michael schurter

I just found out Fedora is attempting to consolidate on Mozilla’s NSS for system-wide cryptography. I love the idea and hope it succeeds as it will make using crypto so much easier for system administrators and users.

Since humans are the weakest link in the security chain, improving the human interaction with crypto is a much bigger security win than the latest impossible-to-crack-by-the-NSA-in-a-bajillion-years algorithm. While switching libraries isn’t exactly a huge UI win, having a single application to manage all of your certificates, keys, passwords, etc. would be.

I’d love to see Debian, Ubuntu, Suse, et al, get on board as well because this is the sort of initiative that simply won’t happen upstream. Upstream developers have already chosen a crypto library and probably like it. The burden of tight integration is definitely the job of system engineers and packagers.

I submitted an Ubuntu Brainstorm Idea, so please feel free to vote on it if you’re so inclined:

I would love to submit this idea to Debian as well, but I have no idea where to even start. Probably a mailing list, but I don’t exactly have the skills to defend this proposition. Eventually bugs would need to be filed against every package that needs to be converted to NSS, but I’m afraid doing that as just-another-end-user might just anger a bunch of maintainers…

Update: Looks like the LSB is standardizing on NSS as well.

I really need to learn deb packaging…

Like most people, I use Flash a lot. Not only do I watch YouTube and Hulu videos, but FusionCharts* are an integral part of one of the main projects I work on. And like most people, I just want Flash to work. While an open source option would be nice, I really just need something that works.

Unfortunately Flash in Linux still sucks.

Fortunately, not for long.

Flash 9

For a long time I’ve just used the flashplugin-nonfree (such an attractive package name) package to get Flash support.

In general this works great, unless you want to also use PulseAudio. For some reason I do, which means my audio is always out of sync. Apparently Ubuntu has a flashplugin-nonfree-pulse (another awesome package name), but Debian won’t package it because of issues with upstream, and the fact the upcoming Flash 10 works fine without any extra wrappers.

Flash 10

So I finally decide to just try out the betas of Flash 10. At this point in time, Flash 10 beta 2, is the latest, so I download it and copy the .so file to /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/.

Tada! Sync’d audio! Yay!

Except now my browser crashes on about 1 out of every 2 sites with Flash. Some Flash doesn’t render completely. Other Flash videos flicker horribly.

Bottom line is even Ubuntu’s notoriously unstable alpha’s are better than trying to use Flash 10 beta 2.

Update: Just tried Flash 10 RC 1, but its not better than beta 2. Actually it might be a bit better because it crashes less, but its more frustrating in other ways: some Flash videos don’t show up at all.

swfdec

One last thing to try: swfdec, an open source Flash player. I’ve followed its development closely on Planet Gnome and really respect its developer, Benjamin Otte. Unfortunately it makes Flash 10 beta 2 look good by comparison. To be fair I used the unstable 0.7.4 version of swfdec, so maybe thats why it crashes fairly often. 0.8 was just released, but evidently not packaged for Debian yet.

I’ll probably keep trying swfdec from time to time in the future as I want to use it, but for now I just need a Flash player that works.

Gnash

I should try it, but the FSF can be such dicks I have a hard time even wanting to try it. They have a stupid “Bad Vista” logo in the upper right corner of their home page. I’m no fan of Vista, but plastering the Internet with poorly drawn negative logos isn’t going to win friends.

I shouldn’t let politics affect whats essentially a purely pragmatic endeavor**, so I’ll probably end up trying it out.

Conclusion

I can’t wait for Flash 10 to be released. While I love open source, Adobe makes excellent products, and I just need Flash to work. Its like my graphics driver: I really don’t care about the source, just make my graphics work!

* Very pretty product. Decent documentation. Worthless JavaScript API and debugging features. I hope <canvas> becomes a viable alternative soon.

** That endeavor being: get Flash to work as well in Linux as it does in Windows.

Do I really need to see this?

Today was my work Christmas! I work from home most of the time, so I’m finally getting around to upgrading some of the equipment I use for my job every day. Today I got 3 new pieces of technology and just finished setting them all up!

Goodbye ATT&T!

I switched from 1.5 Mbps/386 Kbps DSL to 10 Mbps/1 Mbps cable broadband today. I used to download packages at 140 KBps to 160 KBps, but now I easily reach over 1 MBps. Tomorrow I get to call AT&T and cancel not only my DSL but also my landline phone.

The only downside is starting in 2008, my local cable company, Insight, is going to become Comcast. It took me about 10 seconds to get a human on the line when calling Insight. When I tried to call Comcast to find out if anything was going to change, I had to call 3 different phone numbers until I finally reached a sales person who kept trying to sell me a package deal for broadband/tv/phone even though Comcast isn’t in my area yet!

Sales representatives for both companies seemed very confused that a person would only want Internet access. My wife & I watch all of our TV online or through Netflix, and we don’t need a landline phone. Is that really so strange these days? I suppose most people still have cable TV or satellite, but with more shows becoming available for free online I don’t see the point.

Hello 22″ LCD!

I finally got a nice LCD and got rid of my $5 19″ inch CRT (thanks Chris, it was nice while it lasted). Its a Hanns-G HG216D no frills monitor. There was a similarly priced Acer monitor, by the Hanns-G is Energy Star which I like. It looks beautiful to me, but I have to admit the built-in 1 watt speakers are a complete joke for anything error than error beeps. Luckily they’re hidden in the back of the LCD case, so no one even has to notice them.

Setup in Linux was as simple as pressing Ctrl-Alt-Backspace in GDM to restart X. It worked as soon as I plugged it in, but restarting X Windows auto-detected the resolution properly so I didn’t have to mess around in my xorg.conf file.

X Windows has come a very very long way in the past year or two. My xorg.conf file is tiny, and I’m not sure why I even have it. Last time I tried, X Windows autodetected everything just fine!

Oh come on… 3 days later and my monitor has already dropped $20 in price. Yeesh.

Working Wi-Fi in Linux? Yes, but…

My office is upstairs, and our only cable connections are downstairs. Instead of running unsightly cables through our house or drilling holes, I just bought a Wi-Fi card for my desktop. Finding a card that works well with Linux was very very difficult.

In the end I bought a TP-Link TL-WN651G (Ver 1.5), but the box also lists the model as TL-WN650G. Most importantly it works perfectly with the MadWiFi (it uses an Atheros chipset). Its running at 802.11g with WPA2. The PCI card was only $25, so I didn’t even have to spend too much more for Linux compatibility. I question the reliability of those $10-$15 adapters anyway…

The only caveat is caused by Debian’s insistence on freeness and hatred of binary modules. The MadWiFi module uses a binary module, so Debian makes you download a source package and compile it using module-assistant. Now m-a is a wonderful program, but this is still the reason I always recommend Ubuntu to desktop users. Expecting anyone other than a Linux hacker to install some random package and run some random command line tool to get WiFi working is deranged.

My motto: Debian is for developers, Ubuntu is for people.

At any rate, I’ve had a wonderful day and am excited all my new toys play well with Linux.