How the software giants do it these days

http://dilbert.com/fast/2008-05-10/

Still the best, at least for now

While Digsby remains tied to Windows and non-portable (at least, not truly portable and self contained).

I need portable. I need multi-platform. I need meanwhile (Sametime) support, in addition to jabber (google talk), icq, irc, yahoo and msn.
Pidgin is still the only IM that offers me all these things, with an attractive, easy to use interface, and all for free (unlike Trillian).

PidginPortable is presently at version 2.4. This may or may not be better than previous versions - but assuming you have or will download that version and what to fix the one known bug that matters, or get it working with Sametime, then this is how you can do it.

Buddy List Search Bug:
This is bothersome. You have a huge list of buddies, spread across multiple groups and multiple IM protocols, and you can't be bothered scrolling through the list, expanding groups and visually searching for buddies until your eyes bleed.
Up until PidginPortable 2.4 (true for non-portable flavour too), you just started typing the first few letters of the contacts name and pidgin did the rest. However, since the inclusion of the latest GTK+ libraries, this doesn't work - and pidgin just stops the search after you type the first letter. Downer.

Solution:
Download GTK+ 2.12.6 and copy bin/libgdk-win32-2.0-0.dll into PidginPortabl/App/GTK/bin (replacing the one that's already there).
Restart PidginPortable and the problem will be solved.

Sametime support:
So you work for a large blue corporation or some company that buys their IM/collaboration solution from them.
Older versions of Pidgin (Gaim) didn't support Sametime out of the box - you had to install the meanwhile library first. Now, meanwhile is included, but Sametime 7.5 will check your client version and reject Pidgin because it looks like an old Sametime version (3.x).

Here's how to fool Sametime:
Look for accounts.xml (for PidginPortable it's in Data/settings/.purple)
Look the following settings:

<settings>
<setting name='client_major' type='int'>30</setting>
<setting name='server' type='string'>messaging.yourcompany.com</setting>
<setting name='fake_client_id' type='bool'>1</setting>
<setting name='port' type='int'>1533</setting>
<setting name='client_minor' type='int'>6511</setting>
<setting name='force_login' type='bool'>1</setting>
<setting name='client_id_val' type='int'>4098</setting>
</settings>

The 'server' and 'port' lines will be there already from when you added the account, but you'll have to add the 'client_major', 'client_minor' and 'client_id_val' lines.
These three lines will tell the Sametime server what it wants to hear when it queries the pidgin client.
Another problem solved.

Thanks to khaytsus for raising the ticket for the Buddy List Search GTK+ bug and thanks to datallah who took ownership and of course witmaster who posted the downgrade workaround solution.
Thanks to jno and siege for the Sametime workaround.

Kudos to all who work on Pidgin to make it better and keep it relevant, despite stiff competition from the likes of Miranda and Digsby.

Who says ads have no artistic merit?

If, like me, you hate those ads that take over your screen and add to page loading times, you've probably installed an ad blocker, or made some changes to your hosts file.
The Firefox add-on Adblock Plus is particularly good at filtering out content you don't want - it also allows you to enable and disable it for particular pages and it shows tabs on blockable elements of any web page, giving you full control over what ads/nags you want to see and what you don't.
But, it replaces the ads with blank space - which can lead to quite a bit of wasted space on a given web page.

Add-Art (another Firefox add-on) is designed to work with Adblock Plus to replace blocked content with artworks by modern artists. The results can be quite pleasing, and at the very least, that space doesn't go to waste.

Visit the Adblock Plus home page.

XP SP3 and AMD don't mix, apparently

The Inquirer made this revelation earlier today. If, like me, you own a PC running on an AMD chipset - beware! And read the article before you download and install.

Yarr!

Poirates rule, or so a new(ish) book, from author Matt Mason, would have us believe.

"The Pirate's Dilemma"* deals with the movement of anti-capitalist pirates, rebelling against the profit-driven, low value corporations who have made stealing an acceptable - if not honorable - pastime for the average Joe. And there was me thinking we were all just common thieves ;-P

Radiohead's two-fingered salute ( possibly one-fingered) to the music establishment last year, courtesy of their "pay whatever you think it's worth" online offering or their new, erm, offering... and Trent Reznor's most generous new album giveaway seem to me to be a response to the power and purpose of this movement. Surely, someday soon one of these  big corporations will  take the hint and start taking a slightly smaller margin to boost sales. They could sack a few layers of middle-men to compensate.

Read the blog of the book, if ye dare.





*Available now in paperback and hardback from stinking corporate swines Amazon. If anyone wants a free copy in PDF format, I'll PM you my Rapidshare link :-P LOL.

Microsoft promises to support the Open Document Format by next year

However, this has done little to impress interoperability watchdogs ECIS, who are still itching to file a plethora of anti-trust lawsuits against them.

Brave Google shops Indian slanderer to authorities while Internet Cafés install keyloggers

Don't go thinking the Internet is a place you can say whatever you want about whoever you want to say it about - especially not if Google has anything to do with it.

Next time you're in a Mumbai Cyber Café you might want to check for keyloggers before you start typing.
How would you go about doing that? By looking under the keyboard, perhaps?

Lotus Symphony - do I hear a bum note?

Back when I tried OpenOffice 1.1 (my first encounter with it), I thought it was pretty decent. It was the one and only time I blue-screened a Win XP system, but I forgave it for being new(ish) and open source. Since OpenOffice got to 2.2 and later versions it has been rock solid and more useful than ever. With the exception of Excel, I don't think that Microsoft can justify the price of its Office suite anymore. So when IBM announced that they'd be creating their own open source office alternative to replace their aging (to put it mildly) Smartsuite package, I got interested.

Along came Symphony - which I started using towards the end of summer '07. I also stopped using it around that time too. Why? As a test run, I created a text document, and then tried to convert it to PDF. Symphony crashed... Hard. When I tried to restart it, it wouldn't. I realised that this was because the Eclipse javaw.exe process it was wrapped up in had hung on after the rest of Symphony had terminated, so I had to kill it. Then, lo and behold, I managed to get the application started again - and what did I find? A recovered unsaved document? No.

So, my first experience with Symphony was not entirely a success. You could even say it was a dismal failure, but that would be too lenient. The truth is that, although it didn't crash on me again since (mostly because I've barely used it), it doesn't offer a single advantage over OpenOffice 2.x. In fact, it seems to have less going for it in any respect that, in my opinion, counts. Firstly, Eclipse is a pig, so Symphony has a very large footprint - and this extra application tier just means that there's more that can go wrong. Secondly, Symphony is only based on the 1.1.x engine of OpenOffice - so it's not as stable and not as functional as OO 2.4.

All things considered, it's not so much a symphony as a dirge.

Read the linuxjournal article
and then here's a slightly less scathing review (thanks to muglatte)

Swedish file-sharer gets convicted

From Afterdawn...

This morning, a 31 year old man from Sweden was found guilty in Sweden's largest ever P2P case but escaped any jail time for his actions.

The man was initially accused of uploading 23,000 music tracks to the popular filesharing application Direct Connect but Sweden’s Anti-Piracy Agency’s (APB) "use of questionable investigative techniques forced the prosecutor to withdraw some of the charges", down to about 4500 tracks. The man was also accused of uploading 30 movies.

Instead of jail time, the man received a suspended sentence and a "heavy fine." The prosecutors were asking for jail time for the man, but the judge had this to say, “this is a task for the government, that by legislative means or in other ways take the necessary actions” to come to a solution to the problem.

More interestingly, the court even implied that the music industry needs to take some responsibility for the current situation they are in, where piracy is rampant, and many have little respect for copyright laws.

The fine however, is decently large and comes out to about 54670 kronor ($10,000 USD) including court fees he must pay back.

Minister of Justice, Beatrice Ask, commented on the trial:

“A consequence of the court having increased the sanctions in this case is that it will be easier to make ISPs give out information on IP addresses [in the future]. This of course affects the possibilities to act against these kinds of crimes.”

Morgan Gerdin, the defense lawyer, still feels her client was innocent. “The District Court hasn’t observed the technical evidence. It is not possible from that evidence to conclude that my client has been filesharing. He should have been found not guilty.”

Magnus Eriksson, spokesperson for Piratbyrån, sees the verdict as insignificant however and tells filesharers to continue their hobby without risking prosecution. “The outcome of the verdict is based on the amount of files shared by this person. With more modern filesharing software [BitTorrent], it isn’t possible to see all the files that one person is sharing.”

Permalink to the original article.

The Rise and Fall and Rise of DRM

Just when we thought DRM was dead, buried (and that the last of its muffled
screams had subsided), David Hughes, some RIAA technology unit bigwig tells us it isn't.

Why can't they all just FOAD (and take their poxy DRM with them)?

Explorer Aumentation - bigger really is better

http://www.bizzntech.com/2008/04/21/12-essential-windows-explorer-addons