Up until now I've been very happily avoiding this issue by using stow, but recently I found checkinstall which you run instead of make install. Checkinstall creates a package (.deb, or.rpm based on your system) containing all the files getting installed by the make install step, and installs that for you. That means that everything, source installs included, can be conveniently managed from whatever package management application you use (I prefer synaptic myself, it works for anything that supports apt, which includes rpm).
But stow is also a package management system, and it doesn't physically install crud in your $PATH directories (which debs and rpms do). In essence, the application folder in/usr/local/stow becomes both a package and the location of the physical files: if you want to move some software you've compiled onto another machine, you simply copy across the relevant folder and stow it.
There's other advantages to using stow above a.dep or.rpm system, too - when you upgrade a package, unless you physically delete the old folder in/usr/local/stow then you've still got the older version handy in case the new one causes problems. Or if you want to know exactly how much space each package is taking up in your disk, simply do a "du" in the stow directory.
I've never really understood why all the major distros see the need to use databases and fancy scripts to store and access all this info when stow does exactly the same thing using a simple physical directory structure...
So let's see, rape vs. making someone move from katie.com to katiejones.com. [sarcasm] Yes, clearly those are equivalent. How ironic! [/sarcasm]
Lord above! I think you need a reality check, mate:)
I hate to say it, but I think the/. moderation of our respective comments says it all... Look, no-one's equating rape/child molestation/whatever with bullying someone over a domain name. But there's still a strong sense of irony here, okay? If you can't see it, then I'm sorry for you.
There's nothing worse than a pedant who's wrong. Except perhaps a pedant who's anonymous too...
To explain in what should be needless detail: The book katie.com is about internet predators (the author was apparently a victim of one). You would therefore expect the author to act with great respect for other's online rights. However, instead her (and/or her publisher's) lawyers are being predators themselves by attempting to take over a domain name that existed long before the book was ever thought of. Thus there is an inconguity between the anticipated actions of the author and the actions in reality. This is a perfect example of irony.
It seems to me that you cannot use the poster's "1 Australian Dollar is worth 70 to 80 US cents" to make a meaningful evaluation of a harddrive costing Australian $5999 at some time in the past.
Hmmm... I think the point was that $6000 for an 8.6Mb hard drive was funny in itself, irrespective of inflation, cost of living, or whatever other benchmark you care to think up.
(Consider - adjusting as you propose for inflation will only *increase* the equivalent price above $6000. I'd imagine that the conversion rate for the AUD was merely given so that wierd aliens don't think we're living in some banana republic where 1 USD = several thousand AUD;)
Whats the point of all this destructive testing? Do you really need your media to be THAT tough?
It wasn't quite a memory card, but I put my usbflash drive through the wash the other day by accident (damn thing's so light I didn't notice it in my shirt pocket). It was pretty wet inside afterwards, but after careful drying over the central heating vents, it works as good as new:)
So it's quite useful to have tough media! Although I don't intend to make a habit of regularly laundering my flash memory...
That is absolutely asinine, they are NO-fucking-WHERE near equivalent.
Hmmm... obviously, you've never seen a person drive while talking on the phone;-)
Anyway, my point was that no-one should have unlimited "freedom" when that freedom entails endangering others. I was just taking the OP's argument to its logical conclusion.
Automated voice dialing and a hands-free system. I don't have to take my eyes nor my hands off the wheel.
That's legal where I live, too - and I don't know anyone who has a problem with that system. I completely agree with you. I was talking about drivers who talk/text into handsets, which AFAICS was what the rest of this thread was talking about too.
Of course not, but then I never suggested that in the first place.
and not every cell phone user is going to get into accidents. There's a whole other peice of that demographic that claims that they can talk and drive just fine and they DO.
Or rather, they haven't had an accident yet. Perhaps you've never seen the way drivers using mobiles veer from one side of the road to the other... and never even notice that they're doing this until they hit the kerb? Perhaps where you live there haven't been cylists and other drivers killed by phone users who had veered into bike lanes or the opposing lane of traffic? And note: this is not what I'd call standard "moron" behaviour - this is just plain distraction.
There's heaps of data that demonstrate how much driver concentration is reduced by listening to a phone pressed against one ear. It's also quite clear by the behaviour of phone using drivers that they are not aware that they are driving dangerously, even as they lose control of their car. As I said before, someone's own perception of their safety is a very poor indicator. Just think of a drunk mate who claims he's OK to drive home, even though he can't walk in a straight line.
Maybe, just maybe, your concentration isn't reduced while you talk on the phone and drive at the same time. But if that's so, then you're in an incredibly small minority.
Statistics show that eating, smoking cigarettes, and drinking beverages (soda, water) is equally as dangerous while driving if not more dangerous then talking on the cell phone. Do you want to ban these too? Should I get pulled over for taking a sip of my Pepsi?
I'd love to see these statistics - I've never seen drivers who were smoking swerve around the road. But yes - if this behaviour really, consistently causes people to have accidents then of course the answer is yes! Otherwise why don't we just throw out speed limits, drink-driving rules, road signs and all other road laws?
No his freedom is vanishing because some people can't handle the freedoms. He might be able to chat on his cell-phone and drive quite safely. Just because you can't doesn't mean he should be penalized. That's his point.
My friend, let me enlighten you. Everyone who has had an accident while using a mobile phone has thought exactly the same thing: that they were able to chat (and worse, SMS!!) on their phone and drive quite safely... right up until the point where they killed either themselves or someone else. Self-perceptions of risk are never reliable, and especially not in situations like this where other people get killed.
The freedom to text/chat on a mobile is equivalent to the freedom to drive around and randomly shoot at people. Both are dangerous. Both are stupid.
I think the author sets up a straw man. Constructive criticism is great. But I invoke this when somebody is whining, making demands, or generally acting like they paid money for something.
Couldn't agree more here. The number of OSS projects to which I've submitted bug reports (which have in almost all cases rapidly provided fixes for these bugs) would tend to suggest that the article's author has never actually tried making a constructive criticism about a project, but has simply garnered his opinions on OSS from hanging around/.
The OSS community lives and breathes because of user feedback - it's a free and extremely effective way of conducting user-experience studies, and most OSS projects depend on this to improve their software.
Why are laptops going widescreen? Shouldnt PCs be streaching the other way.
Well, laptops have the keyboard formfactor to consider, I guess. But most stand-alone LCD monitors are going tall-screen... at least going from 4:3 to 5:4. It seems a logical move to me, too.
I mean think of that awsome 20in screen you could have a computer and tv all in one.
Well, in theory, with a STB with D-sub or DVI-D output you should be able to do this with any monitor - no need for a PC at all.
It's actually something I've been thinking of myself - LCD monitors are much cheaper than LCD TVs (at least they are here in Australia) and Avermedia makes a cheap SDTV STB with D-sub out. Whether this works well in practise, though, is something I'm wondering about - I'd love to hear from anyone else who's tried this...
That's because it was not a bug... What are you going to call a bug next? "Mozilla loads the goatse.cx page even though no one would ever really want to see that! Goatse.cx has been around at least since 2002, and yet Mozilla has failed to fix this bug that lets you go there!"
See my comments earlier in this thread. But since you want to argue for agument's sake, the obvious difference between blocking requests for goatse vs. allowing malicious code to be downloaded and executed without user prompting is that the former is a request and the latter requires no user initiation. That's the whole point. And just because this exploit comes about because of the stupid nature of a second-rate OS, that doesn't mean developers of mozilla should just ignore the existence of it when the fix is straigtforward and inconveniences noone.
btw - the exploit was filed as a bug once in 2002, and twice separately in 2004. Remember that a bug in bugzilla encompasses the whole gamut from coding errors to feature requests.
Microsoft-style? WTF?... Sweeping bugs under the rug is the way things are done, period.
So does that make this practise in an open-source project acceptable?? I don't think so! I'd like to think that mozilla.org had better morals and priorities than a closed-source profit-based software company...
And the reason I singled out MS is that it makes quite a popular rival browser, for which it has a certain reputation of ignoring reported bugs until they are exploited. And of course it is the designated Evil Empire, so excellent for unsavory comparisons:)
As far as I can see from a quick read of the referenced bug page, they didn't _know_ it was exploitable until the day before yesterday. Not fixing something that you don't know about doesn't seem negligent.
There's a couple of bug references to this, so I'll assume you were referring to the latest one that specifically refers to the shell: protocol. But I was looking at this bug which is a more general form of the same security hole. I'll quote from the bug description:
As we can see in bug 163648, external protocols can cause a lot of security issues. But exploits for this bug are dangerous mainly if external protocol handler is being requested automatically from HTML code via , and other similar cases.
More, with relation to common sense, invoking an external protocol is absurd in this case, because is request to return some data in browser, not for launch external application.
So, disable external protocols in all cases, excluding , can solve this problem.
Marking severity critical according to 163648.
That was filed on the 9th September 2002. It seems fairly clear to me that the whole point of this bug was that external protocol handlers are inherrently exploitable in win32.
This isn't really a fix for a security problem in Mozilla, it's a workaround for a security problem in windows...
Well, regardless of the cause of the problem, if there's an exploitable hole it's still a security issue. Yes, it wasn't caused by some bad coding in Mozilla, but from reading the bug description and comments the exploit comes through HTML that has little or no valid use in legitimate, friendly web pages. (Hence it was possible for Mozilla to quickly release an all-blocking fix once it became publicised - disabling this funcitonality is not going to inconvenience anyone)
In that situation, it still seems negligent to me when you're failing to fix an exploitable hole once it's come to your attention and when there's no disadvantage to doing so.
As a very small-scale open-source developer myself, I feel that despite the GPL clauses about no warranty there's still something of a moral duty of care and trust in situations like this. Two years of being aware of this issue and doing little or nothing about it seems a bit worrying, IMO.
May be Python is even better for beginners to play and learn.
Either Perl or Python, I'd suggest - it often seems that liking one means hating the other. Personally I dislike Python, mainly because I see no advantages over Perl, I dislike the reliance on whitespace and I find it smacks too much of C. But if you like C and you like whitespace-delimiting of blocks then you'll love Python and hate Perl.
They're both great languages though, and excellent means for a beginner to learn to program without having to worry about memory-management and basic string-processing routines, and with the extended power of hashes and regexps.
Not really. The bug history began immediately afterward and for quite some time it was moved between FIX and WONTFIX but received a lot of attention.
However much developer attention it received (and actually it wasn't much - see my comments below), it doesn't change the fact that this exploit was present for almost two years... and a fix was only released when the bug received wider internet attention.
The speed with which a fix was issued after the general public was made aware of the problem was good... but the previous activity over the bug (imagine setting the status to WONTFIX for this!!??) smacks of Microsoft-style negligence/lack-of-concern.
The specific comments you cite are indicative of this lack of concern- Comment #2 basically claims that it's not worth fixing security issues that are initiated without any form of user intervention whatsoever. And why? because it's easy enough to get a luser to click on a malicious link, so why should we worry about sites that just bypass the malicious click?? I don't know about everyone else here, but that sort of logic concerns me!
Just looking at the amount of interest in this bug after 2002 (only brief two comments in 2003 and another two in 2004; no patches submitted or even thought about) seems to suggest that if this had not been reported by the internet media this would never have been fixed. Or at least, not until exploits of it became commonplace.
And with the recent internet-banking trojans using a similar exploit (i.e. download and run malicious code without any user prompting) in IE, the issue seems serious enough to me to have warranted a quicker fix.
Re:Or not...
on
Hacking Quartz
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
ever heard of visual basic?
Actually, I would have said that Perl (and Perl/Tk for creating GUIs) is the equivalent BASIC these days. Simple, straightforward, free and cross-platform... and there's some excellent O'Reilly books for beginners.
Maybe because flash photography can degrade a painting.
Maybe so. But why don't you try using a tripod (and no flash) in an art gallery, and see how long it takes to have your gear confiscated? The original poster didn't say anything about using a flash...
Nothing is worse then trying to download a really important email, but being stuck waiting for a hand full of large, mostly less-important messages to download.
Well, one solution - which is something I'm already doing with yahoo - is using a large capacity webmail account to recieve big attachments, making the account a bit like the upload directory of your own ftp server. You can then use the webmail interface to choose whether or not you want to download the file, without interfering with your normal email.
Mind you - I completely agree with you about not sending photos via email, simply because it's much easier to view lots of photos on a dedicated photo hosting website. I've found fotopic.net to be extremely good in this regard.
Finally an article on something different from GNOME/KDE/any other GUI.
Except that it's a sad state of affairs when GNOME/KDE are the only groups doing active development of a terminal emulator (at least that I can find - rxvt/aterm/eterm haven't been updated for years, and could really do with a tabbed interface).
Once I almost installed GNOME just to use gnome-terminal (except that installing GNOME from sources is soooo painful and seemed so ridiculous just to have a terminal emulator that I gave up). One of my great wishes would be for someone to remove the GNOME/Glade crud from gnome-terminal and make it a standalone GTK app (there can't be any use for specific GNOME libs in a terminal emulator... surely!)
Slashdot Mirror
Up until now I've been very happily avoiding this issue by using stow, but recently I found checkinstall which you run instead of make install. Checkinstall creates a package (.deb, or .rpm based on your system) containing all the files getting installed by the make install step, and installs that for you. That means that everything, source installs included, can be conveniently managed from whatever package management application you use (I prefer synaptic myself, it works for anything that supports apt, which includes rpm).
/usr/local/stow becomes both a package and the location of the physical files: if you want to move some software you've compiled onto another machine, you simply copy across the relevant folder and stow it.
.dep or .rpm system, too - when you upgrade a package, unless you physically delete the old folder in /usr/local/stow then you've still got the older version handy in case the new one causes problems. Or if you want to know exactly how much space each package is taking up in your disk, simply do a "du" in the stow directory.
...
But stow is also a package management system, and it doesn't physically install crud in your $PATH directories (which debs and rpms do). In essence, the application folder in
There's other advantages to using stow above a
I've never really understood why all the major distros see the need to use databases and fancy scripts to store and access all this info when stow does exactly the same thing using a simple physical directory structure
So let's see, rape vs. making someone move from katie.com to katiejones.com. [sarcasm] Yes, clearly those are equivalent. How ironic! [/sarcasm]
:)
/. moderation of our respective comments says it all ... Look, no-one's equating rape/child molestation/whatever with bullying someone over a domain name. But there's still a strong sense of irony here, okay? If you can't see it, then I'm sorry for you.
Lord above! I think you need a reality check, mate
I hate to say it, but I think the
Bugzilla hates slashdot; copy and paste.
:)
Or type "about:config" in your address bar, search for "referer" and set "network.http.sendRefererHeader" to a value of 0 (zero).
Works like a charm
No it isn't ironic.
...
....
There's nothing worse than a pedant who's wrong. Except perhaps a pedant who's anonymous too
To explain in what should be needless detail: The book katie.com is about internet predators (the author was apparently a victim of one). You would therefore expect the author to act with great respect for other's online rights. However, instead her (and/or her publisher's) lawyers are being predators themselves by attempting to take over a domain name that existed long before the book was ever thought of. Thus there is an inconguity between the anticipated actions of the author and the actions in reality. This is a perfect example of irony.
Sheesh
It seems to me that you cannot use the poster's "1 Australian Dollar is worth 70 to 80 US cents" to make a meaningful evaluation of a harddrive costing Australian $5999 at some time in the past.
... I think the point was that $6000 for an 8.6Mb hard drive was funny in itself, irrespective of inflation, cost of living, or whatever other benchmark you care to think up.
;)
Hmmm
(Consider - adjusting as you propose for inflation will only *increase* the equivalent price above $6000. I'd imagine that the conversion rate for the AUD was merely given so that wierd aliens don't think we're living in some banana republic where 1 USD = several thousand AUD
Whats the point of all this destructive testing? Do you really need your media to be THAT tough?
:)
...
It wasn't quite a memory card, but I put my usbflash drive through the wash the other day by accident (damn thing's so light I didn't notice it in my shirt pocket). It was pretty wet inside afterwards, but after careful drying over the central heating vents, it works as good as new
So it's quite useful to have tough media! Although I don't intend to make a habit of regularly laundering my flash memory
That is absolutely asinine, they are NO-fucking-WHERE near equivalent.
... obviously, you've never seen a person drive while talking on the phone ;-)
Hmmm
Anyway, my point was that no-one should have unlimited "freedom" when that freedom entails endangering others. I was just taking the OP's argument to its logical conclusion.
And everyone who had an accident while NOT using a mobile phone has thought exactly the same thing. Your point is?
... ?
That people should drive sensibly and pay attention to road laws that are designed to protect themselves and other people.
And your point is
Automated voice dialing and a hands-free system. I don't have to take my eyes nor my hands off the wheel.
That's legal where I live, too - and I don't know anyone who has a problem with that system. I completely agree with you. I was talking about drivers who talk/text into handsets, which AFAICS was what the rest of this thread was talking about too.
Not every accident is caused by cell phones
... and never even notice that they're doing this until they hit the kerb? Perhaps where you live there haven't been cylists and other drivers killed by phone users who had veered into bike lanes or the opposing lane of traffic? And note: this is not what I'd call standard "moron" behaviour - this is just plain distraction.
Of course not, but then I never suggested that in the first place.
and not every cell phone user is going to get into accidents. There's a whole other peice of that demographic that claims that they can talk and drive just fine and they DO.
Or rather, they haven't had an accident yet. Perhaps you've never seen the way drivers using mobiles veer from one side of the road to the other
There's heaps of data that demonstrate how much driver concentration is reduced by listening to a phone pressed against one ear. It's also quite clear by the behaviour of phone using drivers that they are not aware that they are driving dangerously, even as they lose control of their car. As I said before, someone's own perception of their safety is a very poor indicator. Just think of a drunk mate who claims he's OK to drive home, even though he can't walk in a straight line.
Maybe, just maybe, your concentration isn't reduced while you talk on the phone and drive at the same time. But if that's so, then you're in an incredibly small minority.
Statistics show that eating, smoking cigarettes, and drinking beverages (soda, water) is equally as dangerous while driving if not more dangerous then talking on the cell phone. Do you want to ban these too? Should I get pulled over for taking a sip of my Pepsi?
I'd love to see these statistics - I've never seen drivers who were smoking swerve around the road. But yes - if this behaviour really, consistently causes people to have accidents then of course the answer is yes! Otherwise why don't we just throw out speed limits, drink-driving rules, road signs and all other road laws?
No his freedom is vanishing because some people can't handle the freedoms. He might be able to chat on his cell-phone and drive quite safely. Just because you can't doesn't mean he should be penalized. That's his point.
... right up until the point where they killed either themselves or someone else. Self-perceptions of risk are never reliable, and especially not in situations like this where other people get killed.
My friend, let me enlighten you. Everyone who has had an accident while using a mobile phone has thought exactly the same thing: that they were able to chat (and worse, SMS!!) on their phone and drive quite safely
The freedom to text/chat on a mobile is equivalent to the freedom to drive around and randomly shoot at people. Both are dangerous. Both are stupid.
And both, thankfully, are illegal.
I think the author sets up a straw man. Constructive criticism is great. But I invoke this when somebody is whining, making demands, or generally acting like they paid money for something.
/.
Couldn't agree more here. The number of OSS projects to which I've submitted bug reports (which have in almost all cases rapidly provided fixes for these bugs) would tend to suggest that the article's author has never actually tried making a constructive criticism about a project, but has simply garnered his opinions on OSS from hanging around
The OSS community lives and breathes because of user feedback - it's a free and extremely effective way of conducting user-experience studies, and most OSS projects depend on this to improve their software.
Why are laptops going widescreen? Shouldnt PCs be streaching the other way.
... at least going from 4:3 to 5:4. It seems a logical move to me, too.
Well, laptops have the keyboard formfactor to consider, I guess. But most stand-alone LCD monitors are going tall-screen
I mean think of that awsome 20in screen you could have a computer and tv all in one.
...
Well, in theory, with a STB with D-sub or DVI-D output you should be able to do this with any monitor - no need for a PC at all.
It's actually something I've been thinking of myself - LCD monitors are much cheaper than LCD TVs (at least they are here in Australia) and Avermedia makes a cheap SDTV STB with D-sub out. Whether this works well in practise, though, is something I'm wondering about - I'd love to hear from anyone else who's tried this
Even taking a hard-nose stance Mozilla is the lesser of two evils.
Well of course it is - but that doesn't mean that mozilla.org should be proud of ignoring bugs like this one.
That's because it was not a bug ... What are you going to call a bug next? "Mozilla loads the goatse.cx page even though no one would ever really want to see that! Goatse.cx has been around at least since 2002, and yet Mozilla has failed to fix this bug that lets you go there!"
See my comments earlier in this thread. But since you want to argue for agument's sake, the obvious difference between blocking requests for goatse vs. allowing malicious code to be downloaded and executed without user prompting is that the former is a request and the latter requires no user initiation. That's the whole point. And just because this exploit comes about because of the stupid nature of a second-rate OS, that doesn't mean developers of mozilla should just ignore the existence of it when the fix is straigtforward and inconveniences noone.
btw - the exploit was filed as a bug once in 2002, and twice separately in 2004. Remember that a bug in bugzilla encompasses the whole gamut from coding errors to feature requests.
Microsoft-style? WTF? ... Sweeping bugs under the rug is the way things are done, period.
...
:)
So does that make this practise in an open-source project acceptable?? I don't think so! I'd like to think that mozilla.org had better morals and priorities than a closed-source profit-based software company
And the reason I singled out MS is that it makes quite a popular rival browser, for which it has a certain reputation of ignoring reported bugs until they are exploited. And of course it is the designated Evil Empire, so excellent for unsavory comparisons
As far as I can see from a quick read of the referenced bug page, they didn't _know_ it was exploitable until the day before yesterday. Not fixing something that you don't know about doesn't seem negligent.
There's a couple of bug references to this, so I'll assume you were referring to the latest one that specifically refers to the shell: protocol. But I was looking at this bug which is a more general form of the same security hole. I'll quote from the bug description:
As we can see in bug 163648, external protocols can cause a lot of security
issues. But exploits for this bug are dangerous mainly if external protocol
handler is being requested automatically from HTML code via , and other
similar cases.
More, with relation to common sense, invoking an external protocol is absurd in
this case, because is request to return some data in browser,
not for launch external application.
So, disable external protocols in all cases, excluding , can solve this
problem.
Marking severity critical according to 163648.
That was filed on the 9th September 2002. It seems fairly clear to me that the whole point of this bug was that external protocol handlers are inherrently exploitable in win32.
This isn't really a fix for a security problem in Mozilla, it's a workaround for a security problem in windows...
Well, regardless of the cause of the problem, if there's an exploitable hole it's still a security issue. Yes, it wasn't caused by some bad coding in Mozilla, but from reading the bug description and comments the exploit comes through HTML that has little or no valid use in legitimate, friendly web pages. (Hence it was possible for Mozilla to quickly release an all-blocking fix once it became publicised - disabling this funcitonality is not going to inconvenience anyone)
In that situation, it still seems negligent to me when you're failing to fix an exploitable hole once it's come to your attention and when there's no disadvantage to doing so.
As a very small-scale open-source developer myself, I feel that despite the GPL clauses about no warranty there's still something of a moral duty of care and trust in situations like this. Two years of being aware of this issue and doing little or nothing about it seems a bit worrying, IMO.
May be Python is even better for beginners to play and learn.
Either Perl or Python, I'd suggest - it often seems that liking one means hating the other. Personally I dislike Python, mainly because I see no advantages over Perl, I dislike the reliance on whitespace and I find it smacks too much of C. But if you like C and you like whitespace-delimiting of blocks then you'll love Python and hate Perl.
They're both great languages though, and excellent means for a beginner to learn to program without having to worry about memory-management and basic string-processing routines, and with the extended power of hashes and regexps.
Not really. The bug history began immediately afterward and for quite some time it was moved between FIX and WONTFIX but received a lot of attention.
... and a fix was only released when the bug received wider internet attention.
... but the previous activity over the bug (imagine setting the status to WONTFIX for this!!??) smacks of Microsoft-style negligence/lack-of-concern.
However much developer attention it received (and actually it wasn't much - see my comments below), it doesn't change the fact that this exploit was present for almost two years
The speed with which a fix was issued after the general public was made aware of the problem was good
The specific comments you cite are indicative of this lack of concern- Comment #2 basically claims that it's not worth fixing security issues that are initiated without any form of user intervention whatsoever. And why? because it's easy enough to get a luser to click on a malicious link, so why should we worry about sites that just bypass the malicious click?? I don't know about everyone else here, but that sort of logic concerns me!
Just looking at the amount of interest in this bug after 2002 (only brief two comments in 2003 and another two in 2004; no patches submitted or even thought about) seems to suggest that if this had not been reported by the internet media this would never have been fixed. Or at least, not until exploits of it became commonplace.
And with the recent internet-banking trojans using a similar exploit (i.e. download and run malicious code without any user prompting) in IE, the issue seems serious enough to me to have warranted a quicker fix.
ever heard of visual basic?
... and there's some excellent O'Reilly books for beginners.
:)
Actually, I would have said that Perl (and Perl/Tk for creating GUIs) is the equivalent BASIC these days. Simple, straightforward, free and cross-platform
YMMV, of course
Maybe because flash photography can degrade a painting.
...
Maybe so. But why don't you try using a tripod (and no flash) in an art gallery, and see how long it takes to have your gear confiscated? The original poster didn't say anything about using a flash
Nothing is worse then trying to download a really important email, but being stuck waiting for a hand full of large, mostly less-important messages to download.
Well, one solution - which is something I'm already doing with yahoo - is using a large capacity webmail account to recieve big attachments, making the account a bit like the upload directory of your own ftp server. You can then use the webmail interface to choose whether or not you want to download the file, without interfering with your normal email.
Mind you - I completely agree with you about not sending photos via email, simply because it's much easier to view lots of photos on a dedicated photo hosting website. I've found fotopic.net to be extremely good in this regard.
Finally an article on something different from GNOME/KDE/any other GUI.
... surely!)
Except that it's a sad state of affairs when GNOME/KDE are the only groups doing active development of a terminal emulator (at least that I can find - rxvt/aterm/eterm haven't been updated for years, and could really do with a tabbed interface).
Once I almost installed GNOME just to use gnome-terminal (except that installing GNOME from sources is soooo painful and seemed so ridiculous just to have a terminal emulator that I gave up). One of my great wishes would be for someone to remove the GNOME/Glade crud from gnome-terminal and make it a standalone GTK app (there can't be any use for specific GNOME libs in a terminal emulator