This only weeks since Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd had pronounced much satisfaction with South Australia’s rural health system after visiting Murray Bridge for a Rural Health Summit .

Allowing an email client to render html emails opens up security issues such as ‘web-bugs’ – online images that when fetched (automatically in many clients) provide the sender (potentially a spammer or botnet) of the email nice info such as your IP address, your OS, and that the email address is valid.

Now, I’m not saying that this computer society is using dastardly tactics such as webugs to keep tabs on their readership – they are a good bunch of folks. However, encouraging (or in this case demanding) that email clients have html enabled to view their emails is borderline irresponsible. We computer professionals ought to be encouraging the use of text-only emails and the permanent disarmament of html emails. Numerous security exploits in all the major windows email clients have shown how dangerous this kind of ‘intelligent scripting’ can be.

The fellow behind nthelp.com has setup a page for testing whether you are vulnerable.
http://www.nthelp.com/OEtest/oe.htm

One of the major questions asked year after year is: why give it away? People just don’t accept that stuff can be free, without any adverse catches (there is a catch with GPL‘d software after all – you aren’t allowed to limit others access to it!). Proprietory software houses have done a ‘bang-up-job’ on convincing the public that software cannot possibly be free. Certainly, the shareware craze of the early nineties, and the windows freeware scene (that offers trojans and adware as part of the package) has disillusioned a major proportion of potential users. Many don’t understand the difference between freeware and Free: ‘Free software can be used, studied, and modified without restriction; Free software embodies the concept of “free speech” while freeware that of “free beer“. Freeware is also different from shareware; the latter obliges the user to pay after some trial period or to gain additional functionality.’. (from freeware wikipedia page)

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Neverball, a game of extreme skill and kewl graphics

Twenty-Four hours ’til our Software Freedom Day event starts, and I’m @work wondering if I will have some sleep tonight. There is always so much to do in preparation for these events, and thankfully I don’t have to do any major organising (leaving the heavy lifting to Robert, Peter and Jason over the years has proven to be a much better idea for all involved), but I still find myself burning DVD’s full of Open applications and finishing off installs on various demo machines.  I can still make a little time for one thing though, and that is Neverball (www.neverball.org)!  Like a maniacal cross between SpinDizzy (remember that?) and those wooden puzzle games we had as kids, Neverball is addictive and a lot of fun for the whole family. Such a shame that it’s only available for Linux, Windows, MacOS, FreeBSD, OpenSolaris and countless others.  Viva la OpenSource! Viva la Revolution!

And yes, before you ask, it’s available on this years OpenDisc

Update your bookmarks, and keep coming back!  The site will continue to be accessible at outtaspace.org for the next while, it will simply redirect to spaced.ws for now.

Those who put up with me in RL will know that I’ve run Linux as my Desktop since the early nineties.  You’ll understand that Windows gives me the willies, and my blood-pressure surely couldn’t take vista, I’d stroke-out before the install was complete.  I’ve used just about every mainstream distro available at one time or another, and will tell you this for free – there is very little between them.

It is a popular question on the various forums: ‘which distro for application X’ where X is server/media/whatever.  The question unfortunately highlights a mass confusion about what a distribution is, and isn’t, and the Distro producers are not going to like my answer.  Essentially, I think for the average layperson, it does not matter what distribution you use.  Ubuntu is popular, mostly due to the vast number of forums on the net available for the answering of questions.  There are very few (none?) applications available for Ubuntu that aren’t available for Mandriva or Fedora or Debian or SuSe, or … you get the picture.  The difference between the distros comes down to one or two minor tweaks: some have slightly different text-mode package managers (generally the GUI hides any differences), the default Desktop Environment may be KDE or Gnome or whatever, and the default installed packages may change.  Most of these things can be altered or added – You can have KDE on Ubuntu rather than (or as well as) Gnome if you wish – certainly you can install KDE applications in Gnome and vice-versa.  You don’t need to install Kubuntu (the KDE flavoured Ubuntu) in order to take advantage of your favourite KDE application – and this is the key point: there are thousands of applications available for Linux and OpenSolaris and the *BSD’s – use the package manager that came with your OS and the world is your oyster.  No need to format your drives just because you want to fiddle with VDR or MythTV or you want to use OpenOfffice rather than KOffice.

The very best thing you can do, regardless of distro, is brush up on your googling skills, whatever you’re trying to do, someone has probably done it before either on your distro of choice or one very much like it

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