The Internet Home of Kevin L. Collins
Linux
Posts about Linux.
Gnome Unity – I HATE IT!
1Let me start by saying that I’m sick and I know that is amplifying my frustration, but the title is true none-the-less.
As I have stated, I’m re-coding my company’s Intranet site. To do that, I’ve installed Ubuntu on my laptop (the machine I’m on now). I did that because it gives me a machine that, for all intents and purposes, is an exact copy of my web server in a mobile platform. That way I can develop on the machine, copy the stuff to the web server and things just work. In the past, it’s been great.
It’s been great for another reason as well. With Linux (Gnome for sure, probably the other desktop managers as well) I can have multiple virtual desktops. Currently I use 6 – primarily focusing on 3 of them – one for coding, one for testing/debugging and one for research (Eclipse, Firefox/Terminals, and Firefox/Google/XChat respectively.)
Until “Unity” came around, this had worked flawlessly. But now I have two big issues:
The first is with my keyboard getting lost. Almost every time that I change desktops (with the ctrl-alt-arrows), when I return to Eclipse, the keyboard is non-responsive. I think I’ve narrowed this down to another application retaining “focus”, but I can’t stop it. I can cure it by going to an empty desktop, taping an arrow key and then returning to Eclipse. This I can work around.
What I can’t work around is Compiz loosing its mind and in the middle of a desktop switch, just hanging. That’s what happened not 15 minutes ago. I was switching from my “testing” desktop back to my “coding” desktop because I had forgotten to save a the file with some PHP functions in it. One that I had spent all morning writing. (Yes it happens). I hit the keys to return to Eclipse. The screen showed the overlay of the virtual desktops, put me on the Eclipse desktop, and then just froze. I had mouse control, the cursor was moving. I had partial keyboard control, I could switch to the console and verify that Compiz was consuming 100% of one of the two cores of laptop’s processor. But that was basically it. I couldn’t tell Eclipse to save, I couldn’t get compiz to “un-freeze” – I was dead in the water. So I did the only thing I could, typed “reboot -n” at the console and watch my work go up in smoke.
GAH!
Which brings me to another question: Why can’t Eclipse hold on to the unsaved “buffer”? Vi can. Firefox can. Why not Eclipse?
Back to work, Kevin, back to work.
Houston, we have a problem. I think.
0This morning I updated the journal on the development of the new NEI Intranet. One of the things that I commented on was how I was afraid that the site would have security concerns – mainly because I don’t know enough PHP or the ways to prevent such problems.
That prompted me to look for a way to find out IF the site had problems. My thought was, if I could find out what the problems were, I might have enough time to fix them before I was forced to put the site into production. A Google search later landed me a utility called “Skipfish“. It’s a web site analyzer that can point out all kinds of issues – including security problems.
I’ve been running Skipfish on the development site for nearly an hour. According to the statistics, so far the site has 3290 informational issues and 993 medium issues. I’m not exactly sure what the issues are at this point because the scan is still running, but I can tell you: I’m concerned.
I’m hoping that the issue counts Skipfish is displaying are repetitive counts per run and not unique issues. If not, then I REALLY have my work cut out for me. I can’t in good conscience put the site into production – accessible from the Internet – with security issues in it. I know there is always the possibility of a threat from the INSIDE too, but I’m much less concerned about that than Johnny Hacker and his ten million friends.
All I have to do is wait for the run to complete and then I’ll see where I stand. More to come…
It’s Friday, have you cleaned malware from a PC this week?
1Yesterday around 9 A.M., one of my co-workers called to inform me that they had a “popup” message on their computer while browsing the web. First thought through my head was: “Here we go again…”. Before I even connected to the remote machine I knew what I was going to see. Another fake virus/malware/infection warning. I was right. As soon as I connected, I saw the warning: “You’re running unprotected, please click here to subscribe and removed the following infections.”
GAH! I’m am sick and tired of wasting my time cleaning this garbage up! Why can’t this stuff be stopped?
So, after spending 3 hours on the machine via PCAnywhere, I came to the conclusion that remote cleaning wasn’t going to work. I dispatched a person from each office to meet half-way to deliver the machine back to me. Around 2:30 yesterday afternoon I finally got a few moments to look at it.
Problem is, once the machine booted Windows, the keyboard and mouse became non-responsive. Either Windows had locked up, or the malware didn’t like being disconnected from the Internet (because I refuse to plug the NIC up until it is clean or temporarily running some other operating system). Either case, as it stood the machine was useless.
This morning I’m sitting in front of it watching it run a ‘dd’ from the Ubuntu Live CD, duplicating its hard drive onto another for further analysis. I don’t know how successful I’ll be, but I’m going to try to bring this machine back from “windows death”.
I know I may end up blowing the hard drive away and re-loading the system, but I want to at least try to find out what this malware did and how the machine got infected. I’m tired of not knowing and simply formatting and reloading. I want to get to the bottom of this.
Scratch that; reverse it.
0After a night of thought (a most unsettling night of nausea to be honest) I’ve thought better of loading Windows 7 onto my laptop. While my laptop doesn’t have the guts to run a virtual machine for any *real* work, it should have enough to run two browsers for checking my layouts. So I’m pushing forward with Ubuntu and probably Virtualbox.
During the wee hours of the morning when I couldn’t sleep I ran across a few things that might help me make the layout process quick and (hopefully) cross-browser compliant.
The first is the “1KB Grid System” by Tyler Tate. With it, I’m hoping to take the Intranet from a confusing mess of content and layout to a complete dream of separation. Goal: Making cosmetic updates in the future easier.
I also found “The Design Shack” website. With the information in there I’m hoping to use recent techniques to make the Intranet page quicker and easier to look at.
One thing that really chaps me though is this: If you design something according to standards, why should you have to test it to make sure it works? It should just work. So why is it then that every browser on this planet that “conforms to standards” does not present the design in the same way? HMMM? Microsoft? Apple? Mozilla? Google? Anybody?
UPDATE: I just found this on “Coding Smashing Magazine“, which is a very detailed look at what I’m complaining about – cross platform testing. I don’t know that I’ll go all the way and use 15-20 different browsers, but a setup with IE8, IE9 and Safari (and probably Chrome, because I like it) will get me started.
Changes to the Laptop
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Image via CrunchBase
So I started to layout the changes required for the new NEI Intranet this morning. A couple of things came to mind and were quickly shot down.
During this planning and organizing session one thing came to the top: The new site would need to be compatible with both Internet Explorer 8+ and Safari (because of the widespread use of iPhones and iPads at the office).
This brought me the realization that my laptop, which is currently running Ubuntu Linux, really couldn’t be used to test the new code because I can’t use IE or Safari on Linux.
So, very shortly now, I’m going to back up my work to date and load Windows 7 on my laptop. That way I can load both IE and Safari along with my favorite Windows editor (notepad++) and use Putty to access the code on the development server. (I’m toying with the idea of using WAMP on the laptop instead, but that’ll come later.)
I know, I could use VMware or VirtualBox. But this machine barely has enough resources to run Ubuntu or Windows 7 alone. I think having even a small virtual machine for just testing would be enough to break its back.
