I've been learning how to use debian-installer's preseed functionality in order to automate some of the installations we do at Free IT Athens. Among other things, I wanted to set it to use apt-cacher, our caching proxy server for software, and to install some additional packages, including msttcorefonts. Msttcorefonts downloads each font as an exe file, which isn't in apt-cacher's whitelist of filetypes to accept. If you try, you'll receive a 403 error and the message Sorry, not allowed to fetch that type of file. Since apt-cacher is written in perl, this was an easy fix; I modified line 646 to read

 if ($filename =~ /(\.deb|\.rpm|\.dsc|\.tar\.gz|\.diff\.gz|\.udeb|\.exe)$/) {

I created a version of the LibX Firefox extension for the University of Georgia. It provides nice browser integration with the catalog (Voyager), OpenURL resolver (SFX), and proxy (EZ Proxy). You can install it from here.

For a while now, I had an annoying error every time I created a new page in DokuWiki.

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in inc/HTTPClient.php on line 427 Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at inc/HTTPClient.php:427) in inc/actions.php on line 296

The problem may have been caused by the blog plugin. The fix is to cast $data to an array in line 427 of HTTPCLient.php like so

foreach((array) $data as $key => $val){

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I've uploaded to pdf and latex source from my Macworld presentation about deploying Ruby on Rails here.

I dropped in on the Virtual Citizenship | New Technologies Symposium at Wayne State on Friday via Second Life. This was my first time signing on to Second Life since 2003. The linux client crashed hard at first, but it worked well after I disabled all OpenGL extensions. Since the video link was one way and very few people attended virtually, I didn't see any benefit to Second Life over standard streaming video.

The conference itself was fascinating. I particularly enjoyed Fred Stutzman and Vernor Vinge's talks. Kevin Deegan-Kraus liveblogged the event. Videos should be available on the event website soon.

The news is in that Facebook is tweaking how their Beacon system works. Beacon is a tool a website can use to associate your actions on those sites to Facebook. There is a great post covering the technical details at Radiant Core. When you do something that triggers the Beacon (buying a table on overstock.com, for example), the information about what you did is sent to Facebook. Next, a popup appears and asks if you want to publish this information in your Facebook news feed. In the old system, if you didn't select no an item would appear in your news feed. Publishing was opt-out. Under the new system, you must approve each item. Publishing is now opt-in. However, the information is sent to Facebook regardless. This isn't the first time Facebook has silently collected information on its users from third-parties; they used to mine college newspapers and AOL Instant Messenger away messages. The relevant section from Facebook's privacy policy is Facebook may also collect information about you from other sources, such as newspapers, blogs, instant messaging services, and other users of the Facebook service through the operation of the service (e.g., photo tags) in order to provide you with more useful information and a more personalized experience. Facebook may be just sitting on this data, but I think it's more likely that they're feeding into into their algorithm for targeting advertising.

From my perspective, the current change is an important but insufficient improvement. Two more things need to happen.

1. All websites using Beacon should make it an opt-in feature.

1. Facebook should create a page where you can control the sites from which it accepts and stores Beacon information about you. It should discard any information from sites that you don't authorize.

For now, if you don't want Facebook collecting this information about you, log out before visiting any websites that use the Beacon.

EDIT: Facebook has stated that when Beacon activity occurs on a third-party site, if you elect not to show it they won't store it.

A recent discussion on the Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts mailing list has highlighted that it's not easy to find the systems that Dell sells without Windows. Here are all the desktop and notebook options of which I'm aware.

• Desktops and Laptops (Inspiron) with Ubuntu

• Desktops (Inspiron) with FreeDOS

• Desktops (Precision) with Red Hat

• Laptops (Latitude) with FreeDOS

• Desktops (Optiplex) with FreeDOS

• Desktops (Vostro) with FreeDOS

I've had one of the Inspiron 1420 notebooks sold with Ubuntu since August and am a satisfied customer. If you're looking for a new laptop, Dell is a good deal.

I've installed and enabled the OpenID plugin for dokuwiki. Anyone with an OpenID (more people than you might think) should be able to use it to log in. I'm just doing my part for non-evil federated identity management.

UPDATE: Due to spam, you must log in with OpenID or email me and request a local account in order to post comments.

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This is a script for any users of Linux who'd like a convenient way to begin editing a file as the superuser (i.e root) from Nautilus, the GNOME file manager.

1. Copy and paste the code below into a text editor such as gedit.
2. Save the text as the file ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts/edit_as_root The tilde stands for your home directory. You may need to right click within the save file dialog and check show hidden files before you see .gnome2
3. Open a terminal and run the command 'chmod +x ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts/edit_as_root' This tells your system that the text file is executable, i.e. that it is a script not a document
4. Log out then log back in. Technically, all you must do is restart nautilus.
5. In a nautilus window, you can now right click a file or set of files and select script → edit_as_root.

#!/bin/sh
IFS="
"
for I in $NAUTILUS_SCRIPT_SELECTED_FILE_PATHS
do
  gksu gnome-text-editor $I &
done
exit

• Line 1: The shebang, it says run the program /bin/sh to interpret this script. On Ubuntu this is a soft link to the shell called dash.
• Lines 2-3: Set the internal field separator to a newline only.
• Lines 4-5 and 7: Loop through every line in $NAUTILUS_SCRIPT_SELECTED_FILE_PATHS, call the current line $I, and run Line 6.
• Line 6, gksu: Get authorization via password then run the next command as root. On Ubuntu the gconf key /apps/gksu/sudo-mode makes gksu act like gksudo.
• Line 6, gnome-text-editor $I: Open file $I with the default text editor. This editor can be changed wih the command 'update-alternatives update-alternatives –config gnome-text-editor'.
• Line 6, &: Run the command gnome-text-editor in the background. This means don't wait for it to finish before runing the next command.
• Line 8: The script is finished.

I heard about the first through IDPI's blog. It's a a national press club discussion with communication directors from the Giuliani, Romney, Biden and Thompson campaigns; video of the event is available here in Windows Media format.

The second discussion was hosted by the E-Voter Institute; the panel includes the internet campaign directors for the RNC and DNC. The discussion was broken into segments and uploaded to Google Video; a list of the clips is available here. If you're interested in the results of the Institute's latest survey of consultants and the public, you can download it directly from here.

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