I started with the Win-get repository - which is quite incomplete and out of date in places, but it has a strong overview of non-free (gratis) as well as free (libre+gratis) software. I've listed what I've found. Care should be taken selecting non-free software. It often comes with malware. Everything here was scanned before I installed... but be warned.

Windows essential security: firewall, AV, and adblocker were provided by Zonealarm (non-free), ClamAV (GPL), and adaware (non-free) respectively. There is some overlap between these - which is good.

I note that windows was online about 30 mins before a comprehensive malware scan was performed. Picked up no viruses (trial Norton was running) but six bits of malware... a keylogger, adware, and some data-mining stuff.

Browser: Firefox (MPL) of course - but Opera (non-free) has more aut-of-the-box features. I thought I'd test-drive Opera though I set firefox as the default browser. Anyone cursed with IE6 or below should try these.

I can now test my website in IE6 ... the blog page renders fine in a 2004, non-patched, installation. Of course, the HBCLinux pages are still ugly - but readable.

PIM Suite: Novell Evolution works as a drop-in replacement for Outlook. But you have to copy a dll file into the correct folder if you want it to work without errors. Note: the installer dosn't work in Vista.

Productivity Suite: OpenOffice.org (LGPL) - though there are any number of free alternatives, OOo is something of a standard. It does everything MSOffice-Pro does, without the price-tag.

Photo/Image Editing: That would be the GIMP (GPL). Think "Photoshop". There's inkscape (GPL) for vector graphics and gnu blender (GPL) for 3D design and animations. But I left those off as "not required" for a complete desktop. You need the installer from sourceforge - the repository version dosn't install GTK+ library, which is needed.

Multimedia: MPlayer (GPL) - possibly the most versatile multimedia player in any platform. Also pretty: highly skinnable. Takes abit of nouse to install, so regular users may prefer VLC instead.

Miscelanious:
DexPot (non-free): This is a multi-desktop application for XP and Vista. It also allows the desktop to be completely configurable. Multi-desktop is a very useful productivity tool - if you are stuck on just one desktop, you don't know what you're missing.
ObjectDock (non-free): is an OSX style dock for XP and Vista. Integrates better that some others I tried and easy to configure. With dexpot's ability to group different icons on different desktops, a dock is probably overkill. However, it keeps things handy.
AnyDVD (non-free): deCSS and de-zoner yor DVDs. It would be interesting how this combines with Vistas piracy protection. This lets you play any DVD as if it were unencrypted and multizone. Useful if you travel alot or if you do not possess a hardware DVD player.
ffmpeg2theora (GPL) turns proprietary formats into free formats.

And what would you pay for all this functionality? I reckon the commercial equivalents that come pre-installed are, together, worth between NZ$5-800. So next time you buy a new computer, tell them: "I want no software please."

I should do some more research and stick all the instalers on a CD.

The machines are destined for teaching/loan in the nightschool course next year. Also serve as impromptue demo machines.

They had Windows XP Home (2004) licenses to start with, so removing those was the first job. The stickers come of easily enough but you just try clicking "no" in the EULA! Fortunately I only needed to powerup to get the CD drawer open.

Out of curiosity, I kept one as a dual boot. Windows warns me that I need to register - but MS rejects the product key! The register thing is pretty persistent too... a dialog pops up each day "do you want to register now?" I click "no - do this later." Then a dialog opens: "thank you for choosing to register" - opening IE! Hellooo viruses. (Even now that firefox is the default browser.) I swear - do not let Windows near the internet!

There are a bunch of trial versions of things pre-installed... I didn't look too closely, just long enough to know it isn't useful. delete delete delete. Why does the user have to jump through so many hoops right off the bat? Only to find there is nothing actually useful installed.

Obviously, Windows isn't ready for the desktop.

On the Ubuntu side - up and configured in a half an hour, including the install time. Everything is working out of the box... the modem required a closed source driver, which was included. Nothing activating that I don't need, want or use. Nothing on the desktop I don't put there.

This machine is pretty cool - even supports the new, Compiz/Fusion, 3D desktop. This thing is stable and slick with sensible defaults. Should be an Aero-killer.

Now to learn about wireless networking.

I've been reading the November Cryptogram, checking out the bits I didn't believe. Those of us forced to read Solzanitzen in school will recognise the problems when you have a "snitch state" like this. So far, bad tips have been more from an undercurrent of nervousness highlighting the "different". But it is only a matter of time before people are using this to settle scores.

That's what the extra button in the sidebar is about.

Books: Roma Eterna by Robert Silverberg. This is an alternative history style SF where the Roman Empire dosn't fall. It expands to take over the globe instead - though there's 200 years of Byzantine rule in the middle. The book is set out as short stories set during an important event, illustrating attitudes and ideas the author feels are important to the success of the state. Interestingly, despite the authors nationality, there's little of the "american way" that tends to creap into books like this. The prose is a little stilted and long-winded, but the tale is entertaining enough. It's fun.

This is my personal favorite method to make a quite nice pudding... by cheating.

You need butter, flour, milk, sugar and rice. None of the quantities will be exact... but roughly 50g, 1tblsp, 250ml, 1tblsp, and 1 cup respectively. It's the amount most cookbooks say would serve four - but if you try that you'll need ice-cream too.

Boil up the rice. It needs to be slightly overcooked so it's sticky but not gluggy. This is the longest part - the bit that makes it into a pudding only takes about five minutes. So if you do the rice normally, you can let it stand during the next bit, then drain, it should work out OK.

What we're gonna do is make a thick, sweet, white sauce and mix it in.

Using a microwave safe jug, I use a 2l pyrex jug, melt about 50g of butter. Needs to be completely liquid. Usually takes about 20-30secs. Stir in a tablespoon of flour. Any flour will work, I like to use self-raising flour: it makes things more fluffy. A rounded tablespoon is usually enough. The mixture should be wet but not runny.

Heat a cup of milk. That's a metric cup - 250ml. The milk should not boil, just warm. 30-40secs should be enough. The idea is that it shouldn't make the butter/flour mix go solid when you mix it in. If the milk gets a skin on top, it's too hot.

Gradually stir the milk into the jug. It won't mix evenly so don't worry.

Nuke for 2mins, then stir.

At this point you want a glossy, plasticky look. About the consistency of toothpaste.

Often it comes out too thick, that means too much flour. That's OK, just add more milk, a dribble at a time, and stir it in, until you get the right consistency. If it is too thin, don't worry right now, just go on with the next step. So you should err on the side of too runny.

Sometimes the mix has seperated. In this case, it will be almost solid on top and liquid under that. You'll need to break up the solid part and mix it in - squashing where needed. It can help if you interrupt the nukeage halfway to give it an extra stir. This isn't as bad as the lumps you get in gravey, they usually blend in. Even if they don't, the next nuke will get-em.

Stir in the sugar. It's a pudding so it has to be sweet. I use fine brown sugar for this.

Add flavouring if you want. Baileys is good, a dash of vanilla, caramel or butterscotch works well. This is usually needed since the regular method of making rice pudding in the oven lightly burns the lactose in the milk, turning it into caramel.

Now, if you added a mashed banana at this stage, you could portion it out and chill it overnight, and you'd have banana pudding. Add half a cup of your favorite cheese and you have a simple pasta topping (leave off the sugar). But this is rice pudding so drain that rice and stir it in.

Nuke for another 2mins and stir. If it wasn't too runny though, only go for another minute. You only need to cook in the flavour.

This time it should be a good consistency, holding it's shape when moulded. As before, if it is too thick, slowly add more milk. If too runny you have a problem: add flour, a level table-spoon at a time, stir it in, and re-nuke for a minute, until it's right or too thick.

You can keep it warming in the oven until it is needed. Portion up, garnish and serve.

Restaurants use an ice-cream scoop or some sort of mould. Then it can be served on a plate, and it looks good. People have been known to pour over a thin sauce like a glaze - caramel, chocolate, or a fruit sauce works well. Some pour a shot of brandy over it and set it on fire!

This is a very versatile and forgiving recipe, and, best of all, you can't burn it.

Enjoy.

I've been reviewing the site code, and I should really bring it up to HTMLv4 standard. That will mean using stylesheets and getting a more consistent look across the pages. We'll see.

That "Open Source Computing" course is taking shape - actual dates and a venue. It should kick-off with a free seminar to introduce the ideas. Formally invite people with an interest... the press... but that's in February. Plenty of time.

Movie: V for Vendetta - based on a comic book, a nice take on the Guy Fawlks legend, lots of introspection and dark madness. Bit of a study on the use of fear to control populations. Well worth the watching even if it dosn't have Milla in it.

However, I think the following from the company running the game is very telling:

"We got involved because of an increasing number of sites which are pretending to be Habbo. People might then try and log in and get their details stolen."

This is the mysterious bit - what has actually been stolen? All that's happened is that a value in a players database has changed from "true" to "false". Surely the company can just reverse that?

Banks, for example, have a similar thing. Your balance is a value in a database someplace. Your bank balance, is a representation of your wealth. Technically, Habbo "furni" (and other stuff) is like that - especially as your bank balance is used to obtain it. But bank keep an audit trail, offline too, so that suspect transactions can be traced. This is why you can use your signiture, or a 4-digit pin, for authentication.

The furni also has a physical existence. It occupies some bandwidth and has some overhead to maintain it. We know bandwidth costs money... it's a kind of real-estate. Real estate, like any commodity, is worth whatever people are prepared to pay for it. Modifying the real estate, changes it's value. These guys have found a way of charging absolutely the Earth for each byte of realty.

Can furni be purchased from other players, or just the company? I thought of investigating, but decided I already have a life. If one could give some of your habbo money to another player, the possibility of businesses arise. If the "theives" can onsell their "stolen" goods, the company would really miss out.

Similarities aside, technically the players are paying the company for services - like games, and decorations for their "apartment", not for goods like "furniture". What the scammers have done, in effect, is deface a web page. The company should own up to their responsibilities and restore the pages. They should protect themselves and their players better in future.

Six million people play that game, each month, they say. An odd figure... I suspect that is the number of logins rather than the number of actual players. Presumably, some people login every day. Using this figure for a moment... if each login generates an average of 1/12 of a cent... that's $60,000 a year. I bet it's much higher. At 1 cent a login, they get that much a month!

The company is protecting that business.

That gullible people are worth money is nothing new. I suspect that "virtual worlds" players would tend to have "gullibility" featuring high on their demographic. Scam artists are attracted to congregations of gullible people. Where serious money is involved, you'll find serious scams. It's only a matter of time.

Movie: The Wrong Man (2005, Morgan Freeman, Ben Kingsly, Lucy Liu, Bruce Willis) A black comedy centering around an elaborate sting. The setup is too elaborate for the stated motivation, but the film is good for it's, sometimes biting, humour. Bleak start, steady pace, reasonably satisfying ending that wasn't 100% predictable. Lucy Liu shines as Nancy Drew.

Things suddenly moved quite a bit faster than expected. Today I was asked for a course outline, and required materials - and they'll pay me.

I'm not sure they understand what they are getting - the form was sent in MS DOC format - non-free and really needs MSWord to read it properly. MSWord costs $300 - why require someone to spend so much to read your work when html format is free for everyone.

Fortunately the document was easily converted by Open Office and I had the MS fonts installed. So all's well.

In general, it is very bad form to send attachments in restricted formats - do not do this. Even if your recipient has Word (for eg), that dosn't mean their version of word can read your documents. New versions of Word have trouble rendering DOC files created by older versions - and old versions have no hope of getting the newer formats.

Consider plain text, real text, or html - all available under "save as". There's even a plugin for open document format for Word2007.

Anyway, I've also started putting out feelers for corporate support. There's Canonical, who offer assistance with training schemes, and Novell have an interest in NZ education. There are also a bunch of small computer vendors who have expressed an interest.

As the course is aimed at pensioners, benificiaries and school students, there may be government money in there too.

But it's early days yet, and the course is very small.

Movies:
My Super Ex-Girlfreind - fizzle. Good idea and a nice scene with a shark but it just dosn't come together.
Eragon - High fantasy for kids. Starts out like Star Wars - princess on the run from evil forces, message to be delivered, winds up in the hands of a simple farmboy who lives with his uncle. Farmboy turns out to have a destiny. Even ends with a flying duel in confined spaces against a dark magician. Set up for a sequal - will they make it?

Basically, I'm glad I didn't see these on the big screen.

I got an e-mail from the NZWW reporter, now working fot Herald on Sunday... asking if The Warehouse has offered us hush money :) re Corwin's case re the other kids that have been burned.

Well, I had to dissappoint her, no money offers at all from guys at the Red Shed. Not much point really, I'd blogged the thing before they could get back to me. Once it's on the internet, it's pretty unlikely to go away.

OTOH: if there's money going, I'm pretty sure I could speak louder...

Instead, people have been taking us to dinner - very nice, I like to encourage this. Otherwise, it is a time of cuddles and more cleaning. I've been dismantling the child-safety stuff around the house. Changed the broom-heads and vanquished the cobwebs.

I have a bottle of Jose Cuervo marguerita mix, which actually contains no marguerita ingredients at all, and mixing it with Bacquardi. Nice. Cheers.

It's kinda interesting actually, 49 days of ritually thinking about the person "moving on" seems like good greif therapy. About the right length of time too.

Cathy and I will be spending the weekend in Tutukaka, visiting Schnapper Rock amongst other things. There is a very private beach there where we went to conceive Corwin... under pohutukawa, gannets fishing in the bay, tuis singing overhead... (links are to photos) with any luck I'll be able to resist going for number two! (Weather's co-operating at least.)

On the Linux front: fedora 8 is released on this date in the USA... that's tomorrow in NZ. There is already an excellent install page for fedora releases at mjmwired.net so I won't be doing one.

Fedora is the community project that feeds Red Hat Enterprise. It is a bleading-edge distro which comes with everything on a DVD (or you install over a network.) It is a jack-of-all-trates distro which I would suggest for the student and the programmer. Ubuntu is a better home desktop and OpenSUSE is a better home/enterprise solution.

On DVD: Been watching Babylon 5, four episodes at a time, on DVD. Tonight over a mexican pizza from Dominoes and a rum punch. The series special effects have withstood the test of time and the story is still strong. Perhaps I should organize a B5 festival/weekend sometime and run them all back-to-back?

At the time of the talk, 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) was up and coming, Novell were doing a deal with Microsoft, and the SCO lawsuit was still dragging on.

Noteable events since that talk include the upsurge in linux hardware support as Kernel Hackers basically offered to be the Linux Devision for whoever wants one. Dell started offering Linux pre-installed, Feisty in fact, which Mark said was not going to happen - but he gave reasons why not, and those reasons got addressed.

Movie: Ultraviolet - a ho-hum movie out on DVD, carried by Milla Jovovich. The movie has an OK plot, about vampires and corporate ethics, which it attempts to use as a vehicle for some heavy CGI - which owes a great deal to The Matrix. But... Milla... hmmmm - Milla.

Book: Darwin Awards IV - this is actually quite depressing reading in one go. Best dipped into. The awards "celebrate" the improvement of the human gene-pool by the removal from it of certain individuals in a manner which demonstrates why they were a liability in the first place. We can all be glad these guys (and the are predominantly male) are no longer breeding.

However, the awards still consistently include stories that cannot be true. Like the story of the person who's TV arial blew down while they were watching news coverage of a hurricane bearing down on them... so, climbed on the roof to fix it... (the arial, not the hurricane). The trouble is that this person was alone and was blown for "miles". So how do we know what happened. The most we know is that the dead person must have been outside in the storm and that their TV was on. Nope: the story is false, despite being listed as "confirmed". The only confirmation criterion is that the story get published in a newspaper. Tabloid references are common.

Movie: Resident Evil - fi-nally. Very good and a satisfying finale. Everything we've come to expect. And the team still get away with things that look hokey in print - like the Hitchcock "Birds" scene... mind you, this is "Birds" on P!

There were a few "waitaminute" moments, like when nobody noticed a particular teammate changing when they've presumably seen the symptoms many times and getting out of the cars to investigate a strange noise when they have serveillance cameras. But the pace just bumped over them and onto more Milla Jovovich goodness.

The ending is set up for a sequel. Gossip is that there will be no more, but there may be spinoffs.

Trip to Uretiti beach today, to scatter Corwin's ashes. Personalised plates arrived yesterday, I'd ordered them a while ago and forgot about them until recently... so I put them on my car for the occasion. This beach was Corwin's all-time favorite... we didn't go very often but when we did he would be off along the beach until he was a wee dot. Then he'd be back at warp speed to haul us into the surf. After making sure his parents were thoroughly soaked, he'd want to write his name in the sand. He could manage a wobbly "COR" then stamp his feel excaiming "double---you" before getting help. Then a picnic, and a last plunge through the waves before home. He'd be asleep by the time we'd get back. That's Cathy (left) with the ashes. They're in a tub about the size of 500g of butter, weighs a bit less. A fine, dark grey, feathery ash with white hard bits like crushed shells that I didn't investigate too closely. The day was warm and slightly overcast. We drew his name in the sand, and watched the flames over Marsden Point while waiting for the beach to empty somewhat. Don't want to get Corwin into anyones picnic. We waded into the sea and dropped the ashes. The wind caught and scattered them over the surf. Dinner tonight is apricot-chicken enchiladas.

Much of today was spent fixing my car. Cruising home on the motorway, and the temp. guage hits the red "H"! Oily steam just pours out. I have to cut across three lanes of rush-hour traffic to get to an offramp - everyone makes room for me. It's that dramatic!

At a service station, I find that the radiator and it's bottle are empty and dry. I fill the bottle (not good to fill a hot radiator) and limp home.

I was scaring motorists with great clouds of white steam pouring off the car. When I got home, I couldn't see anything of the engine for the steam. The oily smell was a bit of a worry. That was yesterday.

Today, it became pretty clear there was a leak someplace. So I filled both the bottle and the radiator and tootled off to the garage. The temp. behaved itself, but when I got there (about 10mins) I found half the water had gone. It turned out that the top water hose was split.

This turned out to be an easy fix. Then there's a lot of testing to see how much all this cooked the engine. Well... I got away with it! No measurable damage.

To celebrate, I picked up the Wendies Promo (Baconator - large), a bottle of Bacardi (to go in the coke) and, on impulse, a pre-mix called "Crazy Mexican" (tequila, vodka, lime, guarana, caffien & sugar) which turns out to be very nice. So now I'm feeling muy suave :D

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(CORWIN: 1992 Honda CRX del Sol SiR)

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