Settling on an IDE – Maybe

I am leaning towards Anjuta as a C++ IDE for Linux. I really like Eclipse but the integrated Glade editor is pretty nice to have. I have a feeling though that I will get little actually done for a few days. I kinda wanna play some games.

Too Cute

Some things are just too cute to believe.

Still Alive and Still Lazy…

Though I have long been away I still live and wheeze. The weeks drag and life goes on.

On the OSS front, I have upgraded to Ubuntu 9.10 and after fixing the mess they made of Pulseaudio in their distribution, I am very happy with it. The tools it gives me rock hard. I just turned some video into a video DVD quickly, cleanly and without error. The same process when in Windows land required $100 paid to Nero, triple the transcoding time, and many wasted discs. DVDStyler is great. I just wish I had found it before Nero had sucked up my cash. It also works in Windows. I have no idea why the Nero program took 90 minutes longer than DVDStyler to transcode, but the improved speed was great. My only issue was that I used text as chapter buttons in my project and it didn’t anti-alias that so I got “jaggies.”

Now I am looking for a good IDE and enough motivation to overcome my fear of C++. Any suggestions world?

Still Lazy…

Boxes still lurking… head still hurting… bed looks comfortable…  another night wasted.

A Moving Experience

Two hellish weeks are over, and my move is done. Only a few boxes are lurking hideously in the shadows…

I have some more laundry and organizing to do, but tonight I need to watch some mindless entertainment. I queued up a Haruhi Suzumiya DVD and am taking a break between episodes. I just learned that they are broadcasting a new season in Japan right now!

Magnetic Mayhem

I am preparing to move this month and have been going through all the old computers my sister and I have accumulated while staying together. There were a total of seven needing disposal. One got sold at a garage sale and the other six were disassembled and recycled.

The main concern though when getting rid of old hardware is the magnetic media. What happens to the hard drives and the data on them? If you throw them away, they can be picked up at the dump, mounted in a new machine, and searched. Your data is still there. Formatting your drive or deleting your files won’t solve the problem. All that does is remove the FAT (File Allocation Table) data. The actual file is still there and it is pretty easy to recover. Personal data such as passwords, e-mail, credit card numbers, social security numbers, tax data, the fact that you are a closet Hello Kitty fan… it’s all there for the taking.

So how to destroy it? The simplest way is to do a data wipe. My favorite tool is called Darik’s Boot and Nuke (DBAN). It comes as an ISO file that you have to burn onto a CD, then you boot from the CD, and choose your options. I usually just type DOD and go read a book. The program then writes over the entire surface of the drive seven times. No basic criminal is going to bother trying to get your data back from that. The only guys who have the resources to get data back from that have expensive labs at their beck and call. Criminals don’t have that.

Don’t wanna do that? Let’s try something else then.

In my move preparations, I found four more leftover hard drives that needed destruction. Pictured above are three old Western Digital drives, and behind my eager assistant, is an unmarked drive which we think may have been an IBM DeskStar, but we really aren’t sure.

The Plan? Disassembly. I’d rather take them outside and burn a bit of thermite on top of them, but I imagine that something like that would be illegal, or at least frowned upon by the neighborhood association.

The Tools: Screwdrivers – with a set of hex heads.

The bottom of the hard drive has some screws holding a circuit board to the main body. You can leave that there. If you want to though it comes off easily. Only screws hold it on. The printed circuit board only has contact connections to the body – no wires.

The top screws are what you need to remove. Some of the screws may not be obvious. Two of the Western Digital drives had screws hidden under the labels. These are old drives, but they do this on newer ones as well.

On these older drives I found a feature I hadn’t seen before. After the screws had been removed there was a metallic tape around the edge of the drives’ top plate. If your drive has soemthing like this, just find the end of the tape and pull it off. Don’t worry too much about the voided warranty warning. We’re destroying the drive anyway.

Once you get the top of the drive off, you have access to the guts of the drive.

If you are into just destroying your data, right now you can do all kinds of stuff to the actual hard drive platteres themselves. Me, I start taking everything apart because there are some cool bits inside these things. The shiny metal platters themselves could make some nifty “code ninja shuriken” is you have the tools to work aluminum. The platter retaining rings and spacers I give to my sister so she can make geek bling jewelry. The really cool stuff though is under the metal bracket. REALLY powerful rare earth magnets! Fun stuff if, like me, you never grew up.

If you were more serious about data destruction, take the platters and shred them (somewhat difficult as they are metallic) or go at them with a blow torch. A propane torch flame can exceed 1900C and if the platter is heated to a high enough temperature, the thin-film magnetic coating will either reach it’s Curie point or the platter itself will melt. That is safe and complete data destruction.

New Software!

I am trying to get back to apartment hunting, but the lure of Google Earth is too great. I just installed version 5.0 on my machine. Before the Ubuntu upgrade to 9.04 I couldn’t get 5.0 to run for more than a few seconds, so I have that to be happy about today.

Ahhh… Ubuntu… not the distro I wanted to use, but it is working.

I come from a Fedora background but Fedora 10 was bad for me. It would run at first and then when it did its first software update it ate my NIC drivers and refused to connect to anything. Sometimes it would segfault when I restarted. Bye bye Fedora, it was fun while it lasted.

I flirted with OpenSuse briefly as well, but after a very pleasant installer experience, I restarted only to find that the well-designed installer had eaten my MBR.

So I tried Ubuntu. It worked immediately, but was lacking a few features I needed. For example, even if you are installing off a LiveCD, what kind of Linux comes without LVM? It took a little CLI work, but I got that working. The community is good, the forums are helpful, and the distro is well-balanced and clean. After a bit of time with vanilla Ubuntu, I switched to the Kubuntu desktop. KDE 4.2 is usable and far better than 3.5 as far as I am concerned.

My Linux excursion has been pleasant this time, and the upgrade from 8.10 to 9.04 went smoothly. The upgrade finally got my Sansa View mp3 player functional with Linux, but the new version of Amarok (my favored music player) has left me cold. Version 2.0 seems to be completely incapable of pushing playlists to the View, and as far as I can tell, to any other player either. My choice words to Amarok’s devs – don’t move to a new version unless you can support features you had on the last one.

Speaking of my Sansa View and Linux, it has some strange behavior when it is plugged in. When I am in KDE and plug it in, it fails to connect for a bit then shuts itself off and restarts. If Amarok is running, it will connect properly. When I am in Gnome and plug it in, it gets properly mounted, but functionality is still a bit strange. I used GEdit to change a playlist I had on the device, but it wouldn’t let me save it as a new file. I could overwrite the old list, but couldn’t create a new one.

Oh well, enough for today. I have more books to sort and old media to destroy. I am thinking of doing a post on hard drive destruction for computer novices, because paranoia isn’t just a mental derangement – it’s a survival trait.

My Testimony…

In my last post, not even an hour ago, I mentioned Firefox and AdBlock. I think I must say more about these wonderful programs.

About Firefox, if you are using Windows and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer you should give Firefox a try. It’s more secure, more customizable, more stylish and let’s face it, all the cool nerds are using it.

Next we have AdBlock which is an extension for Firefox. Extensions are little programs you can download for Firefox and it’s Mozilla stablemates (I’m also a big fan of Thunderbird) that allow you to extend your program and add whatever features you think your web browser needs. AdBlock removes ads, banners, and can stop some Internet nastiness by blocking some unscrupulous “advertising” companies. I use it on most sites, but I disable it on respectable sites I want to support, like BoingBoing, /., WordPress, and the like. Get yourself some Firefox and install AdBlock – you’ll like it.

If for some reason you can’t use Firefox and AdBlock there is another way on a windows system to stop a lot of ads, but I’ll have to save that for another time.

PS: Can’t install software at work? Same here. Get yourself a nice little USB key and go to portableapps.com. You can get a nice version of Firefox and some other really good software there that can run off your thumbdrive without requiring installation.

Opt-Out Nirvana

Something useful I found on /. in their “Your Rights Online” section: a list of very handy opt-out pages. Though it is for the “World Privacy Forum,” the list is very US-centric. I personally went for number two and number ten. A quick note for the NAI opt-out: if you are using the page with Firefox, make sure you have the site whitelisted for AdBlock or it just won’t work properly.

Evil Key – I Revoke Thee

Another lovely lesson learned. Do not embed a picture in your GnuPG key even if it is an option. The older keyservers may not support it. My key was rejected by the MIT Keyserver for that reason, so I revoked it and am currently making a new one.

As I typed that my new key completed generation and it has been uploaded to the keyserver. If you’re interested, here it is:

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Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)

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