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Ever since I went ‘Apple’, the urge of moving away from Microsoft Windows operating systems is getting bigger and bigger. A couple of weeks ago I installed a two Ubuntu servers (v7.x) at work. Mainly for testing , and educational purposes.
The installation went extremely smooth on old Compaq ML370 server hardware. So, as a test I tried to install Adobe Coldfusion MX (Coldfusion 8 ) on the Ubuntu server (with Apache, and MySQL).

There are several postings on the Internet suggesting that it should be possible. Even though Ubuntu isn’t on the supported platforms list for Adobe Coldfusion MX.

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As of yesterday, the latest Ubuntu release ‘Hardy Heron‘ is available for download (both client and server). Every time a major Linux distri(bution) hits ‘the shelves’, the Linux community roars. With each release (Ubuntu or whatever flavor) the Linux community gets closer, and closer to Windows.

Even though the OS itself is getting better and better. It still lacks the support of decent major software like Adobe Creative Suite, etc. It’s missing the software people use in every day (business)life.
Sure, there a million different ways of running Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop on a Linux OS, but these require a commercial piece of software (CrossOver) , or in depth knowledge of the OS to make it work (Wine in some cases). Two things that shouldn’t be required. Not if you’re used to Windows (or Apple’s OSX). And even if you find a ’substitute’ it’s most likely to have an awful user experience.

The average housewife won’t use Linux, because her friends all use Windows. All those nice little Windows programs, which makes life easier (or a living hell with all the mal/spyware out there). So if the Linux community wants to make a difference they need to create some sort of critical mass (by their selves, or by Microsoft screwing up) to get the attention of the ‘normal’ user. But in a community where there’s no real (commercial) business model, it’s gonna be damn hard.

Microsoft created this critical mass by playing (probably) the best marketing trick in the world; Release Windows 95, and turn a blind eye to those who use a pirated copy at home. The home users create demand on the workfloor, so businesses start to use it on their workstations. Soon everyone was addicted. And now it’s damn hard to beat the addiction.

B.t.w., Apple is doing it a lot better. They created a nice and stable OS (just like the average Linux desktop distribution), BUT the OS has ALL the relevant drivers for the hardware used. ALSO they have a complete (and cheap) software suite (iLife and iWork), which is more than enough for the average family. No need to search the caverns of the Internet for software, and they look and feel the same as the OS.

So, I guess that my conclusion is that the OS is nearing perfection, but it (Linux in general) lacks good and decent third party software (and a good marketing machine )

In the mean time; I’m gonna upgrade my Linux (mail, web, and ssh) servers at work to ‘Hardy Heron’.

Well, that was another morning well spent….

A couple off weeks ago I started experimenting with FreeRADIUS on Ubuntu server (v6.06.2 TLS). Mainly because I needed to test some things for work. So I used VMWare to experiment. The networking part was set-up as Bridged.

Today, I wanted to test with iperf (a tool for network performance testing). So I launched the virtual machine, but there was no network connectivity. ifconfig showed that eth1 didn’t received an IP adres.
So I ran every possible test there was;

• restarted the interfaces (/etc/init.d/networking restart)

This resulted in the following;

Listening on LPF/eth1/00:0c:29:68:e3:eb
Sending on LPF/eth1/00:0c:29:68:e3:eb
Sending on Socket/fallback
DHCPDISCOVER on eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 8
DHCPDISCOVER on eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 12

The “DHCPDISCOVER” messages continue about 4 times, then the message:

No DHCPOFFERS received.
No working leases in persistent database - sleeping.

• restarted the DHCP server
• rebooted the virtual machine
• changes the networking to NAT instead of Bridged (this way, connectivity was restored, but not the way I wanted. I needed Bridge-mode)
• Tried to run the virtual machine on OSX (VMWare Fusion), which worked surprisingly.

After this I ran Wireshark on my server to see if DHCP request were coming in…. And you might have guessed; No DHCP request were reaching the DHCP server. So the problem was work PC related…. As a matter of fact, I had the Cisco VPN client running….. Which didn’t allow the DHCP request broadcast.

Shutting the VPN client down solved the DHCP problem. After the virtual machine worked I could reinitiate the VPN.

Mental note to myself: do NOT boot/restart the virtual machines when the VPN is up.

There are lot’s of people who complain about the updates on the Windows platform, but Apple tries to compete I guess. In the last 3 days there was a big security update, Safari 3.1 (both Windows and OSX), Time machine and Airport Updates, and now a Camera RAW update for OSX 10.5.2.

Thankfully no problems on my side with the updates.

Looking for other updates from Apple? Just go here.

Early this week, I found a new firmware for my Nokia E61i (out since October 2007). The version I had was v1.x, and this one was v2.0633.65.01 (press *#000# on your E61 to see the current firmaware version).

Updating goes through a separate application, but it should also be possible through download over the mobile network (I haven’t tried this). All you need to know is explained on the Nokia website, but there are some thing you don’t want to forget;

• Use the Nokia Datasuite to create a FULL backup of the phone, because during the upgrade the phone goes back to factory defaults.
• Have lot’s of patience (and some deodorant handy)
• Make sure the PC isn’t doing anything else that might interfere with the update.

The first attempt failed for me. Even with all the warnings (DO NOT INTERRUPT THE UPDATING PROCESS OR DISCONNECT THE PHONE!!!) I rebooted the PC and disconnected the phone. Result, the phone didn’t respond (this is where my deodorant came in). After this I restarted the upgrade process, and the phone got recognized (thankfully). After 10 minutes, the phone rebooted with the new firmware version.

First action was to restore all data and settings on the phone. Since I had some issues with my network connectivity I decided to remove the Access Points and reconfigure them…. Well, don’t. First of all, I wasn’t able to receive the configuration parameters from the mobile operator (SMS ‘ja’ to 1300), so I had to reconfigure them manually.
Their website has a step-by-step manual on configuring the E61i, but this didn’t help either.

MMS functionality remained absent, and none of the applications was able to connect to the Internet by itself. I had to initiate the connection manually before browsing the web.
E-mail was even worse. Every time I had ‘Packet Authentication’ errors. So after a day I decided to restore the Access Points from my backup, and guess what… Everything worked again.

And now for the thing that have changed (at least the ones that I’ve noticed);

• the e-mail application seems more stable
• camera and video are still crappy (the time between the snapshot sound and the actual capture is still multiple seconds)
• Idle connections are terminated. This is a bad thing (for me at least), because I had my UMTS connection open all the time, and this way I received mail throughout the day. Now I have to connect each time I want to check my e-mail.

I haven’t tried VoIP yet, but will try to do so soon (that’s what happens when you don’t pay for your own bills )

Conclusion is that the phone didn’t get better. There are some improvements, and there are some new annoyances. But my e-mail is stable at this moment.

I listened to the latest ‘This Week in Tech’ podcast today. They mentioned a screensaver called FlickrFan. This screensaver can connect to flickr account and images to use in the screensaver. But it also downloads current Associated Press images in high quality and more. This results in awesome pictures from around the world covering the news in HIGH-RES.

B.t.w. it’s much more than just a screensaver, but I liked the screensaver-part best.

Since I have an iMac with OSX 10.5 (Leopard), I use TimeMachine for my backups. This works great actually. But I also need an off-site backup of some sort. Just in case the house burns down or that some f*cker decides to steal my hardware.
So I bought an external Freecom 160GB USB2 drive (USB powered) for my off-site backups.

I encrypted the entire harddisk with TrueCrypt 5.0 on my iMac, and copied the data I needed to preserve. After that I wanted to access the data from my work laptop (Windows XP SP2 with TrueCrypt v5.0)….. This didn’t work. TrueCrypt didn’t recognize the password, or the encrypted disk (AES / SHA-256 full disk encryption).
I tried to access the data on my Mac and everything worked, so there’s no data corruption of some sort. Eventually, I recreated the encrypted drive on my Windows XP laptop (lost the backup in the process). This time the disk would mount, and could also be read/mounted by my Mac.

So, I guess that TrueCrypt is Cross-platform, but with the current version (v5.0a) you need to make sure to create the volume on Windows if you also want to mount it on OSX.

I reported this through their bug-reporting tool to the developers. No idea if there are similar problems with Linux.

UPDATE: Pretty soon they released v5.0a, and today v5.1 was released. So development goes on

We went to the Hoge Veluwe in Gelderland last weekend for some ’serious’ photography. This would be the first real trail for my GPS Logger (Qstarz BT1000).

At the ’start’ I switched the logger to ‘Log’, and forgot about it completely during the day. The device did its work during the day. The real challenge came at home. Linking the GPS info to the photo’s…..

The software for adding the GPS data to the photo’s was ‘GPSPhotoLinker‘ (remember that I use a Mac). Unfortunately, the software kept crashing when I tried to combine GPS data and the images. Possible reason could be the large NEF (Nikon RAW) files, because the crash happened every third image.
So the search for an alternative started, and I quickly found ‘PhotoGPSEditor‘ (also DonationWare). This tool could also manipulate NEF files.

Adding the GPS info was relatively easy with this software (GPSPhotoLinker is more intuitive IMO). After that I imported the photo’s in Adobe Lightroom, which showed the GPS data in the Metadata section of Lightroom (you can see the map location when you click on the arrow behind the GPS coordinates.

Just click on the following picture, to see when and where it was taken.

The complete set can be seen here.

A couple of weeks ago, I was pointed towards Google Maps on my Nokia e61i (I got a download link when I visited google.com on my mobile). After downloading and installing it (which was very easy), I started the application (which was hiding under Menu -> Installations -> Google Maps).

Most basic features are available on the phone app (directions, searching for restaurants etc., Zoom in and out), and there’s the possibility of positioning yourself on the map by using cellular positioning. Thankfully, this is done for you by the application. Downside is that it’s not that accurate. In my case, I could be anywhere in a 1.7 mile radius circle.

It’s also possible to use a GPS mouse (which I recently bought) for your location. The neat thing is that you can see yourself walk across the map (or drive if you’re by car). This is an excellent application.

These is one downside… Google Maps is using a constant Internet connection to update the maps, so make sure you have some sort of flat fee data service (or use wifi when available). Otherwise you might be in for a surprise when you receive your phone bill.

I bought some accessories for my photo gear today. Among the items was a new 2GB SanDisk Extreme III CF card. This package came with a ‘purse’ to store cards, and a CD with recovery software. In most cases you’ll only get the Windows version of a product (if there is an OSX version all together)….. But this CD also contains the OSX version of SanDisk’s RescuePro. Downside is that the CD is mini CD (or what you might call it), and those won’t work very well with the latest Mac’s. The latest Mac’s have DVD/CD players without a tray, so insert the CD, and you can ship your Mac for repairs……

And since the Windows OS can’t read the Mac part of the CD, there’s no way of getting the software of the CD.

The TrueCrypt developers have scheduled the release of v5.0 for Januari Februari 2008. This release will also have Mac OSX version. Now we’re getting somewhere. Finally, true cross-platform (Windows, Linux, and OSX) encryption, and it’s completely free.

TrueCrypt 5.0
Release scheduled for: January 2008

• Windows system partition encryption with pre-boot authentication
• Mac OS X version
• GUI for Linux versions of TrueCrypt
• Parallelized and pipelined read/write
• and more.

The following features are planned to be implemented in future versions:

• Support for external authentication modules (cryptographic tokens)
• ‘Raw’ CD/DVD volumes
• TrueCrypt API
• and more.

I evaluated the MDaemon v9.7.2 mailserver, and I must say that it’s quite complex to get it to run… my way.

It’s quite common to separate the program and the data. So, I tried to put the data on a different disk. This isn’t done by using the GUI, but you need to edit the Mdaemon.ini file in the App directory (not every directory can be changed by the GUI). After changing the defaults, the MultiPOP feature didn’t work. It seems there’s another config file for remote mail stuff. This file (schedule.dat) needs to reference the same location as the Mdaemon.ini file. Why is that? Why use two config files for one program? And why use a different extension (.dat versus .ini)? Beats me.

For a mailserver that pretends to be a fair, and relatively simple alternative to the over-powered and over-featured Microsoft Exchange mailserver you need a ‘rocket science engineers degree‘ to get it to work properly.

The release of the beta PGP v9.7 a couple of weeks ago, made me kinda curious if I had to pay for the new update. I bought v9.0 officially, and every update ’swallowed’ my old license info. And what happend today, when I installed the newly released full version of PGP 9.7 Desktop… It swallowed my old license.

B.t.w. the original purchase was for the Windows version of PGP, but the license also works on the OSX version of the software (it always did). So it’s not necessary to buy a new license when you switch platforms.

There is a downside though; It’s not possible to download a full version for the license holders. You need to download the 30-day trail version. And you’ll only get it when using a valid e-mail address.
In the old days they had some restriction on how many times (and in what time frame) you used an e-mail address.

Major bummer: the sign and encrypt buttons are no longer available in the Apple mail.app. So you need to use the builtin PGP proxy. So basically, there is no way of manipulating single messages (other than using the clipboard). There is no need for me to sign every mail I send, nor is there the necessity of encrypting every mail I send to a certain person.

Having a day off from work meant that I had some time to clean-up my server from everything crap. This also meant trying to upgrade Coldfusion MX 7 to Coldfusion 8. The new version supports some nice new features, with which I wanted to experiment.

Since none of my production websites run on Coldfusion (currently PHP), I could safely uninstall and install the new developer version. When I pressed ‘remove’ I had this flash from the past. When I tried to install version 7 I had humongous problems with the installer (services didn’t register correctly with IIS, etc.). But this could be just a coincidence…

Installing Coldfusion itself was straight-forward. The fun began when the installer wanted to launch the admin-panel to finalize the installation. No responds from the webserver. Even my blog was not working (”System cannot find the file specified“). Seemed that there were references to the old Coldfusion parser in the IIS.. After removing those instances, I had my blog back up-and-running.

Next was to finalize the Coldfusion 8 installation. I had to manually add the Coldfusion parameters to IIS (allowed Web Services, document types, … the works) After screwing around for nearly two hours, I could finish the installation.

Just to make sure that it wasn’t me, I installed it also in a virtual machine. And off course it worked flawlessly. Guess I need to reinstall my server in the next couple of weeks. Who knows what else is f*cking up the system.

Oh, another thing; I used to use RDS for development of the websites, so I tried to configure it again…. Well you might guess it… Not working. After yet another hour searching I found that RDS uses a ‘virtual file‘ called ‘ide.cfm‘. This file is located in /CFIDE/main/. The actual location (main/) doesn’t exist, so IIS returns a 404 error.
It seems that you need to uncheck ‘Verify if file exists‘ in IIS for the .cfm extension for RDS to work. Or do as I did; create the directory ‘main‘ and create an empty file called ide.cfm in that directory.

Well, this was an afternoon well spent…. NOT.

Next mission is to upgrade MySQL to version 5. So expect some serious downtime.

UPDATE: MySQL has also been upgraded to v5.something. It went surprisingly easy.

Since the upgrade to OSX Leopard, I’ve not been able to use PGP, since it simple won’t work. Yesterday I received an e-mail that the public beta of PGP 9.7 has been released (for Windows and OSX). This one does work on Leopard (until December this year though), so I guess that I need to BUY myself yet another version of PGP.

I found one ‘bug’ in the meantime; I seem to be missing the encrypt and sign buttons in the OSX Mail app. Or I might be missing something? I don’t want to use the PGP service which signs or encrypts everything. I want to sign and/or encrypt when I want to, and not when an app tells me to.