morning. Unless they finally managed to fix that bug, but I doubt it. I sure reported it enough times.

Remote backups happening over second-tier switches (D-Link, Linksys, Netgear, and other brands you find in consumer electronics stores) usually fail. Not every time. But more than half the time.

Those are just the problems I remember clearly. There were others. I remember the Oracle agent liked to die a horrible death for weeks at a time. I’d do everything Veritas support told me to do and it’d make no difference. Eventually it’d right itself and inexplicably run fine for a few months.

Maybe competition will fix what support contracts wouldn’t. And if it doesn’t, maybe Backup Exec will die.

And if Backup Exec must die, I want to be part of that execution squad. Remember that scene in Office Space with the laser printer and the baseball bat?

I never thought I’d say this, but now I’m saying it.

Welcome, Microsoft.

Another meaningless security report…

Dave Farquhar Software , , , ,

So Symantec is saying that IE is more secure than Mozilla-based browsers because there were 25 security vulnerabilities disclosed in the first half of 2005 for Mozilla, as opposed to 13 for IE.

Such reports are fine for Clueless Information Officers. Let’s analyze this like someone who actually knows what to do with that thing that sits between your ears.First and foremost, Mozilla lacks tight integration into the operating system, making it fundamentally less dangerous. Internet Explorer is like a bank that leaves its vault open after hours because it locked the front door. Since Mozilla lacks those ties that go directly into the operating system, it’s like a bank that locks the front door and the vault. The more locks the crook has to crack, the better.

Also, past performance isn’t necessarily an indication of future gains. People who invest know this all too well. Remember, the first half of 2005 was when Mozilla was seeing explosive growth. It was still a young product and had a lot of things to shake out.

But the potential is certainly there. Let’s look at Apache vs. IIS. You see fewer Apache vulnerabilities than IIS, even though Apache’s source code is visible for everyone to see, and even though Apache is a much larger market. Mozilla has this same potential.

In the meantime, Mozilla is still a minority browser. Since most hackers these days are motivated by profits, they’re going to do the same thing any other businessman does: Look for volume. Internet Explorer still has 12 times the exposure that Mozilla does. And Internet Explorer is often used in corporate environments, since many corporate intranets rely on IE-specific technology. That makes it an attractive target, since it’s easier to get through a browser than it is a corporate firewall. And once you do manage to get in, there’s a lot more good stuff inside a corporate LAN than there is inside a home LAN.

And by Symantec’s own admission, “at the time of writing, no widespread exploitation of any browser except Microsoft Internet Explorer has occurred.”

That tells us the Mozilla developers are working faster than the would-be Mozilla hackers, and it also suggests that hackers are looking harder at Internet Explorer.

Also, Symantec is being selective about the flaws it’s looking at. The article states that it only counts confirmed flaws. IE has 19 unconfirmed flaws versus 3 unconfirmed flaws for Mozilla. So IE has 19 unconfirmed and unfixed flaws plus 13 confirmed flaws, for a total of 32. Mozilla has 25 confirmed flaws plus 3 unconfirmed and unfixed, for a total of 28.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m more concerned about those unconfirmed and unfixed ones. As long as I’m running the current version of either browser, I’m protected against those 25 big bad flaws (for Mozilla) or the 13 (for IE) from earlier in the year. I can’t do anything about those 19 unfixed Internet Explorer flaws.

Frankly, I think Symantec is just trying to get a headline on a slow news day, and maybe trying to kiss up a bit to Microsoft, with whom it’s always had a very close relationship since Symantec traditionally has been willing to write the pieces of software that Microsoft for whatever reason doesn’t want to touch.

I’m sticking with Mozilla Firefox. Not only is it the safer browser when you look at the things that actually matter, it’s also the better one.

Sticking PDFs together

Dave Farquhar Software

If you’ve ever needed to stick several PDFs together into one document (maybe your scanner software makes one-page PDFs when you scan to that format), my old friend and one-time coauthor Brian has an answer for you: PDF Append 2003.

I guess he wrote it in 2003 but wrote about it yesterday?At any rate, this is one of those cases where if you need something, you probably need it badly. Those of you who need it know who you are.

Adobe buys Macromedia!

Dave Farquhar Software

I thought this was a joke at first, but it appears that Adobe really is buying competitor Macromedia.Ironically, the app that really put Macromedia on the map (before Flash) was Freehand, which was an old Aldus product that Adobe sold off when it bought the creator of Pagemaker.

This pretty much eliminates the only viable competition for Illustrator. I don’t know that anyone considered Fireworks a viable competitor to Photoshop or not. But essentially, when it comes to desktop publishing, the only companies left to compete with Adobe are Quark (who only have one viable product) and what’s left of Corel.

If I were the FTC, I would force Adobe to sell off its competing products, although I don’t know if Quark would want them, and Corel already has its line of graphics apps, although Macromedia’s are generally better respected. But since the current administration loves big business, probably what will happen is either the competing products will be discontinued or dummied down into consumer-level products.

I think the software industry is already consolidated more than it needs to be, and it’s been a long time since I’ve seen an acquisition actually result in a better product. But we’ll see what happens this time.

I’ve been messing around with Backup Exec 10

Dave Farquhar Software , , ,

Veritas is trying mightily to unseat Microsoft as my least-favorite software company. I do believe Backup Exec to be the worst piece of software of any kind on the market. In fact, babysitting Backup Exec is the reason I haven’t been around much.

I’m looking to version 10 for some relief (and the much-needed 1.0 quality that Microsoft usually delivers around version 3–when Veritas will deliver it probably is an interesting Calculus problem).The downside to version 10: I’m told there’s no more Windows NT 4.0 support. Can’t back ’em up. I haven’t actually tried installing the remote agent on an NT4 box to see if it’s unsupported as in we-won’t-help-when-it-breaks or unsupported as in no-can-do. Smart businesses hocked their NT4 servers a couple of years ago. I won’t say anything else, except that not every business is smart.

More downside: If a tape fills up and you can’t change it because the server is offsite and/or behind locked doors that require approval from 14 middle managers and a note from your mother to get to, under some circumstances Backup Exec 10 will hang indefinitely while cancelling the job. Version 9 had the same problem. Bouncing the services will usually relieve the hang, but sometimes you have to reboot.

It’s tempting to put Backup Exec and your tape drive on your biggest file server to get faster backups. But trust me, if you put it on a server that’s dedicated to backups–its day job can be as a domain controller or some other task that’s shared by multiple, redundant mahcines–you’ll thank yourself. It’s very nice to be able to reboot your Backup Exec server without giving your seven bosses something else besides the cover sheet on your TPS reports to grumble about.

If you must put Backup Exec on your file server, set up DFS and mirror the file shares to another server. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy–just something that can prop things up while the server’s rebooting. And run Windows 2003, because it boots fast.

The upside: I can make Backup Exec 9.1 die every time by creating a direct-to-tape job and running it concurrently with a disk-to-disk-to-tape job. The tape portion of the second job will bomb every time. Veritas technical support tells me that bug was fixed in 9.1SP1. It wasn’t. But it’s fixed in 10.

There are some other features in 10, like synthetic backups, that promise to speed backups along. That would be very nice. It would also be nice if it would be reliable.

I’m not going to put it in production yet–when I first deployed 9, it fixed a lot of problems but it made a whole bunch of new ones–but maybe, just maybe, Backup Exec 10 will do what it’s supposed to do well enough that I can work something close to regular hours again.

Otherwise I’ll look forward to Backup Exec 11 and hope that it features more changes than just a new Symantec black-and-gold color scheme and wizards featuring Peter Norton. We’ll see.

Making fill patterns in Gimp

Dave Farquhar Software

I find myself making fill patterns in Gimp every so often and always having to look up the trick.

Here’s how to use Gimp to make tileable fill patterns, which you can either use inside Gimp, inside other programs, or as web backgrounds.

First, to make an image that will tile smoothly when repeated, start with a source image. This can be a drawing or a photograph.

Be careful about copyrights. If you drew or photographed the image yourself, you’re fine. Or if the image is from 1924 or earlier, you’re fine. If the person who created the image puts it in the public domain, licenses it under terms that permit distribution and modification, or otherwise gives you permission, you’re fine. Under any other circumstances, you may not be so fine. For personal use, nobody’s going to beat down your door, but putting the image on the ‘Net doesn’t exactly constitute personal use, if you know what I mean.

Got that? Got a picture? Good. Open it in Gimp. Actually you’ll probably want to open it twice. You’ll see why shortly.

Crop one of the copies of the image down into something that resembles the pattern you want to make. A lot of patterns aren’t much more than 256×256 pixels and you may be able to accomplish what you want in less than that. If it’s photorealism you seek, you may need to go a bit larger.

If the image isn’t straight or square, crop it slightly oversize (select the region with the mouse, then go to Image, Crop image) then use the perspective tool (Tools, Transform Tools, Perspective; or hit shift-p) and/or the rotate tool (Tools, Transform Tools, Rotate; or hit shift-r) to get the image straight and square. Then crop it.

Now, the magic. To make the image tile smoothly, use the offset command and smooth it out. Go to Layer, Transform, Offset (or hit shift-ctrl-o). Punch the button that says x/2 y/2 and hit OK. Your image will now be a tangled mess, in all likelihood. Smooth in the gaps. If you’re tiling bricks or something similar, you may want to go back to the original, uncropped image and copy and paste bits and pieces from it back into the image to cover up the gaps.

Keep in mind that when you cut/copy and paste, you can also select a region and use the paste into command, also from the edit menu.

You may also find it helpful to blur some gaps. Select the region you want to blur, then go to Filters, Blur. You might also find the Tileable Blur under the same menu helpful. Sometimes I’ve gotten good effects by repeatedly sharpening and blurring a region. It introduces just enough noise to bring it close enough that I can finish retouching by hand. You’ll find sharpen under the Filters, Enhance menu.

Once the image looks smooth, hit shift-ctrl-o to offset it again. You may find you’ve introduced new problems. Fix those, and offset again. Repeat the process until the problems disappear.

I find myself zooming way in and out a lot during this process. It’s often easier to select a precise spot you want to fix when you’re zoomed in.

And that’s the secret to making fill patterns in Gimp. Armed with an image, a copy of Gimp, this knowledge, and some determination and patience, you now have everything you need to make spectacular tileable patterns.

Paint.NET is fine for what it\’s intended but no Gimp killer

Dave Farquhar Software

Paint.NET got Slashdotted today (here’s a list of mirrors ) and instantly it was hailed as the killer of Gimp, Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, and probably every other graphics program ever made.

Of course I had to try it out immediately.What I quickly found was a very capable replacement for the venerable, miserable Paint that comes with Windows (which isn’t even as good as some of the type-in paint programs for the C-64 from the late 1980s) with a handful of high-end features bolted on and a user interface that makes most things reasonably easy to find.

Its lasso tool is extremely intuitive and it, as well as the other selection tools, highlight what you’re selecting as you’re doing the selection. That’s a huge plus. It has some nice filters built in too. For what I do, I can think of practical uses for the included “Frosted Glass” filter. Others will enjoy the oil paint filter. Most people will find both of them to be fun.

It lets you zoom way in on your work, which at times is exceptionally helpful.

Some people will find the layers tool very useful and it makes them pretty easy.

But Gimp killer? No. Paint Shop Pro killer? Maybe for some people.

For people who want to do something other than crop a digital picture, sharpen it a little and maybe add an effect and some text, it still has some serious limitations.

For one, you can’t make custom patterns. For me, that’s a showstopper. The included patterns are nice but sometimes I need to make a pattern out of a photograph so I can make something photorealistic. Gimp lets me do that. Paint.NET does not.

If you can make the paint bucket fill an area with a pattern, I couldn’t figure out how to do it. Either this feature–which I use constantly in Gimp–is missing or it’s buried somewhere that this dumb journalist can’t find it.

Don’t get me wrong. As a replacement for Paint to do simple tasks, it succeeds. But don’t call it a Photoshop killer, a Gimp killer, or a Paint Shop Pro killer. It’s all the paint program some people need.

But it’s better than those other programs in the same way Notepad is a better word processor than Word or WordPerfect. Sure, you can’t get any easier to use than Notepad. But did you need fonts? Spell check? Margins?

I recommend downloading and installing Paint.NET, as it’s not terribly large and, even if you don’t use it as your only paint program, you may find yourself loading an image into it to use a couple of its tools that you like before taking the image back into a more powerful editor. Just don’t call it something that it’s not.

How to use Knoppix to replace at least $100 worth of must-have utilities

Dave Farquhar Software ,

Even if you aren’t really a Linux person, the live CD Linux distribution Knoppix is incredibly useful. If nothing else, you can use it to replace Ghost, Partition Magic, and Nero or EZ CD Creator. That’s $100 worth of utilities for the cost of a download, or, if you don’t have broadband, for $5-$10 from a Linux distributor.If you’re not a Linux person, here’s how to boot and fire up the utilities you need. Once they’re up and running, they’re very intuitive; it’s just finding them that can be difficult.

PartitionMagic:
Boot Knoppix.
Click the shell icon in the toolbar at the bottom.
Type ‘su’ (no quotes) and hit enter to become a privileged user.
Type ‘qtparted’ (no quotes) and hit enter to bring up a free Partition Magic clone.

Ghost/DriveImage:
Boot Knoppix.
Click the shell icon in the toolbar at the bottom.
Type ‘su’ (no quotes) and hit enter to become a privileged user.
Type ‘mkdir /smb’ (no quotes) and hit enter to make a point to mount a network share.
Type ‘smbmount //server/share /smb -o username=myusername’ (no quotes) and hit enter to mount the network share. Enter your NT password when indicated.
Type ‘partimage’ (no quotes) and hit enter to launch Partimage, the closest thing there is to a free/open source Ghost. Save your image to /smb and you’ve got it made. No more paying for Ghost licenses, no more dinking around with boot floppies to try to find the right driver for your NIC and trying to find enough room to cram the ever-more-bloated Ghost…

Nero/EZ CD Creator:
Boot Knoppix.
Click the shell icon in the toolbar at the bottom.
Type ‘k3b’ (no quotes) and hit enter to launch a CD burning application.

Drive wiping utilities:
This assumes the drive you want to wipe is the primary master on your first IDE channel. Unless you really know what you’re doing, disconnect all other hard drives!
Boot Knoppix.
Click the shell icon in the toolbar at the bottom.
Type ‘su’ (no quotes) and hit enter to become a privileged user.
Type ‘dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/hda bs=512’ and hit enter.
For something approaching military-grade security, you need to overwrite seven times. Here’s one line to do that. This will take a good, long while.
Type ‘dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 ; dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/hda bs=512 ; dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 ; dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/hda bs=512 ; dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 ; dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/hda bs=512 ; dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512’ and hit enter.
To securely wipe floppies, substitute the string “fd0” for “hda0”.