One Shot Design, open source one day at a time

As any respectable aspiring spy, my Dell Inspiron 1520 laptop is equipped with a self-destruct button. Well actually it is a button Dell intented for booting MediaDirect, a media player embedded on the motherborad and not requiring any OS to run. The problem is that when it loads MediaDirect tends to mess up my OS’s boot settings beyond recovery. In 10 months, I have inadvertently pressed it thirce, and no, I didn’t have spies on my back: it was dark and I was still waking up from slumber.

Luckily, I ritually back up my disk with Grsync, so all my pictures and documents were safely waiting on a UBS external drive. I also sync my portable audio player after each major change to the music library structure, so my collection of almost 4000 songs is easily recovered. I use IMAP for my

This time, I decided to install Linux Mint, a Debian distribution based on Ubuntu and focused on multimedia applications. The developpers included some proprietary software so that more hardware works and the OS plays Macromedia Flash and MPEG straight out of the box.

I did set the new Linux login passwords and the Firefox master password according to my rule of critical relevance. I installed the latest version of Flock, a Firefox-based browser and RSS feeds reader that links to my Facebook and Flickr accounts, and allows me to post entries for this Worpdress blog. I recovered the list of logins and passwords from the Keepassx database. Having restructured my documents folders, I decided to encrypt my financial and correspondence folders with TrueCrypt.

I am not back to fully operational.

John Moore of FCW.com writes: “Government officials who support open source now find they have a new decision to make:  whether to use one of the growing number of open-source packages that could handle higher-profile agency operations, such as business intelligence analysis, content management or customer relationship management (CRM), to name a few.”

Read the article on FCW.com

Cross-platform, multi-protocol chat client Pidgin has briefly been mentionned on this blog. I’ve always used Gaim and its successor Pidgin to manage the MSN, ICQ, AIM and GoogleTalk accounts on GNU/Linux. As of late, I’ve been getting half-a-dozen spam bot messages per day through MSN.

Realizing that blocking the user was pretty much ineffective, since there is a myriad of these bastards, I searched for a possible filter plugin. I came across Bot Sentry, an underrated plugin that surprisingly isn’t included in the default Pidgin distribution. Blogger Mark O’Neill explains how the plugin efficiently gets rid of chat spam.

After fiddling with the command line, I managed to install the plugin and getting it running. I’ll be reporting on the results.

With the strong decrease in price, flash memory has replaced magnetic and optical drives as a universal storage media. Every personal computer user now owns at least one of those USB flash keys. These tiny devices typically hold more data than a CD while taking less than a third of the physical volume. Fact is, USB key are so easy to carry around in the pocket or attached to a key… that they easily get lost or stolen. With the increased digitization of life, storage media often carries personal and sometimes critical information. And that can be a liability.

Password encryption software has already been discussed on this blog, but weekly reports about theft and loss of laptop computers holding critical information do raise the issue of protecting files as well as passwords. Truecrypt, a free open-source disk encryption application (for Windows Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux) enables to create an encrypted containter on media storage or to encrypt a whole storage drive. Once access is given clearance, the application mounts the encrypted data as a virtual drive, allowing the user to browse and move files and folders around with the file explorer.