Fileopen DRM - I love it!

Another great Argh for DRM!!!

I had a lot of fun with the crappy fileopen PDF DRM software, mainly to get it running on Ubuntu Linux Gutsy Gibbon.

My girlfiend decided to become a customer of Alpmann-Schmidt juristic repetitors - they sell knowledge about juristical exams, at quite high prizes, and they try to secure them with the fileopen software.

For all who need to do this some day, here some hints on how to get the fileopen software working:

• Download and install the orignal acrobat rader from adobe - as they only prove an rpm, you have to use alien to convert it to a deb and install that - get it here: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html
• alien RPMFILE
• dpkg -i DEBFILE
• ln -s /opt/Adobe/Reader8/bin/acroread /usr/local/bin/
• Download the fileopen plugin from http://plugin.fileopen.com/getplugin.asp?bhcp=1
• As the user who is supposed to use the plugin, run the commandline install script to install it
  

It's surely possible to hand-edit the commandline script and get it working with the normal Acrobat you can get from Ubuntu packages, but I was under timely pressure, and already had so long to find out to get to this point that I had no nerve left to try that.

I really wonder, why these people don't stop using such bullshit software.

Do they not realize, that copying their stuff is still a matter of making screenhots from the PDF's, removing the user name, and sending out perfectly readable jpg's - even selling them for half the prize of the original, which starts to be really interesting as long as you sell more than 3 copies???

As with all DRM, the only ones being really disturbed by these things, are the legitimate users, the ones who paid and have trouble getting what they paid for.

The more I learn about this juristical content business, I get more and more interested in developing user-driven juristical databases, that come to the learning people at a reasonable price (e.g. - the operation costs for the servers, shared equally by the users)...

Kaioo - naja...

Also, ich fand ja, als ich zuerst davon gehört hatte, die Idee von Kaioo sehr ansprechend.

Aber: wenn man es mal nutzen will, kommen doch viele Fragen auf. Ich fühle mich da einfach schonmal ziemlich verloren, weil ich nicht so recht weiß, was ich da anfangen soll - und vor allem: WO!
Will ich in eine Gruppe, oder will ich in ein Netzwerk?
Was ist überhaupt der Unterschied zwischen beiden? Und, wenn sie, wie schon die Kaioo Hilfe sagt, dass sie eigentlich doch sehr ähnlich und fast gleich sind - warum gibt es dann die Unterscheidung überhaupt?!
Sollte nicht so ein Community-System, um auch von weniger computer-Erfahrenen(wozu ich mich beim besten WIllen nicht zählen kann) bedienbar zu sein, möglichst einfach sein und nicht den User durch den Zwang, sich zwischen so marginal unterschiedlichen Dingen entscheiden zu müssen verwirren?
Und überhaupt, was Netzwerke angeht: wieso sind, wenn man in "Netzwerke - Organisationen - Vereine" reinschaut, da hunterde und wohl sogar tausende Netzwerke von allen möglichen Vereinen, und sogar deren Ortsgruppen, in jedem kleinsten Kaff - aber 99,9% davon haben 0 Mitglieder - was soll das???
Also, irgendwie eine nette Idee, aber vestehen kann ich das Kaioo Dingens irgendwie nicht so recht...

Ich finde noch nicht einmal das Forum, in dem ich diese Kritikpunkte äußern könnte, um den Leuten zu helfen, das System zu verbessern.

Coding Horror: Coding without comments

Argh...

When reading what this guy recommends I could run away - and the earth isn't large enough to get me far enough...

Her recommends coding without any comments, and proposes, in a real strange example - what?
Yeah: Instead of writing a comment above some complex calculation, put the calculation (even though only used ONCE!!!) into a function, and give the function a speaking name - which then acts as a comment!

Yeah, let's add program-syntactical complexity instead of trying to use some normal, human language...
Good for the autists among coders (of which we have too much, anyway), who feel bad when communicating with humans. Bad for any sane person trying to understand what's happening there...

securing moinmoin against spammers

Wiki's are, sadly, a massive thread to spam these days. Some wiki's include captcha checkers these days, some make Email checks and stuff.

Another idea is having something like social control - let only people write who ask or know somebody who is able to write into the wiki.

Locking the wiki against users which are not explictly allowed to write is really only 2 or three lines of configuration in one of the wiki Python config files (names vary depending on how it is installed and maintained, sometimes it's mywiki.py, sometimes farmconfig.py, but can be totally different):

acl_rights_before = u"HenningSprang:read,write,delete,revert,admin +AdminGroup:admin"
acl_rights_default = 'EditorsGroup:read,write,revert All:read'
Then you need a page named AdminGroup, starting with the line

#acl AdminGroup:admin,read,write All:read

And a page EditorsGroup, without anything special.
Registered users that should be able to edit/admin the wiki, can be written into the list of Admins/Editors by writing their UserName in the usual MoinMoin list format, like:

* ThisUserNameIsAnEditor

The interesting part is, to think about this step before - as it will immediatly make the usual "just write without registration" impossible for users, and there will be quite some requests to add people on the editors lists, which must be dealt with in relatively short term.
After a while, when there are some Editors registered, any of them can enable new people to write into the wiki by adding the name to the EditorGroup page.

Using TRAC for source-Browsing, only

... and disable all other services/modules?

I had to search/fiddle for this some while, but basically it's quite simple:

[components]
trac.ticket.report.ReportModule = disabled
trac.wiki.web_ui.WikiModule = disabled
trac.ticket.web_ui.TicketModule = disabled
trac.ticket.roadmap.RoadmapModule = disabled
trac.ticket.query.QueryModule = disabled

Maybe it might help somebody?!

Acces to the remote console on IBM System X / Xseries

Another thing I had to search for a while:

• the remote console card in IBM Xseries seems to be sometimes called IPMI, and othertimes RASII
• it must be enabled in the BIOS
• By default, it tries to get an IP from dhcp, but falls back to a default IP if it gets none
• Default user / pass is USERID/PASSW0RD (with a zero as in 1000, not an o as in "other")
  

Probably it will help someboy sometimes...

exiting the xen xm console...

I searched a while for this.

In some scenarios, it happens that CTRL-] doesn't work - what do you do then???

Searching the web didn't reall help, and finally, I did what Harald König suggests here: "Oh sod it, roll your head on the keyboard while you hold down ctrl."

And guess, what I found?

CTRL-5 works, too. At least with my german keyboard and a machine with whatver locale settings, connected via ssh and screen...

RMLL is great - and France even so!

A first short report from the great RMLL conference in Mont-de-Marsan in France - just before leaving to go home...

I'm sorely missing the community feeling in the german Linuxtag events since it went away from Karlsruhe, and is obviously lacking support from local LUG's - they seem to try pushing it into a more business-oriented conference, but somehow I have the feeling, that currently it is neither a reall good conference for businesses, nor is a very community centric event any more.
I've been to CLT in Chemnitz, and did not find what I was missing from Linuxtag, I somehow didn't like it - even if I can't really say what's wrong. Definitely, it's a bad start if the first thing you get after coming in town is a cab driver that starts yelling at you because you dare to disturb him in his lazyness by willing to use his service...

Whatever, the positive news: RMLL in France is a perfect example of a very great, community-oriented conference. True, it's in France, and therefore most talks given are in French - except some, especially Cajus Pollmeier's Talk about GoSA (Slides) and mine about FAI(slides).
But there are many interesting people to talk with, nice social events in the evenings, and a generally very friendly french-style athmosphere.
They organize cheap places to sleep for everybody who cannot go to the conference on business money, and in general everything is really low cost (beer= 1€, coffee, 40 cents!, and more) without being bad quality or something like that. It's really super-great! And apart from that, I've not been to france for a while, but when getting back it it, I realize my french is not so bad as I always felt, and just about everything in France is really lovely - I can really say: "J'aime la France" :)

Very nice the offer of Rene Mages from FFII.fr to vist him for a week so I can even improve my french - see you in a couple of weeks, Rene!

Yesterday, we even went to the beach just about an hour away, toget wet in the sea and watch the surfers riding some huge waves - obviously a much better way to deal with the sea here than trying to do some swimming.

And we made some interesting plans about the FAI Gosa integration, the FAI GUI and stuff like that. Very motivating! And, itr sounds like GOsa is a much more flexible and professional way of managing an infrastructure with a graphical tool than ebox is. (Still I guess ebox is good for small businesses with not much knowledge an manpower for an initial setup...)

I hope to get some Photos uploaded - taking with the crappy Nokia N95 which I hope tpo throw away soon...