Adopting Open Standards

This is something I have been crying hoarse for many many years.Now the Britishers (among many others!!) seems to have heard my voice ;-) Do read the full article from the BBC site article.  Read on here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20178175


Wish there were similar initiatives - if not in the Government, at least in our organisations. It confounds me why we can't put this in our RFCs and Procurement processes ?? Again - needs the right people at the right places who understand technology and its implications!!

Extract from the site :

Government IT projects: UK adopts open technology standards

"For too long, government IT has been too expensive, over-specified and run in contract structures that encourage complexity, duplication and fragmented user services," said Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude in a speech announcing the strategy.

The standards the government wanted to adopt would favour smaller, innovative tech firms and would demand compliance with open data formats and protocols from every IT supplier, he said.

In the technology world, open standards stand in opposition to proprietary formats. As their name implies they let everyone that wants to look at how a program is built or data is formatted.
This openness helps to flush out bugs in software and makes it easier for data to travel and be re-used as programmers can easily see how it is structured.

Some more info on Open Standards

Open Standards on Wikipedia found here

A quick primer on the Open Standards principles from here :-

Availability
Open Standards are available for all to read and implement.

Maximize End-User Choice
Open Standards create a fair, competitive market for implementations of the standard. They do not lock the customer in to a particular vendor or group.

No Royalty
Open Standards are free for all to implement, with no royalty or fee. Certification of compliance by the standards organization may involve a fee.

No Discrimination
Open Standards and the organizations that administer them do not favor one implementor over another for any reason other than the technical standards compliance of a vendor's implementation. Certification organizations must provide a path for low and zero-cost implementations to be validated, but may also provide enhanced certification services.

Extension or Subset
Implementations of Open Standards may be extended, or offered in subset form. However, certification organizations may decline to certify subset implementations, and may place requirements upon extensions (see Predatory Practices).

Predatory Practices
Open Standards may employ license terms that protect against subversion of the standard by embrace-and-extend tactics. The licenses attached to the standard may require the publication of reference information for extensions, and a license for all others to create, distribute, and sell software that is compatible with the extensions. An Open Standard may not othewise prohibit extensions

Stitch PDF files togather

Many a times I had to face the issue of sending multiple PDF files for official/personal reasons - either by email or for backing up. What bugged me was I had to multiple attachments or references - specially when one had to send a multi-paged invoice or bills - which has been scanned as PDF (each page).

Linux provided a simple solution - using the inbuilt 'Ghostscript' program. Just run it in the command line and presto, we have an output PDF combined file. (ofcourse - you have to have pdfwrite installed - by a simple apt-get install command)

gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=finished.pdf file1.pdf file2.pdf

where:

• gs -- starts the Ghostscript program
• -dBATCH -- once Ghostscript processes the PDF files, it should exit. If you don't include this option, Ghostscript will just keep running
• -dNOPAUSE -- forces Ghostscript to process each page without pausing for user interaction
• -q -- stops Ghostscript from displaying messages while it works
• -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -- tells Ghostscript to use its built-in PDF writer to process the files
• -sOutputFile=finished.pdf -- tells Ghostscript to save the combined PDF file with the name that you specified

Open Source and Linux Economics

The usual question that many ask and suspect - 'How come Linux is given away free? And how do these companies - like Ubuntu - survive?'

I always have a difficult time answering that - and most of the time can make out that the audience is not convinced. Those in the government and decision making chain instead of being thankful that we have a great software available free of cost - do tend to feel there is some ulterior motives (who gives away things for free now-a-days??) or just don't believe it!

Came across a great blog by Mark Shuttleworth - the Owner/Creator of Ubuntu (his company is called Canonical) - wherein he explains some of the free and Open Source Economics. Check it out here
(of course - make it a point to check out the fair comments at the blog site too! Pretty interesting debate!!)

Mark is a 'billionaire' by the way, and the second 'self-funded' space tourist - check his Wikipedia site here

Extract from his blog:

The bulk of the direct cost in creating the audience of Ubuntu users is carried by Canonical. There are many, many indirect costs and contributions that are carried by others, both inside the Ubuntu community and in other communities, without which Ubuntu would not be possible. But that doesn’t diminish the substantial investment made by Canonical in a product that is in turn made available free of charge to millions of users and developers.

The business model which justifies this investment, and which we hope will ultimately sustain that effort for the desktop without dependence on me, is that fee-generating services which are optional for users provide revenue to Canonical. This enables us to make the desktop available in a high quality, fully maintained form, without any royalties or license fees. By contrast, every other commercial Linux desktop is a licensed product – you can’t legally use it for free, the terms for binaries are similar to those for Windows or the MacOS. They’re entitled to do it their way, we think it’s good in the world that we choose to do it our way too.

Social Networking - and Digital freedom

With today's generation growing up with social networks and network-on-the-move-mobiles in their genes, 'my generation' (in the 30s and 40s somethings) are trying their best to cope up with this rapidly changing digital revolution. The hard reality is we will never catch up to the current 'teen' generation mental make-up, but YES - we can try to understand them (emphasis on the word TRY!).


For us, 'History' and 'Geography' meant learning about the Mughals, Freedom Struggle, the continents, oceans, weather and earth behavious. For today's teens - they have to reckon with the WWW first - understand what e-mail is all about (the other day my 14 Year daughter wonder aloud - who needs GMail when she already is living her life with Facebook!), what a simple HTML page meant to us in those days, how we were wonder struck with desktop machines, Win32/95/XP etc., ofcourse along with a dose of the old 'History' and 'Geography'.

So we do have have some cribbing to be done - justifiably, specially since some of us as so passionate about Open Source and Freedom. Came across a great blog that seems to reflect all my thoughts - and of course, the author has put it much better than what I ever could do. Do read - a must for Parents who dig digital technology !! :-)

Convert PDF to Text using Google docs

Seems like manna from heaven!!! Finally, Google has answered a host of prayers and provided a simple tool to convert PDF to Text - in 'Google Docs'!

Just upload PDF files in 'Google Docs', click on convert to txt... Google does its magic for a few seconds.. and lo and behold - the PDF in editable text form is ready

The Text conversion is about 70% - 90% okk.. depending on the kind of PDF uploaded! But No complaints!!!

After struggling with solutions for OCRs for PDF, this is a big relief!!

Touchtable wonder

Fascinating Technology!!

Web Developers Handbook

Completely bowled over by this site:
http://www.alvit.de/handbook/

A must visit for web developers/designers/hobbyist and free-lancers!!
Seems an encyclopaedia for CSS/XHTML/Standards with excellent references and blog links!! Loved it - and needed to bookmark it in my blog.

The Open Source Picture

Open source is a concept of free sharing of technical information that has been around for much longer than most of us would imagine. When we think of open source today, we usually think of software. As wonderful and widely used as open source software is, according to Linus Torvalds, "the future is open source everything." From foods and beverages to scientific and health research studies and advanced technological innovations, the world has turned to open source.

A total picture of Open Source reproduced below from http://www.focus.com/fyi/information-technology/open-source-open-world/

LCD and LED displays to be give way to LPD

Forget LCD and LED Displays - here comes LPD


CA-based Prysm came out of stealth mode to talk about its plans for manufacturing Laser Phosphor Displays, or LPDs. The new devices, which the company will show off at the Integrated Systems Europe trade show in Amsterdam next month, reportedly use 25 percent as much electricity as equivalently-sized LCD screens. And they should be easier to manufacture too, since they don't have a backplane of transistors like LCD screens: the image is generated by a laser beam that sweeps across phosphor stripes under the control of a scanning mirror. The venture-funded startup, which plans to build and sell LPD screens under its own brand, is promoting them as a low-cost, low-maintenance way to display information in lobbies, airports, broadcast studios, command centers, and the like.

Full story at http://bit.ly/4Cu8ud

OpenDNS response to Google's DNS Service

Continuing with the news of Google's new free DNS Service which I posted earlier, the response from the OpenDNS founder is interesting and relevant. From his blog at:
http://blog.opendns.com/2009/12/03/opendns-google-dns/

Visit the site to check out the interesting comments readers have also made
- gantayet

====Extract from the blog=====

Some thoughts on Google DNS 

by David Ulevitch, Founder on Dec 3rd, 2009

Google launched a DNS service today, almost exactly four years after I started OpenDNS. This comes as no surprise as it was only a matter of time before one of the Internet giants realized the strategic importance of DNS. I’ve received a lot of questions from bloggers, journalists, friends and most importantly, our users. And so I want to share my thoughts on what this means for the recursive DNS space and what it means for OpenDNS.

First, it’s not the same as OpenDNS. When you use Google DNS, you are getting the experience they prescribe. When you use OpenDNS, you get the Dashboard controls to manage your experience the way you want for you, your family or your organization. People use OpenDNS because we are pioneers and innovators in the DNS space, offering the most secure recursive DNS service around. We run the largest DNS caches, the fastest resolvers, and we offer the most flexibility in controlling your DNS experience. For example, IT folks want to block malware in the DNS, parents sometimes want to block certain content from kids. All of that and more is possible with our DNS. It is not with Google DNS. Of course, we don’t force those things, we offer them as controls that you manage the way you see fit. Providing people with choice is core to our offerings.

Second, it means that Google realizes that DNS is a critical piece of our Internet’s infrastructure and that it’s of strategic importance to help people safely and reliably navigate the Internet. This is something we’ve championed since day one and will always keep as our primary mission. This is why big enterprise customers are switching to OpenDNS too, not because it’s free but because it’s the best and we add value to DNS and improve the security of their networks.

Third, Google claims that this service is better because it has no ads or redirection. But you have to remember they are also the largest advertising and redirection company on the Internet. To think that Google’s DNS service is for the benefit of the Internet would be naive. They know there is value in controlling more of your Internet experience and I would expect them to explore that fully. And of course, we always have protected user privacy and have never sold our DNS data. Here’s a link to our privacy policy.

Fourth, it means that Google is bringing awareness to a wide audience that there is a choice when it comes to DNS and that users don’t have to settle for what their ISP provides. And we believe that having choice is a good thing — just as Internet users have unbundled their email to services like Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail people have been unbundling their DNS and switching to OpenDNS in huge numbers for the last 3+ years because we’re better.

Fifth, it’s not clear that Internet users really want Google to keep control over so much more of their Internet experience than they do already — from Chrome OS at the bottom of the stack to Google Search at the top, it is becoming an end-to-end infrastructure all run by Google, the largest advertising company in the world. I prefer a heterogeneous Internet with lots of parties collaborating to make this thing work as opposed to an Internet run by one big company.

So how will this impact us? It’s too early to tell, but largely I think this is a good thing for us. Google DNS currently offers none of the choice and flexibility that our service does. It’s new and untested. Having said that, it encourages us to keep making our service better. And ultimately, we’re a business that has been growing aggressively since we launched and has been competing in fair markets and winning. It raises awareness about the importance of DNS and it motivates us to continue providing world-class services to a global audience and to keep innovating.

We will continue to do that without distraction from Google or any of the other players in the DNS or security space. But we welcome Google to the neighborhood.

Faster web browsing using Google's DNS servers

A great news that I was waiting for!! You can now have faster web browsing experience using Google's DNS services!!

Google has launched a Public DNS (Domain Name Service) server and the details are available here.

Simply put, you can abandon the DNS IP addresses given by your ISPs like MTNL, BSNL or local Broadband provider and use the Google DNS IP addresses 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4 

What is DNS? Simply put - when you type in a website address 'Name' on your web browser, say like http://www.google.com, your computer queries a DNS server (setup by your systems DNS setting IP address!!) to get an IP address (in this case http://www.google.com translates to http://209.85.231.99), and then proceeds to connect to the IP address that it gets from the DNS server. The above process is called as 'Name to IP address' resolving and is a very critical part (and time consuming) of every web browsing activity.

Generally, if the DNS server of your local ISP server is not configured/ administered properly, the 'Name to IP address' resolving takes some time. And when you realise that a single web page has many such 'Names', using the Google Public DNS server will save considerable time during the web browsing.


The Advantages?? Definitely faster browsing speed which would be noticeable. On a Linux machine, you can check yourself the speed advantages by giving these commands at the command prompt and comparing the time shown (my results showed a 50% time saving!!):

time dig @ www.blogspot.com

time dig @8.8.8.8 www.blogspot.com

time dig @8.8.4.4 www.blogspot.com

Other advantages (quoting from the Google Blog!):

• Speed: Resolver-side cache misses are one of the primary contributors to sluggish DNS responses. Clever caching techniques can help increase the speed of these responses. Google Public DNS implements prefetching: before the TTL on a record expires, we refresh the record continuously, asychronously and independently of user requests for a large number of popular domains. This allows Google Public DNS to serve many DNS requests in the round trip time it takes a packet to travel to our servers and back.
• Security: DNS is vulnerable to spoofing attacks that can poison the cache of a nameserver and can route all its users to a malicious website. Until new protocols like DNSSEC get widely adopted, resolvers need to take additional measures to keep their caches secure. Google Public DNS makes it more difficult for attackers to spoof valid responses by randomizing the case of query names and including additional data in its DNS messages.
• Validity: Google Public DNS complies with the DNS standards and gives the user the exact response his or her computer expects without performing any blocking, filtering, or redirection that may hamper a user's browsing experience.

Linux usage statistics for Servers and Desktop

Some statistics on Open Source usages for servers can be found here for information:
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2009/11/10/november_2009_web_server_survey.html

Summary:
Market Share:
Apache/Linux  -  67%
Microsoft - 17.75%

Active Sites:
Apache/Linux - 55.32%
Microsoft - 19%



However, Desktop usage is another story with Linux hardly making a dent. From:
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10

Desktop Usage:
Win XP  - 70.48%
Windows Vista - 18.83%
Mac OS - 2.82%
Linux - 0.96%

Control-Alt-Backspace combo in Ubuntu

This is based on query from some of my Linux friends. Linux has a standard way to 'kill' the X-server, that is the GUI, in case the GUI hangs (Yessss, in Linux too the GUI hangs sometimes when doing crappy things like heavy animation or special effect stuffs, or java stuffs!!). The 'kill' is done using the key combination  'ctrl+alt+backspace'. However, Ubuntu disables this key-combo feature by default (cannot fathom the logic for this!!). However, this can be easily restored.

To enable this key combo in Karmic Koala (Ubuntu 9.10) is pretty simple, just go to:

System –> Preferences –> Keyboard –> Layouts (Tab) –> Layout Options –>
             Key sequence to kill the X server 

and (Tick) Control + Alt + Backspace.

Recovering Linux root password

Many people have been getting in touch with me to recover the Linux Admin passwords of their systems. This is mainly because they have forgotten their Admin passwords (unused for long time surprisingly!!!) or the Admin Personnel has gone on leave or just disappeared!!!

The simple procedure explained below will hopefully sort out all your woes!!

First of all, you will require a Linux live CD (like the Ubuntu Live CD or my favourite 'Knoppix' CD. (download it free from here!!!). You can also use the convinient  bootable Linux USB pendrives too.

A long list of available (for free!!) Linux Live CD can be found here!!

"A live CD or live DVD is a CD or DVD containing a bootable computer operating system. Live CDs are unique in that they have the ability to run a complete, modern operating system on a computer lacking mutable secondary storage, such as a hard disk drive. Live USB flash drives are similar to live CDs, but often have the added functionality of automatically and transparently writing changes back to their bootable medium. The term "live" derives from the fact that these CDs each contain a complete, functioning and operational operating system on the distribution medium. While a live CD typically does not alter the operating system or files already installed on a computer's hard drive, many live CDs include mechanisms and utilities for altering the host computer's hard drive, including permanent installation. This is important for the system management aspect of live CDs, such as removing viruses, drive imaging, and system recovery." - from wikipedia

You will recreate a user that has administrative permissions on your server as mentioned below.

1. Boot from a rescue CD such as a Knoppix Live CD or bootable pen-drive. It doesn't really matter what you use, as long as you can boot Linux and get access to a shell prompt. Make sure to mount the /dev and /proc directories and establish a chroot environment that points to your server's root directory. 
2. You are now root on your server's file system. Use the passwd command to reset the password for the user root. From now on, you have re-established access to the root account.
3. Reboot your server without the Knoppix CD and verify that you can log in as root, using the password that you've just set.
4. Recreate an administrative user account that is not root. If for example the name of this user account is Gunz, use useradd -m gunz. To use sudo to execute commands as root, you must make sure that the user account is a member of the group adm. To make a user with the name gunz member of the group adm, use usermod -G adm gunz.
5. Use passwd gunz to give the user you've just created a password. You have now re-established a user account that can be used to perform administration tasks on your server.

Of course, to fix this problem you need physical access to your server and something (Linux Live CD!!) that boots a Linux shell and allows you to mount your server's file systems.

Great Video - The Linux Story

A great and classic/historic video. From Linux Torvalds himself - who himself admits that this 'talk' may well be historic as he dosen't like to give 'talks' and intend talking much in future!!

A must see video for Linux and Open Source lovers.

Useful 'Porn Mode' in Web Browsers

Known widely as 'Porn Mode', now every major browser ( Firefox 3.5 or >, IE8 or greater, Google Chrome had it since inception, Apple's Safari had it since 2005!!) comes with a 'Private Browsing' feature. No more do you have to remember to go post browsing to 'preference/options' menu and clear your caches, saved data/passwords etc (though this is still a good habit!!).


When browsing the  web where danger lurks around every click, one clamours for unobtrusive privacy. As the name 'Porn mode' suggests (no rocket science there in choosing the name!!), it is meant to hide your (embarrassing!!) browsing data and habits. It is most useful as a security tool though, when you are using public Internet access systems, like in Cyber-Cafes or your office systems. You must have noticed that financial web-sites (like banks, e-shopping etc. sites) warn you to close your browser windows post usage so as to delete 'cache' data. This 'warning notice' may become history if the fincancial web-server can recognise that the user is using browsing in 'Porn Mode'!!

In Firefox 3.5 or greater, a mere “ctrl+shift+p” will put Firefox into “Private Browsing”, not saving even a 'bit or byte' of history to disk (Note: I don't use 'IE8 - so go find out  yourself !). Further, rather than opening a new window, it caches off your currently open tabs, closes them, and puts the new porn mode tab as the current tab, all in the same window. When you’re finished, stopping private browsing will restore your tabs from the saved cache, including any text you might have typed in any form field.

So go ahead - make merry with the 'Porn Mode' on your browser :-)