From Wikipedia, GFDL (Text of the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL)):

“You may copy and distribute the Document [wikipedia article] in any medium, either commercially or noncommercially, provided that this [GFDL] License, the copyright notices, and the license notice saying this License applies to the Document are reproduced in all copies, and that you add no other conditions whatsoever to those of this [GFDL] License.”

“You may copy and distribute a Modified Version of the Document under the conditions of sections 2 and 3 above, provided that you release the Modified Version under precisely this License, with the Modified Version filling the role of the Document, thus licensing distribution and modification of the Modified Version to whoever possesses a copy of it.”

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Eastern European hackers are suspected of placing the Asprox virus on more than a thousand British websites, including those run by the NHS and a local council, in the past two weeks. [...] Last week, Asprox infected the Norfolk NHS website, used by thousands of people a day. Hackney Council’s website was one of 12 local council websites also compromised, meaning that anyone logging on to pay a parking ticket or council tax was at risk over a three day period. [...] In the US, the virus has successfully penetrated mainstream sites belonging to Sony’s Playstation, the city of San Francisco and Snapple.

Asprox is an automated SQL injection attack that uses Google to find vulnerable sites and then injects an IFRAME which links to the malware file payload (”aspimgr.exe”). Of course, as The Times failed to report, the malware only infects Microsoft Windows computers - and what details could be found indicate injected attack code is targeted at pages created as ASP.

The Register gives some information, apparently from the same source. The security consultant mentioned claims that only half of current AV applications can catch Asprox; though VirusTotal report slightly better detection rates of 21/32 (giving details of variants and their names). As Avast seems very popular on Slashdot, you might like to see details from an Avast forum post concerning users who’ve acquired the trojan since June 2008.

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I always just type the root domain, example.com. But for sites that I manage I choose “www.example.com” to be canonical - mainly because in print it’s best to use the www. address as it’s easy to pick out as a web address. For .com’s this isn’t as important as for .org or .net, IMO, as nowadays most people recognise that “.com” refers to a website.

Under  Apache this is easy, add this to your .htaccess file in the document root:

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.example\.com$ [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Will redirect all addresses that don’t start “www.example.com” to that same subdomain, so that includes the root domain as well as all subdomains, like  “some.example.com”.

Don’t know how this works on IIS, I’m guessing it’s hard and that’s why folks don’t do it.

FWIW

[Edit: this guy does know how it works on IIS, it is a little more involved, but not much]

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An AOL Living website (they have a blog called ParentDish which I frequent) gives advice on such tricky tasks as cooking marshmallows (”Smores”?) and unpacking a Chinese takeaway and putting it on a plate. Advanced readers wanting to learn a trade can make furniture.

The overly smiley pair on the video entreat us that “we discovered this by chance” … pile up some books and put a piece of flat wood on top, voila, a coffee table. Not exactly penicillin is it.

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I’ve been getting acquainted with Google calendar and it’s features and to be honest I’m pretty impressed.

For Barefoot Ceramics pottery painting studio I’ve created a Google calendar with Newport City Council school term dates (as taken from their website) up until 2010. Hopefully, having made this a public view calendar, it’ll be useful to someone - parents with pda’s? other business folk wanting to track school holidays. I shall probably add the standard diary dates too, Easter / Hannukah / Christmas / &c..

iCal format export and import

Having created several calendars now I feel I’ve got the jist of it’s limitations and benefits. It’ll be great, I think, for use as a collaborative calendar tool - not least because it does (slightly hidden away but otherwise effortless) import and export of .ics files (iCal format).

So if you’d like the Newport, South Wales, school term dates until 2010 in iCal format (.ics) then hit up the link OR use the above link to see the public view. To add teh calendar to your own Google Calendar, click that little “+Google Calendar” icon at the bottom-right …

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Initial research shows this is an Ethernet (browser based admin at 192.168.1.1) or USB (ditto, 192.168.1.2) model. A manual is available by searching for  SmartAX_MT882_V200R002C01B021_User_Manual.pdf with your favourite search engine or from DriverGuide by having a subscription or viewing ads.

That’s all for now, will add details later if I have any problems installing it. As it has an Ethernet port it should be a breeze compared to previous efforts with USB modems on Linux distros … should be!

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Here’s what I did in audacity to get a bearable result:

1.  Noise removal using a “silent” section as the noise sample
2. Effect > Glame, Low-pass (not butterworth)filter: 4800,  10poles
3. Dynamic range compress: Threshold -30dB, Ratio 3:1, Attack 6.2
4. Split new (to section up as “tracks” of a reasonable size to be compressed and emailed)
5. Export multiple to variable rate MP3

That may not help anyone, but I can chuck that scrap of paper away now.

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Update Manager, problem!

The update manager appeared to hang when it came to restarting the X font server, it may have been something else that triggered it, what was clear to me was I had a frozen X session mid-way through a graphically managed dist-upgrade. Not great. I left it for a few hours to see if it was just taking its time, no joy.

I tried a few things by switching to a CLI with alt-ctrl-F1: apt-get and aptitude reported problems. Neither would run enough for a fix. apt-get reported that I should run “dpkg –configure -a” to reconfigure. dpkg reported “too many errors, stopping”. Now I didn’t like the sound of that

Reboot

On reboot, I chose the recovery console. After much playing around I found I could run “apt-get update” (after getting my net connection up by running “/etc/rc.local”; which just does a pon for my speedtch USB modem connection). Still not much use. I noticed that the first package being complained about was libgnomevfs2-bin, so attempted to install that by itself. No joy. Aptitude was useful here in listing what was broken, but not much use otherwise.

In the end after frantically reading through several man pages I discovered the –force options for dpkg, in a do or die moment I entered “dpkg –configure -a –force-all”. Well that seemed to do the trick, finished installing things, which all seemed to have downloaded already (so something was working right in update-manager at least).

Reboot to glorious KDE goodness.

Rebooting again I had the new menu options in GRUB for the new kernel, a good sign. Booted up fine and I logged in to my KDE session and was back in the now familiar territory of Ubuntu.

Well, I was kinda expecting something to have changed. Nothing seemed that different, this is however Ubuntu with the kubuntu-desktop package installed.

Didn’t take long to find what had changed … firefox 3 beta4 had been upgraded to 3 beta 5 and was broken! Oh yeah and I couldn’t launch GUI apps from a root konsole either.

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Anyway, FOSS linux apps I’m auditioning (at least I think they’re all FOSS, definitely free-gratis):

1. Cinelerra [Update: look out if you get cinelerra from Akirad, it installs an app called akiranews, this seems to be some sort of spam gateway (as yetunexploited. I'm a little concerned about it as a security risk too. So I've uninstalled it as a precaution and removed all akirad repositories.]
2. Kino
3. Kdenlive
4. Open Movie Editor
5. Jahshaka
6. Avidemux
7. Cinepaint

Now the less time pressured of you can bitch that this isn’t an exhaustive study or that if I’d only had the zubzub plugin it would have worked perfectly and poured me a beer. Let me know in the comments and if I’m feeling bored I’ll check out your suggestion and make an addendum. Here we go.

1. Cinelerra - seems fully featured but it’s an MDI application so you have windows all over the place, which I find cluttered (but I don’t mind it too much with The gIMP); apart from that tehy seem to be going out of their way to make the interface “unique”. It sucks. Even the file menu doesn’t have “quit” at the bottom. I thought they’d not included a quit menu item, or perhaps this wasn’t the “parent” window. I’ve heard this app is pretty powerful and does all that is required; but it seriously needs the interface fixing IMHO.
2. Kino - requires importing to DV format, or appears to, before you can do anything with it, I don’t really like the layout but apart from the importing it looks pretty good at a basic level.
3. Kdenlive - this one crashed on me, but probably only becuase I did the most on it in my short test. It follows the unwritten standards wrt where things are and seems pretty logical to me. Very easy to add markers, new tracks, text overlays, separate off audio, add transitions, etc.. The couple of problems I had were not being able to select a section by click-and-drag across the timeline and then not being able to select all tracks at once to remove the section of the clip I didn’t want. Oh, and then I couldn’t move everything back to the origin - because I couldn’t select and move all tracks together … minor issues but nonetheless issues. This was definitely most usable and easy to do what I’m after. Perhaps I’ll have to read the manual!
4. Open Movie Editor 0.0.20061221 - good, slightly goofy interface but nowhere near as crazy as Cinelerra.Pretty easy to get stuff done but I couldn’t quickly add transitions and text like in Kdenlive.
5. Blender - wouldn’t let me import my .mov (quicktime, from a Minolta Dimage Z1 digital camera) so couldn’t really test it. Again a weird interface which is really geared to creating animations. No doubt a powerful app, but not what I was looking for here.
6. Jahshaka - not yet tested, it appears to require building formy 64bit Ubuntu, UbuntuStudio referred to it but their package and application lists don’t include it.
7. Avidemux - looks like a tool for re-encoding, can do trimming and probably transitions (didn’t get that far), doesn’t appear to have a timeline view with keyframes, probably more useful for transcoding.
8. Cinepaint - this was touted as the “film gimp”several years ago, it’s used by the like of ILM I gather. However it’s more for correction and manipulation than for simple linear-crop and titling so I imagine the learning curve will be too high. Added to KDE menu as a graphics app (not multimedia) - couldn’t even see how to open/import my mov file.

All of these were tested under Ubuntu 7.04 (”gutsy”) either simply by adding with “apt-get install AppName” or by adding the repos to apt-get (via the synaptic GUI) and the installing. No extra effort was made, that’s not the purpose of this test. Since I moved from Slackware I’ve given up on hours of trying to get apps working - if it doesn’t work I try to find something that does, or give up and wait for further developments!!

So, in case you missed it my choice so far is Kdenlive based on ease of install and use for my stated purposes.

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Turns out that the latest way to extract money from teen girls low self-esteem is to sell “diet patches”, think of them like nicotine patches but for people with (perceived or actual) weight problems. As much as I’m curious I was also sceptical, the only way to lose weight is to expend more energy than you put in as food - smaller portions, more exercise (must try this some time!). Can you really just stick a patch on and lose weight? I doubt it.

The claims

• FAST — You’ll start to burn more fat instantly! Proven to be the quickest way to infuse your body with all-natural weight loss ingredients for amazing results!
• FRESH — Revitalise your body with the energy of the Pink Patch! With the weight coming off, you’ll feel recharged not to mention how amazing you’ll look!
• FREE-SPIRITED — Don’t give up your social life and become a slave to the gym to achieve that perfect body. Simply put on the Pink Patch and take off that stubborn stone - it’s that easy.

There’s more wild claims too …

You can still have pasta, tea biscuits, fizzy drinks, pizza, and chicken nuggets if you want to. The Pink Patch controls your appetite so you don’t gorge. You’ll simply eat less! With the Pink Patch, you won’t be bored with salads!

Sounds like an ad for amphetamines, no? You’ll eat less and salad will be exciting?

Ingredients of a diet patch

What are the ingredients of the pink patch and what do they do?

The people at “the pink patch” kindly tell us what’s in their patches, amid the marketing guff, of course they can’t tell you the proper names for stuff - you might think it was a con … so here’s an analysis of what goes into their “proprietary formula”:

What are the ingredients in the Pink Patch?Proprietary Formula: Fucus Vesiculosus, Extrac, 5-HTP, Guarana, Zinc Pyruvate, Yerba Mate, Flaxseed Oil, Lecithin, L-Carnitine

• Fucus Vesiculosus (extract)
  Seaweed. That’s right and they even mistyped it, “Extrac” that follows is just saying that it’s a part of the seaweed. The particular seaweed here is Bladderwrack and is probably used as a source of iodine, it’s often found in misleadingly named “Kelp tablets”. Iodine can help to mitigate the effects of an over-active thyroid, one of the medical causes of weight gain. Bladderwrack also contains alginic acid, this is a laxative but is also used to “seal” the stomach as a remedy for heartburn.
• 5-HTP
  Derived from the seed pods of the West African plant Griffonia simplicifolia, 5-Hydroxytryptophan is broken down by the body to produce serotonin; this is used as an anti-depressant but has been associated with hypertension and heart valve damage. 5-HTP is closely allied to Tryptophan, banned by the FDA. It’s a tricky type of drug that messes with serotonin; serotonin mediates moods and body temperature, but is also associated with the vomit reflex.
• Guarana
  This is a seed containing guaranine, an alternate name for caffeine. Guarana contains 3 times the caffeine of coffee beans. Anecdotal evidence associates its excess use with seizures, studies have also linked it to fat cell reduction. Pretty much what goes for caffeine goes for guarana. Buzz, buzz, buzz.
• Zinc pyruvate
  Another diet patch with near enough the same ingredients, Trim 24-7, states this to be “a combination of highly unstable pyruvic acid and other substances like calcium, sodium or potassium, added to stabilize pyruvic acid”. Pyruvic acid is formed by the metabolism (chemically breaking down) of glucose in the body. One of the pathways then is production of energy, just as with glucose.
• Yerba Mate
  This is a South American holly plant used to make tea, very popular in Argentina. Yerba Mate contains xanthines which like the low dose of caffeine and the theobromine (found also in chocolate) Yerba Mate contains is a well known stimulant. It has been associated in studies with anti-depressant action as well as relaxation of smooth muscle tissue. As a tea Yerba Mate has laxative properties and is associated with cancers of the mouth and throat.
• Flaxseed Oil
  Also known as Linseed Oil, is used as a supplement due to it’s high levels of Omega-3 fatty acids. One proponent describes it thus: “contains omega-6 and omega-9 essential fatty acids, B vitamins, potassium, lecithin, magnesium, fiber, protein, and zinc and also provides approximately 50% more omega-3 oils than what you could get from taking fish oil, minus that horrible ‘fishy’ after taste.”. Whilst Omega-3 fatty acids are currently considered something of a wonder drug the specific type, ALA, in flaxseed has been associated (but not conclusively) with increased instances of prostrate cancer and macular degeneration (loss of sight). The EPA and DHA types of Omega-3 fatty acid, derived from fish are not associated with these negative side effects.
• Lecithin
  Is an emulsifier/surfactant and is found, amongst other things, in egg yolk, sunflower oil and soy-bean oil. The lecithin’s precise formulation depends on it’s origin, so soy bean lecithin differs from that in sunflower oil. Emulsifiers stabilise mixtures of oils and water. Lecithin is also associated with reduced cholesterol. Lecithin is a common food additive and has E-number E322 in the EU.
• L-Carnitine
  The naturally occuring L sterioisomer of carnitine (beef steak is the best natural source, hence the name “carnitine”) is used by the body to process fats and produce energy. It’s also known as Vitamin B_T. Carnitine deficiency is a serious problem, carnitine supplements are shown to improve metabolism of fat in the heart and other organs.

Summary

Is it good?

So there you go. A mixture of known “dieting” supplements along with a couple of stimulants and some antidepressants. The perfect thing for a growing girl. You could just have a meal of potato (starch makes glucose), avocado (vegetarian source of carnitine), mushroom (serotonin source), fish and egg followed by a Yerma Mate, Guarana, Bladderwrack and linseed tea - so perhaps an omelette and a cup of [rather unusual] tea. All you’re missing then is the little pink sticky patch so don’t forget to buy yourself a packet of sticking plasters too!

Is it any good. Well some of the ingredients will perhaps give you a bit more pep and stop you turning to food if you’re depressed. Others do genuinely help to “burn fat”. Whether any of these things can be delivered via a patch has to be seen. Moreover the idea that all you need do is apply a patch is probably self-defeating, even the tobacco replacement patches are sold with the warning that quitting smoking requires will power … quitting nicotine will too when you come to wean yourself off the patches … but that’s a rant for another time.

The weight loss will be healthy and gradual. Expect an average weight loss of 1-1.5 kg per week. To accelerate the benefits of the Pink Patch it is recommended to eat sensibly and follow an exercise program.

My advice: skip the patch and go straight for the healthy eating and exercise program.

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