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Novell working to implement VBA in OpenOffice.org

By on August 22, 2006 in OpenSource, Technology

OSNews reports “Novell is still working on improving the VBA support of its OpenOffice submission, and is therefore open to all sumbmissions of VBA macros which are not working on the OOo version of SLED 10. In the meantime the question is when – or even if – Sun will accept the patches for OpenOffice to get VBA support.”

Hmm. I'm surprised. VBA is one of Microsoft's Achille's Heels, the weak spot where lots of security flaws can be exploited, via Automation, AutoOpen macros and so forth. I'll be interested in learning how OOo can implement these.

Django the #1 choice for Python's Benevolent Dictator For Life

By on August 22, 2006 in Python

Over at Blue Sky On Mars: Kevin Dangoor, one of the lead developers for the TurboGears Python web framework posts, “There can't be only one.”

“I guess I'd better give up now. Guido announced at SciPy that Django is the standard web framework for Python. How's that for a first two sentences of a blog post? ”

“Always there are two, a master and an apprentice.” Master Yoda says.

Neo claims, “It's about choice. Free will is the one thing that can't be factored out of the system.” Free will mustn't be factored out of the system. The Joy of Branching is that someone else will go off and try something else, take a different direction, chose the Road Less Taken. And that will make all the difference.

No one size fits all. Sometimes you just need a little snippet, a tweak, of inline python code like you can do with Myghty. Other times, you need a big, honking uber-reliable message-passing system with scalability, redundancy, failover, point-in-time recovery and full BuzzTerm 2.0 compliance. Sometimes you just want to toss together a quick-and-dirty web site for a friend and the first app you come across with a README small enough to take in in one glance is the choice.

There's always room for more than one. Fight for choice.

link via Daily Python-URL! (from the Secret Labs)

Why are computers so hard to use?

By on August 20, 2006 in Apple Macintosh OS X, Linux, Microsoft

David Berlind's recent blog post pointing to Tim Bray's trials and tribulations on switching from a Powerbook to a Sun Ultra 20 running Ubuntu (!) has some interesting reflections on how hard all desktop switching is. David says,

[Tim] “used two words — “wrangling” and “gyrations” — in his last post that leap off the page as having long been (in my mind) desktop Linux's key stumbling blocks.”

I've got a half-dozen machines in the office I work at regularly: Dells, HPs, ThinkPads, Macs, running Win98 through XP, OS X, CentOS, Ubuntu, Fedora, Xubuntu and probably a couple of others. I am constantly wrestling with getting a PDF file just right on this one, or wrangling an icon to do what I want on the desktop of that one. They are all hard!

I got tired of using the supplied Apple keyboard with my iMac and thought I'd try a Microsoft Natural Keyboard I had spare around the office. It worked well, just plug it in and It Worked ™. However, the key labels and assignments had me stumped. On Windows and Linux, the control key is the lower, outer left key and I spend all day issuing ^X, ^V, ^F, ^T to cut, paste, fine and create a new FireFox tab. On the Mac, it's not the outer key, it's the option key, the middle of the three keys outboard the spacebar. Except when it's not. Subconsciously, I had gotten myself into the groove of using the different keyboard layout on the (different) Apple keyboard. When I swapped out the keyboard for the one I use on another machine, I lost the ability to touch type those characters on both keyboards.

In the above-cited blog post, Tim was annoyed when Ubuntu didn't follow the hand-patterns he had memorized on the PowerBook; I feel the same way when I use the Mac.

Windows su or sudo?

By on August 20, 2006 in Microsoft, Security

Garrett followed up on my recent post about creating a root shell by point to Aaron Margosis' post with a “MakeMeAdmin.cmd” batch file. My one-liner solution created a shell as an admin user. Aaron's is more extensive and adds the current user temporarily to the administrators group (requiring the admin password), then requires the current logged-in user to log in again for the shell session.

I'm not sure of the security implications of each, or whether one is better than the other. In a sense, my script is similar to “su” where the shell is in the context of another administrator, where Aaron's is closer to “sudo” in the sense that the current user can temporarily execute super user commands. It sure would be nice if the script could go one step further and persist a list of users with sudo capabilities, so you only had to do one login. In either case, it seems that the security context doesn't “leak” outside of the shell in which it is executed.

Customers most satisfied with Apple

By on August 20, 2006 in Apple Macintosh OS X

OSNews reports Apple Leads Industry in Customer Satisfaction. “Newly published data from the American Customer Satisfaction Index show that Apple leads other personal computer manufacturers, beating out Dell, HP and others. On a 100 point scale, Apple merited a score of 83, according to the ACSI, a 2.5 percent year-over-year increase and a 7.8 percent increase from 1995, the first year the ACSI measured the PC industry. The annual ACSI is sponsored by the American Society for Quality and University of Michigan's M. Ross School of Business. It's derived from phone interviews with customers contacted by using digital-dial telephone samples. More than 70000 consumers are identified and interviewed annually.”

No surprise there.

Run a root shell in Windows while LPU

By on August 17, 2006 in Microsoft, Security

When running Windows, you should always run as the “Least Priviledged User” to do the tasks you need. If your user context doesn’t have the rights to mess with most of the system settings, some evildoing script in the compromised javascript, jpeg, word doc, html page, worm, virus, trojan or other Windows nastie won’t have those rights either.

However, sometimes you need to run a simple command that requires system priviledges. Logging in and out or switching users is too much hassle. For this, I created a shortcut on the desktop and labeled it “RootShell.” (Bear in mind when you run commands from this shell that you have nearly complete control of the machine. With great power comes great responsibility.) The shortcut links to a batch file with the command:

runas /noprofile /env /user:MyMachine/MyAdmin cmd

UPDATE: There ought to be a backslash between MyMachine and MyAdmin. My blogging software helpfully deleted it. Grrr.

This batch file runs the command interpreter (cmd) as user “MyAdmin.” (Supply your own settings for ‘MyMachine’ and ‘MyAdmin’. In domain- and ActiveDirectory-controlled networks, the syntax will be slightly different for specifying the user. Type HELP RUNAS at a command shell for guidance.)

Double-clicking the icon opens a command shell and prompts for the administrator’s password. Get it correct, and the shell runs yet another shell in which you can type the commands you need to run. Get it wrong and it closes.

Handy and quick.

One view of LinuxWorld Day One

By on August 16, 2006 in Linux, OpenSource, Technology

Over at NewsForge, Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier blogs A slow start at LinuxWorld during the seminar day before the main trade show opens. It sounds like the conference had many of the classic faux-pas, hard to avoid but difficult to overcome. I'm not picking on LinuxWorld for these, they happen at every show (and I've been guilty of more than one), but to remind us all what conference attendees expect:

  1. Schedule changes: “I'd hoped to attend Greg Kroah-Hartman's “Write a Real Working Linux Driver” session, but it had been cancelled.”
  2. Not delivering what was promised: “Unfortunately, the presentation was not a “hands-on” affair at all.”
  3. Losing control of the session: “Kirkland turned out to be something of a disappointment. Kirkland spent too much time at the beginning of the session discussing the types of RAID and taking questions from a particularly inquisitive attendee at the back of the room. I enjoy sessions where the presenter takes questions during the presentation, but a good speaker knows how to control the audience and will shut down questions when they start to derail a presentation.”

Lenovo offers SuSE ThinkPad T60p?

By on August 15, 2006 in Linux, Technology

Lenovo debuts Linux ThinkPads.

(InfoWorld) – “Lenovo Group announced on Tuesday the availability of the ThinkPad T60p, its first laptop computer preloaded with the Linux operating system… The new laptop is primarily aimed at engineers, the company said… Linux users will welcome Lenovo's decision to preload the open-source operating system on its new ThinkPad.”

Well, the left hand forgot to tell the right hand. The links on the Lenovo site lead to http://www.pc.ibm.com/us/notebooks/thinkpad/t-series/wor where it says, “The ThinkPad T60p Mobile Workstation does not come preloaded with SUSE Linux. Users must obtain SUSE Linux licenses from Novell. The ThinkPad T60p comes with DOS entitlement only and ships with a blank hard disk drive. SUSE Linux OS will be supported by Novell, while Lenovo will support Hardware,” Hopefully, they will get the story together over the next couple of days.

The whole point of buying such a machine is to get a pre-installed image that supports all the oddball features of Bluetooth, hibernate, ACPI, power management, the funky specialized buttons, the pointer, the touchpad and so forth. If you have to go out and buy and install SuSE yourself, what's the point? Buy the T60p with Windows, snapshot the image, shrink the partition and set up the machine to dual-boot.

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