As I'm going through the thousands of emails in my inbox I keep coming across subjects like "(big corporation) Antivirus Email Gateway Notification" with headers that seem to confirm the origin. These emails say things like, "Sender, the following email was blocked due to containing an attached file that violates (big corporation) email security policy."

Do the IT managers of this massive corporation really not know how Windows email trojans work? Do the antivirus vendors not know? Is the IT world filled with that many incompetent people? How is bouncing gazillions of "you are not in compliance with (big company) security policies" to innocent people who are not, and further cannot be, infected help anything? Surely they can disable this in their software. If not, most of these companies are large enough that they could demand from the antivirus vendor that these embarrasing features be removed.

As the conspiracy nuts would claim: maybe it is some sort of screwball advertising policy. How better to spam people? It gets the company name out there, albeit not in a very flattering light, and there's a certain level of plausible deniability involved. The average computer user would probably be grateful for such a false warning. And they might even find a virus on their computer as a result.

Oh well, at least a copy of the virus wasn't attached... Almost everyone seems to have shut that feature off long ago.

BTW, my mail server discards any email with a Microsoft Executable attached. So sorry. Try a zip file or something if you legitimately want to get something through to me.

So, does anyone have 6 LVD SCA hard disks they want to donate? Nah, didn't think so...

Anyway, I finally have an actual server rather than some mess of parts that act vaguely like a server. That will take a load off of my workstation.

So, what will the machine do? Top priority is the SWISH-E daily build and all the services eating away at my workstation resources. I haven't thought far beyond that.

Disk space is a major shortcoming. I have about 500 MB free. But, the machine has 6 (empty) LVD SCA slots in the front. Maybe I'll find some used 9 GB disks at a computer show or something. Who knows. New SCA disks are way beyond my shoestring budget, though. I'd like to get 6 disks and create a mirrored LVM array. I'd have no hot spares but at least there would be redundancy. Another option would be to install an IDE RAID card and move the LVM storage from my workstation. There's no redundancy there, though.

I am having a problem with the machine freezing after about 15 minutes when running in multiprocessor mode. The memory tests good with memtest86. Not sure if it is kernel related or what. I've tried various combinations of apic/noapic, nohlt, acpi=off, apm=off and none make any difference. Uniprocessor mode runs perfectly. So, I'm stuck running on one CPU until I find the problem. The only oddity I notice is that CPU0 and sometimes CPU1 show disabled on the front panel when the machine is frozen. When I got it the CPU0 fan was damaged. (I borrowed a fan from another machine to get it running.) So there's a small chance that CPU is damaged. I don't see any way to boot or run the machine from CPU0 in uniprocessor mode to test it. I guess I could swap the CPUs around...

Oh, yeah, Matt suggested that I name it Hagrid since it resembles a lumbering half-giant.

Why do I feel the sudden urge to slam my head into the desk every time I try to deal with Windows?

I've been trying to get Windows 2000 to play nice with my HP Colorado 5 GB Travan drive. It is a standard IDE Travan QIC drive I installed into a USB 2.0 IDE drive box. Seems reasonable that this should work, no? Why do I need Windows? Well, as with most things Windows the data on the tapes are almost certainly in a proprietary format. So I'll surely need to read them using the same Windows program that created them.

So, I wondered if the drive worked at all. I've not used it in many years and then I only used it with tar (the standard UNIX Tape Archiver program). The HP Colorado user manual claims my tape drive originally came with Yosemite TapeWare for both Windows and Linux. This drive came from a computer show with only a user-manual rubber-banded to the drive. So I went to the HP website, found TapeWare and then installed it on Fedora Core 2. I ran the TapeWare Administration GUI, it auto-detected the make and model of my tape drive, and the drive works without a hitch. The entire process took maybe 5 minutes.

So, since the tape drive worked so effortlessly under Linux I thought I'd see what Windows had to say... For testing purposes I have Windows 2000 on a Virtual Machine running under Linux... I started up the Windows 2000 VM and once it had finished booting I told it to attach the tape drive. Windows 2000 instantly says I attached a "HP Colorado 5GB USB Device." Great, that's precisely what I attached. So I run through the wizard and it says it found no drivers (Floppy, CD-ROM, Windows update, nothing). Fine, I downloaded the HP drivers from HP.com. It sees the drivers but indicates they are not for my drive. So after 30 minutes I concluded it won't allow me to use any of the drivers provided by HP. Almost certainly because none are specifically for a USB tape drive.

Why does Windows need a driver disk? It is a Travan tape drive. Windows knows it is a Travan tape drive. By definition, all Travan tape drives from any manufacturer are essentially identical. Linux has one driver for all Travan tape drives regardless of how they are attached. Further, Linux auto-detects and silently configures the device without the need for input from me.

What is the point of even having a USB IDE drive box on a Windows system if nearly every device you might want to attach is going require special drivers that don't exist? It seems to me like this negates the whole point of the external drive box.

Oh well, we'll see how things go once I have the tapes in question. Hopefully I can devise some way to read the data from them.

I have to say that the current state of Project Utopia is truly outstanding. I desperately hope that the current Project Utopia components make it into Fedora Core 3.

Project Utopia, for those in the dark, is an umbrella term for a collaborative project that aims to integrate the GNOME Desktop Environment with the Linux kernel's (and other kernels such as Solaris and BSD) ability to automatically manage user-oriented hardware.

Examples

• I insert a blank CD-R and Blank CD-R Disc appears on my desktop with a CD-R icon. I'm able to open the Blank CD-R Disc, drag files into it, and then burn it to the blank CD-R.
  
• Upon insertion of a DVD movie the DVD appears on my desktop with a DVD Movie icon and GNOME plays the movie full screen.
  
• Upon insertion of the Compact Flash card from my digital camera into the computer's card slot the label of the flash card "Photographs" appears on my desktop with a compact flash icon.
• If I attach a digital camera to my computer GNOME can automatically import photos from the camera into a photo album.

These are just the test cases, really. So much more is possible with Utopia. I can't wait until everything takes advantage of it fully.

Screenshot of Examples:

I took a few moments tonight and updated the swish_php module. The updates should be in swish-e anonymous CVS sometime soon.

Ideas (Vaporspeak?)

1. Do away with start-here: (done?)
   
2. Place launchers for applications: and favorites: in computer:
3. Create a favorites menu applet similar to the menubar.
4. Fix the bugs in the favorites: handler such as the broken trash can.
5. If feasible, replace the "main menu" with an applet that can embed into a panel.
   
6. Record all application launches in the run dialog MRU. (Everyone realizes they can drag launchers from the run dialog, right?)
7. Create a MRU menu applet which generates itself from the run dialog MRU. This applet would look like the new main menu applet.
8. Fedora's default "main menu" could then be a drawer with the main menu and mru applets embedded.
9. For extra credit, modify drawers to support "text beside icon" (and fix them so they don't run off the edges of the screen), implement the favorites menu like the proposed mru and main menu applets, and this would replace both the menubar and main menu hacks with a normal drawer that embeds favorites menu, main menu, and mru menu.
   

Here is a favorites menu mockup. Surprise, it looks similar to the one that was removed a few years ago. And a menus and drawers mockup.

History

Once upon a time there was a favorites menu that displayed the favorites: location. You could drag an item from applications: into favorites: and it would appear on the favorites menu. It was nice and simple and worked. So someone removed it, if I recall, because we could edit the main menu directly. And then someone broke/disabled the ability to edit the main menu. So users started creating panel drawers and putting their launchers in the drawers. And then (in FC1) GNOME 2.4 drawers never worked. So finally nothing but the desktop worked. So, users were left dragging launchers to their desktops creating a giant mess. Sadly, I have dozens of application launchers on my desktop. So, now we need a way to get to the desktop quickly and thus was created a show/hide desktop action.

I would add that there's no apparent way to edit launcher from nautilus. Unless of course the user somehow knows to associate desktop items with gnome-desktop-item-edit. Shouldn't this be a property page?

Comments

The applications: location could be replaced with the "better application browser" we hear about from time to time. It would have to be really good, though. Something of the magnitude of difference between the old and new file selector. Replacing it with a slightly better version or making a change that requires every application to be patched to use it may be unwise.

The concept of start-here: seemed pretty sound. But it is so underused, unimplemented, unexplained, etc that keeping it would probably do harm to any improvements that might be made on it. The reflex action of throwing it away may have overcome any future usefulness. It is perceived as useless because, well, right now it is useless.

I hate MRU application menus (ala Windows XP). Hate. Hate. Hate. I think the run dialog makes a better MRU. Many people may love MRU menus. Great. Make it possible to turn off somewhere, somehow. The last thing I want is my main menus randomly changing around based on what it thinks I want to do. Or make it a separate applet unto itself.

I don't mind the main menu as it stands. It is massive and clunky and ugly. But it provides quick access to approximately everything that is installed if you know where to look.

Rather than try to convince people someone just needs to just do something and show how it could work. One wouldn't have to fix the existing main menu to create something useful. I think most of this could be implemented outside the existing mechanisms. At the least, I think having the favorites menu back would be great. So long as someone doesn't rip out the favorites: location while we're not looking.