Plans to Prosper

Freespire.com

2008-07-04T10:24:00.003+01:00

www.freespire.org points to the home of the Freespire Linux operating system. A while back another domain appeared, www.freespire.com. This has held various types of content. The most enduring was a page set up to encourage people who were looking for the home page of Freespire to try Ubuntu instead. Pretty tacky stuff.

It’s also held a splash page for a dating website and more recently has been a splash page for a linux distro called Nimblex. Not one I’d heard of before.

The domain owner has obfuscated their details on the records for freespire.com so no one has known for certain who’s behind the site.

But recently Kevin Carmony posted a twitter saying he’s updated the site to Nimblex. For those who don’t know, Kevin Carmony is an ex-CEO of Linspire Inc, the owners of Freespire.

Kevin is currently waging a campaign against the former owner of Linspire, Michael Robertson. From his blog posts and this freespire.com domain it seems evident that Kevin Carmony has been willing to use the distro as a tool against Michael Robertson.

For an ex-CEO who has implied he has the best interests at heart for Linspire/Freespire and the community this seems an odd way to show it. Any respect or sympathy I had for Kevin Carmony have just evaporated. Thank you Kevin!

Linspire acquired by Xandros

2008-06-30T23:02:00.003+01:00

Seems my favourite distro Linspire has been taken over by my second favourite, Xandros.

Kevin Carmony has posted a notice he's received as a stockholder. You can view it at his blog. I expect he's got the hump as I'm convinced he was looking to retake the reigns at Linspire.

So lots of questions now raised:

Will Linspire remain as a distro?
What happens with Freespire?
What happens with the MS deal?
Is this down to the EMI suit on Michael Robertson?

So looks like I may be making the switch to Xandros 5 which should be released fairly soon.

OpenOffice Dictionaries and Spell Check

2008-06-30T17:07:00.002+01:00

Having trouble with dictionaries and spell check not working on your openoffice word document?

Yes, me too. Have been pulling my hair out about this. Have followed loads of posts doing some obscure text file editing. Turns out it's simple, but hidden. What you need to do is go to file - wizards - install new dictionaries.

That's run a script that you follow, download the dictionaries and then a quick restart and it's all sorted.

Hell of a stupid way to do it though. If KOffice was up to speed I'd be working with that instead.

Amarok and mp3tunes

2008-06-26T18:46:00.005+01:00

If you've read this blog then you'll know that I'm a fan of the mp3tunes.com service.

I'm also a fan of Amarok, the media library and player that ships with linux distros running the KDE desktop manager.

Well the good news is that a coder over at the Amarok project has engineered Amarok to interface directly with the mp3tunes.com service. This is fantastic news as it means that one single app can sync up and down all the tracks on my machine.

The now defunct LSongs did this partially a number of years ago, being able to open the web player page from within the application. Amarok has now completed the goal.

Google Maps and Bible for Nokia E65

2008-06-26T07:03:00.005+01:00

Two more fantastic applications for the Nokia E65 - Google Maps and Go Bible.

Google Maps has a novel feature called 'My Location' which probably uses triangulation to determine where you are. Accurate to within one mile or so.

Go Bible is an implementation of the King James Version and is one of the easiest Bible software packages I've ever used. Navigation is very easy and intuitive and it's rendering on the screen is excellent making it very easy to read.

Docking Thunderbird Linux to the systray

2008-06-11T21:18:00.002+01:00

Don't you penguin users just wish that you could dock your instance of Thunderbird in the systray like those Windows users?

Fed up of searching for a systray addon only to find that it only works in Windows?

Well here's an app that will allow you to dock any running application into the systray. It's called AllTray.

You can download it from the Sourceforge site although I installed mine using CNR from www.cnr.com

Setting up as a sole trader

2008-06-07T07:49:00.003+01:00

"How do I set up as a sole trader?"

It's a question often asked and it's something I've done a few years ago. This gives me the opportunity to share my experiences and hopefully help and encourage others wanting to take this step. I'll provide information in the form of questins and answers.

"How do I set up as a sole trader?" - Simply get on the phone and call Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs. Answer a few questions and Bob's your uncle, sorted! It really is that easy.

"Do I have to tell my current employers?" - Not necessarily but it would be polite and prudent to. Think about whether your operating as a sole trader is going to impinge upon your work for your employer. If it does then you'll definitely need to tell them.

"Do I need a seperate bank account?" - No. You can use your current account or a pillow case under the bed should you so desire. But it makes it so much easier to have a purpose business account. There are many available today, some fully featured and even free of charges. I personally use the Business account from the Abbey National. Debit card plus no charges. Within certain limits of course!

"Will I have to fill in a tax return?" - Yes. If you've been on PAYE all your life then chances are you may never have seen a tax return. But you soon will, oh yes!

"Do I need an accountant?" - No. You can do it all yourself and just fill in your tax return online. I intended to do that until I actually saw my tax return. Then the services of an accountant become strangely appealing.

"What about national insurance?" - If you think you may not be earning much for the coming year then maybe worth applying for a small earnings exception to the Class 2 NI contributions.

"What records should I keep?" - Keep invoices, quotes, and record monies in and out.

Spam FAQ Part 2

2008-04-30T08:59:00.002+01:00

In Part 2 I'll give an overview of what must be the most annoying situation regarding spam, and one which you can do nothing about!

The situation is that you open your email up one morning and have to download thousands of what we call 'bounced' email messages. These are emails that have been sent by a server that has received an email that it doesn't know what to do with. This is mainly caused by an unknown address.

What's happened here is that the spammer has used your domain as the email and added a random name to the front. For example sdfertuhty@planstoprosper.org.uk. What the spammer aims for is to get their url link in the email into someone's inbox. They need an address to send it from so they harvest actual domains and just add random names to the front. In most cases they can send it from any server so they hijack a machine or a server and send out thousands if not millions of emails using random domains. So one day it's the turn of your domain to get chosen. So they send out these emails which would seem to be sent by you, but they're not. They have to have somewhere to send them so they again harvest domains and make up the name part. Hence a lot get rejected and bounced. And unfortunately they get bounced back to you.

And the annoying part is that there's absolutely nothing you can do to stop it happening.

You can minimise the annoyance however by deleting all emails that get bounced to random@youremaildomain.com before you need to download them. The spamming still goes on but you just don't see it.

Keep visiting www.planstoprosper.org.uk for Spam FAQ Part 3!

mp3tunes, EMI and the RIAA

2008-04-22T23:33:00.007+01:00

Like most people who use a pc I have ripped all my songs onto a digital format for storage and convenience. When I buy a cd the first thing I do is to rip it and make a copy. Then I take the copy in the car to listen to. I do this because I know that the cd is likely to get damaged in the car. CDs don't get put away, they get dropped, picked up with dirty hands etc. When the cd becomes so damaged it doesn't play properly I put it in the bin and burn another copy. This way the original remains in good condition.

What I also do is to store the ripped copy in an online storage facility. This means that should my hard drive go bang I won't lose all my songs which I've paid for. This online storage is provided by mp3tunes.com and is a commercial service which uses password protected access to my files. The password is known only to me and no-one else. mp3tunes.com allows me to play my music through a web based interface or other players. I can even play it through a Squeezebox without involving my pc! I believe that mp3tunes.com also limit concurrent connections to an account to 2 so it's not really much use in distributing pirate copies of anything.

And this setup suits me fine. I buy music, I listen to my music where and when I want. Everybody's happy. Almost.

It seems that someone wants to shut mp3tunes.com down, or at least relieve them of serious amounts of cash for, well I'm not quite sure what yet. You can read the request to the courts here. The Exchange Morning Post puts forward an excellent understanding of the issues here.

On a positive note a judge has denied EMI's request for mp3tunes to hand over copies of the 100 million files that users have submitted to their personal, password protected lockers. I really cannot understand why a major record label would want access to my personal private files, I really don't. Hopefully this episode will be the death rattle of a dinosaur unwilling to work in the modern age. DRM is now all but dead and the music industry should be working to create new channels to reap the benefit of digital music. Unfortunately they seem to be trying to screw as much money as possible from companies and individuals before they collapse.

Truth is Treason in the Empire of Lies: Linspire "Fact Sheet" Coming Soon

2008-04-15T12:06:00.003+01:00

Former CEO of Linspire, Kevin Carmony seems determined to stir things in his attempt to wrest control of Linspire/CNR from Michael Robertson and Larry Kettler.

I find the way that Kevin Carmony is going about this to be distasteful. He is making what seems to be unfounded allegations by wrapping them up as 'facts' which he'll bestow upon us at a later date. Kevin Carmony seems prepared to cause collateral damage to Linspire as he casts aspersions on Michael Robertson and Larry Kettler.

And it's not as if he even considers Linspire to be worth it! He jumps ship from Linspire and sucks up to the Ubuntu community and now his flavour of the month is Apple.

His blog alleges that Linspire has defrauded a federal bank and looking at previous posts in his blog it seems he's informed the authorities about a company that has attempted to 'defraud a federal bank'.

Kevin Carmony's Blog: Truth is Treason in the Empire of Lies: Linspire "Fact Sheet" Coming Soon

Nokia E65 Tips and Tricks Part 3

2008-04-14T14:39:00.003+01:00

Not too much in this post but it's something that I searched high and low for when I first got my Nokia E65. The problem was how to locate applications that had been minimised or 'left behind'.

For example the Skype application has a 'minimise' option. This I did and then wondered just how I was going to find it again. The answer is simple but not obvious. Hold the menu button down for a couple of seconds and you get a pop up of all running apps. Then scroll to select and press the middle button to go to that app or 'c' to close the app. The 'menu' button is the bottom left, one in key that looks like the moon orbiting an invisible earth.

Nokia E65 Tips and Tricks Part 2

2008-03-31T14:16:00.002+01:00

I have to admit that I sometimes feel left out in terms of pc applications as I run Linux (Linspire). For example my Nokia E65 comes with an Application Suite. I'm not too sure quite sure about everything it does as it's not going to run on my laptop. But sometimes it would be good to know.

I'm pretty sure though that there's some sort of a sync facility on there to synchronise calenders and to-do lists between the E65 and something like Outlook. But since I canned Outlook a long time ago when I switched from Windows I now use Google Calendar to manage my diary. But here's the bonus - I can sync directly between my E65 and Google Calendar!

There's an application available called Goosync which lets me synchronise stuff. As their website blurb says:

Synchronize your Google Calendar with your mobile phone or PDA.

GooSync will seamlessly synchronize almost any mobile device with your Google Calendar. It's quick and simple, sign-up and start syncing.

Upgrade your free account to our premium subscription and get access to GooSync Contacts and Tasks as well as advanced calendar sync features.

Never be without your vital information again!

And it works bloody well. I'm using the free version which has some limits to it's capability, but that works well enough for me for now.

Joomla Hacked

2008-03-25T21:38:00.003Z

Had one of my sites defaced recently by a turkish hacking group. It is a site running Joomla and one where I foolishly hadn't updated the excellent Acajoom newsletter component.

The wakeup made me update all my Joomla sites and components and modules. In doing so I discovered a few visits on some other sites where the visitors were checking for unsecure scripts.

So if you see the following in your search logs I'd recommend getting the component upgraded or removed asap!

inurl:"com_acajoom" mailingid

option=com_acajoom

com_acajoom

In fact if you see any searches in your site related to Joomla components or modules then you need to be aware and start checking logs.

Benny Hinn Communion Service

2008-03-22T08:59:00.005Z

Went to my first Benny Hinn event last night (21st March) and had a wonderful time. It was held at the ExCel Center in London's Docklands and it was also my first visit there. I have to say I was impressed by the ExCel Center, easy parking, easy to get out and the concessions weren't too expensive considering.

The service was packed, really packed. 12,600 people attended the event with several thousand turned away. We arrived over 2 hours early and had to sit about half way back in the arena. With one hour to go the place was full with repeated calls to find available seats.

Everything started off with a fantastic time of praise and worship backed up by a huge and talented choir. A fantastic choice of songs and hymns. Pastor Benny was just like what you see on TV except maybe his voice was a little deeper than I expected. As it was a communion service the event was centred around that. Everyone was provided with a small 'tub' containing a wafer and grape juice. It was good to take communion with so many people. The service ended with the usual number of people laid low by the Holy Spirit.

What I didn't realise was that Pastor Benny hasn't actually laid hands on these people. Healing and miracles occur during the service, or before and those you see on stage are there to provide hope and encouragement and to build up faith in the rest of us.

I'm holding onto the promise of healing for myself and my loved ones. Certainly this event has increased my faith in God's promises.

And my thoughts on Pastor Benny? He doesn't come across as a faker or charlatan as some claim, even those within the church. In my mind he is someone who loves people and wants to do God's work to the best of his abilities.

Back home to Linspire

2008-03-16T17:39:00.005Z

Having been round the houses with Linux systems I've eventually ended up back with Linspire. Recently I've tried openSuse, PCLinuxOS, Fedora, Sabayon, Ubuntu, Mandriva, Xandros, Elive and Dreamlinux. With each distro there have been issues with usability and performance. Most of this stems from my laptop hardware, the awkward components being an MSI mini-pc wireless card with an RT2500 chipset, ATI video chip. There have also been struggles getting my laptop to suspend or hibernate.

Of the distros that have really captured what I want out of a linux distro these all seem to have issues:

Fedora - no wifi
Sabayon - no wifi
Mandriva - no wifi
Ubuntu - no suspend
Elive - no wifi
Dreamlinux - no wifi
PCLinuxOS - ati driver issues
Xandros - old software packages

So I burned the latest Linspire, installed it and set to work tackling the issues I was getting. And I think I've managed to sort them all. Wi-fi works perfect, ati graphics card is using the fglrx driver without issues, suspend to RAM works perfect.

In an ideal world I'd be dual booting with Slackware but Slack is somewhat lacking with the RT2500 chipset.

Spam FAQ Part 1

2008-03-13T11:49:00.002Z

This is the first in a series of articles looking at how spam blights the online lives of so many people. I'll be visiting how spammers operate and what you can do to minimise the grief that spam causes you.

So you think you are suffering because of spam? Well, you probably are. Spammers cause grief in many different ways, not just by filling up your inbox. Here are some scenarios.

You constantly receive spam in your inbox.
You get bounced emails from people telling you that the email address you have apparently sent to doesn’t exist.
You get emails from servers telling you that the message you apparently sent has been flagged as spam.
You find you can’t send emails to certain addresses because somewhere your email address has been labelled as ‘spam’.
Your web host sends you a snotty email asking you to cut back on the number of emails you’re sending.
Unbeknown to you your pc has some processes running which are sending spam emails.
You don’t receive some emails because your system labels them as spam.
Your website on shared hosting is slow because the server is sending spam emails.
You and even your children may be receiving inappropriate emails.

Let’s have a simple look at email. Basically an email is an electronic message sent from one server to another. Usually the message itself is created by your email client and passed to your server or created on the server by your own software such as mailing list managers. Easy in theory but in practice it can be a little more complicated so that we have a system that’s flexible enough to meet our needs.

So in the above case the process is

your pc -> server1 -> server2 -> recipient pc

Each email that’s sent contains ‘headers’ which is a block of code that outlines the trail that the email has taken to get from the sender to the recipient, and this lists all the servers it has used in the journey, together with some other information.

Keep checking back for Spam FAQ Part 2 soon! Or why not subscribe to the site feed at the top of the page?

Anthem of the Soviet Union

2008-03-06T07:08:00.004Z

National anthems by and large are pretty dire things. But there is, or was, one exception. The anthem of the Soviet Union. It's one of those tunes together with lyrics that really move me. And none of this Kruschev revisionist stuff. Stalin is still in the lyrics as was originally intended. Best of all the lyrics here are sung in English by what I consider to be the best singer ever, Paul Robeson.

One listen of this and I start to hanker after what was the certainty of earlier in my life. There was 'us' and 'them', 'good' and 'bad'. Working for the Ministry of Defence in the 80's before the USSR collapsed I was obviously expected to have left leanings and I suppose that this is what has me yearning for those times.

Enjoy.

Official Google Reader Blog: J-walking with Reader

2008-03-04T08:49:00.001Z

Starting to use Google's Reader more and more recently. Being a penguin type of person I find that the system based feed readers available to the linux community don't include any that I like. And as with most stuff I'm finding more and more that it's just so convenient to have it all online. Especially now with my Nokia E65 it's so easy to access the internet.

Here's post outlining some keyboard shortcuts, most useful!

Official Google Reader Blog: J-walking with Reader

Colours

2008-03-03T23:19:00.002Z

Walking the hound through the woods the other day I was taken with the colour of some freshly dropped pine cones. Usually we see these as an earthy, dry grey. But these were very rich in colour, much like a bright wood. So I picked one up and took a photo when I got home.

Charlie swims!

2008-02-25T15:00:00.001Z

Finally got my choc labrador to do his seal impression and actually swim on a visit to Hawley Lake. It's something he's never wanted to do despite all our encouragement and even an inadvertent dip in the River Parrett last summer.

However with some judicious stick throwing he's finally relented and left terra firma for a watery support. He still looks like a fish out of water and he seems to settle lower in the water than many of his friends. I put it down to muscle mass!

Anyway, it's fantastic to see him swimming.

Posting on forums

2008-02-25T08:26:00.004Z

Being a member on various forums I get to see some pretty annoying posting habits of people and 'cliques' of people. One thing that really gets my goat, and puts off a lot of new posters is thread hijacking. It's disheartening when you see it happen to new posters and really annoying when to happens to you.

Here's where it happened to me on the UK Business Forums. Seven replies to my post and not one of them referred to my post! You could have taken my original post off and not noticed the difference.

UK Business Forums have been one of the best business forums for the UK but recently it seems to have become a social chinwag place for a small group of members who deem it necessary to hijack threads seemingly at random and fill them with useless banter.

I did promise to treat myself to paid membership of UKBF at the beginning of this year but I'm so glad I didn't. Maybe if Sift, the owners of UKBF get their arse in gear I'll become a member but definitely not at the moment.

Ubuntu Synaptics Touchpad issue

2008-02-18T19:06:00.008Z

Ever since I've had this lappy I've had issues with the synaptics touchpad. Basically what happens is at some point the scroll function disappears and the pointer becomes overly sensitive. Only solution is to log out and back in. But of course it happens again, usually within minutes.

I've lived with this through a number of distros, some more susceptible to this than others. Linspire and openSuse were among the better behaved.

So I've just installed Ubuntu again and the touchpad is crashing as expected. Happening on Gnome, KDE, Fluxbox, XFCE, Enlightenment in fact all desktops and window managers.

So I decided to have a nose in the syslog files and lo and behold some entries relating to the crash.

Feb 17 09:10:52 crossfire2 kernel: [ 5708.828000] psmouse.c: TouchPad at isa0060/serio2/input0 lost sync at byte 1
Feb 17 09:10:52 crossfire2 kernel: [ 5708.832000] psmouse.c: TouchPad at isa0060/serio2/input0 lost sync at byte 1
Feb 17 09:10:52 crossfire2 kernel: [ 5708.832000] psmouse.c: TouchPad at isa0060/serio2/input0 lost sync at byte 1
Feb 17 09:10:52 crossfire2 kernel: [ 5708.836000] psmouse.c: TouchPad at isa0060/serio2/input0 lost sync at byte 1
Feb 17 09:10:52 crossfire2 kernel: [ 5708.836000] psmouse.c: TouchPad at isa0060/serio2/input0 lost sync at byte 1
Feb 17 09:10:52 crossfire2 kernel: [ 5708.836000] psmouse.c: issuing reconnect request

A quick search on the internet shows a possible solution in adding 'i8042.nomux=1' to the grub boot parameters for the kernel.

And 24 hours later all is well!

Hopefully this is an end to this annoying problem and maybe someone else will find this information useful.

Laptop suspend in Ubuntu

2008-02-16T08:46:00.005Z

Below is a copy of a post I made on this blog when it was running under NucleusCMS. The Ubuntu version was 7.04 but have recently discovered that this setuip doesn't work now Ubuntu is at 7.10. Hence I've gone back to PCLinuxOS especially as I've sorted the synaptics touchpad error.

Ubuntu has to be one of the best all round distributions as it seems to work on so many different types of pc hardware and has a fantastic range of packages in it's depositories. Especially good for me is that it overcomes most of the problems related to multiple sound channels that has plagued linux in the past.

But to put the cherry on the cake I've managed to get the suspend function working on my laptop! All it needed was a little tinkering with the options in the acpi-support file.

I changed the flags to what is listed below

MODULES_WHITELIST="fglrx"
SAVE_VBE_STATE=false
POST_VIDEO=false
DOUBLE_CONSOLE_SWITCH=true

My laptop is a model called Crossfire II from Novatech. It's basically a rebadged Uniwill summat or other model. Running a 64-bit AMD core.

You can see all of my acpi-support file here.

# Comment the next line to disable ACPI suspend to RAM
ACPI_SLEEP=true

# Comment the next line to disable suspend to disk
ACPI_HIBERNATE=true

# Change the following to "standby" to use ACPI S1 sleep, rather than S3.
# This will save less power, but may work on more machines
ACPI_SLEEP_MODE=mem

# Add modules to this list to have them removed before suspend and reloaded
# on resume. An example would be MODULES="em8300 yenta_socket"
#
# Note that network cards and USB controllers will automatically be unloaded
# unless they're listed in MODULES_WHITELIST
MODULES="rt2500"

# Add modules to this list to leave them in the kernel over suspend/resume
MODULES_WHITELIST="fglrx"
# changed from blank

# Should we save and restore state using the VESA BIOS Extensions?
SAVE_VBE_STATE=false
# changed from true

# The file that we use to save the vbestate
VBESTATE=/var/lib/acpi-support/vbestate

# Should we attempt to warm-boot the video hardware on resume?
POST_VIDEO=false
# changed from true

# Save and restore video state?
# SAVE_VIDEO_PCI_STATE=true

# Should we switch the screen off with DPMS on suspend?
USE_DPMS=true

# Use Radeontool to switch the screen off? Seems to be needed on some machines
# RADEON_LIGHT=true

# Uncomment the next line to switch away from X and back again after resume.
# This is needed for some hardware, but should be unnecessary on most.
DOUBLE_CONSOLE_SWITCH=true
# uncommented above

# Set the following to "platform" if you want to use ACPI to shut down
# your machine on hibernation
HIBERNATE_MODE=shutdown

# Comment this out to disable screen locking on resume
LOCK_SCREEN=true

# Uncomment this line to have DMA disabled before suspend and reenabled
# afterwards
# DISABLE_DMA=true

# Uncomment this line to attempt to reset the drive on resume. This seems
# to be needed for some Sonys
# RESET_DRIVE=true

# Add services to this list to stop them before suspend and restart them in
# the resume process.
STOP_SERVICES="mysql "

# Restart Infra Red services on resume - off by default as it crashes some
# machines
RESTART_IRDA=false

# Switch to laptop-mode on battery power - off by default as it causes odd
# hangs on some machines
ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE=false

Picasa on Linux comes of age

2008-02-15T12:57:00.005Z

I personally really like using Picasa as a photo manager. I was overjoyed when Google released a version for Linux, even if it utilised Wine. It was really convenient for me as I use a lot of the web facilities and applications that Google produce

However I was a tadge peeved that Picasa for Linux didn't include an uploading facility. So peeved I moved all my pictures to Flickr.

But now moving from openSuse to PCLinuxOs I discover that the new Picasa client for Linux has the upload feature fully implemented. Time to start uploading to PicasaWeb again.

A big thank you to Google.

Nokia E65 Tips and Tricks Part 1

2008-02-12T18:31:00.000Z

I'm getting more and more impressed with my Nokia E65, especially as it's part of the X-Series from Three Network here in the UK.

Three Network offer a service called 3Mail which costs about a fiver a month. Let's you access your email from whatever server it's on. But as part of the X-Series contract I can use MobileMail to access my emails using the Three Network for free! Shome mistake shurely?

Another nice little app is Goosync. Allows me to sync with my Google Calendar. Has to sync over my home wireless network else Three will charge. All power to the wi-fi capability of the E65 though!