I stumbled upon free OpenOffice training videos in a variety of news sources this morning. Although the videos demonstrate the recently-released OpenOffice 2 in a Windows environment, these are just as relevant to Linux users.

As a public service for Commonwealth of Massachusetts employees (and everyone else), NewsForge is presenting — absolutely free of charge — 11 OpenOffice.org training videos as part of this article.

Plenty of Web traffic and computer power drained in vain

OMBIE attacks on this site have persisted for over a month and have shown no sign of abatement. In fact, it only gets worse as more diverse locations get targetted for the puspose of referrer spam injection.

I have ultimately grown tired of these attacks rather than become accustomed to them. Each day, over 1,000 attacks are launched against my domain (2 of them actually) by hijacked Windows-powered machines. To remain kind to all genuine visitors, thus far I have re-directed suspicious page requests internally, displaying a forbidden (error 403) page. This has gotten me nowhere as the attackers are not deterred by any of this. Only more and more Windows computer get hijacked and ‘puppeteered’, so brute-force is never an issue.

Yesterday I became slightly more emotional and perhaps courageous enough to forward all of these leeches to microsoft.com/this-is-YOUR-zombie-NOT-mine. Let us wait and see how Microsoft handles nearly 50,000 of these zombie attacks per month. In my defence, all I do is merely pass on the zombies to the domain which I find responsible for their misfortunate existence. I look forward to some form of response from Microsoft with great anticipation.

A week back I enquired in nntp://uk.legal as to whether Microsoft could be held accountable directly for these attacks, which are due to major loopholes in their flagship O/S. Opinions which I received in response were mixed, but no doubt Microsoft’s faulty product, which allows computers to be used as weapons, ought to take at least part of the blame. I previously explained more on that stance of mine and arguments regarding liability.

Season of the playful penguins from Oyonale

Microsoft released a report that is very damaging to the image of their operating system. As Paul Murphy from ZDNet put it, ‘Unix beats Windows’ – says Microsoft!.

What’s noteworthy about it is that Microsoft compared Singularity to FreeBSD and Linux as well as Windows/XP – and almost every result shows Windows losing to the two Unix variants. For example, they show the number of CPU cycles needed to “create and start a process” as 1,032,000 for FreeBSD, 719,000 for Linux, and 5,376,000 for Windows/XP.”

Microsoft are still trying to defend their new operating system called Singularity, but in the process they lead to public confusion and doubt. As we approach the release of Windows Vista (due next year), the Gartner group suggests that Vista should be ignored until 2008.

Companies shouldn’t rush to upgrade to Microsoft Windows Vista, according to analysts at Gartner, who believe most firms could safely hold back until 2008.

The majority of improvements in Vista will be security-related and most of this functionality “is available via third-party products today”, Gartner claimed in a research note published on Friday.

In short, I read the following item, which I believe is old news despite the datestamp:

The world’s largest maker of personal computers, Dell, has reported a fall in third-quarter profits after taking a charge to repair faulty parts.

Putting two and two together, the following item on bad Intel capacitors got Slashdotted a short while ago:

At issue are faulty capacitors on motherboards that store power and regulate voltage. Defective capacitors found in the Dell Optiplex workstations, some Apple iMac G5s, HP xw-series workstations made in 2004 and PCs with the Intel D865GBF motherboard have been found to bulge, pop, leak and crust over, causing video failure and periodic system shutdowns.

I have recently discovered a UK shop that sells laptops without an operating system (i.e. without Windows) and offers many AMD options too. Thus, they are entitled to have a link.

Related link: Linux on the laptop

A sign that is sure to get people’s attention

ATHER common these are aptly-orchestrated campaigns that attract media attention and stir talks among people. It is a form of free advertisement, which benefits from people’s willingness to propagate a message.

Take this code debugging project for example. They offer beer, they offer a trip to Roumania (timely due to Halloween) and finally they receive a free advert on Slashdot and free labour to test their program. Slashdot editors, among others, fell for it…

The winning formula:

• Set up a contest
• Make the reward interesting
• 1^st prize: Get free ads
• Invite just the ‘talented’ few
• Users test program
• Hacks found and fixed
• 2^nd prize: Profit

Jeff Veen explains why the idea of invites is similar. WordPress.com takes this approach when accumulating users for a new Web service, possibly following the tactics of Google Mail. This also may prevent misuse and bad activity as I previously explained. From a commercial point-of-view, it is a disguised form of playing hard to get, though there true intentions behind it, namely quality assurance (e.g. misuse of 2 GB mail account for MP3 sharing and storage) and reliable moderation, e.g. spam flagging in Akismet, which can be tricky.

Firefox Web Developer extension (click to enlarge)

OME time in the past I mentioned my ‘Firefox essentials’ and a variety of Firefox toolbars. As it has been many months since then, I would like to list extensions and hacks which I am still pleased with.

• CSS-based ads blocker – get rid of nasty advertisements (even the ones that sometimes appear in my site)
• Mouse Gestures (particularly from Optimoz) – browse using your hand motion
• Flashblock – block Flash and permit its invocation using mouseclicks
• Googlebar – better in many respects than the Google Toolbar
• SearchStatus – highlight rel="nofollow" links in red; display PageRank and Alexa rank in the status bar; check for inclusion in the Google Directory and DMOZ
• Web Developer – the ultimate designer/debugger extension (see picture at top)
• Netcraft Toolbar – detailed and rather technical site information
• AdSense Notifier – little notifier for accumulated earnings – updated merely at real-time in the status bar

Redundant extensions that I no longer use or have disabled over time:

• FlashGot – mass downloads (can use wget instead)
• SpellBound – spellchecker in textareas (does not work consistently)
• PRGoogleBar – Googlebar with PageRank (Googlebar has evolved more though)
• Live HTTP Headers – if you are curious or develop for the Web and delve into headers-level
• A9 Toolbar – good for boosting your Alexa rank (via history log)

OUSE gestures are the means for commanding actions using movement of the mouse. The user, for example, could jiggle the mouse and/or use combinations of mouseclicks to flip from one Web page to another or insert a piece of commonly-used text such as an E-mail signature. More usefully, programs can be opened by drawing letters and numbers that menmonically characterise them.

There are free software packages for enabling mouse gestures, all of which are rather light-weight:

Linux: WayV – Supports text commands, e.g. quick insertion of names, frequently-used Web site addresses, form filling, etc. WayV supports binding to either a mouse key or a mouse combination with keyboard triggers such as SHIFT or ALT, which avoid collisions. There is no front-end for configuration of actions and gestures, yet (as of 2001).

Windows: StrokeIt – A graphical interface for configuring mouse gestures, which supports plenty of actions. A clear distance is taken from the command-line approach (as in WayV), so there is good abstraction which helps any beginner. The application, however, does not look very modern. It is said to be the ‘standard’ mouse gesture application for Windows users nonetheless.

Note that both Windows and Linux applications don’t appear to have been maintained (nor extended) for a very long time. Regardless, they still are compatible with modern desktop environments.

Firefox (cross-platform): Optimoz – One extension which I personally consider to be a Firefox essential is the Optimoz Mouse Gestures extension. It is only one among several mouse gestures extensions, of which I tried a few. Opera includes mouse gestures ‘out of the box’ and is apparently the root of browser mouse gestures.

Alternative: Keyboard accelerators – Keyboard shortcut keys (for Linux/Windows) can be quick provided that the user gets the mouse and keyboard positioning right and has memorised the key-to-program assignments. Keyboard accelerators are only one among several methods for invoking programs.

All in all, I still find use of the keyboard accelerators to be faster then mouse gestures. This is also a matter of habit.