Use the Latest Skype on Ubuntu

Posted on 2012 February 16, Thursday by JamesIsIn

I have been using this method for keeping Skype up to date on my Ubuntu systems (I’m currently using 10.04 all  around but this ought to be flexible enough to work on other versions).  Here is my condensed version for your copy and paste joy.

You’ll want to have a terminal open for a couple of lines of code. You can open a terminal by navigating to Applications —> Accessories —> Terminal.

Ok, let’s ask Synaptic to manage any new updates that come down for Skype. Open Synaptic (System —> Administration —> Synaptic Package Manager). You will be asked for your password.

Navigate to Settings —> Repositories —> Third-Party Software and click the “Add” button. Enter this line in the “APT Line:” text box:

deb http://download.skype.com/linux/repos/debian/ stable non-free

Then click the “Add Source” button and the “Close” button twice. (The second dialog is just letting you know that you have made a repository change.)

This tells Synaptic where to seek out updates for Skype.

Let’s import the public key so your system knows it is really communicating with the Skype repository when you run your updates.

Hop back over to your Terminal; it’s a single line of code:

sudo apt-key adv –keyserver pgp.mit.edu –recv-keys 0xd66b746e

Now, when you click the “Reload” button in the Synaptic Package Manger you will not get a key verification error.

Installing Skype is a one line command operation or you can just locate it in Synaptic and install it from there:

sudo apt-get install skype

(You will be asked for your password.)

From now on, when you run your updates by navigating to System —> Administration —> Update Manager it should seek out any new updates for Skype in addition to any updates otherwise ready for your system.

Have fun with that.

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When I Was a Child, they Taught Me to Share

Posted on 2012 January 20, Friday by JamesIsIn

There are, perhaps famously, two bills in the national legislature right now which are threatening to disrupt everything the Internet has accomplished over the last decade or more in terms of openness, discovery, and innovation.  These bills are SOPA and PIPA.  I believe they are both bad (very bad in fact) and I want you to understand them as best as is possible.

Here is a great discussion of the material history behind these two bills and a discussion of how they will likely impact you and I as well as a brief discussion of why they will not have any of their claimed intended effects on piracy.

The important part to understand is that removing sites from the name system will not make those sites inaccessible.  Those sites will still be accessible using their numeric IP addresses and using links created with those numeric addresses.

However, giving corporations the power to remove my site or your site or any site from the name system because they believe it is in their best interest (without due process and without court-worthy evidence)… well, that just puts the biggest bully in charge of the playground.

Please watch the above video; please educate yourself on matters of fare-use and sharing; please tell your elected representatives what we have discovered and how bills like these will be bad for all of us; and please watch the sky for signs of bills like this raining down in the future.

Useful Links:

CraigsList

Wikipedia

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Repairing Grub after Windows Breaks It

Posted on 2012 January 16, Monday by JamesIsIn

Recently I built my dad a dual boot system with Ubuntu 10.04 and Windows XP. He likes his games so he wanted to keep a Windows installation for gaming. Fine. Built, tested, delivered.

However, he had a bad video card (and some other issues) and he had a friend help him at various stages. He lives on the other side of the state with a mountain range in between us so I understand.

Anyway, to make a long story a little shorter and to emphasize my confusion, I received the machine in the following condition. First, Windows 7 had been installed. This of course broke all that I had done with my dual boot. My Ubuntu installation, which had been controlling boot loading with Grub, was borked and the Windows 7 installation was on what appeared to be a failing hard drive. Instructions? Make it work.

First thing I did was just to reinstall Ubuntu so as to take control of boot loading again and since it was a fresh installation anyway, why not? Then I used GParted to move the partitions around to make room for the Windows 7 installation on the same drive where the other installations were. This fixed Ubuntu and Windows XP, but Windows 7 (whether the original or the copy) would not boot. (Sometime around here I removed the old 7 drive from the machine which I believe to be failing.)

I tried all the usual shit. Various Grub configurations, various Windows boot configurations, moving around the boot flag, updating Grub at various moments. Bah! Nothing would improve matters if I chose 7: the basic black screen and quickly flashing cursor that meant the machine was waiting for an operating system to take over.

Using Grub to point to XP and then trying to use the Windows boot menu to choose between 7 and XP brought in a host of its own problems. Fuck it. I threw in the towel and rebuilt the 7 partition(s).

Now Windows 7 was working great but this of course broke my Grub again. So once again I went back in with chroot and updated Grub. This wasn’t enough, but while looking up the commands for doing this I noticed a utility called boot-repair. It can be downloaded as a stand-alone ISO or it can be used within Ubuntu.

If you run the Ubuntu Live CD you can simply run these two commands to install and run boot-repair:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yannubuntu/boot-repair && sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y boot-repair && boot-repair

You can read more about its usage here. I ran it with the normal settings (after perusing the Advanced options) and it fixed my boot problem. Now all three operating systems boot from the Grub menu.

This boot-repair has some pretty cool options (like selecting which boot option is default). Definitely worth adding to your toolbox.

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Attach Ubuntu to Windows Domain via Active Directory (+ sudo)

Posted on 2011 December 7, Wednesday by JamesIsIn

There may not be too many advantages to adding your Ubuntu machines to your Windows domain, but if you think of them this will allow you to work toward them.  It’s actually pretty easy to add a Linux box to Active Directory.  This is true because AD started out life as an LDAP server and it still retains its LDAP genes somewhere deep inside its withered exterior.

First thing you will want to do is add this utility to your Ubuntu machine:

sudo apt-get install likewise-open

It will allow you to authenticate against AD using Kerberos.  If you don’t know what that means it’s not important at this stage; it’s enough to understand that it’s a secure method for assuring identity between your client machine and your AD server.

I then added the machine to the domain.  Again this is a simple operation.  Before you do anything on the Ubuntu machine, hop into Active Directory and create a machine account in the name of the Ubuntu machine.  Then back on the Ubuntu machine it’s one line of code:

sudo domainjoin-cli join [domain.name] [username]

Easy enough.

Further I added a domain group to the local sudo group by adding these lines to the /etc/sudoers file:

# Active Directory group [groupname] given sudo privs
%[domain.name]\\[groupname] ALL=(ALL) ALL

If you don’t know how to edit a protected file like /etc/sudoers I recommend using Gedit:

gksudo gedit /etc/sudoers

Just add those two lines to the end of the file.  The first line is just a comment line and could say something different.  Replace those items in the square brackets with the appropriate information to your network.

For the group I created in Active Directory to grant these sudo privileges I included Domain Administrators and a couple of individuals who would likely be using the Ubuntu box and need sudo rights.  If you’d rather you could substitute a username for the groupname in the edit above, but I think it’s better to use a security group in AD since you’re now attached to it.

Anyway, that’s about it.  Not too exciting but sure it’s useful for something.  Have fun with it.

(The same can be done with Macs or probably any Unix-like system as long as it can authenticate against an LDAP.  Of course for other systems the details will be, you know, different.)

 

 

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Random List of Useful Windows Utilities

Posted on 2011 December 7, Wednesday by JamesIsIn

I came across an article listing forty-three Windows utilities for enhancing the functionality of that less-than configurable operating system.  There is some good stuff on this list, which isn’t hard to imagine since it’s pretty long.

Forty-Three of The Best Free Windows Enhancements That You Should Know About

One particularly important caveat is that you will not want to install all of these at once.  For one there are redundant entries, multiple applications which provide the same or highly similar functionality.  For two you will strap your system with superfluous processor strain running forty-three extra applications all the time.

My best advice would be to look over the list, try a handful of them, and keep only those you will continuously use and don’t get in the way of what you really want to do with your computer.

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New RootKit Extractor

Posted on 2011 November 30, Wednesday by JamesIsIn

I installed a rootkit on my Vista machine.  It was interesting to note that I have no virus software which would detect this root kit either in its zip file or in its executable.  You can read about that dangerous file here.

My usual fall-back for rooting out deep clinging nasties is ComboFix.  You can read about ComboFix here, but keep in mind it’s a last-line extraction utility and should be used with care (and maybe should be used by people who know what they are doing).  However, ComboFix was not able to locate this particular nasty.

Not only was ComboFix unable to find this rootkit but Spybot, Avast!, Security Essentials, Sophos Anti-Rootkit, and some random others were all unable to rid my system of this annoyance (or even find it for that matter).

Finally I heard about a utility Kaspersky is making called TDSSKiller.  (Thanks, Harry.)  It’s specifically a rootkit extractor so don’t expect more than that, but as far as rootkit extractors go this one’s rockin the misty bog.  I think it took less than two minutes to scan my system and offer to cure the file.  And it did find a bad file and cure it.  As far as I can tell it’s all better now.  Well, it’s still Vista; it’s not better in that respect.

Previously I would reboot the machine (usually because it was required by updates) and Avast! would snap the nasty when it poked its head up trying to take action.  I’ve rebooted several times now over a couple of days, and nothing seems to be out of the ordinary.  Excellent thus far.

Hope that helps you on your adventures.

 

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Steampunk Computer in the Works

Posted on 2011 November 11, Friday by JamesIsIn

Did you ever used to read Marvel’s What If…? comics?  I did.  Fascinating alternate histories in the Marvel universe.  There is a lot of literature out there like that.  I once listened to a story about a time traveler who went back to help the South win the war using advanced weaponry.  I love Radio Reader.

Anyway, this whole steampunk thing is like an entire What if…? genre.  The thing is there were a lot of clever bastards roaming around the planet during the steam era.  One such non-dumby was Charles Babbage.

One of the crazy steam era ideas Babbage put forward was the difference engine.  More or less a pocket calculator for an enormous pocket.  It is run by a steam engine, after all.  He also worked on (though never completed) a more advanced calculating machine called the Analytical Engine.

Here’s where the steampunkers can get excited.

Recently Nathan Myhrvold commissioned and London’s Science Museum has put on display a working model of Babbage’s difference engine.  You can find out more about it here.

But that’s not enough apparently.  Now some British folks are looking to build a working model of the Analytical Engine from Babbage’s various notes and partial designs.  Here is a good starting point article.

With a likely price tag in the millions, why are they building this?  Surely the only answer is “because we can (we hope)”.

Good luck, fellow crazies.

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Good Night Flash Mobile

Posted on 2011 November 9, Wednesday by JamesIsIn

For those of you who have already been working with HTML 5, the announcement that Adobe was throwing in the towel on mobile Flash development probably comes as no great shock.  It’s just a matter of time before HTML 5 relegates Flash (and it’s retarded step-cousin Silverlight) to the pages of history.

Let’s not be cruel; it had a good run.  I mean Flash in general.  There have always been issues with the mobile versions.  We’ll likely miss them less.

Sure all the browsers out there (Opera, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, &c) are now supporting HTML 5, but there are still a lot of developers who haven’t dipped in (or at least not very deeply).

Running a search on Amazon for “HTML 5″ returned more than 12,000 results.  Not that Amazon has much of a search engine, but nonetheless it’s here to stay based on those numbers.  (Searching for “Flash” only brought back about 18,000 and many of those were for The Flash.)

Anyway, the real buzz out there is about how Steve Jobs was totally right all along because he’s so smart and we love him to death but not really to death though he’s dead now and we are all really really sad (and so what if people are dying in Africa or China or whatever; you’re a jerk).

Well, you can read my article debunking the notion that Jobs was right about anything in his address and decide for yourself.  You can find that article here.

Oh, and here is a nice article on the current announcement.  (You should visit this article at least for the cool graphic they plucked from themz Interwebz for Flash.)

Have fun with that and don’t let anyone, not even an asshole like me, dissuade you from your best line of reasoning.

 

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A Little Light Boxing

Posted on 2011 November 8, Tuesday by JamesIsIn

There are several methods for implementing the lightbox effect in a WordPress blog.  I was using the Lightbox 2 plugin since I started my blog a couple years back.  Or maybe I started with Lightbox and upgraded.  I really don’t remember; too much time.

I recently split my technology posts into this current blog and split them off from my personal blog.  I basically just copied everything over from the old blog to the new blog.  There were some oddities which needed ironing, but essentially everything worked fine.

I realized recently that my lightbox effect on this new blog was not functioning.  (My other blog includes my photography and so I use the effect a lot; this blog rarely includes images I create and thus it went easily unnoticed.)

In my effort to fix this issue I discovered a couple other plugins (Lightbox 3 and Lightbox Plus) which offer similar functionality.  Unfortunately I could get none of these three plugins to function.  I disabled all other plugins and tested three different themes (including the default theme), and none of this changed anything.

I suppose, in perfect 20/20 hindsight, I should have seen the obvious clue when I clicked on the image tring to get it to display.  When the image was clicked the browser was directed to a different page complete with all the blog dressing all around the image.  Usually if I click on an image (and by usually I mean on my original blog which was not having this problem) with the light boxing plugin disabled, I am directed to an image (no surrounding page).

Feeling closer to the solution?

Yeah, in the image properties dialog and on the Edit Image tab you will find a “Link to Image” button.  That is the URL you really want to use.  Click!

Image Properties — Edit Image

Image Properties — Edit Image

That’s it.  No coding.  No fancy work-arounds.  Just one click of a button.  (See this article for additional information.)

In the end I switched to Lightbox Plus for no particular reason, in case you were wondering.  (Yes, all three are working.)

Also, in my other blog (the blog where light boxing was always working) both of those buttons provide the same URL so there is clearly something else happening here.  I need to figure out how to make it work by default in a newly uploaded image because I shouldn’t have to make this change every time I upload an image.

I hope that saves you some of the hours it took me to discover the answer.

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How to Fail at Creating a Server Share Folder

Posted on 2011 November 8, Tuesday by JamesIsIn

I found this great step-by-step guide for making a mapped drive in Active Directory for each user.  It covers both sets of permissions (share and security), and it covers all of the basic details for each section in AD.  Set up correctly this method even automagically creates each user folder as needed.  Very comprehensive.

However, there is one detail they never explicitly mention and which may cause you to stumble (as it did me).  They neglect to mention that you cannot use a trailing slash in your path or you will get an error when you try to Apply the new setting.

The specified path is not valid. Enter a valid network server path using the form: \\server\share\folder.

This error is not all that clear either.  Though it does not itself contain a trailing slash, I find it so common to use one when you are referring to a directory (thank you all other computing that’s not Microsoft) it seemed only natural to include one.  If you are reading this article then you probably also think nothing of using a trailing slash.

I don’t know for certain if this holds true still (in Server 2008 or SBS 2011), but it’s true in SBS 2003 (and presumably Server 2003).

In short don’t do this:

\\Server\Share\%username%\

Hope that helps you somewhere.

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