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This article talks about cool features of KDE and why, in the authors opinion, KDE rules.

While it is definitely not comprehensive and most of it touches on items I have discussed in the past on smashedbug (ioslaves, dcop, kparts, konqueror, etc..), it does provide lots of screenshots showing examples of this functionality.

Cool things I’ve learned: Pop in an audio CD .. it will access the CDDB (CD Database) and name all the tracks at the filesystem level.. on top of this, it creates virtual folders such as MP3 where you can drag and drop and it will automatically rip and encode those songs in the background. No need to use a third party application and learn yet-another-interface.

Interesting use of kioslaves — to refresh, kioslaves allow you to access remote filesystems as if they were local. Ie from any KDE application’s open dialog, I can point it to an FTP site, network share or similar remote location and it will utilize that resource with the ease and simplicity of the local file system. One thing I’ve learned is with Konqueror (KDE Web browser), when uploading a file to a website, if the file exists on another website, I can simply point the “Browse..” to that remote location (ie cut and paste the address) and KDE is smart enough to know how to grab it from that remote location and upload it.. no need to download that item to the desktop, then browse and upload via the web form.

Overwriting files — Lets say you copy one folder to another folder and there is a filename conflict … on Windows at best you get some file modified dates and perhaps a file size .. but with KDE and the use of kparts, it will load up those items in the dialog so you can visually decide which you want to keep (let it be a document, image, video, music file, etc..).

Regular Expression find/replace dialog.. This is one power tool I find I use very often but unfortunately has a poor to non-existant showing on non *nix desktops. The basic jist of Regular Expressions –> In a find dialog you might be familiar with typing in a word .. perhaps you even know how to use wildcards (such as * for any number of characters or ? for a any single character).. Regular Expressions takes this to the logical extreme.. for example, I could create a regular expression to search for two words or perhaps multiple spellings of a given word or perhaps a word but only if it is at the beginning or end of a sentence/paragraph, before a period, whatever..

The default find/replace dialog in KDE provides access to this powerful feature for all KDE apps. Simple. Needless to say, I’ve missed this easy access to Regular Expressions when using other operating systems.. definitely a *huge* timesaver.

Guess thats all for now.. just a few more reasons to check out KDE.

The Business Software Alliance (BSA) is shifting its message in an effort to curb software piracy. Instead of touting financial damage due to “intellectual property theft” to the companies it represents, the BSA is now touting the economic benefits of not pirating.

The logic goes something like this … If software piracy is reduced, it makes people and companies buy thousands of dollars in software therefore increasing tax revenues, allowing software companies to hire more people and improving the economy for local governments (China, Russia, United States, etc..).

From BSA’s point of view, I think this is a very stupid argument. Here’s why:

The BSA represents companies such as Microsoft, Adobe, IBM, Dell, Intel, Apple, Autodesk, Cisco, McAfee, SAP and Symantec. Last time I checked, these companies were US-based companies and most (perhaps all) being Fortune-500 companies with extensive increasing cash reserves (hundreds of millions for the smaller companies and billions or tens-of-billions for the larger companies).

So a foreign company buys lots of Microsoft or Adobe products. This money gets funneled back to the US with a small portion staying in the originating country (sales tax, VAT, etc..). Of course, this sales tax is negligible as perhaps a person or company would have used that money elsewhere (ie buying a locally made product, hiring additional personnel, etc..).

The BSA member gets more money. So what? They already have LOTS of cash and are not spending it. No additional programmers are being hired .. at best, perhaps another automated manufacturing line would be opened to create and package the CD.

So where is the economic benefit? I don’t see it. Of course, this is looking at the problem from the BSA’s point of view (well what *should* be their point of view).

Lets analyze it from an alternative point of view. The BSA is successful in increasing the enforcement of copyright and governments respond by cracking down on blatant piracy resulting in a significant reduction of piracy. So now what? Do companies turn around and reward the BSA and its members by buying the software? I doubt it. I see a transition to use of free open source software (FOSS). A company or person could acquire a very productive software suite (operating system, office suite, graphics editing, multimedia apps, games, internet tools, server software, etc..) without spending the thousands (or millions) to transition their existing pirated infrastructure to legitimate copies of the software.

So what happens when people and companies transition to FOSS inside these companies? First, their money stays within the country. They can spend it on other products and services or perhaps hire an additional workforce with the funds. Second, it increases the capabilities of the FOSS due to an increase in users and developers. Third, it empowers companies and governments to customize the FOSS to be suitable for their people (let it be customized features, internationalization efforts, bug smashing, migrating the software to alternative/locally designed and manufactured platforms, etc.).

Needless to say, I think the BSA is right — the use of piracy does stifle competition and economic progress. Reducing piracy is a noble goal. I think the outcome will not be favorable for the BSA or its members as it would require them to be much more competitive (opening file formats, being more price conscious in poorer countries, etc..) but competition always seems to be a good thing. Go BSA. ha.

After reviewing my morning email system reports, I noticed I didn’t receive a backup report from a Windows server. Upon closer inspection, I noticed the backup software was not running. I attempted to start it without luck.. after a few minutes, the application just hung without any error message.

Check out this solution!

Apparently, my backup software REQUIRES Outlook to be made the default mail client for it to run. We are talking about an ENTERPRISE LEVEL backup software FAILING because of a change in default setting. No matter that Outlook is installed and fully accessible.

What a change from a UNIX system. I have *NEVER* had a system service on UNIX not start due to a USER preference. I’ve *NEVER* had a system service on UNIX not start without providing some detailed information on *WHY* it wouldn’t start (generally if the logs it generates is not adequate, you can easily enable debug or verbosity and it will spit out a lot of useful information)

Needless to say, I found it quite funny that an “enterprise level” network backup solution for Windows will not start or provide logging information when Outlook is not set as the default mail client. So umm.. keep that in mind if it ever happens to you!! *Pffft*

Every few months I run across an application or tool that could be considered a “killer app” of sorts. The latest two are a media player called Amarok and the OpenBSD firewall, pf.

Amarok

Amarok is a KDE baased media player (Screenshots). The interface centralizes around playlists and extensive categorization via ID3 tags.

Some features I found particular cool..

• Fast searches. I have over 7,000 music files and I can quickly locate music by genre, artist, title and other attributes.
• Automatic ranking - As I listen to music, Amarok keeps track of what I listen to and can give me some historical information (ie first time and last time listening to a song) as well as ranking of songs. It generates dynamic playlists around this information.
• Album cover, lyric and wiki integration. Amarok will find the album cover for a song, download lyrics (which I can use to sing along, print out, etc..) as well as tie into wikipedia to give me information on the artist. In addition, when listening to a song, it provides a list of other songs/albums in my collection by that artist.
• ipod/mp3 player and CD creation integration.
• full KDE integration including kioslaves and dcop. This translates into a standardized way to extend control of amarok and pulling informaiton from amarok (ie control amarok from a remote control in your family room or write a small script that posts what your listening to on your website..)
• podcasting, internet radio, etc support
• standard visualizations, multi-band eq, effects and other plug-ins
• Great tagging support (right up there with Juk which has been way ahead of any other program, on any platform that I’ve used..)

Anyways.. I think its pretty cool and now my preferred music player application. After showing it to my fellow musicians, they wanted to know where to download the Windows port. heh.. tough luck for them..

OpenBSD pf

I am starting the process of migrating some of my FreeBSD 4.x servers to FreeBSD 6.x. Somewhere within FreeBSD 5.x, built-in support for the OpenBSD pf firewall was added. After doing a crash-course yesterday on pf, I’ve made plans to migrate ALL my existing firewalls to pf.. Why? A few reasons..

• Sophisticated configuration file. Supports macros, variables, tables, lists and other time saving items which reduces the number of firewall rules needed (Great for complex configurations)
• “scrubbing” — it makes sure the packets being transmitted are standardized. While I haven’t had an issue with bad packets in the past (atleast I don’t *think* I have), it sounds like a great bonus
• Dynamic tables. With the use of tables, I can create dynamic lists of IPs .. for example, if I am getting spammed by a particular user, I could tie in my spam software to add an IP to a given list (ie a spam table) that could be configured to drop connections from that user.
• Inclusiveness — pf supports basic firewall functions, port forwarding, bandwidth throttling and network address translation. Previously, I was using ipfilter, ipfw’s dummynet and ipnat to perform these functions.
• load-balancing — the firewall can load balance outgoing or incoming traffic. Ie: balance traffic among multiple front-end web servers (round robin) or divide outgoing traffic among multiple network interfaces (ie if you have a DSL connection and T1 connection).
• CARP and pfsync - ability to have redundancy at the firewall level. If one computer dies, it can auto-fail over to the other system without any downtime.

Needless to say, for firewall functions, its feature set leaves very little to be desired. The flexibility of the system and initial ease of configuration for simple setups makes it an ideal firewall for a wide variety of networks.