Yet Another IT-related Blog

Today I decided to migrate some of my Lightroom catalogs from my laptop to my iMac and for that I made a two step process:

Everything went as expected excepting the color labels. After some time googling I realized they were there indeed, only in another language! My laptop install is in English while the other one is in Spanish, thus the issue.

The simplest solution is to redefine the color labels in the new Lightroom install by going to the Metadata | Color label set | Edit… and redefine them as found in the files.

… as viagra-like pills. Hi there, it’s a long time since my last post and this one is not going to be related to IT. As I say in the title, discretia was mentioned in yesterday’s episode of the famous TV series Prison Break. They made it up as some kind of pills, you can see it in the next screenshot.

As you know, I own the discretia.org domain name and I like it. I remember how I got to it, and it sure doesn’t sound like a pill’s name to me. I was looking for a name for a supposed computer security company and I even used it in an exercise at the university :-).

By the way, the discretia.com domain was already bought in 2004 by one of those companies who try to resell it afterwards, so that’s with whom I’d have to fight if I want it in the future. And now it comes the IT-part of the post (I was lying about this post not being IT-related… sorry).

If you want to know who owns a domain name, there is a whois service and some other useful links for that matter at internic.net. And as a matter of fact I can check that my domain is not owned by me, but my hosting company. And it is also marked as Client Transfer Prohibited, which means that they locked it so I cannot transfer it to another register. Nice uh?

In my previous post about remote development I complained that Eclipse RSE wasn’t ready to be considered a tool for remote development of mid-sized projects.
Well, is it? The more I try to find out about this DSDP project, the more I like it. But it’s all a bit blurry, no simple howto or real experience gives a point about what you can/can’t do with RSE/TM.

The guys at the DSDP seem to be doing a great work, there are many presentations explaining their work, some members have a blog, but from the end user perspective: messy. What can I expect from the project?

Perhaps I overlooked some of its features, I just started to use it for small-projects, college assignments and web development. Useful experiences will be posted.

I found this other blog RSE World, which seems end user oriented (just not actively updated), one case of use in it.

Today I met a unix utility I didn’t know of. Not because it was new, I simply didn’t know it. Found it useful so I’m blogging about it before I forget it
fuser tells you which processes are using some file or socket. Interesting when you try to disconnect something but it keeps insisting someone is still using it. Another occasion is when VMWare is unable to activate sound because /dev/dsp is busy and you *need* to watch this football match in your virtual windows machine with sound (that was my case :P) .

In case you are an action guy and only knowing who uses it doesn’t feel good enough, you can signal those processes. And I’m sure the best signal is -9 so use -k flag and kill ‘em all.

Just two restrictions, from its Linux manpage:

fuser may only be able to gather partial information unless run with privileges. As a consequence, files opened by processes belonging to other users may not be listed and executables may be classified as mapped only.
fuser cannot report on any processes that it doesn’t have permission to look at the file descriptor table for. The most common time this problem occurs is when looking for TCP or UDP sockets when running fuser as a non-root user. In this case fuser will report no access

Of course these both could be bypassed activating SUID bit on fuser, but that doesn’t sound like a good idea from security point of view.

Videoconferences have proven to be a pain to me. Some years ago I used netmeeting, which worked fine almost 50% of the times I needed. Afterwards, I made some changes to my network and there was no way of making it work… Besides I’m a Linux user in my workstation, so it was time to change but neither gnomemeeting nor Ekiga gave me good impressions.

Probably Ekiga is nowadays a pretty good videoconference client, but I didn’t manage to configure both my webcam and microphone quite well. And even more difficult was to ask my friends and relatives to install it. So I couldn’t dedicate enough time to enjoy it.

So I remembered I’m also a MacOS X user and many people around me were using Skype… Yes there is also a Linux version but it doesn’t support videoconference. So it was time to give it a chance. The problem was that Apple doesn’t allow third-party manufacturers to add support for OS X in their cameras (generally)… You know, it’s all about hardware control and minimum quality requirements. And I wasn’t going to spend more than 25€.

But there is this project: macam, which is a collection of drivers for hundreds of webcams to work in OS X. There is a compatibility list, so it seems to be an easy task to choose the right one. Well, not that easy. Some webcams have different revisions and the product id is not printed on the box so…

After some time looking in the store I decided myself for the Creative Webcam Vista rev. A, since it was on the compatibility list, but it didn’t work! The problem was that the rev. A printed in the box was the one listed in the list as Webcam Vista (D)… Ovislink 519 chip, which seems to be supported for some cams but simply not that one.

This guys at Creative have a passion for making hundreds of revisions of the same products… There is no way of identifying exactly the model without opening the box so I searched for another brand. There were almost 20 webcams in the store and finally the Hercules Classic webcam was in the list, no revisions, only one version… And the same chip!!! The OV519, but this time it works.

So this time, being an OS X user hasn’t saved me from the hardware incompatibilities which we Linux users have to suffer. Lucky me it has saved me from the software incompatibilities

These days I’ve been doing some upgrading/tuning tasks in my workstation that I had previously postponed because of exams and other projects. One of them being the upgrade of vmware player, which felt more responsive and finally features usb 2.0 support. I really like this virtualization software and the freely available player version joint to the ability of QEMU for creating vmware images allows me to test new OS versions, multiplatform software, etc. Since I cannot afford the workstation version.

The installation was really straightforward, I downloaded the 64-bit version from its website and executed the vmware-install.pl script. It overwrote my previous version and asked only for installation directories, which by default matched the ones of my previous install in /opt. The difficult part in vmware installations usually comes now with the vmware-config.pl script, specially when it comes to the compilation of the kernel modules, but this time everything worked fine! Default options were right, it detected my kernel source libraries and compiled against them.

The previous time I had to install vmware-player there was no way of doing it without patching both configurator and kernel, I’m sure some of you have heard about the vmware-any-any patches So everything felt quite good, I just ran vmware as always, accept the license agreement and…

saburo virtual # /opt/vmware/player/bin/vmplayer
/opt/vmware/player/lib/vmware/bin/vmplayer: symbol lookup error: /opt/vmware/player/lib/vmware/lib/libvmwareui.so.0/libvmwareui.so.0: undefined symbol: _ZN3Gtk13RecentManager11get_defaultEv

Symbol lookup error… cool, time to google a bit. Lucky me, having waited for some time to upgrade let time for others to go around this problem and there are already fixes posted in vmware forums. It’s got something to do with GTK libraries for the user interface and the fix is as easy as adding the following line before the exec command in the /opt/vmware/bin/vmware script:

export VMWARE_USE_SHIPPED_GTK=yes

And that’s all…

There is always this confrontation between Security and Usability in the area of human-computer interaction. And there are well-known cases where security constraints have made a system fully unusable. So this is a really interesting field for both security specialists and software designers. As I am not the expert I’ll only refer to some texts that I read recently (better said: still reading) and found very instructive and practical for my career.

The first one is Security Engineering, which gives a wide overview of general aspects of security. The Bible, very amusing and freely distributed. Not directly related to usability but it’s a needed base.

The second one is Security and Usability, which I recently bought and haven’t finished yet. In fact it’s a collection of essays from different experts regarding main topics about building secure usable systems. It’s interesting because it exposes practical cases.

And finally, it’s impossible to avoid reffering to the guru Bruce Schneier (I know, it’s always the same with gurus, xD). He’s writing lately many things about psychology behind perceived security and that’s the third corner of the Security-Usability-Trust triangle. I hope you like it. Just let me quote this part:

Like a squirrel whose predator-evasion techniques fail when confronted with a car, or a passenger pigeon who finds that evolution prepared him to survive the hawk but not the shotgun, our innate capabilities to deal with risk can fail when confronted with such things as modern human society, technology, and the media. And, even worse, they can be made to fail by others–politicians, marketers, and so on–who exploit our natural failures for their gain.

There is also a spanish translation of the last document.