Occasional Thoughts

Dear David Fincher, Director of The Social Network,

yesterday evening I saw your great movie and I must say that I enjoyed it very much.

Besides the very interesting plot I was very happy that you have chosen KDE as Desktop environment for Marks computer (that does not prove that Mark is using KDE in real-life, of course - but as Mark is a smart guy, I would not wonder). At least you haven't followed the rest of Hollywood and gave him an Apple or made him use Windows.

I was very delighted that you did your homework and showed us the magic of wget and perl and no unrealistic Hollywood typical computer voodoo. People that did not know how to fetch a bunch of images from a website really learned something. Thank you very much for that.

But... really... was it necessary to ruin this good impression with the close up of the terminal session, where Mark had typed

> ping localhost
PING localhost.localdomain (127.0.0.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from localhost (127.0.0.1): icmp_req=1 ttl=64 time=0.031 ms
64 bytes from localhost (127.0.0.1): icmp_req=2 ttl=64 time=0.041 ms
64 bytes from localhost (127.0.0.1): icmp_req=3 ttl=64 time=0.045 ms
64 bytes from localhost (127.0.0.1): icmp_req=4 ttl=64 time=0.036 ms
64 bytes from localhost (127.0.0.1): icmp_req=5 ttl=64 time=0.047 ms
^C
--- localhost.localdomain ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 3996ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.031/0.040/0.047/0.005 ms

I guess Mark knows that his computer is up and running, while he sits in front of it surfing Facebook.

Some thoughts of what could happen if that headline above could become a reality.

Most probably you've already heard about Steve Jobs dislike of the Adobe Flash Player. A War that started when it was announced that the iPad will not support Flash and his claims that HTML 5 is superior to Flash (I already blogged about this topic). The current climax is the change in the famous section 3.3.1 of the Apple developer contract that forbids the use of any programming language which is not approved by Apple directly targeting towards the Flash Packager contained in the Creative Suite 5 (CS5). This Flash Packager can create a native iPhone application from Flash code.

This change in the Apple developer license domination eventually forced Adobe to throw away their work in the Flash Packager shortly after its announcement and a refocus on other platforms as written by Mike Chambers.

Understandably this caused quite some uproar and finally Steve Jobs has felt the need to comment on this on the Apple web site. However his Thoughts on Flash contain several falsehoods and half-truth. Jesse Warden has written a long post commenting several of such points. I recommend reading this for the details and I do not want to repeat this. Just some points I would like to highlight and add.

KDE 4.4 comes with a great native editor for your blog: Blogilo. Out of the box it supports Blogger1.0, MetaWeblog, MovableType and Google GData. So Serendipity users may feel left out. However you can use Blogilo with Serendipity anyway since there is the XML-RPC plugin available. You just need to know how to configure it.

My mother wanted a simple laptop, which is sufficient for browsing the web, writing some emails and some letters. So I haven chosen a HP Compaq 615 since it has a very low price but does it's job. As I don't want to bother my mother with viruses and I wanted the flexibility to setup a system that just fits her needs, I installed Kubuntu. Therefore the next advantage of the HP Compaq 615 is that it has no Microsoft Tax - it's delivered with DR-DOS only.

Ubuntu is supported very well on this laptop. After some tweaks, I managed to get everything working but some function keys that are not really required.

Do you have a Notebook running Linux?

Do you frequently use it in different network environments with different proxy configurations?

Are you sick of frequently reconfiguring all the applications that have their own proxy settings like the web browser, the Java IDE, the desktop and the applications that uses its settings, the other desktop environment that uses other settings... and so on?

If your answer to these questions is yes, yes and yes then read on. The solution I present here allows you to configure proxy settings in any of your applications just once and will even change the proxy settings automatically as soon as you connect your laptop to a network.