Inspirated

At last, there’s some good news for PS3 fans like me. A hacker known as muslix64 has uploaded the BackupBluRay program. The software is still in its initial stages but at least things have now moved a step forward. Reportedly, people have been able to bypass AACS and play high definition movies in open source media players. According to muslix64, there are even few people who have burned successfully a Blu-ray HD movie to a HDDVD and vice versa.

This turn of events isn’t much surprising though, as content decryption for HD video was bound to happen sooner or later. Now we have to just wait and see the further counter actions that AACS folks are going to take against customers who demand fair-use. Things will supposedly get difficult for people who want to use the likes of BackupBluRay once the BD+ discs are widely adopted. However, that’s still not likely to dent the enthusiasm of the curious hacker community in any way. To know more about the current situation of HD discs’ copy protection, read this interview of muslix64 on slyck.com.

The whole thing has lifted my hopes once more. I can now look forward to buying pirated Blu-ray discs this summer when I buy a PS3. I have also noticed that the industry’s response to these attacks isn’t as aggressive as it was for CSS decryption, and there can only be two possible reasons for that. Either (more likely) they’re putting their hopes in BD+ and volume unique keys or (less likely) they have now accepted the harsh truth that piracy sells related hardware and most importantly, consoles :P .

Edit: It just came to my knowledge that the first Blu-ray rip has appeared on Bit Torrent network. The tracker is currently an invite-only site though and the movie size is about 22 GB!

Tags: AACS, BackupBluRay, Blu-ray, Copy Protection, CSS, DRM, Gaming, HDDVD, PS3, rip, Technology

It’s finally here, and everyone is talking about it. Microsoft’s new operating system promises a revolution in computing, and a safer experience for its users. But, anyone who keeps himself in touch with Linux news knows that our beloved operating system kicks Vista in the pants in every technical aspect worth considering. Honestly speaking, that won’t change much as the fan-boys will blatantly remain fan-boys, no matter what you throw at them and how rational your reasoning is. Still, I thought of comparing the the current states of Linux and Vista desktops so that I’d link any future Vista fan that I encounter directly to this post.

Let’s start …

Security

In October 2001, Microsoft launched the latest version, dubbed as XP, of their flagship product Windows. The company claimed that the new version was its “most secure operating system ever made”. While installing the OS, the screens constantly kept reiterating words such as “security, usability and dependability”. Given that most of the Microsoft’s users are people who know as much about security as I do about Organic Chemistry, the marketing tactic indeed proved quite successful. However, it wasn’t long before crackers, virus writers and trojan makers started targeting XP, and the most secure OS of Microsoft was collectively devastated. To remedy the situation, Microsoft came up with Service Pack 2. This time using taglines such as “latest security updates and innovations from Microsoft”. These “new proactive protection features” were nothing more than a collection of fixed bugs, default firewall and a “Security Center” that constantly bugged you about installing an Anti-Virus on your PC. The Anti-Viruses had to run in background to perform their routine tasks, and as a consequence, you were left with lesser resources to do your work. It was almost impossible to edit multiple spreadsheets efficiently in Office while having Norton’s AV “shield” your PC from known threats.

The common misconception about Windows’ inherent security troubles was that Windows is less secure only because it’s more targeted by malicious crackers. It was useless telling people who believed it that Windows only dominates the desktop side of computing; and that more damage could’ve been achieved by crackers if they targeted *nix operating systems (which dominated and still dominate the server side of computing) and they had been flawed in security like Windows. The actual reasons for Windows being horse crap in terms of security were quite different. The initial versions of Windows were never created as a network operating system, and the situation became ugly only when the later versions were used as one. There was no proper privilege system in Windows, and even XP’s firewall filtered only inbound traffic. Ironically, with Vista, Microsoft is implementing long time security practices that *nix operating systems have always had, and flagging their operating system (once again) as “more secure operating system than any other”. Things like file system encryption, firewall and a user privilege system were present in real networking operating systems like FreeBSD and Linux for a long time before Microsoft even considered adding them to Windows. In fact, it still astonishes many seasoned *nix users that millions of Windows PCs used to connect to the internet without a proper firewall and a user privilege system. The funniest thing about the whole phenomenon is that Microsoft is tagging the whole thing is “innovation”. Leaving that aside, even if we consider the current states of security features for Vista and a Linux operating system, Vista still lags behind due to technologies like SELinux, iptables and the platform portable nature of Linux itself.

Look and feel

Another feature of Vista which admirers love to brag about is the Aero interface, while the misconception (which wasn’t a misconception really, quite a few years back) about Linux is that the GUIs of its desktop environments aren’t as user friendly and aesthetically pleasing as Macintosh or Windows. Recent developments such as Xgl, AIGLX, Beryl and Cairo have provided Linux the most impressive GUIs of any operating system, and I’m not just issuing hollow statements like Microsoft here either. Consider having multiple “virtual” desktops on a cube which you can rotate and view in real-time. Right now, it’s only possible with a hardware accelerated X server like Xgl or AIGLX.

 
Beryl: The most advanced GUI interface on any OS

And let’s not forget that you have something in Linux which Windows will never be able to offer: the choice of desktop environments. So if you don’t want to have all those effects, or even if you have a computer with only 64 MB of RAM, you can always run a minimalist window manager e.g. Fluxbox.

Conclusion

There are also other “innovations” of Vista such as desktop widgets and search tools which have been present in Linux for years in form of SuperKaramba and Beagle. Nevertheless, as I’ve said before, the “ignorant fan-boy syndrome” has no cure, and there will still be people who’ll find it very satisfying to pay money for things like operating system, office software and email management software. Even when a Linux distribution offers gigabytes of those utilities for free (in terms of both beer and speech).

Tags: Aero, AIGLX, Beagle, Beryl, Cairo, Linux, Microsoft, Open Source, Sarcasm, SuperKaramba, Technology, Vista, Xgl, XP

Xfce is a light-weight desktop environment which, in my opinion, balances the resources vs. features graph in the best possible way. Until last week, the latest stable version of Xfce was 4.2, while 4.4 release candidates had been rolling out since mid-2006. The 4.4 version promised some very exciting features, such as the new Thunar File Manager but was, not surprisingly, never incorporated in mainstream distributions such as Fedora or Ubuntu. Fans continued to compile it from source or install unofficial builds on their distributions, but there was no significant increase in its usage over this period as the general expectations of a modern desktop environment were lifted due to relatively shorter stable release cycles of Gnome and KDE. The situation should be changed now that Xfce has finally released the much awaited stable upgrade.

Xfce was one of the first desktop environments to include its own compositing manager with its default window manager. The whole thing was quite sexy without taking huge chunks of memory either. In my experience, an Xfce desktop can look really cool while using only 80-100 MB of RAM. Back in the days when I had Xfwm4 as my default window manager, the setup shown in the following screenshot ran quite smoothly on a 733 MHz P3 with 128 MB of RAM!

Xfce 4.4 RC2 on Fedora Core 6

(No one can deny the fact though that once someone uses Beryl/Emerald, all other window managers of the universe start to look ultra-boring. That’s why my normal setup consists of both Beryl and Xfce, and it’s quite a treat.)

I’ll be reviewing the 4.4 release as soon as I get back to my PC in February. It’s really hard being away from your beloved C2D processor that compiles a whole kernel in 20 minutes, and using a P3 processor which compiles the same thing in approximately two hours. It’s like going to a movie with a talkative nauseous wife after having seen the same thing with a gorgeous taciturn girlfriend on the night before!

Tags: Beryl, Emerald, Fedora Core, Gnome, KDE, Open Source, Technology, Thunar, Xfce

Instances of unmaintained valuable open-source software have been greatly reduced over the last couple of years. Nowadays, good software is quickly forked off if its developers aren’t active anymore, a recent example of which would be the XMMS/Audacious fork.

Nevertheless, one can still find some true gems lying around that are apparently abandoned by their developers because of not generating enough public interest and ObexFS definitely belongs to this category. Its purpose is (or was) to implement a FUSE based file system for browsing OBEX devices (e.g. Nokia cell phones). However, the most recent version of ObexFS (0.10) was released on July 4th, 2006. While trying to use it, I found out that even the basic autotools configuration wasn’t done properly in the tarball, so compiling the program still tried to link to bluetooth libraries even though –disable-bluetooth option was given to the configure script.

I am not an autotools guru myself, so I couldn’t fix the script. The most obvious solution for me was to install the bluetooth libraries. Even worse, there’s no CVS access for obexfs where someone would be able to commit a patch. I just hope that some developer decides soon that it’s now time to fork the whole OpenOBEX project for a more active resource.

Note: If you want to use the ObexFS software, please note that the latest tarballs of ObexFS and ObexFTP are available on the ObexFTP download directory, not the SourceForge repository.

Tags: Bluetooth, Nokia, OBEX, ObexFS, ObexFTP, OpenOBEX, Technology

As much as I hate Internet Explorer, it’s just not possible for me (or any other web-designer) to completely ignore it. Inspirated used to render perfectly in Firefox and passed W3C’s XHTML & CSS validators without any errors or warnings. However, one of my MSN contacts pointed out that the layout was badly broken in Internet Explorer. After Googling for the cause of a problem, I discovered that IE 6 couldn’t properly handle floated divs without some CSS hacks. Consequentially, peculiar display errors were present on my site e.g. a page showing everything nicely until it was scrolled, making all the boxes disappear.

After editing the style sheet and making few other changes in the page layout, the site is now rendered in IE as expected. Though I still can’t get over the fact that I wasted two whole hours on fixing something that wasn’t broken in the first place. Even worse, I had to do it only because something that I dearly despise is quite popular among the masses.

Tags: CSS, Firefox, Internet Explorer, W3C, XHTML

An AMV of various goals from Capitano with Manson’s song in the background:

Tags: AMV, Capitano, Goal, Marilyn Manson, Rock is Dead, Roma, Soccer, Totti, Video, Youtube

Finally, Inspirated.com is up and running. Without further blabbing, let me list the things that are going to be different from my previous home page (Ultimation):

• Name and design.
• Obsolete source codes and references are removed. No one was interested in them anyway.
• Blogging is now done through WordPress. This will not only make the job hell lot of easier for me but will also enable other people to post comments on anything.
• Instead of a single-person effort, the site is now managed by two people i.e. me and Angeousa Quicksilver. AQ is a multimedia artist and Inspirated will hopefully be featuring his work (graphics & music) soon.

Other than that, things like my photo galley and wallpapers were just duplicated from Ultimation without any considerable difference. I’m still a bug and the Earth is still a giant monolithic kernel. See you later!

Tags: WordPress