Technoblog

Stop software patents in Europe

0
2 years ago
by jan in ,

stopsoftwarepatents.eu petition banner

Today we face an unprecedented patent bubble of poisonous software and business methods patents. Most patents are stockpiled for strategic purposes. These poisonous assets generate no measurable benefits or insignificant licensing revenue for their holders. Large industry is aware of a patent inflation crisis but it seems too hard to march to the beat of a different drum.

Soft patents are still land mines for software development and stifle innovators. Under the EU Lisbon treaty a new instrument is set into force, the European Citizens’ Initiative. The EU-Commission is now obliged to present a legislative proposal when a critical mass of citizens demands it.

Currently, a new platform is built to get a new directive which bans software patenting once and for all. I would like to ask you to sign this new petition on:
http://petition.stopsoftwarepatents.eu

iPhone

10 Reasons why I’m not an Apple fan-boy

1
2 years ago
by jan in ,

A few days ago, I had a twitter conversation with @molier about why the iPhone wouldn’t be my choice. I promised to get back to him about this in a blog:

apple-molier

So here are my reasons:

  1. iPhoneDevelopers are unhappy: Apple’s App Store is a mess for small and independent developers. Very few developers are making even a livable wage, and the approval process is a black box. Facebook developer Joe Hewitt, the man behind the immensely popular Facebook application for iPhone, said that he quit the project entirely on Apple’s tyrannical App Store approval policies.
  2. Anti-competitive policies on the iPhone: Apple is disallowing applications because they “duplicate existing functionality”. This means that applications from competitors that offer similar functionaliy are automatically banned. What Apple does is 100x worse than what Microsoft does, although Microsoft also bundles a set of their own applications, at least Microsoft still allows other application to be installed. Recently, Apple lifted its ban for internet browsers.
  3. Apple prohibits Voice-over-ip: Apple prohibited the Google Voice or other Voice over IP applications from being distributed on its iTunes application store with no public explanation of why, a refusal to offer any suggestions that could permit the application to be distributed, and no process for appealing the decision. Apple also removed third-party Google Voice-compatible applications by explaining that they violate a policy against applications that duplicate native iPhone functionality, despite this rule being wildly inconsistent in its enforcement. Again, Apple refused to offer any suggestions for how developers could comply with the guidelines, and offered no process for appealing the decision. Only very recently Apple has started to allow VOIP applications, provided that they use wifi only.
  4. Telecommunications choice is gone: If you want to buy an iPhone and through the official channels, it is compulsory to do business with T-Mobile too (Or O2 in the UK, AT&T in the US).
  5. Apple sues bloggers: Once Apple found out that there was a leak in their development organisation, they went to the extend of sueing the bloggers that were reporting the novelties. In their opinion online journalists have less rights than offline journalists. Fortunately EFF jumped in and Apple lost.
  6. Exploiting trivial patents: Apple has filed and has been rewarded trivial patents, and isn’t scared of using a bunch of them to squeeze their competitors (yes a bunch, so that it will become very difficult for their opponent to invalidate all of them). They have 2,000 patents and if they want to start a battle, it’s quite likely that they can find a patent that applies. This also says a lot about the patent office that doesn’t care whether a patent existed before or whether there is prior act, but that’s a completely different story.
  7. Apple violates statutory warranty: Apple ignores the legal warranty rules in The Netherlands, as it refuses free repairs or replacements of their products after a one year warranty term. It is said to reverse the burden of proof and tries to sell expensive extended warranty packages to give consumers what they are already entitled to by law.
  8. Denying liability and trying to silence owners of exploding iPhones: Numerous press reports are claiming that iPhones are exploding or catching fire in the US, UK, France, Holland, and Sweden. If this wasn’t bad enough Apple managed to write one letter that both denies liability and offers an owner money to keep quiet. Even the European Commission has turned its attention to Apple and their mysteriously exploding iPhones.
  9. Will all Apple products going to display compulsory ads?: Apple is seeking a patent for technology that displays advertising on almost anything that has a screen of some kind: computers, phones, televisions, media players, game devices and other consumer electronics. The technology can freeze the device until the user clicks a button or answers a test question to demonstrate that he or she has dutifully noticed the commercial message. Because this technology would be embedded in the innermost core of the device, the ads could appear on the screen at any time, no matter what one is doing.
  10. Apple is over-priced: It is a public secret that Apple devices are over-priced. Currently (19-12-2009) the iPhone is exclusively available at T-Mobile. If you want the one that connects to the 3G network, prepare to fork out €99.95 for 24 months. The 32MB version will set you back €4800 in the 24 months that you’re under contract. That’s the price of a small car!

How to uninstall hidden devices, drivers, and services

0
2 years ago
by jan in

Ever have those drivers or devices that just won’t go away even though you’re sure you’ve uninstalled them? Or, say you replace your old 100Mbps network card with a faster Gbps adapter. But, you can’t re-assign it the same IP address because your system insists there is still an adapter installed with that same IP address and you forgot to remove the driver before removing the old card (which is now in your little brother’s pc)?

To get rid of that unwanted driver, device, or service:

  1. Open the “Start” menu and choose “Run…”
  2. Type in “cmd” (without the quotes) and click “ok”.
  3. At the cmd prompt, type in “set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1″ (without the quotes) and press enter. (Note that nothing seems to happen–this is ok. We are actually setting an environment variable which is going to help us to see hidden devices)
  4. On the next cmd prompt line, type in “devmgmt.msc” (without the quotes) and press enter. This will launch the Windows Device Manager Console.
  5. In the Device Manager Console, from the “View” menu, select “Show Hidden Devices”.

Now, as you expand the different drivers and devices in device manager you will see not only the items that Windows currently detects as installed on your pc (these are the usual items displayed), but you will also see drivers, devices, and services which have been loaded in the past but were not uninstalled or are not currently started. You can find your offending device, right-click, and choose “uninstall” to remove it from the system completely.

Be careful though; you should note that non-loaded devices, drivers, and services are “grayed” out, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you should delete all of them. Only remove items you know you don’t need. And, be careful that you don’t change too many devices or you might need to re-activate your Windows installation.

Last thing, if you accidentally exit the Device Manager Console you will need to start over again at the cmd prompt. To close the cmd prompt window, type “exit” (without the quotes).

SSH login without password

0
3 years ago
by jan in

Your aim
You want to use Linux and OpenSSH to automize your tasks. Therefore you need an automatic login from host A / user a to Host B / user b. You don’t want to enter any passwords, because you want to call ssh from a within a shell script.

How to do it
First log in on A as user a and generate a pair of authentication keys. Do not enter a passphrase:

    a@A:~> ssh-keygen -t rsa
    Generating public/private rsa key pair.
    Enter file in which to save the key (/home/a/.ssh/id_rsa):
    Created directory '/home/a/.ssh'.
    Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
    Enter same passphrase again:
    Your identification has been saved in /home/a/.ssh/id_rsa.
    Your public key has been saved in /home/a/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.
    The key fingerprint is:
    3e:4f:05:79:3a:9f:96:7c:3b:ad:e9:58:37:bc:37:e4 a@A

Now use ssh to create a directory ~/.ssh as user b on B. (The directory may already exist, which is fine):

    a@A:~> ssh b@B mkdir -p .ssh
    b@B's password:

Finally append a’s new public key to b@B:.ssh/authorized_keys and enter b’s password one last time:

    a@A:~> cat .ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh b@B 'cat >> .ssh/authorized_keys'
    b@B's password:

From now on you can log into B as b from A as a without password:

    a@A:~> ssh b@B hostname
    B

Start a process on resume from S3

0
3 years ago
by jan in

When you want to run an application when resume your PC from stand-by, you can follow the following procedure:

  1. Open task sheduler [press windows key, type task, click on task scheduler at the top of the menu list]
  2. In Actions [menu or right pane] click ‘new task’
  3. In General tab, give your task a name
  4. In Trigger tab, click ‘new’
  5. Choose ‘on an event’ in the top drop-down list.
  6. Choose ‘custom’ radio button
  7. Click on the ‘new event filter’ button that now appears.
  8. For event level, choose ‘information’
  9. In ‘event logs’ drop-down menu, choose windows logs > system. Put a tick next to ‘system’ only
  10. Click on the text ‘All event ID’s’ [the text will clear] and insert 1
  11. Click ok
  12. In the ‘Actions’ tab, choose the program you want to start by clicking ‘new’
  13. In the ‘new action’ window, use the browse button to navigate to the .exe of the program you want to run. If you have a shortcut on your desktop for the program, you can simply choose that and scheduler will extract the path from the shortcut.
  14. [optional] Add -fullscreen to the ‘arguments’ box if you want your program to start full screen and it supports this switch [argument]

Vista won’t go to sleep

0
3 years ago
by jan in

This problem happened to me almost instantly after I installed Vista. I’d press the sleep button (or select Sleep from the Start menu). My PC would go through all its shutdown things, blank the screen and immediately wake up. After a short while the login screen would be displayed, I’d type my password and be back where I started.

I read on the www.tabletquestions.com forum of other people who’d had similar problems and some had referred to a POWERCFG utility. This turned out to the problem on my PC.

I ran this utility (in a Command window, as administrator) with the “-DEVICEQUERY wake_armed” parameters and got a list of hardware devices that would wake the PC up. This showed:

C:\Windows\system32>powercfg -devicequery wake_armed
Standard 101/102-Key or Microsoft Natural PS/2 Keyboard
Microsoft USB Wheel Mouse Optical

So if there was activity on my mouse or keyboard, the system would wake up from sleep. It seems that when going to sleep, there’s enough activity from the mouse to wake the system up. Also I didn’t really want the PC to wake up just because I’d moved the mouse out of the way on my desk. So I disabled the mouse as a wake-up device:

C:\Windows\system32>powercfg -devicedisablewake “Microsoft USB Wheel Mouse Optical”

Now the devicequery request does not show the mouse:

C:\Windows\system32>powercfg -devicequery wake_armed
Standard 101/102-Key or Microsoft Natural PS/2 Keyboard

It could be argued I don’t want the keyboard to wake the PC up either, but my motherboard does support wake from sleep on the keyboard so I might give that a go in the future – at the moment it’s disabled in the BIOS.

Anyway my PC now goes to sleep.

More info: http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/63567-power-options-sleep-mode-problems.html

Click to run an ActiveX control on this webpage

0
5 years ago
by jan in

Are you receiving a windows prompt asking you to “click to run an ActiveX control on this webpage”?

ActiveX Control Warning
 

Here’s how to fix it:

  1. Download the following Compatibility Patch to revert the IE Active X Control Behavior http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=B7D9801B-4FB5-492E-903E-3400ABF1D731&displaylang=en
  2. Install it and reboot your computer
  3. Try the webpage you were receiving the prompt on

Moved to WordPress

0
6 years ago
by jan in

After making

No Software Patents in Europe

0
6 years ago
by jan in

No software patents in EuropeIt’s been all over the internet, but because I was heavily complaining about the draft patents bill earlier in my blog, I just wanted to include this victory message here as well:

“After years of struggle, the European Parliament finally rejected the software patent directive with 648 of 680 votes: A strong signal against patents on software logic, a sign of lost faith in the European Union and a clear request for the European Patent Office (EPO) to change its policy: the EPO must stop issuing software patents today.” – Free Software Foundation Europe press

It is finally over :)

chkdsk saved my life!

4
7 years ago
by jan in

Yesterday I noticed the delights of this simple tool chkdsk that’s part of Windows XP. As a fanatic Linux user, I’ve done some repartitioning to make some space on my PC. Unfortunately Partition Magic had some troubles with my disk for one reason or another and decided to stop the process somewhere half-way, leaving me with an inaccessible disk. Windows would reboot after having loaded the 3rd or 4th driver, which made booting up virtually impossible. Oh man, I’ve experienced that before and that’s the moment that it doesn’t matter how cold the room is or how still you sit. Sweat start coming from your pores, your butt starts itching and your hands get into a cramp. At that time I knew my brain’s most primitive defense mechanisms were trying to take over and wanted to make me get out of that troublesome situation as soon as possible. And while the most primitive parts of the brains are taking over, the realization sets in that unfortunately this job is not going to be an easy one…

Okay, disk damaged, what’s the partition like, how accessible is it and where are my valuable files… Fdisk showed that the partition hadn’t shrunk in the partition table yet, so that was good news. The disk wasn’t accessible however and even the Windows rescue disks couldn’t find a Windows section that they could attach to. Bad bad bad…. So open go the drawers with my valuable PC tools. The drawer with screwdrivers, hammers and plyers on the left, the drawer with PC utilities on the right. So what’s the strategy, which tool should we try first:

  • ERD Commander: There aren’t any Window’s to look through. Sorry buddy, perhaps you can try somewhere else.
  • Partition magic: Didn’t really notice that something was wrong with the disk until I asked for a disk check. Answer Immediattely ‘O yeah, something’s wrong. Error xxx, good luck!’
  • NTFSDOS: Nah, I’m not going to mount that disk. Forget it, who do you think I am, gimme good food and I’ll consider it
  • NTFS driver under Linux: ‘Buddy, I wasn’t made for Windows in the first place and Bill never even considered sharing his NTFS specs with me, and now you want me to eat it raw? Go and find help elsewhere dude’
  • Partition resizer: Nah, I don’t know ext3 and also don’t know ntfs. Gimme some FAT food

You can imagine that the I’m doomed thoughts came up… And then something that saved the day: I though by myself, okay let’s boot up with the Windows disk again. Perhaps that rescue mode can give me some insight. Ran in rescue mode and entered ‘DIR’. Answer: Your disk is very bad you see, can’t really help you here. ‘CD Windows’, Answer ‘We don’t have that, no way to go there’. Then eventually, as a last resort before just formatting the entire disk, I decided to give chkdsk a try.

Chkdsk started with just 3 messages that it did some time little repair and then eventually after working through the disk a little, gave control back to the command prompt. I thought that this was another useless effort, the chkdsk just went too fast, but just when I wanted to give up, maybe just out of habit I entered the ‘dir’ command and suddenly saw the usual old directory appear. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw that, would this little tool from pre-historic times indeed save my valuable data?

So I gave it a shot, rebooted to Windows and couldn’t believe my eyes. It worked. Did a check: no errors. Checked my files: no inconsistencies. Checked my other partitions: worked as normal.

I hereby would really like to express my wholeharted thanks to the creator of chkdsk! You saved me a big lot of time! And I just can’t believe that even though I pulled my drawer open that contains the most powerful partition and repair tools, that chkdsk eventually defeats them all!

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