First Ever ‘Donate To FOSS Day’
In case you don’t know what FOSS is, it stands for Free and Open Source Software. And even though you may not know it, chances are you are using it in some form everyday. I don’t think these guys get enough recognition for what they do, and now seems as good of time as any for a ‘change’.
My goal is to have one day out of the year (February 24) where everyone donates something/supports their favorite Free or Open Source project. It doesn’t have to be monetary.
Can you go without your coffee and send $5 their way? That’s always great and sometimes the most convenient way to donate. But remember, a lot of these guys don’t even accept monetary donations (more so the pure Open Source guys). Luckily there are a ton of other ways to help out.
Why I Love Ubuntu 8.10 After Four Months Of Use
I recently wrote a post about some issues I was having with Ubuntu 8.10 after I’ve been using it as my primary machine for the past four months. To balance things out, I wanted to write about why I absolutely love Ubuntu as well.
- It’s Free – I had to get this one out of the way. It still amazes my that an OS as powerful and stable as Ubuntu can be offered for free. Huge kudos to Canonical and the entire community that made this happen.
- Community – The Linux/Ubuntu communities are an amazing wealth of information and for the most part, incredibly helpful. The Ubuntu forums are crawling with seriously l33t hax0rs looking to help you out.
- Out Of the Box Software – An average user could probably use Ubuntu out of the box without the need to install anything else on it if they wanted to. There’s little that it can’t do after a fresh install.
WordPress Error: Forbidden
I was recently working on an article detailing how to install TrueCrypt 5.1a on Ubuntu 8.04. I had just written another article minutes earlier, so I knew everything was fine with WordPress at that time.
This time, however, everytime I chose to Save the article, I was given an error.
Forbidden
You don't have permission to access /blog/wp-admin/post.php on this server.
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
After deactivating my plugins, changing permissions to post.php and drinking a few beers, I finally found the problem.
For some reason, WordPress didn’t like the character combination of ‘wget h’. In the first step, you need to run the command ‘wget http://www.truecrypt.org/downloads/truecrypt-5.1a-ubuntu-x86.tar.gz” to download the TrueCrypt file.
I was finally able to get around it by adding a non-breaking space ( ) between the ‘wget’ and the ‘h’
Is this a SQL injection safeguard or just a weird bug? Can anyone else replicate it? Anyone?
Using Truecrypt to Encrypt Your Entire Hard Drive
If you’re as paranoid as I am, you more than likely appreciate the advancements that the TrueCrypt team has made with version 5.0. For me, the greatest thing they did was making whole disk encryption dead simple. Here’s how you do it.
Getting Started
- First you will need to visit the TrueCrypt site and download and install it on your system. I’m going to be using Windows XP for my demonstration, but they have since released very good and stable version for Mac OSX and Linux.
- Next, go ahead and open the main window by clicking on the TrueCrypt logo in the system tray. The window should look like this
Setting Up the Encryption Settings
- Click the the ‘Create Volume ‘ button
- On the next window, choose the radio button next to ‘Encrypt the system partition or entire system drive ‘
Four Hundred Million Firefox Downloads
Congratulations to the everyone at the Mozilla Co and Spread Firefox!
No hurry…but in V3, can you take out the “crash every 20 minutes feature?”
Pidgin Bug – Won’t Open After It’s Closed to the Sys Tray (Windows)
Well, I’ve now experienced my first bug in Pidgin. I don’t think however that it is actually a problem with Pidgin itself because I didn’t notice any trouble until I enabled the “Windows Pidgin Options” Plugin.
Basically, I have it setup so when I ‘x’ out of the program, it goes to my sys tray and keeps running in the background. Today I closed it out and then was trying to get it back open, but it just sat there.
Once I forced quit, it seemed to work for a couple times, but then died again. I’ve since restarted and it now seems to be working fine.
Anyone else having this problem?
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It just happened again. I disabled the Windows Pidgin Option plugin and restarted Pidgin. I’ll keep ya posted if that was the issue or not.
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Adding Popup Notifications In Pidgin
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After using this plugin for a few days, Pidgin kept locking up and I was able to track it down to Guifications…follow this tutorial at your own risk:)
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So I’ve been using Pidgin for not quite a week now and it really made me feel stupid for staying with MSN Messenger for so long.
This thing is more powerful, more flexible, utilizes plugins, much more lightweight, supports every kind of IM protocol…I could go on all day.
But, for everything that it does, there are a few things I do miss. As small and minute this inconvenience was, I really, really missed the little popup window in the lower right hand of the screen that showed me when someone signed in.
