Mandriva

Well, a friend sent one of those app invites on Facebook today and largely I ignore them but this one was “which bible character are you most like” and she said it was “scary accurate”. So I answered the 5-6 questions, stuff like “do you believe in God”, “do you love God”, “what kind of music do you listen to”, “what are your hobbies”… of course, the guy who did the app can’t spell so one strike against it there.

Anyways, at the end it tells you that you need to send invites to 12 people in order to see who you’re most like. No thanks… I’m not gonna spam people with that junk. Anyways, back to my profile page and lo-and-behold there’s this big red devil head on there and the bible character app is telling me that out of all the people in the bible, I’m most like Satan.

Of course, I just kinda stared at it for a bit before removing the app (although the results stay on my page until they get shuffled off). But… seriously… wtf?!? Ok, I answered my favourite music was heavy metal but everything else pretty pro-God.

I’m starting to think that quiz is rigged and there are only three answers… Jesus, Satan, and Moses. I guess if I answered I listen to gospel music I’d be like Jesus, and if I listened to pop I’d be like Moses. Oh wait… maybe pop would make me like Jesus (i.e. that Jesus Christ Superstar nonsense).

Normally I find Facebook tolerable at best and don’t think it’s really worth mentioning, but this one really kinda cracked me up.

Well, a friend sent one of those app invites on Facebook today and largely I ignore them but this one was “which bible character are you most like” and she said it was “scary accurate”. So I answered the 5-6 questions, stuff like “do you believe in God”, “do you love God”, “what kind of music do you listen to”, “what are your hobbies”… of course, the guy who did the app can’t spell so one strike against it there.

Anyways, at the end it tells you that you need to send invites to 12 people in order to see who you’re most like. No thanks… I’m not gonna spam people with that junk. Anyways, back to my profile page and lo-and-behold there’s this big red devil head on there and the bible character app is telling me that out of all the people in the bible, I’m most like Satan.

Of course, I just kinda stared at it for a bit before removing the app (although the results stay on my page until they get shuffled off). But… seriously… wtf?!? Ok, I answered my favourite music was heavy metal but everything else pretty pro-God.

I’m starting to think that quiz is rigged and there are only three answers… Jesus, Satan, and Moses. I guess if I answered I listen to gospel music I’d be like Jesus, and if I listened to pop I’d be like Moses. Oh wait… maybe pop would make me like Jesus (i.e. that Jesus Christ Superstar nonsense).

Normally I find Facebook tolerable at best and don’t think it’s really worth mentioning, but this one really kinda cracked me up.

Last week I was setting up a machine with ide raid. It was of the cheap kind, software with bios aka fake raid aka dmraid, but the kind I had did actually offer some hardware support if using the proprietary driver. So since the dmraid driver in linux is compatible with this kind of raid I thought that I could just go on and use dmraid for install, then switch to proprietary driver afterwards. Unfortunately it didn't seem like raid 5 of this kind were supported by dmraid, so I went on using linux md raid in stead.

D'oh, first bug spotted, harddrake's (partition utility used by Mandriva installer) raid support was broken. This was in short time fixed by Mandriva ace Pixel, so I got around to install this way shortly afterwards. The install went smooth, but when I rebooted I wasn't able to boot. I banged my head against this issue trying to switch between lilo, grub & grub 2 as bootloaders all of them failing. After wasting too much time on this I figured out that the bootloader was unable to read the partition tables, setting up raid in bios and not using it obviously messed up things. So after killing of this bios raid stuff completely and reinstalling the bootloader worked fine. Now unfortunately I came across yet another raid issue, raid handling in mkinitrd was broken as well due to wrong awk syntax in mkinitrd script. After figurin out this, it was quite trivial to fix and I commited a fix for it shortly afterwards.

Dealing with this I came to think something I've thought of many times in the past, some minimal rescue environment in mkinitrd would be really nice! So after doing some googling I found some old patch for this. I've cleaned it up and improved it a bit as well as made some other fixes to mkinitrd (it seems that a lot of mkinitrd code is very outdated and much less used options has become brokendue to this:/) and submitted a patch to bugzilla. Since we're just days away from final release of 2008.1, this will certainly not enter cooker at this moment, but I really hope it will for 2009.0, it would be really nice to have for failsafe boot. :)

To make a initrd image using this you have to apply the patch to mkinitrd, then you make a new initrd with '--rescue' option. Now you have a initrd built with this, to activate it you pass 'rescue' as argument to kernel at boot. This will make you enter a minimal busybox rescue environment at the beginning of boot where you can perform diagnostics and investigate issues you might have, ie. like if mount of root device fails. Then you can just exit the evironment and the boot will continue as normal.

Quite simple and useful, isn't it? :)

Last week I was setting up a machine with ide raid. It was of the cheap kind, software with bios aka fake raid aka dmraid, but the kind I had did actually offer some hardware support if using the proprietary driver. So since the dmraid driver in linux is compatible with this kind of raid I thought that I could just go on and use dmraid for install, then switch to proprietary driver afterwards. Unfortunately it didn't seem like raid 5 of this kind were supported by dmraid, so I went on using linux md raid in stead.

D'oh, first bug spotted, harddrake's (partition utility used by Mandriva installer) raid support was broken. This was in short time fixed by Mandriva ace Pixel, so I got around to install this way shortly afterwards. The install went smooth, but when I rebooted I wasn't able to boot. I banged my head against this issue trying to switch between lilo, grub & grub 2 as bootloaders all of them failing. After wasting too much time on this I figured out that the bootloader was unable to read the partition tables, setting up raid in bios and not using it obviously messed up things. So after killing of this bios raid stuff completely and reinstalling the bootloader worked fine. Now unfortunately I came across yet another raid issue, raid handling in mkinitrd was broken as well due to wrong awk syntax in mkinitrd script. After figurin out this, it was quite trivial to fix and I commited a fix for it shortly afterwards.

Dealing with this I came to think something I've thought of many times in the past, some minimal rescue environment in mkinitrd would be really nice! So after doing some googling I found some old patch for this. I've cleaned it up and improved it a bit as well as made some other fixes to mkinitrd (it seems that a lot of mkinitrd code is very outdated and much less used options has become brokendue to this:/) and submitted a patch to bugzilla. Since we're just days away from final release of 2008.1, this will certainly not enter cooker at this moment, but I really hope it will for 2009.0, it would be really nice to have for failsafe boot. :)

To make a initrd image using this you have to apply the patch to mkinitrd, then you make a new initrd with '--rescue' option. Now you have a initrd built with this, to activate it you pass 'rescue' as argument to kernel at boot. This will make you enter a minimal busybox rescue environment at the beginning of boot where you can perform diagnostics and investigate issues you might have, ie. like if mount of root device fails. Then you can just exit the evironment and the boot will continue as normal.

Quite simple and useful, isn't it? :)

This week’s TechMail is Configure Snort to log packets to MySQL which looks at using MySQL to store snort logs and BASE to view them. Already there’s a comment there about someone wanting to know how to do it on Windows. I’m sure it’s possible, but my first instinct was to reply “you can’t”. Someone has a case of snort envy perhaps?

urpme -a mono

Sorry for the little bit of downtime… I finally got around to moving the linsec.ca site from home to the hosting provider that has the rest of my sites (except for annvix.*). A few little hiccups but nothing major.

I do really like tuxmachine.org website because it's really a good way to be keep informed of what is happening in the Linux world. Today I've discovered a very interesting howto : Obtain core dump of current running application. This article talks about gcore, a very useful application which allow to take core dumps of running applications : very useful for debugging purposes.

On the same website, I found also another interesting howto : obtain core dump by aborting the running apps. The point of this one is to use -6 signal ( ABRT ) to quit a running application and generate a coredump.

Note : It seems that gcore is not available in Mandriva repositories

Exceptionnellement, je vais un peu parler de Windows. En effet, en 1 mois et demi, 3 de mes contacts MSN ont été contaminés par un virus. Donc ce petit article leur est destiné afin qu'ils puissent la prochaine fois savoir que faire ;-)

1. Faire un scan de son ordinateur : Tout d'abord il convient de faire un scan de son ordinateur par un antivirus pour éliminer les menaces les plus connues. On peut par exemple utiliser le logiciel Multivirus Cleaner. Une fois que vous aurez effectué un scan avec Multivirus Cleaner, vous pouvez éventuellement le désinstaller.
2. Désinfecter MSN : Une fois le scan de base effectué, il est temps de désinfecté MSN Messenger. Pour cela vous pouvez utiliser le logiciel MSNFix. Comme l'interface de MSNFix est sous DOS, je vous conseille de lire attentivement le tutorial suivant qui vous expliquera la marche à suivre pour désinfecter MSN, mais aussi paramétrer MSN pour éviter de se faire contaminer par la suite : http://www.malekal.com/tutorial_MSNFix.php. Si vraiment vous êtes réfractaire à MSNFix, vous pouvez éventuellement essayer le logiciel MSNCleaner qui propose une interface plus simple. Cependant même dans le cas où vous utilisez MSN Cleaner, je vous conseille de lire le tutorial de MSNFix.
3. Installer un bon antivirus : Si vous avez un antivirus installé, et que celui-ci n'est plus valable ou pas à jour, il faudra peut être envisager de le désinstaller et d'installer à la place un Antivirus éventuellement plus performant. Parmi les antivirus payants, je recommande fortement Kaspersky Antivirus/Internet Security ou Panda Internet Security qui peuvent être trouver facilement dans le commerce à des prix abordables. Pour faire votre choix, et avoir une meilleure idée de l'efficacité et de l'impact des différents antivirus, vous pouvez consulter les comparatifs de Clubic et Tom's Guide.
   S'il fallait conseiller un antivirus gratuit, ce serait AntiVir. Bien que l'interface d'AntiVir soit en anglais, et que les mises à jour peuvent être lentes, il offre une bien meilleure protection qu'Avast. Pour vous en convaincre, je vous recommande la lecture de cet article qui compare Avast et AntiVir. Un tutorial est aussi disponible qui explique comment configurer Antivir au mieux.
4. Faire un scan complet de son ordinateur : Une fois que vous avez installé un nouveau antivirus éventuellement plus performant, il ne vous reste plus qu'à effectuer un scan complet de votre ordinateur avec celui-ci après l'avoir mis à jour. Sachez qu'un antivirus n'est pas la panacée, et qu'aucun antivirus ne pourra vous protéger à 100%, à vous aussi de faire attention.
5. Considérer l'utilisation de logiciels alternatifs : Beaucoup d'infections ont comme vecteurs MSN Messenger ou Internet Explorer qui comportent des failles de sécurité. Par conséquent il se révèle intéressant d'utiliser des logiciels alternatifs éventuellement plus sécurisé ou en tout cas moins exposés. Ainsi Firefox est un navigateur internet rapide et offrant une bonne sécurité. De plus il est aisé d'ajouter des fonctionnalités en utilisant des extensions. Pour remplacer MSN Messenger, il existe le logiciel libre Pidgin qui est très léger et dispose d'une interface agréable. Cependant il ne supporte pas la webcam ou d'autres fonctionnalités avancées de MSN, mais en a-t-on vraiment besoin ? Sinon il existe aussi dans sa version Basic ( gratuite ) Trillian.
6. Utiliser autre chose que Windows ? : Enfin il ne faudra pas oublier qu'il existe autre chose que Windows. En effet il existe d'autres systèmes d'exploitations qui peuvent fournir plus de sécurité et de stabilité. Il y a ainsi Mac OS X, mais celui-ci ne fonctionne que sur le matériel d'Apple et il vous faudra changer d'ordinateur, ce qui peut se révéler très couteux. Une autre alternative est d'utiliser Linux qui est sécurisé, relativement simple d'utilisation, pour lequel il existe très peu de virus ( limite il faut passer une petite annonce pour attraper un virus ), et offre un très bon rapport qualité/prix. Je ne saurais trop vous conseiller de tester le LiveCd Mandriva Linux One qui vous permettra de tester gratuitement la version de Linux éditée par l'éditeur franco-brésilien Mandriva à partir d'un CD et ceci sans toucher à votre Windows. Vous pourrez ainsi vous faire une opinion et voir si Linux peut vous convenir :) Sachez que Linux inclut de base un navigateur internet, un logiciel de messagerie instantanée compatible avec MSN/Yahoo/AIM/Gtalk, une suite bureautique compatible avec Microsoft office Word/Excel/PowerPoint, un logiciel de gestion de photos et de retouche d'images, des lecteurs multimédias pour voir vos vidéos, et un logiciel de gravure pour faire vos compilations. De plus Linux supporte aussi la plupart des lecteurs mp3 portables du marché.

Si jamais vous voulez plus d'informations sur les logiciels libres et leur philosophie, n'hésitez pas à lire l'article suivant : Introduction à Linux.

This past week’s TechMail tip is Detect intruders on your network with Snort which is a quick primer on how to use the Snort IDS (Intrusion Detection System). Snort is pretty cool if you have the patience to deal with it and the time to invest in setting it up properly. The techmail is, again, just a quick primer but should be enough to perhaps get you interested and some of the comments made by readers may be useful as well.

I'm feeling a crazy month of April coming :

• we are in the final rush for Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring (RC2 was released some days ago) and it should be out in the first days of April.
• I've accepted new responsabilities at Mandriva : in addition of being GNOME / HAL / Freedesktop.org guy, I'm now Manager of France Engineering team (located in Paris), whose main task is to work on Mandriva Linux distribution (as well with our Brazilian colleagues).
• As part of those new responsibilities, I'll be flying to Linux Foundation Collaboration Submit to attend Desktop Architect Meeting (I'll be part of the Distributions panel) in Austin, TX from April 8 to April 10 (but I'll be in Austin from April 5).
  
• just one week after this meeting, I'll be flying to Nepal for two weeks holidays (part visit, part trekking). I'll share my photo setup soon.
  

A side note for French readers : I've started back to blog in french on subjects only relevant to French people (or French speakers). Those posts won't be visible in Planet GNOME and Planet Mandriva.

Last week, I swtiched back from GNOME to KDE for one week. I used KDE 3.5.9, not 4.0.2 because I think that one will very probably not be mature enough for my needs.

What is nice in KDE, is that it is often much more advanced than GNOME functionality wise. For example, Kopete has much better MSN support than Pidgin: it supports sending and receiving of away/personal messages, there's webcam support,... The KDE notifications framework is a great way to fine tune all kinds of different notifications to events, such as sounds, passive pop-up notifications, etc,... K3b is by far the best Free CD burner application, while Amarok is still unrivaled in its combination of power and GUI attractiveness and GNOME's F-Spot does not even have half of Digikam's features. KDE's memory usage also felt better than GNOME. My 1 GB system seemed to swap less than in GNOME, running comparable programs.

The big problem with KDE however, still are the random crashes and various things which do not work as expected. In one week of time, I experienced two random Kontact/KMail crashes. GWenview/nspluginviewer is crashing when entering a directory with movies if you have mplayerplug-in installed. KMail sometimes gives new mail notifications for old, unread e-mail and changing the file associations for MIME types, does not always seem to work correctly, especially when using the right click - Open With menu, and selecting the option to always use the selected application in the future. KDE does not support mounting LUKS encrpyted file systems and the fact that you have to explicitly open a removable device first in Konqueror in order to have it mounted, can be annoying at times.

So I am back to GNOME again now. While it has generally less features than KDE, the features that are there, generally work very reliably, which is not always the case in KDE. Unfortunately, I am afraid that the Linux desktop will only really start taking of if there's a desktop which can nicely combine stability, features and ease of use, which is not yet the case to my feeling. I am curious to see what KDE 4 will bring in the future. Based on Mutt's motto, for now I dare to conclude: all desktops suck, GNOME just sucks slightly less.

It seems that recently, Apple started pushing its Safari web browser to all Windows users having iTunes installed. I've never been an Apple fan: I think the OS is certainly not more userfriendly in contrast to what some people say, and although it is somewhat Unix based, they removed and re-implemented half of it (I'm thinking of things like launchd, broken NIS support and others), which is terrible for people used to *nix. And I have my doubts about the hardware too: apparently the latest generation Macbook Pro still come with way too less USB ports to work comfortobly, the international keyboards are different from standard PC keyboards, and I'm still not sure it is really that cheap, or at least the "Pro" stuff).

With the decision to force the installation of Safari on all Windows systems running the Apple updater, Apple is finally showing its real face: just like Microsoft, it does not care at all about its users and will do whatever is necessary to gain widespread adoption.

When AMD begun to release specs for its GPU, I've read a theory about the fact that this move was motivated by the project to release hybrid CPU/GPU by AMD. Indeed, AMD CPU were also successful because Linux users like AMD too. However if AMD release an hybrid CPU/GPU and that the GPU part is only supported by a binary driver, it means for AMD/ATI that most Free Linux distribution won't be able to support out of the box the AMD CPU/GPU and some Linux users may no longer buy AMD CPU because of this. So providing the doc, and allowing to have Free support out of the box was a must. As we could see, AMD is providing all the needed specs and microcode.

Intel is now doing the same thing. At first I believed this was only a strategy to not lose its role as leader in the X OpenSource community. However atfer the reading of the following article, I think I can understand better : Intel also is planning to release hybrid CPU/GPU. So to have a good support out of the box, they need to give the specs to have a good opensource support and be friendly.

Now we may eventually understand why Nvidia is not providing OpenSource drivers. Nvidia can't provide hybrid CPU/GPU, and so their goal is to provide always the faster and most powerful GPU. For this they don't need to have the OpenSource support, as professional users doing heavy graphical simulations will afford to use closed but heavily tweaked display drivers. Now the issue for them is to not be relegated to a niche market share of power users, especially with the "Green" movement which ask to save power and use more efficiently the resources. Nvidia GPU are like 4x4/SUV/Roadster, whereas Intel ones are like small cards ( Swatch, Fiat 500, Clio, 208, ... ) and AMD may be like hybrid cars as they still have powerful GPU but with the CPU.

IMHO it will be very interesting to see how things will evolved in the future for theses 3 big players.

If you use the XMLRPC client in ruby over a self certified SSL you have this warning :

 warning: peer certificate won’t be verified in this SSL session

You can get override that warning cleanly (i have seen some people who just comment the message in the standard library) like that :

require 'xmlrpc/client'   require 'net/https' require 'openssl' require 'pp'module SELF_SSL   class Net_HTTP < Net::HTTP   def initialize(*args)   super   @ssl_context = OpenSSL::SSL::SSLContext.new   @ssl_context.verify_mode = OpenSSL::SSL::VERIFY_NONE   end   end   class XMLRPC_Client < XMLRPC::Client   def initialize(*args)   super   @http = SELF_SSL::Net_HTTP.new( @host, @port, @proxy_host,@proxy_port )   @http.use_ssl = @use_ssl if @use_ssl   @http.read_timeout = @timeout   @http.open_timeout = @timeout   end   end   end   if __FILE__ == $0   f = SELF_SSL::XMLRPC_Client.new2("https://url") puts f.call("method", 'arg') end

I just updated Serendipity, the software that is behind this web log, to version 1.3. The update went very smooth: I am using Subversion to manage this software, so a simple svn switch to Serendipity's 1.3 branch and a few clicks to update the configuration file, sufficed to make everything up to date! I should play around a bit to see what improvements this brought me and whether the multi-language stuff finally works correctly (which I doubt, but one never knows...).

While talking with my fellow colleague Darren Birkett about what seems a design limitation
of yum to not be able to force listing the excludes from yum. I had a
shoot to make a yum plugin to force listing the excludes.

Here is how it works :

root@centos5:~> grep exclude /etc/yum.conf
exclude=rpm*
root@centos5:~> yum install rpm-devel
Loading “installonlyn” plugin
Loading “changelog” plugin
Loading “chmouel” plugin
Loading “priorities” plugin
Setting up Install Process
Setting up repositories
Reading repository metadata in from local files
Excluding Packages in global exclude list
Finished
0 packages excluded due to repository priority protections
Parsing package install arguments
Nothing to do

rpm* is excluded, but if we use the environment variable FORCE_EXCLUDE
it will force it.

 root@centos5:~> FORCE_EXCLUDE=true yum install rpm-devel
Loading “installonlyn” plugin
Loading “changelog” plugin
Loading “chmouel” plugin
Loading “priorities” plugin
Setting up Install Process
Setting up repositories
Reading repository metadata in from local files
0 packages excluded due to repository priority protections
Parsing package install arguments
Resolving Dependencies
–> Populating transaction set with selected packages. Please wait.
—> Downloading header for rpm-devel to pack into transaction set.
rpm-devel-4.4.2-47.el5.i3 100% |=========================| 17 kB 00:00
—> Package rpm-devel.i386 0:4.4.2-47.el5 set to be updated
–> Running transaction check
[…..]

It will allow you to list the excluded rpm as well :

 root@centos5:~> FORCE_EXCLUDE=true yum list|grep rpm
rpm.i386 4.4.2-47.el5 installed
rpm-libs.i386 4.4.2-47.el5 installed
rpm-python.i386 4.4.2-47.el5 installed
redhat-rpm-config.noarch 8.0.45-22.el5.centos base
rpm-build.i386 4.4.2-47.el5 base
rpm-devel.i386 4.4.2-47.el5 base
root@centos5:~> yum list|grep rpm
rpm.i386 4.4.2-47.el5 installed
rpm-libs.i386 4.4.2-47.el5 installed
rpm-python.i386 4.4.2-47.el5 installed
redhat-rpm-config.noarch 8.0.45-22.el5.centos base

See the README.txt in the rpm file to see how to use/install it.

You can download the rpm here and the src.rpm here

Some posts or web articles I found interesting to read :

• OpenOffice.org performance improvements : This page lists all the performance improvements done in OpenOffice.org releases. Mandriva 2008.1 Spring will shipped OpenOffice.org 2.4, and as you can see, there's many improvements done already.
• OpenOffice.org 3.0's new features, an early look : An early look at OpenOffice.org 3.0 new features by the same author than previously.
• Customize or remove the splash screen : This article will explain how to disable OpenOffice.org splashscreen, or how to customise it. Please note that Mandriva is using a customised splashscreen.
• Writing long documents with OpenOffice.org : Still on the OpenOffice.org front, I discover today a very useful article about the usage of masters documents in OpenOffice.org. Masters documents allow to combine in one "master" document several writer documents. This allow differents people to work on the same document, but each of them will be using a different file. This is best achieve if each personn is working on a different chapter, then all the documents could be merged in the "master" document where you will add index, footpages, ...
• Getting my microphone to work : Or how bad is the sound situation under linux :( Béranger also had the same issues, but latest Mandriva 2008.1 Spring was "working".
• DBD::Pg advanced tracing options : How to trace PostgreSQL queries or helper functions with perl DBD::Pg. If only I could do the same thing with PHP, this will help for debugging purposes.
• SELinux support in Ubuntu 8.04 ("Hardy Heron") : So, it seems that Ubuntu will switch from AppArmor to SELinux in its next version. The Ubuntu wiki are a useful read about the implementation of AppArmor and SELinux in Ubuntu.
• bdar - block device archive : How to be ~4x faster than tar and ~2x faster than dump :)
• Useful ext3 documentation (and undelete tool) : A deep look at ext3 structure, and how you can recover data thanks to this
• Traits of the Common and Generally Mythical Evolution Data Server Replacement : A very interesting read in defense of Evolution data server, and possible ways to improve it. Philip Vanhoof objects to some of Ross points, notably the advantages of using cursors to save memory and keep efficiency. I'm somewhat disappointed to see that the only answer of Ross is : show me the code. Really, if you know that there's something wrong in e-d-s, and that your are the maintainer, why don't you fix some of theses issues yourself ? Just saying "show me the code" will not help improving the situation. Maybe when you will begin yourself to improve the situation, others dev may feel confident enough to jump in the wagon ...
• A pink desktop : In short, KDE4 for women. Sebastian Kuegler is doing a demontrastion of the theming capabilities of Plasma by using the Fluffy Bunny. Really I must admit that this is a very beautiful theme ... What's interesting is also the look of the plasma panel, and the new selection on hovering feature in Dolphin. Plasma themes can be download KHotNewStuff. Others interestings improvements in KDE 4.1 will be improved usability in device notifier notably to umount devices, Kepas - KDE Easy Publish and Share, Nepomuk Social Query Client. For further informations, you can also have a look at Plasma improvements: KDE 4.0.2 and beyond, KDE 4.1: Visual Changelog (rev 783000), An Early Look At KDE 4.1

The sixth pre-release of Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring is here. This pre-release includes support for easy synchronization of Windows Mobile 5+, Blackberry and Nokia devices, the Codeina multimedia codec installation system, support for Radeon HD 3xxx series graphics cards, more improvements to the Mandriva software installation tools, the finalized 2008 Spring theme, a new metapackage for easily installing a complete LAMP setup, and available KDE 4.0.2. See here for download information.

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This week something insane happened to me that gives me hope for our children and the future of the world.

I met a second person at UofT Law School who uses exclusively Linux on their laptop. And it wasn't even Ubuntu! It's was Fedora 8. How cool is that??!?!! And the person is a she, and she's only in first year. So she has three years to convert more people than I did (i.e. zero). Now, if they'd just get rid of stupid ExamSoft, it might become a decent place to learn stuff.

As an aside, I happened to be at the law school at University of Alberta in Edmonton last week, and they have the most bizarre system for accessing school wireless. Unlike the annoying web-login we have at UofT, at UofA you have to open a terminal, ssh into 10.0.0.1 with your username and password, and then just leave the terminal open while you return to using your web browser. Not user-friendly, but beautifully unixy, easy to automate, and nothing to install. Slick.