The bad reputation that the press is giving the term “hacker” is getting. Too. Much. To bear. From this morning’s news.

Supporters of Gary McKinnon have condemned the decision to let the former hacker be extradited to the US.

[...]

“The US Government is scapegoating Gary McKinnon to cover up their ownshortcomings as systems administrators,” he told the BBC News website. “Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?”

For the record, the system administrators did not change the default password, so McKinnon had a look at some files and changed the desktop’s wallpaper. This is based on something that I read in a fairly reliable source last year. It seems as though the current American regime is becoming irrational and suppressive.

The following screenshot, which I grabbed just moments ago, speaks for itself. Many thanks to T.J. from the search engine newsgroup for pointing that one out.

Google proposes Yahoo Search (it shiows up right below Yahoo
Mail) as a candidate for ‘therapy products’

Rarely can you find such ironic screenshots.

HEN was the last time you revised your résumé? Here comes a personal rant. Explicitly putting in skills such as “Word” and “Photoshop”, rather than “office/authoring/WYSIWYG tools” and “graphical design/editing applications” (respectively), is just plain silly. Competence in industry is about skills that are independent of just one commercial application. Times are changing and preferred software changes in accordance. Businesses evolve. Adaptability and familiarity with diversity is where true merits lie. Common function names and icons can help the user quickly familiarise and re-orientate, so generic skills are what truly counts. Think memorisation of menus versus understanding. The paradigm and terminology, as well as menu layouts, will typically remain uniform, owing to the nature of the task at hand.

In conclusion, I would suggest omitting brand names from any curriculum vitæ. Programming languages might be the exception, yet it’s the paradigms that count (e.g. object oriented, scripting, declarative). In programming languages, it’s largely syntax that varies, much as in menus in various applications and common utilities. Avoid being assigned to a vendor, whether it is commercial or not. Failing to do so is pretty much like saying that you can drive a Corsa rather than saying that you are in possession of a drivers’s licence.

An example of a poor user interface
in The GIMP (version 1.2.3)

VER wondered what a Windows XP clone that is based on Linux would look like? Just follow the link to find out. Apart from various Linux distributions that achieve Windows ‘lookalikiness’ out of the box, there are many extensions too. Regular and long-time Linux users , however, are rarely happy to discover some a new “Start” button for Ubuntu, for instance. And I speak from recent experiences and observations here.

On a related note, KDE is frequently said to imitate Microsoft Windows a little bit too much (design mistakes included). Nevertheless, definitely not in spite my opposition to this claim, I always say that KDE is user-friendly, intuitive, innovative, and comprehensive. It offers me plenty of function that is not available elsewhere. I have just spotted the following ‘fresh-out-of-the-oven’ blog post, which seems to concur with my opinion:

10 Things I Love About KDE

Oh, man, a top ten list. Am I already scraping the bottom of the barrel? Don’t worry, friends. I have several articles on the back burner, but various endeavors are preventing me from completing them. So let’s just run through my favorite desktop environment ever. In no particular order, here are ten things I love about KDE.

(The list in brevity):

1. KIOSlaves

2. Krusader

3. YaKuake

4. Respect

5. KMyMoney

6. KDevelop

7. The Simple Things

8. It’s About Choice Too

9. You Don’t Get Functionality Like This Just Anywhere, You Know

10. Outlook Killer? Okay!

Here is an arbitrary list of items which contribute to hassle and even distress:

• Monolithic content management systems such as PHP-Nuke (and its derivatives or siblings) still attract spam. My forum section has begun eating spam on a daily basis and it is very time consuming. I restore from backup every couple of days, merely reverting to an older database state.
• The blog’s CAPTCHA filter has been cracked, so I must cope with over 100 spam per day.
• Some people post incoherent comments which are not only characterised by poor grammar and typos. It makes one wonder if click-and-point sobriety tests should replace CAPTCHA-based filters.
• With the increase in the number of Windows zombies on the Web, the amount of junk mail that I receive doubled within a few months. I am not alone in this, so I at least find some sympathy.

Speaking of which, the following showed up in the news last night:

Spam zombies give UK ISPs the fear

A massive 96 per cent of 50 ISP respondents cited the proliferation of botnets – networks of virus-infected PCs under the control of hackers – as a key business issue.

According to industry analyst firm Gartner, seven in 10 items of spam originate from infected PCs.

Let us take a moment to thank out friends at Microsoft. Owing to their so-easy-to-hijack operating system, we all choke on spam.

• Lawsuit against Google over PageRank got bloggers humming. It was a mastery of incompetence. One such lawsuit was apparently successful, so algorithms that discriminate (not deliberately so) can lead their operator to paying fines.
• Judging by one of the OSDL mailing lists, to which I have been subscribed for while, the OSDL mailing lists (much like xmms-dev) mainly attract spam, kooks, and posers.
• Outlook Express or Outlook (same codebase; same rubbish; one word less) are a bit of a handful. I am tired of receiving E-mail where responses, are top-posted (‘jeopardy-style’ composition, i.e. answer comes first, then the question).
• Making your software exclusively available for Windows is like selling and displaying your merchandise at a garbage site just because most prospective customers reside.
• Digg version 3 does not discourage dupes as effectively as it used to. It makes it somewhat inferior to its predecessor. But I digress…

Season of the playful penguins from Oyonale

HE ‘SCO threat’ is merely gone now, which means that Linux should no longer be associated with looming lawsuits. To quote:

“A judge’s decision to dismiss 182 of the company’s 294 claims against IBM reduces the chance that SCO will prevail, one analyst says. ”

This is a significant milestone in the road to worldwide Linux adoption. Within just a couple of month, Novell is expected to deliver a real ‘Windows killer’. The following set of videos demonstrates some of the new features.

The annual conference Medical Image Understanding and Analysis 2006 is due to begin tomorrow. I will be presenting on the second day (HTML version). This means that I am not very likely to be active on the Web. Certain habitual chores will be unaffected: exercise and posting of GNU/Linux advocacy items. I have begun taking the latter more seriously and, as of several months ago, the return has been tremendous.

The months to proceed are likely to have me occupied with thesis writing. It appears as though I’ll have to make various submissions concurrently. These events often seem to distract, but I am positive that I can stay on track nevertheless and submit in September.